SEVEN., a group exhibition by We Buy Gold, is on view at Jack Shainman Gallery and Nicola Vassell Gallery in Chelsea, New York through August 11. Curated by Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, SEVEN. features work by Max Guy, Renee Gladman, David Hammons, Nandi Loaf, Abigail Lucien, Kerry James Marshall, Lorraine O’Grady, Ashley Teamer, Charisse Pearlina Weston, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Founded in 2017, We Buy Gold is a roving art space presenting exhibitions, commissioned projects, and public events. Launching with a suite of four exhibitions in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn (ONE., TWO., THREE. and The Yard), and going on to produce ambitious collaborations with contemporary artists and curators such as Moses Sumney (SUNSET.), Nina Chanel Abney (FIVE.), and Diana Nawi (SIX.), We Buy Gold mounts projects that encourage the dissection and deconstruction of systems of power by artists working in a cross-section of creative media.
SEVEN. explores the ways in which artists disrupt the politics of space, time, and language to constitute another world. In their fertile hands, the measure of time lengthens, bodies morph, and the fixed use-value of objects and language slips—highlighting the foundational fractures present within contemporary society. Whether in Max Guy’s time-warped diptych of The Wiz and The Wizard of Oz, Ashley Teamer’s splintered interstates of embroidered inkjet prints, or Kerry James Marshall’s clattering and colossal pocket change, emerging and established voices harmonize through practices that strive to upend figurative expectations and reveal the obscure structures that dictate significance. Distorting the boundaries of the body, architecture, place, and meaning, each artist investigates the generative capacity and possibilities of the undefined and malleable. How are new worlds constituted in the midst of contemporary crises? By leaning into ruptures that open out into an otherwise.
Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 W 20th Street | Nicola Vassell Gallery, 138 10th Avenue
On View Through August 11, 2023
