Kates-Ferri Projects is pleased to announce the gallery’s third show, WHAT LIES BENEATH, presenting new paintings by Emilia Olsen and a sculptural site-specific mural by C.J. Chueca.
The exhibition unveils how both artists are invested in exploring water through its multifaceted manifestations as a source of inspiration and wealth of implicit metaphors. Like amenable H20 morphs from liquid to solid or gas depending on the physical environment it interacts with and is influenced by, during history women had to perform shapeshifting depending on the surrounding social environment to fit into a preconceived notion of their place and role. Through the work on view, Chueca and Olsen individually open up their subconscious worlds and while revealing their intimate female experiences to the viewers they take charge of their own narratives.
C.J. Chueca is a Peruvian American artist born in Lima, Peru (b.1977). For the exhibition, C.J. composes a mural size collage with ceramic elements all in shades of blue and white. Blue at the bottom, white at the top, split by a straight horizon line right at the height of the artist own nose, as if she was at the verge of drowning or having just enough room to breathe. This site-specific installation titled "We used to be /una canción de amor" evokes the time when the lives of two people were interweaved and synchronized with intensity. The artist references the relationship of the ocean with the sky as a metaphor: they exist one next to the other but are dramatically different, still, they always appear as in an eternal affaire.
South Africa-born American artist Emilia Olsen (b.1989 and Brooklyn-based), offers a vulnerable exploration of the female body through a series of paintings of the artist as subject. The paintings speak to an inevitability of death, love, heartbreak, joy and greif: solidifying the artist’s ethos that those are all connected and that they meet somewhere in the middle like the twilights, the velvety nights, the way the light changes, the dreamlike, the hazy and the half asleep. Olsen distills big emotions into a visual projection meant to symbolize the everyday moments that happen in our peripheries, however mundane the scene. In the way stories are told, some details loom larger than others.
On view by Emilia Olsen, is the work The Birth of Venus (2021-2022), oil on found canvas, 80 x 70 inches. Classically this painting by Sandro Botticelli is the presentation of the goddess of love and beauty arriving on land. She is resplendent on a scallop shell, like an aphrodisiac ready to be served. In Olsen’s version, Venus is less certain. Painted on a found canvas as big as a man, she peers out with two of her eyes from between the scallop’s valves. As she observes and debates the outside world gulls, crabs, and waves toss her body to the shore. It will come as no surprise that she was painted about halfway through the last couple years of pandemic, when vaccine roll outs were beginning, and the world began to open up again.
About the Artists:
Emilia Olsen was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1989 due to her parents working in the Peace Corps. She grew up in Madison, WI and in 2011 she received her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art & Design in Washington, DC. She has exhibited her work nationally, with solo shows at Arts & Leisure (NY) and Doppelganger |Studio (Queens) and notable recent group exhibitions at the Spring Break Art Show (NY), Freight & Volume (NY), Gallery Also (LA), Elephant Gallery (Nashville), Greenpoint Terminal Gallery (Brooklyn), and Juxtapoz Projects at Mana Contemporary (NJ). She has been artist-in-residence at DNA Residency (Provincetown, MA); New York Studio Residency Program (Brooklyn, NY); Starry Nights (Truth Or Consequences, NM); Hotel Belmar (Costa Rica) and the Horse and Art Research Program (Hungary). Her work has been featured in Two Coats of Paint, Vogue, Art Maze, Hyperallergic, Maake Magazine, the podcast Sound & Vision and others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
C.J. Chueca has lived between Lima and New York since 2003. Chueca’s history as a perpetual immigrant (earlier years found her in different cities in Mexico) has lead her to explore the concepts of home, territory, transit, multicultural experiences, uprooting and solitude. Focusing on discussions about lives that are still on the road (or without route) in the streets of the world. C.J. Chueca’s exhibition highlights include Micaela, La Sangre de Todas in Vigil Gonzales Galería, A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience; 20 Years of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection curated by Amethyst Rey Beaver and Eva Thornton at the Taubman Museum of Art, Art Souterrain in Montreal with a public commissioned installation curated by Dulce Pinzón at Palais des Congres and Hay algo incomestible en la garganta. Poéticas antipatriarcales y nueva escena en los años noventa curated by Miguel López at ICPNA-Lima to name a few. Her work has been featured in Hyperalergic, Artnet, Flaunt, Artishock and Artifoid. Forthcoming, C.J. Chueca will work in a public commission in the Bronx managed by Percent for Art, from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
