LOS ANGELES, CA.- Across a breadth of modes and media, Noctis Imago considers six artists' critiques, extrapolations, and expansive reimaginations of the meeting points between bodies and the systems and institutions that orient them. Prominent within each artist's work are hybridic or mythological metaphors for the often self-contradictory facets of embodiment in society. Chimeras, biomechanical forms, dizzying parallax views, and impossible, recombinative landscapes become ways to imagine and interface these double conditions. With inventiveness and clarity, these artists reflect on the political and epistemic systems whose reach continues to color and complicate perspectives on the body: medicalism, biopolitics and philosophies of science, bureaucracy, geographical borders, certain art histories, and colonialism to name a few.
Jorge Camacho
Hailed by writer and critic Zoé Valdés as the "last of the great Latin American Surrealists," Cuban painter Jorge Camacho (b. 1934, Havana - 2011, Paris) crafts hazy, vespertine scenes that bridge mythology and occultism, Symbolist literature, Afro-Cuban traditions, and incisive reflections on the nation's political and spiritual lot in the second half of the 20th century. Born in Havana in 1934, Camacho relocated to Paris in 1959 on scholarship from the Cuban government. There, he met André Breton in 1961 and was welcomed into the fold of the Surrealists, becoming one of Breton's final protégés and honing over subsequent years a visual and symbolic sensibility all his own. His images-dusken arenas where ossuaries, organic machines, extractive forces, and totemic figures intertwine-offer arcane, often harrowing portrayals of violence and punishment that merge the realm of dreams with the grave realities faced by his generation of Cubans in exile.
Jorge Camacho was born in 1934 in Havana, Cuba. Selected solo exhibitions include La Maison de l'Amerique Latine, Paris; Galerie Thessa Hérold, Paris; Galerie Raymond Cordier, Paris; Galerie Maya, Brussels; Galerie Joan Prats, Barcelona; Galerie Mathias Fels, Paris; and Galería Cubana, Havana. Selected group exhibitions include Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the 42nd Venice Biennale, Venice; Musée de l'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Musée Ingres, Montauban; Galerie Maeght, Paris; Galerie de Seine, Paris; and Galerie de l'Œil, Paris. His work is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Peréz Art Museum, Musée de l'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, and Musée d'Arts de Nantes, among others.
Aníma Correa
Painter, writer, and installation-based artist Ánima Correa explores in her work the oblique systems that connect image circulation, geopolitical relationships, and psychic mining. Through a expansive research-based practice encompassing optics, divination, pop culture, marine ecology, and Latin American history, Correa threads together works that evoke the contemporary phantasmagorical experience of seeing, perceiving, and diagnosing.
Ánima Correa (b.1990, Los Angeles) lives and works in Los Angeles. Selected solo exhibitions include Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles; Court Space, Glendale; and Master Piss Galeria, Lima. Selected group exhibitions include Spiaggia Libera, Paris; Barbati Gallery, Venice; Future Gallery, Berlin; Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles; and Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York.
Victor Estrada
Victor Estrada's artistic practice spans thirty years and several mediums, among them sculpture, painting, and drawing. His works are an amalgamation of seemingly disparate creative traditions, including the Chicano movement, pop art, and California conceptualism. Shaped by Los Angeles-based artists such as Ed Kienholz and Mike Kelley, his work is itself an important continuation of a tradition with deep roots in the artistic experimentation of post-World War II LA. Estrada's practice is defined by an uncanny relationship with materials and a hybridic understanding of image making that merges cartoon aesthetics, punk influences, and figurative illustration. His works picture a vast universe of expressive and delirious forms, creatures, and abstractions that illustrate the artist's deep commitment to subverting expectations that Black and Brown communities should represent themselves with strategies of realism.
Victor Estrada (b. 1956, Burbank, California) received a BFA in 1986 and an MFA in 1988 from ArtCenter College of Design. Solo exhibitions include ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena; Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York; and Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe; Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park; El Museo del Barrio and Americas Society, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami; and Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt.
Max Hooper Schneider
Max Hooper Schneider's polymathic practice brings together the fields of biology, philosophy, and landscape architecture to create objects and environments that speculate on entropic forces and posthuman forms. Hooper Schneider develops and explores the aesthetics of succession, abandonment, and the uncanny through habitat-like artworks that materialize and dramatize natural and artificial systems. Conceiving of nature as a process of ceaseless morphological change, Hooper Schneider never takes the idea of the body for granted, instead proposing countless ways for bodies to be continuously broken down, recreated and transformed. With a deeply researched practice that draws upon fieldwork around the world, Hooper Schneider defamiliarizes human-centered time scales and material culture, returning time and again to the strangenesses and symbioses that have preceded and that will outlast human civilization.
Hooper Schneider (b. 1982, Los Angeles, CA) received his Master's degree in Landscape Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and his Bachelor's degrees in Urban Design and Biology from New York University, with additional studies in Marine Biology and Entomology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Santa Monica College. He has shown in solo exhibitions at prominent museums and institutions internationally, including UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, MO.CO Montpellier Museée Contemporain, and the Hammer Museum. His museum group exhibitions include Centre Pompidou-Metz, Schinkel Pavillon, Leeum Museum of Art, Kistefos Museum, and Musée d'art moderne de Paris. Hooper Schneider has been included in a number of international biennial exhibitions, including the 15th Gwangju Biennale, 16th Istanbul Biennial, 13th Baltic Triennial, and the Mongolia Land Art Biennial.
Jeffrey Meris
Jeffrey Meris is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores relationships between material, gesture, and larger cultural and social phenomena. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, and drawing, Meris' work considers ecology, embodiment, and various lived experiences, and looks to heal deeply personal and historical wounds. Meris's native Bahamas often appear as both setting and subject in his work, where incisive critiques of imperialism and colonial legacies are interwoven with intimate reflections on body, kinship, movement, and reconciliation.
Jeffrey Meris (b. 1991, Haiti, raised in Bahamas) lives and works between New York City and the Bahamas. He earned a BFA in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art in 2015, and an MFA from Columbia University in 2019. Selected solo exhibitions include Matthew Brown Gallery, Los Angeles; and White Columns, New York. Selected group exhibitions include Prospect 6, New Orleans; Studio Museum and MoMA PS1, New York; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown; Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth; Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, Ridgefield; Lehmann Maupin, New York; James Cohan Gallery, New York; Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco; Halle 14, Leipzig; and the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, Nassau. Meris is an alumni of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, as well as a NXTHVN Studio fellow and a previous artist-in-residence at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Berenice Olmedo
Mexico City-based artist Berenice Olmedo creates sculptures and kinetic installations that often integrate prostheses and orthoses. Her works-fusions of medical plastics, armatures, and surgical implants-challenge notions of human wholeness and draw attention to the political dimensions of disability, illness, and care. In her practice, Olmedo considers standardized or hegemonic expectations of the human body and explores the extent to which external aids are essential to contemporary life. By reusing forms and materials from the medical field, she challenges dominant fixations on efficiency and optimization in favor of a more mutualistic, politically inextricable view of embodiment.
Berenice Olmedo (b. 1987, Oaxaca, Mexico) lives and works in Mexico City. Selected solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris; Lodos Gallery, Mexico City; and Jan Kaps, Cologne. Selected group exhibitions include the ICA Boston, Boston; the Boros Collection, Berlin; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; the Dortmunder Kunstverein; the TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Tenerife; the Eres Foundation, Munich; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey, Monterrey; the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts; the Krannert Art Museum, Chicago; the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; the Simian, Copenhagen; the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Haus Mödrath - Räume für Kunst, Kerpen; Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte, Mexico City; and Musée d'art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux.
Reginald Sylvester II
Reginald Sylvester II creates large-scale paintings and sculptures that trace the generative relationship between the two mediums. Working predominantly in abstraction, he incorporates a variety of unique sculptural materials into his painting practice: rubber, tarp, aluminium, and steel, as well as repurposed military and industrial components. His layered, assemblage-like works contemplate the identity and mutability of their respective media. Strainer bars are left exposed, while textile surfaces are stretched and pierced; metal patinas evoke histories of gestural painting as well as a sleek, futuristic monumentality. In his work, Sylvester II often emphasizes materials that relate to his personal history and spirituality, connecting them in formal relationships keyed to broader societal and art historical narratives.
Reginald Sylvester II (b. 1987, Jacksonville, NC) lives and works between New York City and Hudson, NY. Institutional solo exhibitions include the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture. Selected solo and group exhibitions include Roberts Projects, Los Angeles; Maximillian William, London; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; Gagosian and Jeffery Deitch, Miami; The Arts Club, London; and Fondazione Stelline, Milan. Sylvester II's work is held in institutional collections including the Nasher Museum of Art; Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; North Carolina Museum of Art; Newark Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; ICA Miami; Ackland Art Museum; Wolverhampton Art Gallery; Spazio 1; and Fondazione Stelline.
