NEW YORK, NY.- Artist Connor Wright debuts Alexa, Truth or Dare? a solo presentation of new monumental paintings in New York City. Wright reinterprets an encyclopedic range of images –from the political to the iconic and the lesser-known – with a deeply personal, intuitive visual language. In an age of deepfakes, extreme subjectivity, dopamine loops, biotech shortcuts, and fame cycles shrinking faster than a Warholian prophecy — from 15 minutes to 15 seconds— Wright isn’t interested in decoding the chaos so much as metabolizing it. Curated by Jesse Bandler Firestone, Alexa, Truth or Dare? will be on view at 545 West 23rd Street, December 11, 2025-January 20, 2026.

Wright pulls source material from literally everywhere: personal archives, sports photography, niche internet culture, found objects, and historical documents. In his hands and heart, the hierarchy of imagery collapses. The iconic sits shoulder-to-shoulder with the mundane, the political with the personal, the tragic with the absurd— all filtered through the same undeniable graphic logic.



Rendered in oil atop lush spray-painted color fields akin to acid-laced tie-dye, his characters hover between figuration and abstraction, presence and outline. A flash in the pan amongst the expanse of time. In their honor, Wright paints these figures monumental in scale, yet thin, intentionally exaggerated, elongated, and queered to the point of becoming mythic or beautifully monstrous. A standout feature, a signature, you might say, are the hands of each figure. Hands: those age-old symbols of craft, lineage, and communication become avatars of artistic agency, tenderness, and Wright’s ongoing queering of visual representation. In his eyes, men, nuns, women, and children alike all donning the longest of acrylic nails.

What makes an image powerful now? What makes it hum, haunt, or hold? Wright searches for those answers not through theory but through feeling, building an personalized image ecology where humor, melancholy, camp, and critique coexist without canceling each other out. There’s a world-building sensibility running through the work: people reduced to contour and then reassembled, not judged by their context but reimagined through Connor’s vision of the world he wants to see, already sees; one more embellished, enlivened, and eccentric.



Even the subjects themselves become self-aware commentaries on context and contemporary myth-making. An iPhone rendered like an archaeological relic— referencing the iconic photo of the first iPhone reveal — could be displayed beside a painting depicting a breastfeeding figure. This intimate scene references “Nursing Mother,” an image of a nursing woman that was electronically placed on the phonograph records carried onboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts as a kind of cosmic PR stunt. “Dear Aliens, we come in breastfeeding peace!!” Or perhaps these works also sit comfortably beside Wright’s painting of two women who appear

to be devouring and dwarfing a little-itty-bitty bobblehead figure of our President. The combinations available are biting, depressing, and hilarious all at once. Wright exposes our hunger to monumentalize ourselves and our devices, to declare our moment historically significant before it’s even over, all while whispering soft interstellar apologies and requests for galactic deliverance.

In a cultural moment saturated with noise, Wright’s paintings do something rare: they make the noise legible, not by taming it, but by letting it be strange, sensual, and alive. Rather than solve the mess, he asks us to sit inside it — to feel its texture, its distortion, its beauty — and to consider what life might mean now that everything is both too much and never enough.



CONNOR WRIGHT

Connor Wright is a contemporary artist living and working in New York City. Hailing from St. Louis, MO, Wright became a viral sensation as a teenager for creating murals from quotidian objects like rubix cubes, crayons, lipsticks and dominos. His work evolved to include collaborations with META and Maybelline. During his senior year at the University of Pennsylvania in 2020, Wright collaborated with fellow student Anna Barber to create the “Say Their Name” memorial in Minneapolis to honor the victims of police killings and dovetailing with the larger Black Lives Matter movement. Wright’s work has been critically acclaimed and covered extensively including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Times, Forbes, Oprah, Newsweek, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Louis Post Dispatch and beyond. Wright received his Bachelor of Arts in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania.

Wright’s latest work expands these investigations into paintings grounded in the immediacy of now — virality unfolding in real time, political stakes cresting, and lived experience pressing through the surface.
connorwright.art

JESSE BANDLER FIRESTONE

Jesse Bandler Firestone is a curator, writer, and producer whose practice operates as an ongoing experiment in exhibition-making — one in which standards of display, methods of interpretation, artist agency, and public trust are continuously renegotiated. His curatorial framework centers artists working in institutional critique, transgressive and conceptual practices, and systems-oriented inquiry. Across his work, he is drawn to artists who trouble inherited protocols and reconfigure the terms of cultural participation, expanding the ways art organizes relation, knowledge, and perception. His research emphasizes process-driven, socially engaged approaches and sustained collaboration — particularly with LGBTQ+, BIPOC, disabled, and emerging artists. With over a decade of curatorial experience, Firestone has developed exhibitions, public programs, and commissions across museums, universities, nonprofit spaces, and artist-run platforms including Montclair State University, Wave Hill, and The Shed— where he was a member of the founding team for Open Call, commissioning large-scale interdisciplinary projects from emerging artists across New York City. In addition to his institutional work, Firestone runs J. Firestone Arts LLC, an independent curatorial consultancy through which he supports artists, nonprofits, and cultural partners with exhibition development, writing, professional stewardship, and strategic planning.