LOS ANGELES, CA.- Walter Maciel Gallery is presenting a group show entitled I.D., Please! Including works by eight artists who have developed studio practices based around notions of identity. Works by Hung Liu, John Bankston, Lezley Saar, John Jurayj, Maria E. Piñeres, Nike Schröder, Dana Weiser and Monica Lundy are being exhibited within the context of a diverse range of individual subjects and personal reflections.

On January 20, 2017 the United States will be governed by a potentially dangerous leader who has shown signs of attack on people from distinct racial backgrounds and identities. Women, Muslims, African Americans, Latinos, LGBT and disabled persons are among these targets where it is clear that this new leadership promotes discrimination and intolerance not accepted by the majority of Americans. As a response to this impending dangerous circumstance, Walter Maciel Gallery celebrates diversity with a range of distinct portraits depicted in the show.

As part of her new series American Exodus, Hung Liu presents Father’s Arm, a painting depicting a poverty stricken father embracing his infant child in front of an old pick up truck. The original photograph used as the source material was taken in Kentucky by William Gedney in the early 1980s as part of a series portraying American poverty. A second painting by Liu depicts a traditional portrait of a prostitute shown in relationship to an animated fish that evokes a conversation between the two subjects. Perhaps the fish is sending a message of prosperity and good will. Former student, Monica Lundy also presents imagery of prostitutes but from the Victorian era. Lundy’s painting is a diptych portrait with an older Madame sternly gazing at the viewer on the left juxtaposed with the innocence of a youthful courtesan casually smiling on the right. A second portrait of Billy Holiday shows the singer in a confident pose with a fur around her shoulders and a cigarette poised between her fingers.

Nike Schröder and Dana Weiser create self portraits as their subjects to define racial stereotypes and gender. Using her signature thread to make the imagery, Schröder transforms a series of photo booth shots of her and her friends into a life size drawings using the standard vertical four-picture format. The work comments on social behavior and the act of posing as a means of expression. Weiser’s self portrait was done as part of a series entitled Enacting my Koreanness, (self-portrait performance) and depicts herself dressed in a traditional Korean robe with white face makeup with red dots and a folksy hat made of kitschy materials. Weiser uses her personal memories as a Korean adoptee, followed by research, to explore current incidents of racial stereotyping to reflect on contemporary observations on our society. Likewise, Racial stereotyping is explored in the work of John Bankston who presents bold animated characters in a coloring book style format to explore notions of drag within the context of masculine behavior. Bankston creates a central protagonist character seen in the portrait, Prince Charming who goes on an adventure in a imaginary forest and meets different characters who try to befriend, persuade and coax him into their social circles as seen in the second painting Mysterious Machine. Lezley Saar also uses an imaginary landscape with commentary on racial issues to focus on the metaphysical reality, mixed with her signature Victorian subjects in her works displayed from the Parallel Universe series. Saar referred to philosopher Gottfried Leibniz’s definition of “Monad” for her concept: “an unextended, indivisible and indestructible entity that is the basic or ultimate constituent of the universe and a microcosm of it” while depicting subjects of mixed-race identities.

Maria E. Piñeres features a group of small format portraits that comment on the notions and challenges of celebrity. Works include a portrait of Billy Jo Armstrong’s mug shot after an arrest made out of Piñeres’s signature needlepoint as well as playful imagery of icon Betty Page, musician Pete Doherty and transgender 80s model Teri Toye from a previous series entitled Palindromes with mirrored imagery. In contrast, John Jurayj focuses on ordinary subjects who have fallen victim to tragic political circumstances since the breakout of the Lebanese Civil War. The work featured in the show displays a photographic image of a dead body resulting from one of many bombings in Beirut. Jurayj attempts to enliven the mortality of the victim using a mixture of ink and gun powder to silkscreen the imagery on a stainless steel panel. The slain figure appears to be unconscious, lost in a deep sleep, lying with hands out to either side in a horizontal position on the ground, however Jurayj attempts to free her constraint by returning her body back to a vertical position.