Quartet of Joy

For our presentation at NADA Miami 2021, we bring together three gallery artists working across painting, glass and ceramics, each just now beginning to exhibit internationally. Each addresses the fragile boundary between figuration and abstraction through an engagement with apophenia-the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. Hend Samir contributes a new large scale canvas in which she abandons the ground familiar to her prior work, opting to create a new type of "body-landscape" for her characters. These figures, borne of her unique process, emerge casually through the flick of paint, coming together in social conflagrations that address cultural taboos, communal celebration, and the imperialist traditions recapitulated daily by the discipline of architecture. Narumi Nekpenekpen, known for modest-scale quasi-figurative (and occasionally vehicular) ceramic works, contributes a new large scale ceramic. In "in the seas of corruption," Nekpenekpen scales up chain-like forms explored previously, opting to saddle a body composed curiously of two leg-like masses with a phantom limb borne of interlocking loops, their airbrushed patina suggesting an alternative dimensionality. Marc Librizzi has created a visual paradox articulated in two slabs of cast glass, a new foray for the young artist. Titled "Path of Fluid Motion," these works face one another, implicating the viewer in their selectively mirrored surfaces. The effect is an uncanny stasis between entrapment and joyous liberation.