October Shows at No.9 Cork Street
This month’s exhibitions explore place and identity, with solo presentations by Canadian painter Wanda Koop and New York-based artist Kenny Rivero, and a group exhibition curated by Tony Albert and Jenn Ellis
This month’s exhibitions explore place and identity, with solo presentations by Canadian painter Wanda Koop and New York-based artist Kenny Rivero, and a group exhibition curated by Tony Albert and Jenn Ellis
The October programme at Frieze’s No.9 Cork Street features exhibitions from Sullivan+Strumpf (Sydney and Melbourne), Night Gallery (Los Angeles) and Charles Moffett (New York) running October 5–21.
Sullivan+Strumpf: ‘Story, Place’
Sullivan+Strumpf presents a collective consideration of land, ancestry and belief, with indigenous and diasporic voices from around the globe. Curated by renowned Australian artist Tony Albert and curator Jenn Ellis, the group show features artists Tony Albert, Shiraz Bayjoo, Edgar Calel, Gunybi Ganambarr, Lindy Lee, Naminapu Maymuru-White, Angela Tiatia and Jemima Wyman.
In three parts, ‘Story, Place’ begins with a consideration of earth, materiality and our relationship with places or origin. It’s explored in the work of Naminapu Maymuru-White, of the Maŋgalili clan, and Lindy Lee, a second-generation Chinese-Australian artist, both of whom delve into themes of the earth and cosmos.
Also exploring ancestry, land and materiality are Gunybi Ganambarr of the Ŋaymil people and Jemima Wyman, a palawa woman, with paternal descendants from the pairrebeener people of tebrakunna and poredareme. Ganambarr reworks materials such as tree bark and road signs with his geometric mark-making to refer to the sacred waters around Gängan, the land of his mother’s people. Wyman collects and collages hundreds of images of protest, investigating resistance and camouflage as a social and political strategy in negotiating identity.
Edgar Calel, of the Mayan Kaqchikel cosmovision, presents a new series of works titled Runojel xa xti jotayimpe, Runojel xa xti tzolimpe, chuech ri ruach’ulew (Everything Will Blossom, Everything Will Reappear Before the Face of the Earth). His canvases feature landscapes, objects, relics, concepts and experiences, of spiritual importance. The paintings are then covered almost entirely with clay collected by his family in a scared forest.
Angela Tiatia, an artist of Samoan and Australian descent explores representation, gender, neo-colonialism and the commodification of the body and place. She presents two films created in 2015 on Funafuti, the main atoll of the Tuvalu archipelago. They show the artist on a cement slab as the surrounding ocean laps and washes over her, highlighting the plight of Pacific peoples holding on to their lands amid global warming.
Tony Albert of the Kuku Yalanji people presents an installation that engages with political, historical and cultural Aboriginal and Australian history, and his fascination with kitsch ‘Aboriginalia’. Also considering histories is the work of Shiraz Bayjoo, a Mauritian artist based in London. Bayjoo presents an amalgamation of photographs, paintings and repurposed archival displays to rework Western narratives and orientalist tropes.
Night Gallery: ‘Eclipse’
Night Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by Wanda Koop. Koop’s uncanny paintings reinvigorate landscape traditions with surreal interventions. Inspired by her dreams, the works the unconscious to explore contemporary ecological concerns.
Smoke (2023), for example, presents a bright orange moon, apparently fantastical until considered against images of the Pacific Northwest coast during fire season. In Blood Moon (2022), the lunar body becomes a violent pink, perfectly shaded circle which hovers at unreal proportion to the horizon line. Applying many layers to her paintings to generate their heady atmospheres, Koop’s acid tones echo the way we are used to seeing nature today: glowing from a screen. Her longstanding interest in the relationship between technology and perception finds expression in Barcode Borealis (2023), where a series of white and blue rectangles protrude from a minimal, twilit landscape.
Courtesy of the artist and Charles Moffett.
Charles Moffett: Kenny Rivero
Finally, there’s a solo exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Kenny Rivero from Charles Moffett. Coinciding with Frieze London 2023, it marks the first presentation of Rivero’s work in the UK. Born in New York’s Washington Heights to Dominican parents and now based in the Bronx, Rivero deconstructs the histories and identities he has been raised to understand as absolute and re-engineers them. Employing painting, collage, drawings and sculpture, his creative process explores the broken narrative of Dominican American identity, socio-geographic solidarity, familial expectations, and race and gender roles.
A trained musician, Rivero cites the hybrid qualities of salsa, hip hop, house, jazz and merengue as influences on his work, with musical equipment alongside paints, brushes and canvases in his studio. He often works on one canvas over the course of months if not years, returning again and again to discover the painting’s evolving form.
Emerging from a diverse religious upbringing that incorporated Christianity, Vodun, Santeria and Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices, Rivero’s faith poetically inflects his artistic practice. Often, his paintings hint at a parallel world, one that feels familiar to the life and urban vernacular of his native Washington Heights, current home in the Bronx, or his ancestral home in Santiago and el Cibáo, yet occupying a nebulous space between the living and the dead.
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Main image: Angela Tiatia, Lick (still), video, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf
Thumbnail image: Tony Albert, ‘Story, Place’ (detail), Installations, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf
