OF LIVING DELICIOUSLY
April Street
Vivien Chung
Ellen Jong + Aura Friedman
Erica Schreiner view press release
- David Hume
It has become commonplace in contemporary society to streamline emotion. Identification and classification exist as means of emotional castration. Placing a cap on the ability to feel allows us to minimize pain, suffering, personal condemnation. Within an excessively categorized emotional landscape, there are few that possess an innate predisposition toward passion.
‘Of Living Deliciously’ pays homage to the inherent sensibility toward beauty and deformity present in those with a certain delicacy of passion. To live ‘deliciously’ is to embrace boundlessness and to relish decadence. Yet to exist boundlessly enlarges the sphere of both our happiness and our misery. Each of these artists is individually attuned to this spectrum, communicating this through their unique intentionality of material and their emphasis on identity, physicality, and the ephemeral nature of self.
Unbound by the need for classification, the works in this exhibition emerge as a quiet refuge within an ever-shifting world; a calm within the storm. There is solace in illegibility: in the refusal to render, define, or categorize. Here, abstraction offers a freedom from finality, replacing certainty with familiarity found in color, movement, and texture. Enchanting the viewer in an act of play, each artist engages curiosity and dialog through the use of ethereal landscapes, luminous mark making, and succulent textures.
April Street’s new series of small watercolors called "Weather Patterns” are spontaneously painted landscapes with reworded weather reports written on each of them at the place and time of completion. They bring together the disembodied time of the imagined world with the physical conditions surrounding the artist at a particular moment.
Drawing inspiration from idealized “World Landscapes” of the Flemish Renaissance, Street’s landscapes are floating “in between" interior and exterior perceptions of time. Street’s canvas’s bear witness to the unavoidable progression moving forward season to season, day to day, weather condition to weather condition, while reflecting on our complicated relationship to nature, technology, and our physical existence in the world.
Vivien Ebright Chung reflects on the contemporary desire for variety both in the way we consume media and satiate desires, her imagery takes hold of multiplicities in both technique and subject. Layering divergent moments in time delineated with elegant mark making, the viewer is presented with illegible opaque narratives which hide beneath the guise of the familiar: straddling the line between the beautiful and the grotesque. Illusion carries significance within Ebright Chung’s body of work, highlighting the inherent depth hidden within ambiguity.
Ellen Jong and Aura Friedman collaborate to create singular figurative works that merge their distinct practices, grounded in organic material and custom pigment. Jong (b. Queens, NY) investigates the intersections of body, material, and cultural lineage, transforming ink, a medium long associated with authority and tradition, into living, sculptural forms that evolve, decay, and leave traces. Friedman, a renowned hair colorist known for her technical and painterly approach, treats hair as both medium and surface, using pigment and gesture to shape identity and expression.
Together, their collaboration explores the impermanence and persistence of the self, how we mark and re-mark the body through gesture, color, and time. Ink and hair become not only adornment but living artifacts. The resulting works are raw figurative expressions that hold space for shared authorship while reflecting on identity, physicality, and the impulse to transcend the tumultuous conditions of American history.