Portrait Show

Through the work of five artists—Mira Dancy, Dalton Gata, Paul Heyer, Cheyenne Julien, and Erin Jane Nelson—this group show highlights as many distinct manifestations of highly stylized portraiture.

From Chapter NY:

Through portraits of themselves and others, both real and imagined, these artists all use the genre of portraiture to different ends. Mira Dancy's two paintings of heroic female figures each embody strength amid their chaotic architectural settings and melancholic palettes. Dalton Gata's ink drawings, made over the past couple months, epitomize his characteristic style of portraiture, merging elements of high fashion with accentuated physical features to question cultural standards of beauty and celebrate the diversity of self-expression during a time of cultural isolation. Paul Heyer's painted skeleton subject admires a fluttering butterfly, finding the humor and beauty in ephemeral life. Cheyenne Julien's portrait of a startled figure sprayed with tubes of brightly colored paint confronts its viewer with an unsettling metaphor for the art world's fetishization of bodies and artists of color. In Erin Jane Nelson's recent stoneware pieces, she combines disparate images—including photographic portraits of her adolescent self, a recent ultrasound scan of her own empty womb, and a printed image of organic matter suspended in melting ice, among others—to reflect upon the precarity of a world that is unable to adequately prepare for present and future catastrophes.