February 21 – March 30, 2024
Autumn Breon | Uzumaki Cepeda | Alanis Forde | Lewinale Havette | Jazmine Hayes | Monica Hernandez | Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow | Ambrose Rhapsody Murray | Kelli Ryan
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to announce our collabortation with Cierra Britton Gallery titled, Déjà Vu opening on February 24th during Frieze week at 1923 S. Santa Fe Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90021. This group exhibition features artists of multiple disciplines including Autumn Breon, Uzumaki Cepeda, Alanis Forde, Lewinale Havette, Jazmine Hayes, Monica Hernandez, Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, and Kelli Ryan.
Déjà Vu is a group exhibition that explores the idea of multiple realities and worlds built by artists that bring the viewer into the mind of the artist. Inspired by escapism, the works in Déjà Vu include mythical figures, imagined landscapes, and new paradigms that feel familiar to each artist. The title of the exhibit references the common French phrase for the phenomenon of feeling as though one has lived through the present situation before. It is an illusion of memory whereby—despite a strong sense of recollection—the time, place, and context of the "previous" experience are uncertain or impossible.
Autumn Breon creates art that investigates the visual vocabulary of liberation through a queer Black feminist lens. A graduate of Stanford University, she studied Aeronautics & Astronautics and researched aeronautical astrobiology applications for NASA. Autumn’s examination of contemporary art throughout the African Diaspora began when she was living and working in South Africa. Through inquiry-based interaction, she invites audiences to participate in the examination of freedom, intersectional identities, and Diasporic memory. Using a variety of media – including installation, performance, and collage – her qualitative and quantitative research processes provide the foundation for reimagining and creating systems that make current oppressive systems obsolete. Breon’s work has been recognized by Artsy, the Smithsonian Institution, Aspen Institute, TED, the Obama Foundation, Artnet, Time Magazine, and the New York Times.
“Uzumaki” Cepeda (Bronx-born, Los Angeles-based) makes sculptures, paintings, installations, collages, and photography that examine how senses of safety, comfort, and agency are negotiated through objects and space. As a first-generation American woman of Dominican heritage, Uzumaki’s textile tableau act as safe spaces for Black and Brown people, while also addressing the stigmas of homophobia, transphobia, racism, and colorism that often people and women who feel unprotected by American public life and policies. Her practice consists of transforming everyday, often found objects with brightly-colored faux fur to create interactive installations informed by traditional iconography of domestic spaces. Uzumaki’s dream-like and vibrant work draws from her childhood imagination growing up both on the islands of the Dominican Republic and in the Bronx.
Alanis Forde is a figurative portraiture and surrealist Barbadian artist who works mainly with oil paint and collage on traditional surfaces like canvas. Alanis attended the Barbados community College and attained her Bachelor’s Degree and has been a full time artist for six years. Alanis' work navigates life through a portrayed paradise that questions concepts based on black female identity in an idealized, exotic, Caribbean space. By portraying herself and her reality. Forde questions the meaning of escape and paradise as someone who dwells in a place that is a paradise and escape for others. Both introspective and escapist, Forde’s work depicts her ongoing conflict between comfort at home and the desire to escape the ironic paradise she exists within.
Lewinale Havette underlying themes in her work deal primarily with aspects of identity, including gender and power dynamics, race, religion, and sexuality. As a West African woman, she finds it crucial to reposition black female bodies away from the lens of patriarchal capitalism and as human beings capable of tenderness, power, and strength in contrast to fear, powerlessness, and exploitation.
Jazmine Hayes is an interdisciplinary visual artist, musician and poet—born, raised and based in Brooklyn, New York. Her practice explores histories of the African diaspora and the ways they are preserved and reproduced through cultural traditions. Through this exploration, Hayes works across an array of mediums such as installation, painting, drawing, performance, video, sound, textile and writing. She is a 2023 U.S. Fulbright researcher, in which she traveled to Senegal, West Africa to explore weaving traditions and pattern as coded communication, protection and a preserver of Black American, Caribbean & West African histories.
Monica Hernandez’s oil paintings explore gender, identity, sexuality, and representation. The new paintings she presents are steeped in introspection as the artist referenced photographs of herself as an initial point of departure. In this sense, the works are autobiographical by nature, however, their development strays from realistic depictions of the physical body in a psychological pursuit of processing intergenerational traumas, desires and lived experiences. Hernandez emphasizes an interest in progressing her studies of the female form in relation to domestic interiors by taking the figure out of the confines of a set place and time. Toying with perspective, she deconstructs her compositions and rearranges the elements into geometric dreamscapes that serve as visual metaphors for her active analysis of personal memories and relationships.
Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow (b.1990 in Stockholm, Sweden), currently residing in Los Angeles, is a Swedish- Gambian visual artist known primarily for her work with acrylic and oil paint. Her bold self-portraits ensnare emotivity as each layer resonates the artist's internal and outward struggle with feeling distanced from the world around her as she tries to reconcile the dichotomies of bridging multiple cultures as a mixed woman.
Rugiyatou was raised by her Gambian father and step mother who imparted West African values and culture while residing her whole life in Sweden. The artist credits her Swedish mother and grandmother as being early artistic influences in her life, inspiring her to start painting at an early age. Her upbringing became her inspiration to portray black subjectivity and explore her half-Swedish and half-Gambian identity. Jallow’s use of color to portray black, white, and mixed skin with the thread, is acting as a visual representation of equality and connection across races. The bright colors specifically are a further representation of the artist’s connection to nature and feeling of belonging on this Earth.
Ambrose Rhapsody Murray is a self-taught artist, born in Jacksonville, Florida and raised in Asheville, NC. Through sewing, painting, material experimentation, film and collaborative projects, they create stories to investigate our relationships to the colonial undercurrents of our lives, the charged symbology of black feminine bodies, and the ephemeral and layered qualities of memory and remembering. Ambrose was transformed by Black Studies while at Yale College where they received their BA. Through their work, Ambrose seeks to bring physical form to the ideas and theories they have been struck by from Black feminist writers and visionaries. Their work and practice are rooted in ethea of care, reverence, intimacy, time-travel, healing, grief and attending to the stories of the dead. Their work has exhibited across the US as well as abroad in Berlin, Mexico City, London and more.
Kelli Ryan is a multidisciplinary artist who was born and raised in Baltimore, MD, and now lives and works in New York, NY. She attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 with a BFA in New Genres. After a five-year position as production manager and lead painter for Amy Sherald, Kelli’s current art practice involves weaving together musical experiences with painted visuals.
About the galleries:
Founded in 2021, the Cierra Britton Gallery is the first NYC-based gallery dedicated to representing BIPOC womxn artists whose work contributes to the contemporary cultural dialogue across the globe. The gallery’s mission is to make space for artists who are creating exploratory work inclusive of all mediums such as painting, photography, drawing, and performance. Starting as a nomadic and online gallery, our programming has focused on a diverse roster of artists making work that is rooted in storytelling, exploration, and cultural commentary. CBG is creating a safe and much-needed space for BIPOC womxn artists who have historically been marginalized from the mainstream art world. We aim to uphold artists and create community through dialogue and support for the arts.
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with locations in Boston and Los Angeles. We exhibit contemporary art with a heavy emphasis on concept-driven artwork by emerging to mid-career artists located across the country and internationally. The gallery primarily focuses on paintings but also exhibits a range of other media including photography, sculpture, mixed media, digital prints, drawings, and much more. Owner Abigail Ogilvy Ryan founded the Boston gallery in 2015, and in Fall 2023 the gallery program expanded to a second location in Los Angeles. The gallery is committed to exhibiting the strongest work from both local and international artists.
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery's new Los Angeles gallery will provide a platform for new perspectives and education through independent curation and artist partnerships. The collaborative approach upends the traditional gallery model and aims to enhance the careers of artists, curators, collectors, and other art world professionals, both emerging and established. The gallery program primarily features guest curators in order to share diverse perspectives and voices with the Los Angeles area and the greater art market. AOG x LA is now open to the public.
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