TBN Projects is excited to announce our inaugural exhibition opening, which will take place on November 5th, 2022. The group exhibition entitled L.A. Currents is curated by Shelley Holcomb and features the work of twelve L.A.-based artists. The works span several mediums, including painting, sculpture, video, and installation by twelve artists who are from, based in, and influenced by Los Angeles. L.A. Currents is a snapshot of the makers who are creating art in our esteemed city. Aaron Douglas Estrada Andrea Aragon Brea Weinreb Cat Jones Devin Troy Strother Gbenga Komolafe Haleigh Nickerson Javier Ramirez Jessica Taylor Bellamy Karla Ekatherine Canseco Katie Hector Lizette Hernandez LOS ANGELES: An opening reception will be held on Saturday, November 5th, 2022, from 6-10pm. The exhibition will be on view through November 22, 2022, by appointment only. Aaron Douglas Estrada (he/him) is an artist whose work examines the body in space, moments of play, and decolonization. He is a first-generation Los Angeles Salvadorian native. He incorporates growing up in Los Angeles and his interaction with diverse cultures and lifestyles in his work. He documents materials and the energy in them through collective memories and everyday life. He is creating repositories for memories. He includes songs, sayings, and cultural signifiers that contain a multi-layered history into his sculptures, paintings, murals, public artworks, and installations. The work functions as a growing ethnographic archive that examines systemic racism, the body, and acts of decolonization. The archive contains rituals, life, death, pain, joy, music, and collective achievements from Black and Brown bodies. Andrea Aragon (she/they) is a partially self-taught artist & first-generation Mexican American. She incorporates the use of traditional oil painting in collaboration with found materials. Powering through techniques, she illustrates and shapes the human experience with the influence of growing up in lower to lower-middle-class America. She presents her paintings with sporadic compositions of photographed cultural norms from her personal life. She hopes to make connections by presenting political, cultural, & social understandings of humanity and how it feeds in today's times. The work entices a narrative that invites the viewer to tap into their subconscious and present awareness of a perspective yet to be told. Brea Weinreb (she/her) is a queer figurative painter based in Los Angeles. Her paintings depict and decode moments of camaraderie, solidarity, performativity, and exclusivity amongst gay men. “Taste the Rainbow” is from Weinreb’s most recent series, Pride Paintings, which references images taken during Pride celebrations on Gay Beach in San Francisco. Her focus begins with the gazes between men taking place alongside yet indifferent to the presence of women. Weinreb is fascinated by how this triangulation of gazes, including her own, displaces the desire typically imbued in artist-subject relationships. In this work specifically, there is a cluster of jewel-toned figures with their backs turned to both the artist and the viewer. She utilizes bright colors and abstraction of form to break down the solidity of the image and link the role of the observer to deepen the understanding of community, belonging, and identity. Cat Jones (he/him) is a multi-media artist whose work is centered around identity, self-acceptance, and reflection. He uses his years of mental health work to gauge his practice and influence narratives that are necessary to highlight; work that centers on the interpersonal dialogue one has with the external world in ways that are inviting, sharp, and warm. “Quiet One” explores the interpersonal processing that occurs usually alone. The act of self-surveillance has allowed Jones to reflect on and embrace aspects of his identity he’s been hesitant to acknowledge. Devin Troy Strother (he/him) borrows gestures, images, and themes from Philip Guston as “an entry point back into figurative painting.” The paintings started as master copies until Strother was compelled to “appropriate and adopt some of Guston’s themes and approaches from his show at Marlborough Gallery in the 1970’s.” Cancel culture and its restrictions on subjectivity disturbs and fascinates Strother; the cancellation of Guston’s recent shows at four different museums, for example, propelled his interest in “further putting myself in the other position.” ​​Gbenga Komolafe (they/he) is a Nigerian artist currently based in Los Angeles. Exploring the intersections of textile, video, sound, and sculpture, Komolafe draws from the parallels between traditional African art practices looted from Komolafe’s Yoruba ancestors and the innovative craftsmanship of mid-20th-century queer and Black American communities. Komolafe’s practice builds on ancestral traditions of batik, quilting, and cult imagery by implementing modern techniques like digital manipulation and assemblage. Utilizing everyday found materials, analog and digital printmaking techniques, and fabric-based installations, Komolafe stitches together personal memories with greater universal motifs to explore the possibilities of a collectively imagined future where queer, Black, and marginalized bodies are not only seen but celebrated. Haleigh Nickerson's (she/her) work explores race, gender, desire, and power through strategies involving the body's physicality that engage aspects of vulnerability and refusal. She uses the body as a tool, subject, and site where she thinks about notions of agency, empowerment, and spectatorship through intermedia. Nickerson is interested in constructions of Black female identity and specific constructions of “Blackness” or Black identity, the doing and the undoing. She aims to examine identity as a specific site of freedom through (self-portraits) photography works, video/film works, sculpture, installation, and performance. Javier Ramirez’s (he/him) work examines his relationship with being raised in an immigrant home with iconography that characterizes growing up in “The Valley’s” sun-drenched suburbia. Through painting and sculpture, the imagery often evokes lighthearted but also poignant and tender memories of family, friends, and pets. Jessica Taylor Bellamy (she/her) explores the tension of living at the edge of a precarious paradise. Primarily working with oil painting, Bellamy also incorporates screen printing, video, and sculpture into her practice. Her paintings function as collages that intend to deconstruct idealist narratives by exploring the political, social, and ecological implications of a false promise of paradise and false notions of progress. Through a critical and loving approach, Bellamy examines the phenomenological experience of the California landscape and proposes that we reimagine our relationship to the environment and examine the social structures that strain it. Karla Ekatherine Canseco’s (she/her) practice explores the nuances of identity through different mediums, particularly clay and performance. She interrogates the body knowledge, such as epigenetics, that she has inherited from her family in her work and as an access point to interpret the body as a vessel with the ability to transform and mimic. She is interested in how matter carries information that has been passed down and is present; Our corporealities collapse conceptions of time and hold stories in the same manner clay transcribes its composition and impression. In making, she invites her history within, daydreams, and poetics to materialize into sculptures forming her personal and shared mythologies. Katie Hector’s (she/her) portraits of friends, people she’s met, and complete strangers are allegories of longing, intimacy, and grief in response to isolation and dissociation. Layering bleach and dye on canvas Hector builds up and erases sections to create composite likenesses. Painting with bleach and dye instead of acrylic or traditional mediums allows her to have a direct conversation with the canvas itself. Within each painting, she is testing the limits of the fibers and the canvas’s ability to retain or let go of pigment. Thus the memory of the surface produces the final after image; an impression of personhood, an uncanny portrait. Shelley Holcomb (she/her) is an artist, writer, curator, and active member of the Los Angeles arts community. She is the CEO and Creative Director of Curate LA and co-host of Whits & Giggles, a monthly radio show on NTS Radio. She holds a Painting BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design. Holcomb’s art has been exhibited in multiple institutions, including the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, NC, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, CA, the Jepson Center in Savannah, GA, Attleboro Arts Museum, and Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. TBN Projects was founded in the city of Vernon, and developed out of The Big New (TBN)'s desire to provide a platform for early and mid-career curators and artists to collaborate on new projects and exhibit their work. We are not limited in our definition of who an artist is and what art can be, and we will actively promote collaborations and projects with artists and creators across all disciplines in the pursuit of the most interesting ideas and outcomes. TBN Projects is located at 2940 Leonis Blvd, Vernon, CA 90058. Please email contact@thebignew.co with appointments and inquiries. Artwork: Andrea Aragon, "Anything Helps," 2022, spray paint, oil paint, found materials on wood panel, 56 x 40 ½ inches.