Yossi Milo Gallery

Yossi Milo is pleased to present Crusading The Specter, a group exhibition curated by artist and filmmaker Shikeith. The exhibition will present work by Antoine d'Agata, Kevin Beasley, Kevin Claiborne, Justin Emmanuel Dumas, Alanna Fields, Diana Al-Hadid, Allison Janae Hamilton, Y. Malik Jalal, Harold Mendez, Azza El Siddique, Bri Williams, and London Williams. The exhibition will open with a reception on Thursday, June 22 and will be on view through Friday, August 11, 2023. Crusading The Specter is a creative response to a prevailing socio-political state of mourning and remembrance, an ever-increasing loss of societal liberties and privileges, and worldwide environmental devastation. This exhibition delves into the spatial dimension and politics of the notion of ‘a haunting,’ drawing inspiration from the concept of Hauntology as introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1992 magnum opus, Specters of Marx. Hauntology emphasizes that the past is not merely a relic of bygone eras but rather an ever-present haunting force that profoundly impacts our lives. The artists featured in Crusading The Specter embark on uncovering and following traces of the past that shape our contemporary experiences and identities. Through their artistic endeavors, these artists communicate processes of grieving, yearning, recovery, and temporality, shedding light on the intricate interplay between history, memory, and the human condition. Among those featured in the exhibition is Kevin Beasley (American, b. 1985), whose sculpture Fisher (2020) presents a ghostly figure made from worn clothing and a repurposed fishing net, set in form and preserved in resin. The process of creating this work is intensive, with Beasley dipping the garments into resin, and quickly molding and shaping them before they solidify in roughly one half of an hour. The resulting work carries evidence of the cycles of use and disuse, the artist’s body, and the process of its own creation, blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and performance. Azza El Siddique’s (Sudanese, b. 1984) bronze sculpture 7 3/8 (2022) takes the form of a snapback baseball cap mounted to a wall. The work is a replica of a hat worn by the artist’s late brother and artist Teto El Siddique, and captures every minute detail of the original garment. Yet, the cap itself was destroyed in the casting process, speaking to notions of grief, memory, forgetting, and healing. Included in the exhibition is Kevin Claiborne’s (American, b. 1989) Throne (2022). Made from old police barricades, the multimedia sculpture recalls the form of a seat used in BDSM practices. The structure is sealed with a thin layer of shea butter—a uniquely African ingredient used for centuries—and suggests a crossing of boundaries and barriers to assert agency over experiences, identities, bodies, pleasure, and pain. Among the photographic works presented in the exhibition is Alanna Fields’ (American, b. 1990) Come To My Garden (2021). The mise en abyme photograph presents the repeated image of a nude figure seated on a blanket outdoors. Sourced from an archival photograph, the work reframes extant relics of history and memories of the past, transforming how we understand and relate to events of the present. Curator and multimedia artist Shikeith (American, b. 1989) has exhibited across the United States and internationally. His work is in the permanent collections of the 21c Museum, Louisville, KY; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and the Newark Museum of Art, NJ, among others. In 2021, the artist presented notes towards becoming a spill, a site-specific performance at the Performa Biennial in New York, NY, and released his debut monograph of the same name the following year. Shikeith has been honored with numerous awards and grants, including the 2022 Pittsburgh Foundation's Exposure Artist Award in co-fellowship with The Carnegie Museum of Art; 2020 Art Matters Foundation Grant; 2020 Leslie Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship; and 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, among others. Most recently, the artist was chosen as a 2023-2024 fellow for the Sharpe-Walentas studio program, and has previously completed residencies at the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Long Road Projects, Jacksonville, FL, and Pittsburgh Glass Center, PA, among others. Shikeith holds a BFA from The Pennsylvania State University and an MFA from Yale University. The artist lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA.

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Nineteen Eighty-Five, Natia Lemay's debut solo exhibition in New York and first with the gallery. Opening on Thursday, May 11 and on view through Saturday, June 17, the exhibition will present new works exploring psychological, metaphysical, and material spaces of 'home.' Natia Lemay engages her practice as a means of building new notions of home. Hailing from T'karonto (Toronto), Canada, the artist navigated much of her childhood through insecure housing and environments of drug use, impeding a firm sense of home from ever fully forming. This precarious and formative period of the artist's life exists only in the realm of memory, as she possesses almost no photographs from those years. Revisiting and processing these memories as an adult, Lemay paints images and visions of herself at different moments in her childhood, and sculpts miniatures of the furniture from the transient spaces she inhabited. Lemay's paintings and sculptures are the result of this investigative process, allowing the artist to recuperate lost memories, and trace a path of trauma and dispossession beginning with settler colonialism and leading up to the present day. Working across multiple mediums, Lemay steers this path towards a future of healing. The artist's painted worlds of black bring her own visions of home to light, turning the very color of black itself into a paradox of visibility. Of mixed Afro-Indigenous descent, Lemay learned to find refuge in the traditions of her ancestors, from a spiritual reverence for trees, to the form of the circle as a symbolic demarcation of home, referencing drum circles, dream catchers, and beads worn in braided hair. Today, Lemay calls upon these traditions in her art practice to recall memories, trace the generations of trauma inflicted by settler-colonialism, and invoke the embodied knowledge inherited from her ancestors. Included in the show is Untitled (2022), a circular painting depicting two children standing in a barren room. The figures are childhood versions of Lemay herself and her brother, the likenesses of whom the artist referenced from one of the only photographs she has from her childhood. In Untitled (2022), The artist and her brother are positioned at the very fore of the composition with their bodies partially cropped by the curved edge of the canvas, as if being simultaneously pulled into close focus and pushed into the peripheries. Lemay is painted entirely in black, while her brother is rendered in full color. The artist chromatically distinguishes between the two in acknowledgement of the different lived experiences of gender within a patriarchal society. While both are of Afro-Indigenous descent, and both live in the same environment of neglect, the female child slips further into the oblivion of her background due to the social positioning of her gender. The intersecting layers of race, culture, age, and gender are constantly subject to scrutiny in Lemay's work, a process that allows the artist to process and emerge from the traumas that permeated her childhood. Alongside the paintings presented in Nineteen Eighty-Five, Lemay will debut a new body of sculptural works, including miniature versions of stacked furniture made from soapstone. Throughout her practice, the artist returns to furniture for its quotidian yet powerful significance in our domestic lives. Despite their impermanence in Lemay's childhood, the artist regards these objects as permanent fixtures of memory, linking the present to the past through fleeting visions and remembrances. Rebuilding these relics from soapstone, Lemay draws a parallel between the material as something that is at once extremely heavy yet soft, and the transitory experiences of home she had as a child. As members of the Indigenous Nation of Mi'kmaq, the artist and her ancestors have been dispossessed of their land by the European colonial project, which continues to have devastating and rippling impacts today. With her soapstone sculptures, Lemay returns to the land, harnessing the Earth's resources to reconfigure the structural components of homes lost and forgotten. Placed in conversation with painted memories and visions of the past, these sculptures ask the viewer to find both comfort and discomfort as they too are made to grapple with histories manifested in the present, both materially and psychologically. Natia Lemay (b. 1985; T'karonto [Toronto], Canada) has exhibited widely throughout North America, including at Green Hall Gallery, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT; Mayten's Gallery, Toronto, Canada; and Artscape, Toronto, Canada, among others. The artist was selected for the 2022 Royal Drawing School Residency in Dumfries, Scotland and was the recipient of the 2020 Christopher Pratt & Mary West Pratt Bursary and 2020 OCAD University Diversity and Equity Excellence Award, among others. She received her BFA from Ontario College of Art & Design University in 2021 and is a 2023 MFA candidate at Yale School of Art. Lemay currently lives and works in New Haven, CT.

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce FACADES III, Markus Brunetti's third solo exhibition with the gallery. Opening on Thursday, March 16 and on view through Saturday, May 6, the exhibition will present new photographic works from Brunetti's ongoing series FACADES. Markus Brunetti's (b. 1965; Germany) most recent work continues his singular mission to document Europe's historic cathedrals, churches, monasteries, and synagogues in immaculate detail. With his partner, Betty Schoener, Brunetti travels the continent in a converted firetruck-turned-photo lab. Together, the two live and work on the road, returning to their subjects repeatedly over a period of several years and taking thousands of photographs of each structure. Brunetti then edits, layers, and arranges each frame to create a composite image that eschews the illusory effects of spatial perspective and provides an otherwise impossible, perfect view of the building's façade. Brunetti's practice is often likened to Bernd and Hilla Becher's serial documentation of German industrialization, yet the artist himself aligns his methods more closely with the tradition of Old Master painting. Like the masters of the Renaissance, the artist offers interpretations of his monumental subjects, not simply by photographing them, but by crafting a view of each structure according to his conceptual understanding of its architecture. Brunetti's images thus offer their own Bildsprache, or visual language, that translates the presence of each building in three-dimensional space into an idealized, two-dimensional image that showcases the finest details of every square-meter of the façade. In this way, the artist preserves the cultural heritage these structures embody, immortalizing them in his impeccable renderings. The unique embellishments and stylistic features of Brunetti's subjects take on new meaning when works from the series are placed in conversation. FACADES III presents images of sacred buildings from similar time periods and architectural movements, yet which differ vastly in their design, material, and construction. Included in the show is Cambridge, King's College Chapel (2014 - 2023), whose construction began in 1446 and was completed in 1515 in England. The church is an exemplar of Perpendicular Gothic architecture, with its clean vertical lines, large windows, and regular geometric embellishments. Likewise built in the latter half of the 15th century, the church depicted in Venezia, Santa Maria dei Miracoli (2006 - 2023) contrasts with King's College Chapel in its luscious, colored marble façade, curved arches, and small rounded windows. The variations in local resources, politics, and culture had immense impact on the construction of buildings that were erected much for the same purpose: as holy sites and testaments to the far reaches of human achievement and artistic philosophy. Brunetti devotes his painstaking process to creating works of art whose detail, effort, and devotion match that of the structures themselves. Since this project began in 2005, Markus Brunetti and Betty Schoener have spent nearly two decades travelling Europe and working ceaselessly to create their sublime renderings of some of humankind's most remarkable achievements. From Lincoln, The Cathedral Church of St. Mary (2006 - 2023) in England, to Lucca, San Michele In Foro (2012 - 2023) in Italy, to Cordoba, Mezquita-Catedral (2013 - 2023) in Spain, the historic sites Brunetti captures have stood the test of time as the world around them changed over the course of centuries, and are testament to humankind's artistry on a monumental scale. The artist's own rigorous and passionate practice translates these accomplishments into modern images, preserving the work of architects and laborers of centuries past, and offering evidence of their glory to contemporary audiences the world over. Markus Brunetti's FACADES have been featured in prominent group exhibitions, including PROPORTIO at Palazzo Fortuny, which coincided with the 57th Venice Biennale in Italy, and the 2015 Les Rencontres d'Arles Photographie Festival in France. The artist has presented solo exhibitions at the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI; Museum of Fine Arts, Le Locle, Switzerland; Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Hong Kong, China, among others. Brunetti's work is held in the permanent collections of the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Le Locle, Switzerland; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, among others. Brunetti and his partner Betty Schoener live and work across Europe, always furthering the FACADES series.

Yossi Milo Gallery is delighted to present Eurovision, Navot Miller’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will open with an artist’s reception on Thursday, February 2, 2023 from 6–8 PM, and will be on view through Saturday, March 11, 2023. With his distinctively vibrant palette, Navot Miller (b. 1991; Israel) draws from the flow of moments and memories in his own life, presenting the landscapes, architecture, and people he sees with fresh, inquisitive eyes. Growing up in a rural Israeli village, Miller found it difficult to express himself and his identity as a young gay person. Upon relocating to Berlin as an adult, he found a community of creatives who opened up new possibilities for self-expression. Among them were curator Joel Mu, who introduced Miller to Berlin’s alternative art scene, and instructors Michael von Erlenbach and Kathrin Ruhlig, who became his most significant mentors. Today, Miller’s bold, colorful palette has become a means of expressing the parts of himself that remained hidden during his childhood. The new body of work in Eurovision presents the artist’s past year living in Berlin and travelling through Europe. Nodding to the hit international singing competition of the same name, Eurovision encapsulates Miller’s experiences while journeying across a continent, collecting memories and forging relationships along the way.

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to present Meghann Riepenhoff’s third exhibition with the gallery, Ice. Coinciding with the exhibition, a monograph by the same name will be published by Radius Books in conjunction with Yossi Milo Gallery, featuring an essay by Rebecca Solnit. Ice opens Saturday, September 10, with an artist’s reception and book signing from 6:00 – 8:00 PM. The show will remain on view through Saturday, October 22. For her latest series Ice, Riepenhoff ventured deep into wintry climates to extract photographic records of water in its frozen states. Using the early photographic process of cyanotype, Riepenhoff creates images that not only depict, but are themselves the physical traces of ice in its varied forms. Traveling to various bodies of water across the United States, Riepenhoff immerses large sheets of cyanotype paper directly into the elements, allowing snow, ice, and freezing waters to coat the paper’s surface. The elements are then removed, both by way of the artist’s intervention and the natural propensity of ice to melt: a collaboration between artist and the immovable will of nature. Riepenhoff then exposes the paper to sunlight, allowing the effects of time and chemistry to unearth the intricate microstructures and cosmic vastness of ice normally hidden from the human eye. Works from Ice are richly varied in both color and form: swaths of deep indigo, icy blue, even pale yellow flood the cyanotype’s surface, occasionally punctuated by flashes of bright orange and fluorescent green. At a glance, the dramatic ebbs and flows of these colorful forms are reminiscent of color field painting. Yet, upon closer inspection, thousands of fine crystals become visible. The formation of ice crystals is a highly reactive process, dependent entirely upon the environments in which they reside; the slightest change in acidity, algae life, temperature, or presence of chemicals dramatically changes the behavior of each ice crystal. Cyanotype, a medium that similarly responds in a volatile fashion to its immediate surroundings, fittingly captures the diversity of ice formations, from the fractal minutia of mineral structures, to wavelike flushes of freezing water, to wispy ferns of delicate ice crystals. The myriad forms that populate Riepenhoff’s cyanotypes are testament to the dynamism of ice as a material, a microcosm of sorts that, despite its rigidity, is constantly changing. Change is a driving force behind Riepenhoff’s practice, both its natural progression and its acceleration due to human intervention. The inevitability of change over time manifests visually in Riepenhoff’s work, with the artist studying weather patterns and returning to the same location under identical conditions, yet never capturing the exact same image. For a number of works, the artist visited bodies of water that have suffered the pollutive runoff effects of the photography industry, capturing the effects of change as it happens imposingly at the hands of humans. This tension between natural and accelerated processes of change highlights a constancy in Riepenhoff’s work: the passage of time. Ice captures periods of time wherein water freezes and melts, a cyclical process that will persist through millennia. Meghann Riepenhoff’s (b. 1979; Atlanta, GA) work has been presented internationally in exhibitions across the globe, including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Denver Art Museum, CO; C/O Berlin, Germany; Aperture Foundation, New York, NY; and Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX. Her work is held in permanent collections across the United States, including those of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL, among others. In 2018, the artist was selected as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. Riepenhoff earned her BFA in Photography from the University of Georgia, Athens, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. The artist divides her time between Bainbridge Island, WA, and San Francisco, CA.

The title grace comes violently is derived from a line in the Greek tragedy Agamemnon that reads “grace comes somehow violent.” For Shikeith, grace is not an unconditional gift, but rather a precarious stage in a stormy cycle of processing grief. In an incredibly thorough process of his own, Shikeith examines the stages of overwhelming loss and pain that precede grace, if it ever comes at all.

Cameron Welch meticulously assembles hand-cut bits of marble, stone, glass, and tile, to produce his monumental mosaics. His intricate compositions recount epic stories of contemporary life in America, laden with references to ancient mythology, art history, and the artist’s identity. Mosaic, the artist’s medium of choice, allows each constituent piece to embody its own history while simultaneously contributing to the work’s grander narrative.

Developing from Hoque’s earlier works, these new paintings are populated with the signature figures of his personal mythology, borne from traditions of his Bangladeshi heritage, birthplace of Rome, and upbringing in southern Florida. However, the pieces presented in Before Sunrise embody growth at their core. Familiar characters, such as cupids, phoenixes, lions, and ceramic vessels, meet novel forms such as the Bengal tiger. Monumental in size, all of these works emanate the sensuality and exuberance of Brown joy.

The Club, 2021

Matthew Brandt’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery continues his experimental processes inspired by the natural world. Featured are black carbon prints, laser-engraved birch plywood pieces, gelatin silver prints doused in liquid silver, and a selection of reclaimed chandeliers from various rooms. Together, these works address the interrelationship of light and dark, and their influence on the subject, material, and observer.

Untitled, 2020

Sarah Perles Gazin', 2015 / 1436 (Gregorian/Hijri)

New work by Kyle Meyer on view at High Line Nine [507 West 27th Street] through February 28.

For her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Sarah Anne Johnson draws inspiration from her sense of intimacy and integration with the natural world, photographing trees in and around her native Manitoba. “Johnson’s transformed woodlands exude calming positivity and genuine optimism,” writes Loring Knoblauch in Collector Daily. “What emerges is a magical kaleidoscope of color nestled in among the trees.”