83 Bowery, 2nd floor
New York, NY
island gallery is pleased to present a group show titled, White Lodge, with works by Pacifico Silano, Anders Lindseth, Alyssa Kazew, Ondine Vinao, Jia Sung, Alya Hatta, Deanna Barahona, Rebekah Campbell, Lau Wai, Xingzi Gu. This is part two of a two part exhibition with the first half titled, Black Lodge. Drawing from the ideas in David Lynch’s cult classic, Twin Peaks, White Lodge is a paradise deeply corrupted by base desires. A wounded utopia where flesh, mythologies and systems collide. This is Jeffrey Epstein’s America where capital comingles with labor, where bodies are consumed and subsumed by forces beyond reproach. Only a vague memory of these times will survive as new utopias are generated once more to take the place of the broken ones in our wake.
Alyssa Kazew (b. 1991, Mars, PA) received her BA from Pratt Institute in 2012 and currently resides in Austin, TX. Kazew draws inspiration from internet meme culture and popular icons such as the Scream mask and SpongeBob SquarePants. Her multimedia body of work is a wild expression of hedonistic joy, self-deprecating humor, performance art, and sex positivity. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Anonymous Gallery in New York, LVL3 Gallery in Chicago, Take Courage Gallery in London, as well as Outsider Art Fair and Dallas Art Fair with Bill Arning Exhibitions.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, currently based in New York, Lau Wai is a multidisciplinary artist who utilizes moving images, new media, photography, sculptural objects, and installation to investigate how history, fiction, personal memory, and virtuality collide in the process of identity formation. Their research and material sources range from personal and historical archives to cinematic imagery, popular culture, and emerging technologies. Their works are collected by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (United States); Alexander Tutsek – Stiftung Foundation (Germany), and M+ Museum (Hong Kong), among others. They have exhibited in Europe, Asia, and North America, including Brandts Museum of Art and Visual Culture, Denmark (2016); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2018); Para Site, Hong Kong (2015, 2018); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2019, 2021); Kuandu Biennale, Taiwan (2018); Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, Japan (2015); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, United States (2019) and Yokohama Triennale, Japan (2020). They have also participated in residency programs at LES Studio Program, a program of Artists Alliance Inc.; NARS Foundation, New York; and Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred University, New York. They received their BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London and MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University, New York.
Xingzi Gu is an artist based in New York. She/They received BFA from the School of the Art Institute Chicago in 2018, and currently are completing an MFA at New York University. Previous exhibition or performance at Anonymous Gallery, 80 WSE Gallery, O’Flaherty’s, Latitude Gallery in New York; Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, and Art Book Fairs in China. Publications mentioned include Art in America and Art Maze Magazine. Residency participation includes Chicago Artist Coalition, Vermont Studio Center, Dark Study, and Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art.
Ondine Viñao (b. 1994, New York) is an Argentine-American artist and filmmaker. At NYU, Viñao studied between the Studio Art department at Steinhardt and the Film & Television department at Tisch. HOLY FOOLS, Viñao’s solo presentation, was exhibited at the Rubber Factory (NY). Notable exhibitions include screening and talk at the Sheffield Doc Fest (UK) alongside Werner Herzog, Labs New Artists at Red Hook Labs (NY), and a two-artist show at The Goss-Michael Foundation (TX). Other achievements include artist talks at Hauser & Wirth (NY) and Freunde von Freunden (DE), and Viñao’s first photo book published with Ginny Projects. Her work has been profiled in publications including ARTnews, Artnet, Document Journal, Garage Magazine, Office Magazine, The Observer, BlackBook, Jalouse, and New York Magazine. She is currently in pre-production on her first feature film, shooting this fall.
Alya Hatta (b.1999, Malaysia) is an interdisciplinary artist based between London and Kuala Lumpur. She graduated from her BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London before finding herself in the MA Painting Course at Royal College of Art. She has exhibited internationally in London, Milan, Paris, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Tübingen and Sydney amongst others. Hatta is a member of London-based Southeast Asian artist group ‘Unamed Collective’.
Anders Lindseth (b.1990, Cleveland, Ohio) is a multi-media artist who makes paintings, drawings and sculptures. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of the ‘end of the world’, his works reference Tibetan Buddhism as well as fauvism and expressionism, while subverting the traditional labels of painting or drawing. His work has been featured in exhibitions at M+B in Los Angeles, Spazio Amanita in Los Angeles and Florence, Moosey Art in London, and many more. Anders received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 and he currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Deanna Barahona (b. 1997, Los Angeles) lives and works in San Diego, where she is currently an MFA candidate at UCSD. Barahona’s practice centers around themes of collection, obsession, familiar kinship, and symbolic expressions of love and romance. She’s interested in the personal objects and interiors marked with classic characteristics of the Latin-American diaspora. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at White Room Gallery in Bakersfield, Two Rooms Gallery in San Diego, and Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.
Jia Sung is an artist and educator, born in Minnesota, bred in Singapore, now based in Brooklyn. Her practice spans disciplines, painting, artist books, textiles, printmaking, murals, writing, and translation. Inspired by Chinese historical textiles and traditions of feminized labor, her recent work combines tapestry, embroidery, and beadwork with painting. Drawing on motifs from Chinese mythology and Buddhist iconography, Sung uses the familiar visual language of folklore to examine and subvert conventional archetypes of femininity, queerness, and otherness, imbuing them with an eroticism that pushes back at the bowdlerization of inherited stories. Her paintings and artist books have been exhibited across North America, including the Knockdown Center, RISD Museum, Wave Hill, EFA Project Space, Lincoln Center, Yale University, and MOMA PS1. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Emergence Magazine, Hyperallergic, Jacobin Magazine, and Asian American Writers Workshop, and collected by the Met, SFMOMA, and the Special Collections at Yale, SAIC, and RISD. She has taught at organizations like the AC Institute, Abron Arts Center, Children’s Museum of the Arts, and Museum of Chinese in America. She was a 2018-2019 Smack Mellon Studio Artist and Van Lier Fellow, and is currently an adjunct professor at RISD, where she received her BFA in 2015.
Rebekah Campbell is a director and photographer based in New York, currently creating work on femininity and the brink of youth hood. Her works explore the subject’s individuality as well as the effects of natural states while escalating the intimate narrative.
Pacifico Silano (b. 1986, USA) is a lens-based appropriation artist based in New York City, where he graduated with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2012. Exploring print culture, image circulation and questions of LGBT+ identity, his work is entirely composed of repurposed fragments from gay pornographic magazines of the 1970s and 80s – an era connecting the progressive legacies of sexual revolution with the advent of the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis. Silano’s works have been exhibited in both group and solo shows at the likes of the Bronx Museum; Tacoma Art Museum; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; The Museum of Sex; The International Center for Photography, Houston Center for Photography; Baxter ST@CCNY; Rubber-Factory; Stellar Projects; Light Work; Melanie Flood Projects; Fragment Gallery & Luis De Jesus Gallery. His work is also found in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Silano is a past recipient of the Aaron Siskin Foundation Fellowship, the NYFA Fellowship in Photography, and a finalist of the 2013 Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize. He was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture First Book Award with his debut publication, I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, published by Loose Joints in 2021.