Night Gallery is pleased to announce solo presentations by Paul Heyer and Jesse Mockrin in Platform, an online viewing room hosted by David Zwirner now open to the public.
Paul Heyer is a Chicago-based artist exploring how imagination shapes our lived experience. Playfully employing a lexicon of skeletons, blue apples, and other natural elements, he reminds the viewer that there are always new ways of seeing (and constructing) our world. Heyer’s hyper-saturated paintings echo Symbolist and Surrealist painting traditions while urgently asking what kind of future we want to craft. He mischievously reminds the viewer how little we know of this world and embraces a queer perspective to challenge traditional boundaries.
Jesse Mockrin is a Los Angeles-based painter whose works use quotation to emphasize enduring symbolic traditions and cultural narratives that can be found within the history of European art. Using methods of cropping, enlargement, and combination to destabilize her source material, Mockrin invigorates these works with new significance even where her renderings remain faithful. Isolating her citations from their historical context and bringing them into ours, Mockrin asks the viewer to complete the picture, questioning and envisioning what is outside the frame. The topic of gender is a central investigation in these paintings, which reclaim stories about female characters from a feminist perspective at the same time that their androgynous figures speak to changing codes of gender in art history and popular culture. These staggeringly exacting works are a testament to the meticulous depth of Mockrin’s research and the utter virtuosity of her hand, in works that operate at the scope of history.