Jamie Chan and Sonya Derman: Indoor Interference

Opening Reception: Friday, January 6, 4-6 PM
Closing Reception: Sunday, February 4, 4-6PM with poetry from Alex Cuff and Ana Božičević

Essex Flowers is proud to present Jamie Chan and Sonya Derman in Indoor Interference, a two-artist exhibition curated by Sophia Ma. Play is at the center of their shared sensibilities for painting and image-making, with subjects like out-of-context baseball players, Renaissance figures, and visualized thoughts to explore the mind and externalize the internal. Using surprising colors, they destabilize the viewing experience, while inviting viewers to stay curious.

They introduce components that challenge stylistic norms, such as cutting off legs at the ankles in Chan’s Cursorily Improvized Men (2023). Both paintmakers, Chan uses both earthen and synthetic paints, while Derman integrates homemade organic inks. Without the completed image in mind when they start, the artists observe what the drying process would yield and allow their work to evolve. In Derman’s Purple Birthday (2020), the testing page for her inks became a ground for noticing one’s own thoughts while working. By moving intuitively in their creative processes, the artists arrive at something expansive and open for what painting is to them.

Through gestures of play, Chan and Derman evoke dream-like spaces reminiscent of surrealism. They mold and shape their work by layering varied materials and techniques and adding elements such as text and recognizable Western iconography. As symbols of Americana and athleticism, the baseball players in Chan’s work are stripped of their competitive context, which gives rise to the discussion of their interiority and the inherent structure within which they belong. Based on the early photographs on baseball cards in the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection that could not capture moving bodies, the funny poses and expressions made them look like bad players. With no apparent connection to the sport, Chan nevertheless borrows from the iconic tradition, generating an energy borne of awkwardness to perform her version of athleticism. Derman draws her subjects from daily life as flavored by the pervasive environs of social media vernacular. Integrating poetic prose amidst the fawning language in Instagram posts she captures the essence of their soundbite messages to the audience. Using quilting and embroidery in one body of work, she slows the thinking and making process to solidify ephemeral moments. Rendering her lounging cat and politicians beside interior monologues, Derman makes a patchwork of our modern modes of communication through imagery and language. Her haptic expressions of fleeting thoughts, apologies, and questions foreground flexibility and unknowing.