Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Sarah Joncas, Oda & King and Alex Garant Present New Works in “Transfigure”

A new group exhibition at Last Rites Gallery in New York is looking at how 4 different artists style the human figure: Alex Garant, Sarah Joncas, and collaborative artist duo Kit King and Corey Popp (aka "Oda") make their subjects more exciting and complex by enhancing their portraits in various ways. Whether through color, line, shape, or dramatic composition, their subjects undergo a certain transformation in their works. Their collective exhibition, "Transfigure", currently on view through October 3rd, explores this idea.


Oda & King

A new group exhibition at Last Rites Gallery in New York is looking at how 4 different artists style the human figure: Alex Garant, Sarah Joncas, and collaborative artist duo Kit King and Corey Popp (aka “Oda”) make their subjects more exciting and complex by enhancing their portraits in various ways. Whether through color, line, shape, or dramatic composition, their subjects undergo a certain transformation in their works. Their collective exhibition, “Transfigure”, currently on view through October 3rd, explores this idea.

Sarah Joncas portrays her subjects as multi-sided individuals; decorated tattooed girls and other worldly zombies with complex emotions. Her new series takes the opportunity to embellish and play with the designs that adorn them. Patterns of flowers and mushrooms overgrow from their tattoos and clothing into the third dimension of the image. Other times, they are surrounded by mysterious strings of floating protozoa.


Alex Garant

The paintings of Canadian artist Alex Garant have become instantly recognizable for the dizzying effect they create – she calls them “double eyed” portraits, referring to her overlaying of facial features like eyes and lips. Her latest subjects seem to come from another time, wearing voluminous dresses that appear to move and expand as they do. Toronto based artists Oda & King (Kit King, with her husband Oda) also portray their subjects in fragments in their hyper-realistic oil paintings. King has said that she prefers to think of their work as a transformed rendition of the world, which she and Oda render meticulously. Here, their subjects take this transformation upon themselves, applying tape, paper and other materials to their faces. Take a look at more images from “Transfigure” courtesy of Last Rites Gallery below.

Sarah Joncas:

Alex Garant:

Oda & King:

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Christine Wu's oil paintings feature multi-layered images of figures with haunting and sensual undertones, often reminiscent of double-exposure photography. She likens the people that she paints to apparitions, displaying a sort of uneasy flux about them and evoking a sense of nostalgia for distant memories. When we last caught up with her, Wu explained, "The concept behind the work is a variation of the ideas that appear throughout my paintings: the feeling of or search for transcendence." Since then, Wu has moved from Los Angeles to Brooklyn, New York, where she has been busy working on her latest body of work that debuted over the weekend at Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles.
Alessandra Maria and Zachari Logan's works offer poetic and detailed portrayals of figures mixed with nature, but in different ways. The two artists will debut their new series in side by side exhibitions tomorrow at Roq la Rue gallery in Seattle. While Logan's distorts the male figure in a sensual way, Maria's enhances the divine qualities of feminine allure. For his latest series, titled "Grotesques", Logan transforms figures based on his own into a landscape of lush flora and fauna. Using a subdued palette, his paintings weave together figures out of petals, branches and animals to the effect of a Medieval tapestry. Though elegant, his hybrid subjects embody the concept of grotesqueness in their disfigurement or "re-wilding", as he calls it.
Canadian artist Alex Garant's "double-eyed" portraits, featured here on our blog, have become instantly recognizable for the dizzying effect they create. Her style of overlaying her subject's features like eyes and lips produces multiple images that are captivating but admittedly, also challenging to look at; for some, her works create phantom images, and even the feeling of being intoxicated. Her new series of portraits, titled "Wakefulness", is inspired by how our brains enter into a state of consciousness when we wake up.
Currently on view at New York City's Last Rites Gallery, Donato Giancola and Fred Harper's respective solo shows take viewers into strange worlds influenced by science fiction and fantasy. Donato Giancola's "Silent Tragedies" is a rich series of oil paintings set in a distant realm where mechanical meets Medieval. Painting with a filmmaker's eye, he depicts his protagonists in pivotal moments of their adventures. Fred Harper's show "Virus Like Us" takes viewers into a megalopolis where biomorphic shapes become architectural structures (H.R. Giger appears to be a big influence). Harper attributes his interest in strange cityscapes to the culture shock he experienced when coming to New York from a small Pennsylvania town. Both shows are on view through October 4, so check them out while you still can.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List