Felix
February 17 – 20, 2022
Cabana Suite 108
P·P·O·W is pleased to present works by Erin M. Riley, Portia Munson, Allison Schulnik, Jessica Stoller, Betty Tompkins, Katharine Kuharic, and Elizabeth Glaessner.
Erin M. Riley’s (b. 1985) meticulously crafted, large-scale tapestries depict intimate, erotic, and psychologically raw imagery that reflects upon relationships, memories, fantasies, sexual violence, and trauma. Collaging personal photographs, images sourced from the internet, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera to create her compositions, the Brooklyn-based weaver exposes the range of women’s lived experiences and how trauma weighs on the search for self-identity. In her review of Riley’s most recent solo exhibition, The Consensual Reality of Healing Fantasies at P·P·O·W, Roberta Smith of the New York Times wrote, “Her richly variegated colors and complex, arresting scenes take full advantage of tapestry’s stitch-by-stitch autonomy.” Riley received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York; Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs; Gana Art Gallery, Seoul; among others. Riley is the recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship Grant, 2021 and an American Academy of Arts & Letters Art Purchase Prize, 2021 and has completed residencies at MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire and the Museum of Art and Design, New York. Her work will be featured in 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone opening at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in June 2022 and manifesto of fragility, the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, in September 2022.
For over three decades, Portia Munson (b. 1961) has created maximal installations, sculptures, paintings, and digital prints that harness a vast array of accumulated consumer products. Synthesizing environmental and cultural themes from a feminist perspective, Munson’s work elucidates the connection between our indifference to the natural world and the ongoing struggle for gender equality. Munson’s ongoing Functional Women series features works that appropriate found candlesticks, soap dishes, lamps, and tchotchkes which exaggerate the female form for some ridiculous utility. Part of this series, Bound Angels presents ceramic and glass figurines that are individually tied up with string and amassed on elegant, anachronistic silver platters. These sensual sculptures and digital prints exemplify Munson’s signature wit and deft intersectional critique. Munson’s work has been the focus of more than 20 solo exhibitions and has been shown in major public and private spaces including MASS MoCA, the New Museum, Albany International Airport, Wave Hill, and Bryant Park subway station in collaboration with the Metropolitan Transit Authority. She holds a BFA from Cooper Union (1983), and an MFA from Mason Gross School of Art (1990), Rutgers University. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1987) and has been awarded residencies at institutions including Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Italy; MacDowell Colony for the Arts, Peterborough, NH; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; and Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY. Munson has presented three solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York. In June 2022, Munson will present an immersive installation at Art Omi, a gallery and sculpture park in Ghent, New York.
Working in paint, sculpture, and animation, Allison Schulnik (b. 1978) seamlessly transitions between mediums, imbuing her work with a distinct sensibility that melds theatricality with intense emotional vulnerability. Known for her uncanny approach to traversing the internal and immaterial terrains of nostalgia, childhood memories, and dreams, Schulnik choreographs an honest, complex and contemporary portrait of new motherhood and life seen through the red haze and black silence of the desert. Schulnik lives and works in Sky Valley, CA. Her films have been included in internationally renowned festivals and museums including MASS MoCA, the Hammer Museum, LACMA, Annecy International Animated Film Festival and Animafest Zagreb. Solo exhibitions of Schulnik’s work have been presented at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Oklahoma City Museum of Art, OK; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles; ZieherSmith, New York, NY; and Galeria Javier Lopez & Fer Frances, Madrid. Schulnik's work can be found in numerous museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Santa Barbara Art Museum, Santa Barbara, CA; Museé de Beaux Arts, Montreal, Canada; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and The Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY.
Working in the realm of figurative sculpture, Jessica Stoller (b. 1981) mines the rich and complicated history of porcelain, harnessing its links to power, desire and taste. Synthesizing the cultural, historical, and corporeal notions of the female body, Stoller expands the feminist visual vernacular and makes space for subversion, defiance, and play. For Stoller the ‘grotesque’ becomes a powerful tool to challenge patriarchal power structures, as female figures flaunt what they are told to hide, reveling in their own pleasure and abjection. With masterful technical finesse, Stoller sculpts wrinkles, pimples, piercings, cellulite, and sagging flesh that writhes and pulsates with energy. Stoller lives and works in West New York, NJ. She received her BFA from the College for Creative Studies, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has been reviewed, in such publications as The New York Times, Artforum, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, and Ceramics: Art and Perception, among others. She has been included in exhibitions at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA; Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY; Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY; Foundation Bernardaud, Limoges, France; and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY, among others. She has had solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Hionas Gallery, New York, NY; and The Clay Studio, PA. A 2016 Pollock-Krasner grantee, 2013 Peter S. Reed grantee, and 2013 Louis C. Tiffany nominee, Stoller has also participated in residencies such as the Museum of Arts and Design's Artist Studios Program, the Kohler Arts & Industry Program, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts' Artist in the Marketplace Program, among others.
In a career spanning five decades, Betty Tompkins (b.1945) has been celebrated and scorned for her provocative feminist iconography. By appropriating imagery created for male self-pleasure, Tompkins has reframed long-held taboos by challenging critical discourses around content, style and scale. Her recent Insults & Laments series unifies her critically acclaimed WOMEN Words with her signature airbrushed paintings. By combining text and image, Tompkins responds to ongoing political and cultural debates about inequity, harassment and violence. Tompkins’s work, with its formal elegance and conceptual clarity, point up the power dynamics of canonical art and help redefine its narratives, from which women’s perspectives have been so perniciously excluded. Tompkins has presented solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; GAVLAK, Los Angeles, CA; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium; J Hammond Projects, London; The Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY; and Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, among others. Her work has been featured in influential group exhibitions, including Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas (2016) and Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011), among others. Raw Material, a revelatory survey exhibition of Tompkins’ storied career, was presented at MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain, Montpellier, France in 2021. Tompkins’ work is currently on view in Late Night Enterprise at Galerie Perrotin, New York through February 19.
Over the past three decades, innovative figurative painter Katharine Kuharic (b. 1962) has pioneered a genre of distinctly queer image-making that is both pastoral and pop. Eschewing various gendered historical tropes, Kuharic’s work conjures open-ended narratives, always insisting that things are different from what they seem. Emphasizing an individual aesthetic counter to the virtual realities of technology, Kuharic’s performative, labor intensive process necessitates an equivalent time-based immersion and emotional impact on the viewer. Her consistently multi-layered symbolism, hyper-realistic style, and highly keyed pallet, forms a dizzying yet incisive picture of America. Kuharic was born in South Bend, IN and completed her BFA in Painting & Drawing at Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. She has exhibited in the U.S. and abroad in solo or group exhibitions in Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Stockholm, London, and Amsterdam. Kuharic has been the subject of museum exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE; the South Bend Regional Art Museum, South Bend, IN; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; and the Portsmouth Museum of Art, Portsmouth, NH. She has been represented by P·P·O·W since 1994 and presented four solo exhibitions with the gallery.
Elizabeth Glaessner (b. 1984) conjures a saturated, densely layered world of transformation and multiplicity. Siphoning inspiration from an evolving pool of art historical, mythological, and cultural references, and inspired by symbolist painters such as Edvard Munch, Glaessner conjures a surreal universe of hypnotic landscapes populated by androgynous doppelgangers, sphinxes, fiends, mirages, and more. Glaessner renders alternative psychological, sexual, and emotional worlds where the self is multitudinous, and heaven and hell are made irrelevant. Through both process and composition, Glaessner seeks to better understand our emotional world by making it visual, the amorphous figures ultimately serving as conduits for ineffable emotion. Glaessner was born in Palo Alto, California and grew up in Houston, Texas. After receiving a BA from Trinity University in 2006, Glaessner moved to New York and completed an MFA at the New York Academy of Art in 2013. Glaessner was awarded a postgraduate fellowship at the New York Academy of Art in 2013, a residency at GlogauAIR, Berlin in 2013, and a residency at the Leipzig International Art Programme in 2012. Glaessner has presented two solo exhibitions with P·P·O·W, in 2014 and 2018, and has contributed to group exhibitions throughout North America and Europe. P·P·O·W will present Phantom Tail, Glaessner’s third exhibition with the gallery, February 18 – March 19, 2022. Glaessner will also present solo exhibitions at Le Consortium, Dijon, France, February 4 – May 22, 2022, and Galerie Perrotin, Paris, France in fall 2022.
