Alex Nuñez

ARTIST STATEMENT

Resembling a large, unruly overgrowth, Alex Nuñez’s monumental abstract paintings suggest that ignorance is the ultimate existential threat. Creating large-scale canvases that obscure hidden messages with boldly colored splashes and creeping abstract figures, her paintings are hidden object games reflecting the anxiety of human impermanence. The immersive, monumental scale of her paintings swallows us whole, an ominous reminder that survival is tenuous in a culture that emphasizes materiality and instant gratification over the protection of our natural environment.

Nuñez’s work is entirely spontaneous, emphasizing intuitive meticulous mark-making and gestural splashes in bold, vibrant color. These abstract markings are layered over a series of hidden references drawn from pop culture that resonate with the artist. Internet memes, song lyrics, tabloid fodder, and celebrity scandal are subliminal messages invading our psyche, and Nuñez’s canvases alludes that these missives are actually hiding in plain sight. Through a set of personal hieroglyphics - fingers, teeth, man-eating insects, foliage and polyps recur frequently in her work - Nuñez reflects on her native Miami backdrop and her own anxiety toward its material nebulous. She typically moves across the canvas as she works, dually emulating both uncontrollable jungle spread and the all-consuming nature of 24/7 connectivity. Not a single portion of the canvas is spared, and Nuñez works rigorously until her canvas is covered in paint. Analogous of the menace of invasive environmental spread, and drawing attention to the profound shift toward material culture in our digital and analog worlds, Nuñez’s paintings are a startling dreamscape of an altered and complex reality.

BIO

Alex Nuñez is a Cuban-American mixed media painter from Miami, FL. She received her Bachelors of Arts & Sciences from Loyola University New Orleans in 2006. She completed international workshops at Firenze Arti Visive, Florence and Metafora, Barcelona. In 2009, she received her Post Baccalaureate Diploma from SMFA, Boston. She received her MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York in 2012; upon completion, she was awarded the C12 Emerging Artist Fellowship. Nuñez is the host and producer of the Sunday Painter podcast on Jolt Radio, now in the show’s fourth year of production and a recipient of Locust Project’s 2018 Wavemaker Grant. In 2019 she completed a year residency at the Deering Estate. She currently has a solo show Internal Vacation with Lobo del Mar gallery.

ARTIST LINKS

Website:  www.alexnunez.net

Instagram: @shockingly_unambitious, @the_sunday_painter

Podcast: www.sundaypainter.net

Joyce Billet

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am interested in nature, raising awareness of destruction, absence and decay through the tension that exist between the analog and the digital. While the works start out painted by hand, the final pieces are computed, digital works. There is complexity in the technical process. Through programmatic steps, I hand paint monochromatic brushstrokes on canvas, and then translate them into a computer-generated format so that they can be laser-cut and etched. Although the drawing is programmed, there is a space between the initial painting and the way it materializes itself on the chosen surface allowing each piece to be unique. Through tenacious curiosity the works lie between an essence of painting and sculpture, between wood and paper. The dialogue begins here by questioning the material, the process, and the purpose. In translating the treatment of material from traditional approaches to their digital counterparts there is tension that invites conflict.  Cutting, carving and perforating surfaces through burning with a laser cutter reveals stress and collaboration between tradition and evolution. Following a strong craft tradition, wood and its byproducts are the main materials used in my work. The disposition of a material to be etched, cut, malleable, and organic, ties to nature from beginning to end, involving my hand and tools, challenging the evolution that wood has come to have. I am interested in duality: positive and negative forms, presence and absence, darkness and light. Just as nature has textures, debris, deposits and layered materials I aim to evoke the dialogue between the natural and the digital. This piece raises awareness of destruction and evokes nature with its positive and negative forms. The brushstrokes are laser etched to create a dimensional surface that reveals stress and collaboration between tradition and evolution.

BIO

Joyce Billet is a practicing artist that merges her forward-looking technical expertise with conceptual ideas. Her background in architecture has influence on her work which plays with materials and scale to mix the sensations of painting and sculpture. She explores the tensions and relationships, between the natural and the artificial, between the unique and the mass produced, between tradition and progress. She has been selected to participate in group shows juried by curators such as Maurizio Pellegrin, Heather Darcy Bhandari and Margaret Carrigan. In 2019, she was picked by a committee of art world experts as one of 130 talented independent and emerging artists to participate in The Other Art Fair in Brooklyn. Billet graduated with a Bachelor’s in Architecture from Pratt Institute and in 2010 she received a Master of Science degree in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University. Billet worked at firms such as Norman Foster in London and Studio Daniel Libeskind in New York. She then went on to apply her artistic skills as an in-house architectural designer at Chanel. Billet is a French-American artist who currently lives and works in the US.

ARTIST LINKS

Website:   www.joycebillet.com

Instagram: @_j_b_c/