Jaishri Abichandani, Gabriel Barcia-Colombo, Andrea Dezsö, Sophie Kahn

C24 Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Transfigured. David C. Terry’s second exhibition as Artistic Director and Curator represents a transition towards the future, embracing the gallery’s place in the artistic landscape of New York City. Transfigured features four prolific, New York-based artists: Gabriel Barcia-Colombo, Sophie Kahn, Andrea Dezsö, and Jaishri Abichandani. The exhibition will run from January 10th to February 23rd, 2018.

The title Transfigured refers to C24 Gallery’s evolution as an art establishment, while also referencing the exhibition’s figurative work by artists who push their media to its fullest potential, in a wholly transformative manner. Terry has long worked with each featured artist and recognizes their dialogue with one another as an homage to the New York art world.

Originally from four different continents, (Kahn, Australia; Dezsö, Romania; Abichandani, India; and Barcia-Colombo, the United States), these artists represent the wealth of artistic voices New York City has to offer. Each artist is affiliated with the New York Foundation for the Arts and has contributed to New York’s artistic community in a variety of modes; Barcia-Colombo teaches at NYU and Kahn has taught at Pratt, Abichandani founded the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective in New York, and Deszö’s public art is featured by both the City University of New York and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Kahn’s work directly references photographic documentation of female hysteria patients in an exploration of the construction and demolition of the female form and psyche. The content of those works relates directly to Abichandani’s sculptures, which elevate the female form to a place of divinity while exposing the archaic ideology that has resulted in black trans women being subjected to systemic violence and extraordinary rates of murder. Abichandani’s bright colors and mythic imagery complement Dezsö’s fantastical and paracosmic mixed media paintings, drawings, and embroidery.

Transfigured displays four artists who transcend the boundaries of their medium. Each of them fearlessly and unapologetically tackles issues of human sexuality and psyche as well as societal norms and ills, both immersively and transformatively.

A Note from the Curator:
The term transfigure can mean to metamorphosize or transform into something else, implying a change in existence or ideas. It is part of a process. The four artists represented in Transfigured create works that are about process, existence, the future, and the past and asks us where we fit within these contexts. All of the artists work with the figure to enable the viewer to imagine themselves in the space of the work, be it two-dimensional, three-dimensional or virtual. Additionally, because Transfigured is a multi-media exhibition, the viewer can connect to the material quality of the work, from meticulously drawn fantastical environments and beings, to vibrantly colored hand-sculpted figures, to television-snow figurines rising from an old monitor juxtaposed to actual digitally printed bodies. The materiality of the work draws you into the dialogue.

The viewer, enticed by the visual elegance, will quickly read into the complex content of the artists’ work and be brought in to the personal world of feminine and transgender empowerment, and a celebration of strength and body. Imaginary protectors of child laborers are depicted in a ghostly yet endearing tribute. Documentation of select individuals’ reoccurring dreams of anxiety will virtually appear over a physical miniature bed. Brutal medical practices on women of the past will be brought to the present through the latest technology leaving one wondering where we are headed as a society.

Transfigured collectively brings artists, ideas, technology and history to an inward look at ourselves as a culture in the process of transition.

David C. Terry