MaterialX

Curated by Catherine Haggarty & Hilary Doyle
Joan Reutershan, Lauren Packard, and Qinza Najm
On view: July 1st – August 1st, 2021
Opening reception: July 10th, 4 – 7 pm

5-50 Gallery proudly announces MaterialX, featuring NYC CRIT CLUB artists Joan Reutershan, Lauren Packard, Qinza Najm. Curated by NYC CRIT CLUB’s founders Hilary Doyle & Catherine Haggarty. MaterialX will be on view from Thursday the July 1st through August 1st, with an opening reception on Saturday, July 10th, 4pm - 7pm. 

Two diagonals headed off into space, into infinity and the unknown, intersect, and we have an X. The farthest imaginable extensions in 4 directions meet at a crossover point of total, granular specificity. 

X designates the most diverse of symbols and signifiers, indicating both absence and specific presence:

— X is known as a sign in mathematics for the “independent variable,” the “unknown” and by analogy what is forgotten, excluded from mainstream culture, the “other.”
— XX in genetics indicates the female pair of sex chromosomes, as distinguished from the XY normative male pair;
— X revolutionizes contemporary language and thinking by pointing beyond binaries to demand inclusion in references to gender and identity; 
— X In art or fashion indicates a collaboration among two or more artists.

 MaterialX presents three artists, one originally from Lahore, Pakistan, two from Brooklyn, NY. Though distinct in style, they have several commonalities: Each deals with Ab X aesthetics, layering, found materials as a questioning of the world, and fabric empowered and emboldened. They ask who occupies and has a voice in space, present “cut as content” and some wild irreverence. Color, line and shape and especially their MaterialX are the foundation of their work and utopic exploration of polyvocal, open, unknown spaces.

Lauren Packard x Qinza Najm x Joan Reutershan

In her new body of work in the 5-50 exhibition, Lauren Packard is thinking about Queer Utopias, subverting a heteronormative status quo dreaming of joyful futuristic spaces full of possibility. She uses her identity as a queer feminist artist to examine the tension between material/emotion, and language/memory. A reimagination of construction, pairing older and newer pieces, sometimes attaching with safety pins references the performative and punk influence of disrupting the norm. Ideas of feminism, performance, adolescence, and identity circulate throughout as I dream of futuristic queer utopias. Mixing and experimenting with different materials, such as spray paint, bleach and safety pins, in addition to the inclusion of text and drawing allows for a tension and spontaneity in how they react to one another; a push-pull in exploring the visceral in the painterly. 

Qinza Najm is interested in the body as both medium and subject—the circumstances surrounding its physical occupation of space, the norms and laws that govern bodies as political subjects, and the uneven burden these norms often place on women and minorities. Drawing from her upbringing in Lahore, Pakistan, and adulthood in the United States, her painting sculptures, installations, and performances address gender, politics, and cultural power.

Najm often uses motifs of bodies stretched, deconstructed, distorted, and pushed beyond their limits (White Nara, Purple Nara). A manipulated body is a reflection of how power is exerted on our being. However, she is more interested in the depiction of human potential—an extended body claims space beyond its expected role, both physically and figuratively. In particular, she aims to raise questions about how we might transcend and combat cultural stereotypes, prejudice, and sexist norms towards empathy, healing and personal transformation.

Inspired by the Downtown Brooklyn streets where she lives, Joan Reutershan makes acid-colored collage and assemblage paintings with fluorescent paint, found objects and funky down-market materials. Interweaving drawing, painting, silkscreen and collage, and within each mode using mixed styles, (expressive to diagrammatic, abstract and representational, references low and high), her streetscapes posit a melange of identities, a refutation of binaries and boundaries. When elements jump the canvas edge onto the wall as in Outer Boro Blues and Lepisma Saccharina, Reutershan’s assemblage work opens the rectangle to the space beyond, metaphorically challenging the limits of our urban imaginations. Positing the streetscape as a field of transgressive energy and open possibility, her paintings queer the urban landscape. Her work explores conflicts between chaos and design, and sense and nonsense, but repeated rhymes in color and composition act as a metaphor of hope for transformation in the urban and wider worlds.