We Buy Gold FOUR.
April 29 – May 27, 2018
We Buy Gold FOUR.
April 29 – May 27, 2018
Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
Ja'Tovia Gary
texas isaiah
Shellyne Rodriguez
Opening Sunday, April 29th, 2-6 PM
We Buy Gold presents FOUR., opening Sunday, April 29th at Sargent's Daughters, 179 East Broadway, NYC. Featuring the work of Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Ja’Tovia Gary, texas isaiah and Shellyne Rodriguez, FOUR. brings together multiple mediums to explore cycles of protection, loss and renewal. Inclusive of photographs, installation, sculpture and video, the works in this exhibition seek to unpack cultural objects, complicate their own narratives and explore the multiplicity of subjectivity.
We Buy Gold is a roving art space presenting exhibitions, commissioned projects, and public events. It also features a shop where artist and trade books, zines, art objects, and artists’ prints are available. The inaugural project was a suite of exhibitions (ONE., TWO., THREE. and The Yard) located in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The exhibitions encouraged the dissection and deconstruction of structures of power by artists working in a cross-section of media.
Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. is a conceptual photographer working on ideas related to intimacy, domestic space, and marginality. Constructed as recontextualized moments in ongoing narratives, his work functions as a documented abstraction of daily life. He subverts the biographical context in which the images were made in favor of multiple fictions about the subject, and inquiries into the medium of photography, expressed through installation, text, and sculpture. He is interested in the limitations of photography, specifically what is excluded from what is included in the image; what information is compromised, and to what effect, in the distance between the image and the viewer. Further, how can this distance conjure multiple realities for the image?
Brown Jr.’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Leroy Neiman Gallery, New York, Spring/Break Art Fair, New York, Platform Gallery, Baltimore, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and Polifórum Digital Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico. He was a participant in the New York Times Portfolio Review (2016) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2017).
Ja’Tovia Gary confronts traditional notions of representation, race, gender, sexuality, and power. Gary is concerned with charting the various ways raced and gendered subjects navigate the concessions made for visibility and capitalism.
Her work has screened at festivals including Frameline LGBTQ Film Festival, Edinburgh, International Film Festival, New Orleans, Film Festival, Toronto, Inside Out Festival, Gdansk, BlackStar Film Festival, Philadelphia, Tampere Film Festival, Finland and Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan. Gary's work is part of The Whitney Museum of American Art's permanent collection and has exhibited at cultural institutions worldwide including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYU Florence, Chicago’s Black Cinema House, Indiana University Cinema, Goldsmiths University, London, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Union Docs, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, MoMA PS1, New York and the Made in New York Media Center. In 2017 Gary was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Filmmaking from Filmmaker Magazine.
texas isaiah is a visual narrator whose work explores gender, race, and sexuality by inviting the sitter to participate in the photographic process. the invitation constructs a space to begin and continue collaborative visual dialogues about legacy, emotional justice, protection, and topophilia (the affective bond between people and place). texas isaiah is invested in what it means to be seen and loved when you have your photograph taken.
he has exhibited at numerous spaces including the kitchen, new york, the studio museum in harlem, new york, charlie james gallery, los angeles, slought foundation, philadelphia, and new space center for photography portland. his work has been featured in the FADER, killens review of arts & letters, paper safe magazine, the photographic journal and spook magazine.
Shellyne Rodriguez is a visual artist who works in multiple mediums to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against false hope, a device employed in the service of subjugation. These psychological and emotive inquiries puts the Baroque in contact with a decoloniality rooted in the traditions of hip hop culture. Her work utilizes text, drawing, painting, found materials and sculpture.
Rodriguez has exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum and the New Museum, New York. She has recently been commissioned by the city of New York for a permanent public sculpture, which will serve as a monument to the people of the Bronx.