HOUSE OF WAHALA: Art Auction

Regina Agu’s work is conceptually oriented towards language, history and representation. She addresses these as they coalesce and intersect in contemporary ideas around landscape. Agu produces drawings, installations, photographs, performances, texts, and collaborative public projects.

Estimate $350-500.  (Set of three)

KELANI ABASS Casing History 14 Letterpress drawer and digital prints 14 x 32 inches Estimate $1000-1,500.

Olatunde Alara is a self-taught multimedia artist. He cites Pro-Black thought, through an intersectional feminist lens which–though not overtly represented in his work–is a guiding force to his approach.  He looks at themes of mental health, gender, and class issues, without presenting these so overtly in his work. Alara relies on a ‘gritty’ aesthetic, which is communicated through his current preferred medium of choice, spray paint, but not limited to it, and through drips created from directing the paint in one direction for a few seconds longer. While he creates small and large scale works in the studio, he also makes wall-sized works in guerrilla sites in Lagos as a way to reclaim and expand uses of public space in the city.

Kari Orvik creates one-of-a-kind glass ambrotype studies of light and form using the historic wetplate collodion process. The luminous 8x10” photographic plates record artifacts found and collected at demolition sites within one block of her San Francisco studio. The wetplate process’ visual allusions to the past provide a context to this current cycle of neighborhood change by visually connecting it to what has come before. Orvik reinvigorates the historical process through her experimental and profoundly personal approach that explores memory and possibility through the processes of chemical and metaphoric change. The plates become allegories of a neighborhood told through its discarded ephemera - reflections on where we place value and what we hold on to.

My work explores themes of new myth, the dream world, the environment and the cosmos. I am drawn to darkness, mysticism and the unknown. I rely on my intuition and dreams as a direct source of storytelling. My practice allows me to explore fictional narratives, which enable me to remove all concrete limitation and boundaries. In this way I truly liberate myself from social constructs. I make art to try to understand myself, my environment and the greater world beyond. I am drawn to the threshold between life and death and my paintings often project this duality. I paint characters that investigate and confront the void. I paint characters that are facets of myself, but not earthbound. I paint characters that stem from a distant, lingering yearning for freedom. I work with collage and often create characters using beauty magazines from which I deconstruct editorial photos. Once created, the character dictates the painting. This is the process I enjoy most - allowing the character time to reveal itself to me and lend me the narrative to follow.

Olatunde Alara is a self-taught multimedia artist. He cites Pro-Black thought, through an intersectional feminist lens which--though not overtly represented in his work--is a guiding force to his approach.  He looks at themes of mental health, gender, and class issues, without presenting these so overtly in his work. Alara relies on a 'gritty' aesthetic, which is communicated through his current preferred medium of choice, spray paint, but not limited to it, and through drips created from directing the paint in one direction for a few seconds longer. While he creates small and large scale works in the studio, he also makes wall-sized works in guerrilla sites in Lagos as a way to reclaim and expand uses of public space in the city.

My early ideals of race and beauty were linked through paintings of renaissance artists and photographs in fashion magazines. Those images were mythical, heroic, beautiful, and powerful and embodied a particular status that was not afforded equally to me or anyone I knew. My process is to combine interspersed images of iconology like Afros, crowns, large hoop earrings, and big-circled red lips. Each component has character and agency both in the motif and in the complicated narratives of American history.

OLATUNDE ALARA Piece by Piece 1 2015 Spray paint on canvas 36 x 33 inches SOLD

My work explores themes of new myth, the dream world, the environment and the cosmos. I am drawn to darkness, mysticism and the unknown. I rely on my intuition and dreams as a direct source of storytelling. My practice allows me to explore fictional narratives, which enable me to remove all concrete limitation and boundaries. In this way I truly liberate myself from social constructs. I make art to try to understand myself, my environment and the greater world beyond. I am drawn to the threshold between life and death and my paintings often project this duality. I paint characters that investigate and confront the void. I paint characters that are facets of myself, but not earthbound. I paint characters that stem from a distant, lingering yearning for freedom. I work with collage and often create characters using beauty magazines from which I deconstruct editorial photos. Once created, the character dictates the painting. This is the process I enjoy most - allowing the character time to reveal itself to me and lend me the narrative to follow.

In my practice, I render a variety of combs in ceramic casting slip. As an essential beauty tool for most people, I utilize the aesthetics of combs and their history to create alternative possibilities. Inspired mainly by the body but also weapons, antennae, rulers, and other objects, my manipulation of the material transforms these beauty tools into bodily forms, imbuing each with their own personality.  

Choinacky’s work explores connectivity, symmetry & relationships. Her painting process has evolved into her meditation practice. All work is created in one sitting. Her current body of work includes ink on paper and is inspired by Morton Feldman’s piano compositions.

By re-contextualizing images in abstract environments of symbolism and landscape, I create works to transcend time and space. My work is motivated by dreams, intuition, travel, and hues of the moment. The color palettes resemble that of familiar homes and landscapes in the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica. The use of vivid colors in Caribbean home-scapes provide a kind of celebratory visual solace that rest outside the impact of colonization. The celebratory use of luminous color provides temporary peace and long term healing in a postcolonial culture. While honoring my ancestral past and spiritual roots, my work is a visual dialogue that reshapes and expands the constructs of Blackness.

uirila (go on water way place land) is from the series The Museum of Transmigration (MOTM), a constellation of work that is influenced and informed by conversations, ideas and perspectives surrounding various means of migration and communication within the context of Anthropocentric discourse. Czerny is interested in how we reside and/or travel through and experience time and place, and how these concepts are actualized in the language of visual art in order to express the complexity of spirit simultaneously contained within and beyond the forms and systems we construct.

Regina Agu’s work is conceptually oriented towards language, history and representation. She addresses these as they coalesce and intersect in contemporary ideas around landscape. Agu produces drawings, installations, photographs, performances, texts, and collaborative public projects.

Nicole Vlado’s work explores contact; the common interactions made between bodies, objects, and those surfaces that surround them.  Using casting as the method to record these moments of contact, the reproductive nature of this process becomes itself a performance as Vlado tests the limits of mass-production, the impossibility of replication, and the intimacy of surfaces that touch.

CHRISTINA COLEMAN Variation on the Pick #24 2016 Earthenware casting slip, ceramic glaze 6-1/2 x 2-3/4 x 1/4 inches SOLD