Group Exhibition: Big Bloom
Co-curated with Vanessa Indies
Dates: May 18 - June 29, 2024
Reception: Saturday, May 18 | 6 - 8 PM
Glass Rice is proud to present Big Bloom, a group exhibition co-curated with Vanessa Indies featuring paintings by eight artists whose works each give a unique and subtle nod to the season that is Spring.
In bringing together a diverse group of artists with the intent to pay homage to Spring’s abundant and transformative qualities, Big Bloom captures a multitude of reflections. Some of the artist’s works depict introspection leading to deep growth - tackling the complexities of identity and cultural hybridity, or the burgeoning confidence a woman gains from empowerment and fearlessness with maturity. In others, flowers animate and take on a curious life of their own. Playful scenes of figures dancing with foliage and flowers swirling amongst them mark radiant moments of beauty and joy. Together, the paintings in this exhibition represent the myriad of possibilities when you naturally allow something to just bloom.
In addition to this exhibition, Big Bloom also coincides with the opening of Strip Mall, a new concept shop located within the gallery. With Spring being the season of growth and vitality, aligning the opening of our new endeavor with a radiant exhibition like this will hopefully bring us a season of prosperity and vigor through this time of change and growth.
Amelia Briggs is a NYC-based multidisciplinary artist working between fiber, painting, and installation. She has exhibited internationally, and her work is included in collections in South Korea, Australia, Sweden, Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and throughout the US. Recent publications include The New York Times, Vogue, Boston Art Review, Forbes, Elle Decor, Architectural Digest, Artforum, Clever, Domino Magazine, New American Paintings, Art Maze Magazine, Surface Magazine, and Contemporary Art Review LA.
Brittany Fanning who grew up in the Southeastern United States, draws profound inspiration from the natural disasters and creatures that marked her early life, including alligators, hurricanes, and forest fires. After completing her university education in North Georgia, she relocated to South Korea for a seven-year exploration, capturing the essence of neighborhoods like Itaewon and Gyeongnidan in her vibrant urban landscape paintings. Now residing in Los Angeles, Brittany immerses herself in the diverse flora and fauna of Southern California, photographing elements such as aging art deco architecture, backyard swimming pools, and tennis courts. These visual snippets form the foundation of her compositions, which often feature relaxed human figures, tables laden with food, and the occasional presence of predators or impending disasters.
“The sheer enjoyment of searching for and being open to strange beauty is the foundation of what I do as an artist. The subconscious mind with all of its lexicon and image banks, Saturday morning cartoons, Disney classics, Tex Avery to Spongebob, and commercial art from the 1950s and 60s are all some of the things that inhabit my paintings. My process is more like doodling on peechee folders, combined with the collage of handmade decals, made of paint or paper, and sometimes covered in epoxy resins. These piles, this layering relates to my elaborate dense installation work of years prior. In this playpen of paint and what it can do, I discover things that are oddly new yet familiar, reinforcing the peculiar and interesting experience of being human.” - Terry Hoff
Nahyun Kim is a Korean-American painter living and working in San Francisco. Having immigrated to the Bay Area at age 10, her works reinterpret landscapes that exist within her through memories, familial ties, folk tales and dreams. Kim’s artistic practice redefines and expands upon symbols of empowerment that transcends the rigidity of societal expectations, so that we can rise above.
Demitrius Omphroy is an American artist of Panamanian and Filipino heritage, widely known for his expressionistic style and former soccer career. He studied art at the University of California, Berkeley. Simplified lines and primary colors have heavily influenced his style. Thematically, all of his pieces focus on channeling that inner child by allowing artistic expression without the boundaries we internalize from our experiences with the world. Demit Omphroy lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles.
Caroline Pinney’s paintings comment on the spectrum of contemporary social interaction: vibrant moments of solidarity, chaotic scenes with an underlying tension, and contemplative moment of leisure, intimacy, or companionship. Notable is Pinney’s depiction of women, who confidently take up space, with limbs exaggeratedly curving across compositions like personifications of fearless autonomy. This mirrors the artist’s own navigation of self-awareness: a growing audaciousness to define and translate a personal understanding of what it means to be a woman.
Jeremy Shockley considers painting a form of storytelling. Influenced by the literary techniques of magical realist writers, he renders the impossible and the surreal in a matter-of-fact way. Shockley was born in Travelers Rest, SC, a town pocketed in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, known as a haven for tired livestock drovers. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Shingo Yamazaki is a Honolulu-born artist whose work addresses the complexities of cultural hybridity, identity, and the meaning of “home.” His work captures a rich mixture of Hawai‘i’s cultural nuances and iconography along with his own personal history as a mixed Korean and Japanese American. By intertwining his personal story with the familiar motifs of daily life, Yamazaki transforms the discrete concept of home into a vessel for collective identity, inviting viewers to partake in these dialogues of everyday existence.