A group show featuring Demetri Broxton, Richard Colman, Jamil Hellu, Michelle Yi Martin, and Amy Nathan.
The Space Program San Francisco and Minnesota Street Project are proud to announce Beauty is Resistance, a group exhibition by contemporary artists Demetri Broxton, Richard Colman, Jamil Hellu, Michelle Yi Martin and Amy Nathan, all former residents of The Space Program. The 5 artists chosen for this exhibition all deal with the figure in radically different ways and materials.
Richard Colman breaks the figure down into stark, graphic, geometric and bold line work that often incorporates personal symbology. His paintings utilize complex composition and bold use of color to explore societal hierarchies, interpersonal relationships, and life and death.
Through a vibrant photographic vocabulary, Jamil Hellu centers queer embodiment and the politics of visibility. Hellu transforms the studio into a stage of color, texture, and performance, where material experimentation becomes a strategy of self-construction and resistance. Both Colman's and Hellu's command of color and composition evoke emotions that move from the serene to the unsettling.
Amy Nathan's practice asks questions about how meaning can be expressed through visual languages such as the gendered nature of politics and power, classical mythology, contemporary literature, and the body's visceral reaction to its environment. Nathan uses sculpture, drawing, painting, and assemblage to create a very human world of self reflection while holding a mirror up to the cultural landscape.
Demetri Broxton and Michelle Yi Martin use textile in ways that nod to history and pure abstraction. Broxton adorns standard Everlast boxing gloves with materials like cowrie shells, glass beads, feathers, and various metaphysical elements to explore themes of Black history, identity, masculinity, and spirituality. The beading becomes both a historical reference to his Creole and Filipino heritage and his love of hip hop and graffiti.
Yi Martin pushes the medium of weaving by using non-traditional materials like plastics, photo negatives, metals, light, and sound to create abstract textiles that manifest in a range of sizes and shapes but often are human scale in their presentation. Definitely the least traditional figurative artist in the group, Yi Martin's works feel as though they are almost a shell or a ghost of figuration asking the viewer to fill in the volume themselves. Haunting and beautiful, simple and delicately complicated, her works are ethereal and contemplative.
Beauty is Resistance references the current sociopolitical climate we all find ourselves in. The curatorial staff at The Space Program chose these artists and these works as an act of defiance. In the face of destruction, we choose creation. Putting beauty into the world is our way of reminding each other, and ourselves that there is always hope.