September 9-12, 2021
Steve Turner is pleased to present a four-person booth featuring new works by Bianca Fields (b. 1995, Cleveland); Jon Key (b. 1990, Seale, Alabama); David Leggett (b. 1980, Springfield, Massachusetts); and Brittany Tucker (b. 1996, Brooklyn). All four artists mine the territory of race and identity to create psychologically loaded and open-ended narratives that reflect their respective experiences.
Bianca Fields creates paintings that are composed with thick brush strokes, agitated lines and drippy marks to convey animated images of her emotional self. She draws from cartoons and other childhood imagery to create works that are at once attractive and grotesque.
Jon Key’s newest works feature his own likeness and that of friends in park settings against green, black, violet and red backgrounds. Key limits his palette to these four colors to acknowledge his Southern roots, his Blackness, his Queerness and his family.
David Leggett uses images from cartoons and pop culture to prompt discussion on topics such as race and class that are often difficult to confront. He combines text composed of letters cut from felt with cartoon images to invite viewers in so that they might take a closer look and ask serious questions.
Brittany Tucker creates paintings that combine her own likeness with that of a cartoonish image of a generic white man. She misrepresents the white figure in order to address the uneasy relationship between American blackness and whiteness and to offset the stereotyped characters from minstrelsy. By rendering herself realistically, she makes herself the primary subject while the white man is the joke of the painting. The awkward situations highlight the growing divide between the races and the sexes in the post-Obama era.
