Steve Turner is pleased to present the first iteration of Our World, an online group exhibition which features new works by eight artists (Hannah Epstein, Kate Klingbeil, David Leggett, Kevin McNamee-Tweed, Samantha Rosenwald, Stipan Tadić, Brittany Tucker and Mark Yang) who come from various parts of the world and who have coalesced to become part of the gallery’s world. While the artists work in a broad range of media, styles and concepts, all make deeply personal work that is a consequence of their biography, geography, identity and mentality. Their world is our world and we are delighted to present it to the art world at a time when we all would be converging in Miami for Art Basel Week. With no art fairs and no opening receptions, we want to demonstrate that life goes on, art goes on and community goes on. 

Subsequent presentations of Our World will feature additional artists. Profiles with interviews of some Our World artists can now be viewed on the Focus section of our website. Others will be added over the course of 2021.

Please click here for artist's CV's

My works contain a cross section of the underground, they show an above world and below as a complete picture of the landscape. There is so much underground that feeds back into the above ground world. I'm exposing the underground as a way to reconcile the past as I step into the future, trying to understand this foundation that I’ve often had trouble seeing.

- Kate Klingbeil

I was in New York when I started producing these paintings. It was during the first months of the pandemic and I was drawn to the theme of night. I saw it as a symbol which could summarize the mood of the time. It enabled me to focus on emotion and atmosphere during a time I found to be highly charged.

- Stipan Tadić

The research and accumulation of my own visual galaxy happens everywhere at all times, as folks close to me can tell you. Storefronts, trash piles, digital collection archives, libraries, Google rabbit holes, and many many books. One can only gather if indeed they are looking. I am obsessively, hungrily looking—a crazed animal.

- Kevin McNamee-Tweed

The images I use in my work come from many sources. I’m interested in older illustration, animation, Black Americana and comic books. Some of the images are older, from the early 1900's to the 1960’s. I like using images from that time period because many have been softened for today's standards.

- David Leggett

As 2020 comes to a close, we’re all walking on egg shells, praying to whichever god will listen that things only get better— that we leave the sourness of this profoundly sucky year behind us. When thinking about “our world” the way it is today, I think about universal tragedy. I think about death, horror, revolution. There have been so many catastrophes  this year, it’s almost an inescapable comedy of errors. So, fittingly, what else can we turn to aside from old wives’ tales to ward off the evil? When reality and logic seem to fail us time and time again, wishing, praying, and superstition seem to be the only governances that make sense in this time of upside down disaster.

- Samantha Rosenwald

History, anatomy, psychology, sensuality, and spirituality are central to my work.

- Mark Yang

These two works relate to hair as a symbol of difference. I examine the ways that I have changed or wanted to change my hair to fit the European standard of beauty. I am giving space to that insecurity and longing to conform as a way of healing. I’m paying attention to and caring for the wills of my younger self while also acknowledging that those wills were born from damage.  

-Brittany Tucker

The pieces in this show, like all my work, are an outpouring of an imaginative realm into "reality". They build, one at a time, into a world, which is both a reflection of the one I inhabit and the one that co-exists in the mind. A running commentary on the news, a poorly digested meal of  a 24/7 media bath and the striving for purpose and peace amongst monsters.

- Hannah Epstein