This presentation at UNTITLED thus includes artists working across media and forms, but who through all their differences speak to experiences shared across space and time. The ceramic sculptures and wall-based tile works by Mandelbaum are, for example, marked by personal signifiers that nevertheless translate to a universal audience, as they allude to Greek and Roman architecture as well as various characters, celestial bodies, animals, and figures, such as Kachina (2020) which draws upon the indigenous doll of the same name. His handmade ceramic tiles, which foreground their own materiality and are assembled in such a way that they create the illusion of a woven tapestry, serve as the building blocks of his distinct visual lexicon.

By painting New York through her window, Pierce does not look to art history as Mandelbaum does, but rather situates her practice in the present. Slow looking and quiet observation of the outside world from an interior space results in Pierce’s fractured and refracted layering of colors in varying degrees of opacity, which coalesce in moments frozen in motion—an oxymoronic state of static flux. The majority of her paintings serve as responses to her surrounding environment, and thus feature domestic spaces, city views, plants, and portraits. Though discernible in their subject matter, the paintings that result from her meditative practice nevertheless lean towards abstraction, a heightened experiential intensity, and perhaps even a hallucinatory sensation.

Similarly representational and yet bordering on abstraction, Rheingold’s paintings delve into the affects and experiences of girlhood within American contemporary culture. Her practice foregrounds symbols of adolescence, femininity, and a heterogeneous cultural background. By re-presenting these elements in occasionally unexpected configurations, she threads a nonlinear narrative throughout her oeuvre, populated with family, friends, and ambiguous representations of the artist herself. The stories that spill forth highlight everyday emotions and quotidian spaces which exaggerate the details and often vailed truths—such as the braces, oily skin, acne, birth control, heavy periods and stretch marks—of the teenage feminine experience.

Scenes of daily life also take center stage in Singleton’s paintings which shine a refreshingly prescient light and playful wit on his figural subjects and the spaces in which they’re engaged. Seemingly quotidian scenes of joggers, friends, daily life, and domestic spaces all reveal latent and unexpected, though resonant, truths about Black life in America. The binaries that characterize the pictured environments—private/public, home/office, casual/professional, physical/virtual—echo the duality of such a position while his jovial application of paint to canvas effectively communicates both the joys and realities of widely relatable experiences. In tandem, the works on view speak to a range of identities and experiences that do not only teach us something about the artists but also about ourselves.

Dan Mandelbaum (b. 1994, Westfield, New Jersey) holds a BFA from Pratt Institute. He has exhibited with widely in the United States and Europe including V1, Copenhagen; Stems Gallery, Belgium; and Sim Smith, London; Marvin Gardens, New York; The Hole, New York; Stanley!s, Los Angeles; Antennae, New Orleans; Best Western, New York; and Current Space, Baltimore. He lives and works in Queens and is currently attending the Palmyra Sculpture Centre Residency in Mallorca.

Stephanie Pierce (b. 1974, Memphis, Tennessee) earned her BFA from the Art Institute of Boston, and her MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle. She has exhibited throughout the United States at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York; Alpha Gallery, Boston; and Stanek Gallery, Philadelphia; amongst others. Her work resides in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Boston Public Library, Boston; Scholastic Corporation, Pennsylvania; and the Joan and Roger Sonnabend Collection, Boston. Pierce was formerly on faculty at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; and currently teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. She received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors’ Grant and currently lives and works in New York.

Dylan Rose Rheingold (b. 1997, New York, New York) received her BFA from Syracuse University and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Her paintings have been featured in exhibitions at Jupiter Contemporary, Miami, Floirda; T293 Gallery, Rome; Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York; London Paint Club, London; Grove Collective, London; Backhaus Projects, Berlin; China Academy of Art, Hangzhou; Latitude Gallery, New York; Selenas Mountain, New York; UUU Art Collective, Rochester; Ki Smith Gallery, New York; amongst others. Rheingold lives and works in New York City.

Marcus Leslie Singleton (b. 1990, Seattle, Washington) currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His paintings have been featured in recent solo and group exhibitions at Jupiter Contemporary, Miami; September Gallery, Hudson; University Art Museum, Albany; Superposition Gallery, Amagansett; Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles; Journal Gallery, New York; SKAVO Gallery, Brooklyn; TURN Gallery, New York; and Medium Tings, Brooklyn.