This presentation at Zona Maco 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-bound 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.

This presentation at Zona Maco 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.

Within Jia’s work resides a cast of characters—many of whom are derived from popular culture and cartoon influences to anthropomorphic objects and animals. Each character has its own complex identity within the childlike worlds in which they are portrayed, empowered by the reinvention of the ordinary. Jia embraces the idea of her paintings serving as visualized narratives to the sculptures and vice-versa. The first of her family to become an artist, Jia is inspired by daily life—the personal and shared experiences, “the undifferentiated universality of objects,” and, perhaps most importantly, the humor of it all.

Lawson has a complex relationship with the act of painting. The variegated surfaces of his work are obsessively covered by blotches, smears, and clumps of pigment in a roughshod manner, including all four sides of the stretcher bars. No quadrant is devoid of intense color, and layers are built up recursively to expose the artist’s numerous attempts to arrive at a final composition. Treating each piece as if it has commanding powers over his decision-making, Lawson wrestles with recalcitrant materials in order to discover the painting’s aesthetic resolution.

Through a process that foregrounds the unguarded manifestations of his subconscious, Matthieu’s constructs bold, highly textured portraits and abstracted scenes. A sociological storyteller, Matthieu invites his audience to add to the conversation as he narrates his encounters and travels through a creative process of psychic autonomism, popular within Surrealism and Dada. Fractured faces and artistic stories convey the artist’s often uneasy emotional terrain as he explores the intersection of community, landscape, and culture.

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 non-linear 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.

Pocetti’s work depicts women as mythological creatures in woodland settings, lending mystery and whimsy to their stories. In her paintings, she references the Raphaelite period of art history to create a style of painting that’s both grounded in reality and the wonder of nature. As an Argentinian artist whose culture places an enormous emphasis on psychology and psychoanalysis to truly understand oneself, Pocetti thinks about how feminist theory has been affected or misconstrued by psychoanalysts like Freud or Lacan; working with female figures allows Ornella to reflect on how women have been depicted as hysterical or unreliable, and even ‘monstrous.’ The women in her painting often appear as grotesque yet equally lovely, signaling Ornella’s interpretation of the feminine both in psychoanalysis and the history of image making. Like her depiction of women explores contradictions, their placement within nature has a similar function: Largely detached from nature as a city-dwelling porteña, Ornella uses nature as a fictional space to make her paintings more enigmatic and atmospheric.

An artist and programmer whose multi-disciplinary practice has established her as a pioneer in the field of virtual reality, Rossin’s work blends painting, sculpture, new media and more to create digital landscapes, which she uses to address aspects of entropy, embodiment, the ubiquity of technology, and its effect on human psychology. Thermal Imaging II stages a new conceptual and visual vocabulary, addressing the expanded limits of the human body and mind today. Imagining the corporeal as a component within a larger technical assemblage, the work draws from the historic development of body peripherals and outsourced sensing. Marshalling visual tropes from gaming, mobile apps, manga, and documentary video, Rachel Rossin’s work is a guided trip through the outer reaches of fantasy made real. Various icons are conjured along the way, like figures in a dream, that serve as symbols for prostheses used to augment our bodily existence.

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.