Throat King by Maja Ruznic
THE WELL BENEATH
January 4 - 28th, 2019
Friday, January 4 : 7 - 10 PM
featuring poetry readings by Aiden Arata, Keisha Raines, and Katrina Kirkpatrick
Nous Tous Gallery
454b Jung Jing Rd, Los Angeles, CA 90012
The Well Beneath is a group exhibition featuring work by Britt Harrison, B. Justine Jaime, Nick Runge, Maja Ruznic, and Molly Segal.
As the new year emerges, we begin our annual tradition of self-investigation and reinvention. How can we look better, act better, be better? How can we best strive for the spiritual fulfillment and perfect skin advertised in idyllic panels on our social media feeds. In building our online personas, it’s common to crop out the messy edges and unflattering angles of our lives, bodies and personalities. It is so easy to imagine these finely tuned reliefs as our reality and that beauty or success is ultimately effortless.
However, life isn’t always beautiful. Sustained happiness isn’t effortless. Our fast-paced, highly curated social culture avoids expressing our struggle- the emotions that ultimately make us human. This practice of emotional posturing disconnects us from our community, and in this isolation, we are left to internalize anxieties and self-doubt. By voicing our personal experiences, we hope to combat the mounting stigma attached to mental health.
Future Tongue is hosting a group exhibition, entitled The Well Beneath, that will feature the work of five visual artists who create vulnerable and honest depictions of our tenuous conscious. The show will include work from Britt Harrison, B. Justine Jaime, Nick Runge, Maja Ruznic, and Molly Segal. Both organizers and the artists would like to use this opportunity to support mental health awareness and treatment by donating 25% of the proceeds from sales to NULA, an urban affiliate of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. NAMI is the nation's largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to educating, advocating, supporting, and building better lives for the millions of individuals & families affected by mental illness.
The Well Beneath will include portraits and imagery drawn from a well of personal understanding. This body of work openly explores the complexities surrounding contemporary mental struggle through the intimate lens of the artist’s own experience, and investigates both surface representations of mental health and fluctuating miasma underneath. We hope the viewer will question their own vulnerability and connection with the people in their lives and community.
Britt Harrison is a Los Angeles-based artist and curator originally from North Carolina. She studied fine art at New York University and received her B.S in Psychology from University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 2011. She is the co-founder of the arts collective and publication Future Tongue. Through painting and printmaking, Harrison explores how societal expectations can shape the way we process emotions anxiety, anger, and self-doubt. She is interested in Jungian theories on ideas of the self, archetypes, and social masking.
B. Justine Jaime is a Los Angeles based photographer and multimedia artist. She received a BFA in Photography and Media from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Extracting from memories, she pushes the boundaries of photography to create abstracted, magical realist narratives that reimagine true events and experiences, and places them in reworked landscapes and environments.
The manipulated information takes form in large scale collage, short film, immersive video installation, as well as sculpture. Her methodical color treatment and intentionally distorted images evoke dreamlike states. Influenced by Afrofuturism and Mexican folklore, Justine's work investigates visual story telling as a way to process interpersonal dynamics and human conditions as an effort reclaim what otherwise might be erased, forgotten, or dismissed.
Nick Runge was born in 1985 in Colorado and is currently living and working in Los Angeles. After working for many years as an illustrator, Runge refocused his career to fine art. Using oils and watercolors, he creates realistic portraits and figures that have been abstracted by the process of breaking down the natural shapes and form. Runge works to retain the humanistic element in each portrait while playing with elements of light and space.
Maja Ruznic was born in Bosnia & Hercegovina. She studied Psychology and Art at UC Berkeley and received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2009. Ruznic came to the United States as a refugee in 1992 and currently lives and works in Roswell, New Mexico. Ruznic is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco and has exhibited her work across the country as well as internationally.
Ruznic’s paintings, drawings and performances explore memory and how it shapes our understanding of reality. She will be showing figures from her watercolor color series that depict haunted characters born from the convergence of her memory, imagination, and daily observations. She work with themes such as inherited trauma, memory, identity, and home.
Molly Segal is from Oakland, CA. She received a BFA from the California College of the Arts and an MFA from The School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA. Her paintings have recently appeared in group exhibitions at Charlie James Gallery, PØST, Zevitas Marcus, and BLAM. She has contributed to publications such as Venison Quarterly, Full Blede, Reflections of The Burden of Men, and Lapham’s Quarterly. She was an artist in residence at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in 2017 and the Vermont Studio Center in 2018.
Segal currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.Segal’s watercolors are concerned with cyclical interdependence and the costs and limits of intimacy. Her use of water-media on slick nonporous surfaces reveal what happens when boundaries begin to blur and bleed.