MIDDLE GROUND

_{August 10 – September 23, 2023}

^{81 Leonard St, New York, NY 10013}

_{81 Leonard Gallery is pleased to present Middle Ground, featuring Jen DeLuna, Ray Hwang, Soobin Jeon, and Rochelle Voyles. On view August 10th through September 23rd, Middle Ground presents both two and three-dimensional work that negotiates with material, narrative, and each other.

In Soobin Jeon’s ceramic vessels, smiley faces are inflected with the eeriness of droop; the delightfulness of kitsch, maximalist surfaces are complicated by hollowness. Layers of paint in Ray Hwang’s work, applied with both soft airbrushing and hard-edge brushstrokes, function like lenses filtering images, memories, and messages from blurriness to lucidity. Rochelle Voyle’s collages intertwine places and histories through cut-out forms that recall thread and the language of cloth while physically intervening with cutting rather than sewing. Jen DeLuna’s shifting representational style within singular paintings and across series presents a processing of memory humored with apathy, voyeurism, and art-historical reference. Sharing space, the works exhibited find the Middle Ground between hard and soft, additive and subtractive, surface and depth.}