Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce Geoffrey Chadsey, Toyin Odutola and Naga Artifacts, a group exhibition curated by Claude Simard. The exhibition includes several new drawings by Geoffrey Chadsey and Toyin Odutola, as well as a selection of late 19th to early 20th century artifacts from Nagaland, the low Himalayan hills of northeastern India and Myanmar/Burma.

Geoffrey Chadsey continues to create impeccably drafted and highly labored works using watercolor pencil on mylar. His portraits are a conglomerate of images gleaned from photographs that he collects from the internet and mobile chat sites. The images are fictionalized as they become hybrid figures, blurring gender, race and age. Chadseys technique of line making and self-described process that is painting of a photograph with pencil, also serves as a meditation on form and an examination of the gay body (politic), making it other-worldly and riveting the gaze upon the spectral femininity in gay masculinity.

Toyin Odutolas new ink drawings of closely cropped subjects, mapped out with obsessive muscle striation or hair-like lines, are punctuated with deep blues, greens, purples, reds and a spectrum of shades found on the human body. Using skin as a foundation to create a narrative, Odutola uses the positive markings of her pen to build form and story layed upon the blank, negative space of the white paper.

Together, Chadsey and Odutola use the subject to examine amalgamated narratives through a formal practice that is situated in a long tradition of drawing and portraiture. The artifacts and ornaments of Nagaland have a symbolic vocabulary that is ensconced in a material culture. As markers of place and both individual and communal identities, these objects not only have formal correlations to the works of Chadsey and Odutola, but they also represent specific associations and social agency of inanimate objects. The triangular conversation of the exhibition overcomes the profound dichotomy between people and things and works to draw out the social life imbued in materiality.

Geoffrey Chadsey, born in Philidelphia, currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He earned his BA in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University and his MFA from the California College of the Arts. He has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions in the United States at numerous institutions including the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Exit Art, New York, Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Diego Museum of Art. He is a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts, John Burton Harter Charitable Trust Fellow.

Toyin Odutola, born in Nigeria, currently lives and works in San Francisco. She is a second year MFA at the California College of the Arts. Her work has been included in several group exhibitions including The Black Portrait, Rush Gallery, New York, curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Natasha L. Logan, Common Ground, ARTLAB33 / Art Space, Miami, curated by Onajide Shabaka and Selections on View. in the Contemporary Galleries of the Birmingham Museum. She is a recipient of the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship Grant, Yale/Norfolk and the Erzulie Veasey Johnson Painting & Drawing Award.