Organized by independent curator Claudio González, Strange Brew builds upon the interplaying body of work of artists Alejandra Villasmil and D. Dominick Lombardi, whose imaginary narratives populated by distorted characters evoke both pleasant childhood memories and premonitions of a disqueting future.

Villasmil’s dinosaurs, chimaeras, astronauts, and escort ladies inhabit allegoric scenarios reminiscent of children’s book illustrations and Japonisme. Her fantastic tales solve tensions between naturalism/artifice, eroticism/innocence, and myth/reality.

“My stories are surreal and open-ended, absurd, humorous, utopian, and at times dystopian and apocalyptic. I invent them in an attempt to recapture my childhood and to recover a lost sense of mystical participation in nature’s processes in times of exacerbated consumerism, technology and information,” says the artist.

Lombardi presents part of his “Post Apocalyptic Tattoo Series” of Plexiglas paintings, ink / charcoal drawings, and wall mounted sculptures. He imagines the works to be created by a tattoo artist living in the future. Like a Supreme Being this artist sees and represents his people, albeit lovingly and beautifully, as devastated life forms that endures some of the most difficult physical circumstances.

“The best way to understand the series is to imagine a hierarchal society populated by individual characters. At the top (just beneath the all knowing tattoo artist) are the elite eight….Below this stands a number of secondary and tertiary individuals who can, at times, be pivotal characters in the narrative – they include Spirits, Shrunken Heads…Sightless ones… and a Queen who dies at the foot of the last atomic explosion,” says Lombardi, who will also be debuting his latest twist on the tattoo series with Graffoos, a graffiti/tattoo hybrid set aginst old and new works.