Fuse Gallery is pleased to announce “Subterranea”, the anticipated exhibition for San Francisco based artists Kelly Tunstall & Ferris Plock. A site-specific installation and series of paintings, this group of works depicts a fictional underground realm inhabited by a world of characters inspired by New York’s subways, sewers and underground tunnels.

Working collaboratively for two years has fostered a creative dynamic between Tunstall and Plock and this mutual inspiration has been essential in the evolution of their respective oeuvres. Tunstall’s enticing and provocative female representations have developed in their allure, playing on the curiosity of the viewer, while Plock’s characters have become more complex in their intensified tenacity and devilish countenance.

Plock’s creatures evoke the medieval monsters, personifications and grotesques figures that populated the margins of illuminated manuscripts or the capitals of gothic cathedrals. In an absolutely contemporary way his figures take us into a grotesque realm, where the comic and the horrifying are combined in the hilarious representation of human attitudes. Based on sketches, Ferris Plock’s artwork often personifies animals or monsters by situating these characters in everyday human experiences- commuting to work, dodging puddle splashes from cars, or walking pets. By marrying fantasy and reality, Plock subverts the notion of the banal in these familiar scenarios, while challenging the viewer’s concept of the expected.

The strength and beauty found in the notion of femininity are the driving forces behind Kelly Tunstall’s body of work. Her slender, weightless and pseudo innocent dolls are reminiscent of Japanese mangas as well as 1950’s western fashion illustrations. Complex and captivating, common themes reflect the dualities of Tunstall’s femmes: interior and exterior realms; innocence and mischief; concrete reality and the dreamscapes of eroticism.

This exhibition has been organized by independent New York based curator Rita de Alencar Pinto.