Cinders Gallery is proud to present C.H.U.D.Z., a 3 person show featuring new paintings, drawings, and collages. The title is a mysterious acronym that likens itself to the cult film C.H.U.D. aka “Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller,” where toxic waste has mutated people into flesh-eating zombies that come up from the sewers to feed. Certainly B-movie monsters, science fiction, conspiracy theories, secret societies and the arcane knowledge of the underground all play an influential role in each of these artists’ work but it also reveals their collective sense of humor as old friends, as a kind of tongue in cheek term for their new works or even a term of endearment for each other.

All three artists create whole worlds of their own iconography amidst a mysterious, playful and at times dystopic backdrop of a fantastical future. Pyramids, outer-space, 2-headed creatures, seemingly functional mechanisms, and nonsensical architecture are all prevalent in each of these artists’ worlds. Alex Barry marries a biting sense of self-deprecating humor with the truly bizarre and surreal in his darker drawings and watercolors on paper. Richard Colman creates hyper-busy cyber punked landscapes where fleshy organs, melting colors, bursting rainbows, and people in their underwear hang out in a suspension of time and reality. Josh Slater’s drawings and collages feature calmer, more muted tones in his desolate landscapes of pyramids and buildings. We find explosions of stars, shrines perhaps awaiting alien visitation, stairs that lead to nowhere and architecture that eschews realism for new ideas of space.

We invite you to join us for C.H.U.D.Z as we to step inside each of these artists’ worlds.