INTRODUCING DIANA 
7 September - 16 October 2022 

Amba Sayal-Bennett’s (b. 1991, UK, lives and works in London) mild steel sculptures reduce nonpareil experiences to their basic forms in terms of line, color, and shape. Meticulously investigating what the artist calls cybernetic systems - an ongoing process of human material engagement and feedback – Sayal-Bennett’s post-Internet and robotic apparatuses explore methods of researching as a tool for exchange and developing material processes. Repeatability in science is a means of verifying hypothesis. It can be an industrial and mechanised act, but it can also be meditative, ritualistic and performative. Exploring the doubling of form, Blur is a layering of a single shape, offset and visually hard to focus on.

Philip Mueller’s (b. 1988, Austria, lives and works in Vienna) new works counteract the monumental and technically classical nature of his practice. Through a longer phase of experimenting with reduction, the artist returns to the fundamental form of communication - pure drawing. Seamlessly shifting through various perspectives depicting hedonistic scenes and masked characters, Mueller’s invented locales draw on his life and experiences. By having a thorough understanding of the technical aspects of drawing and painting, the artist can create a basis for his paintings and then obliterate the technicalities in an effortless manner. 

Matthew Kirk (b. 1978, Arizona, lives and works in NY) is known for his use of non-traditional art making materials as well as his wry interrogation of Native American visual culture and as such his own relationship to his Navajo heritage and identity. Kirk has for the past decade made a habit of using non-traditional materials primarily from the construction and art handling industries in his practice. His primary painting substrate is commercial sheetrock, and he uses the various color gradings (purple for bathrooms, green for mold resistant) to experiment with his palette. He will have a solo exhibition at FIERMAN in November 2022. 

Jimmy Wright (b. 1944, Tennessee, lives and works in NY) moved to New York in 1974, following an education at the Art Institute of Chicago in which he engaged with the emergent group of Chicago Imagist artists. His work from the Chicago period reflects his upbringing in a religious family in Kentucky, with serene and mystical scenes of baptisms and other non-Christian spiritual imagery. Upon arriving in 1970’s New York, he immersed himself with the same fervor in the thriving gay scene of the period, frequenting the bathhouses, discos, and sex clubs that flourished in that heady post-Stonewall pre-AIDS moment. Wright’s momento mori floral still life paintings will be on view concurrently at FIERMAN. 

Rachel Martin (Tlingit, Dakl’aweidí clan, lives and works in Queens, NYC) Rachel Martin is an enrolled Tlingit artist working primarily in sculpture and drawing. She focuses on themes of Indigenous sovereignty and tribal identity through images of traditional subsistence foods, matriarchal figures, landscapes and sea creatures with humorous undertones and layered symbolism. Martin has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Macaulay & Co Fine Art in Vancouver, in November. 

Tyler Bright Hilton (b. 1979, Kitchener, Ontario, lives and works in Toronto) makes prints and drawings that depict issues of identity formation and explore the distinctions between perception and projection. Framed within an ongoing narrative centred on a fictional protagonist, his imagery balances unpredictable and conflicting moods; at once sentimental and ironic, aesthetic and grotesque. Hilton received a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, and an MFA from the Chelsea College of Art, London (2008). His work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Archive of Modern Conflict.