Peachtree Industrial

Bessie Harvey, Jane Fox Hipple, Chloé Elizabeth Maratta, Josh Minkus, Jiha Moon, Saige Rowe, Lily van der Stokker

June 24–August 6, 2016

Curated by Jason Benson and Erin Jane Nelson

Peachtree Industrial brings together the work of seven artists, linked in a shared commitment to the private civic lives where their work and world-making takes form. For what it's worth, we [Species] have constructed our civic world so far in places where life happens slower and in less familiar trajectories than a life here in New York City. Those geographic, temporal specificities have led us to meet the artworks in this show, and when lucky, their makers.

First in Oakland, California, where we met the work of Josh Minkus, who makes inventories of small sculptures from found and made bits, akin to list poems, and then Chloé Elizabeth Maratta who chronicles the anti-aesthetic fashions and accessories of her life touring as part of the music duo Odwalla88 in carefully decoupaged digital photographs. And how else to meet artwork outside of center but through that ever-helpful looking glass of the screen—this is where we met and fell in love with the cloyingly Seussical work of Dutch artist Lily van der Stokker, whose predilection towards the curlycute&clean borders on diabolical—resulting in a sort of pediatric waiting room of an art practice.

And then we moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where we were welcomed by Jane Fox Hipple, whose ironpurpley-pink paintings and sculptures make for queasy inner-bodily and inter-body abstractions, Saige Rowe and her earnest, matter-of-fact video vignettes often awkward and funny and sharp at the same time, and Jiha Moon with her discombobulated matrices of culturally divergent signs and materials. Also in the South we have been thrilled to meet the phenomenal work of Georgia-born Bessie Harvey, who is just one in a legacy of so many under-regarded Southern self-taught artists whose works have been the quiet precursor to so many contemporary artists. The sculptures on display are only a small fraction of her artistic output which began in 1972 at the age of 53 and continued as a religious, artistic, and therapeutic communion with the souls of found roots and trees until her death in 1994.

As Species, and as two artists, we present in the form of an exhibition, a calendar of practices we have been inspired to meet thus far. Consider it an anti-logical proposal for living outside of the center of it all: a little pastoral, a little informatic, quietly wild but sweet.

Love,
Erin and Jason

Species is an exhibition space based in Atlanta organized by the artists Erin Jane Nelson and Jason Benson.