
September 25th—28th
BOOTH D13
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Exhibited Artists:
︎ Tiffany Calvert
Tiffany Calvert’s practice connects painting’s history to our current visual culture, which is shaped in often confusing ways by algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and blurred boundaries between real and virtual. Calvert uses image generating machine learning models (StyleGAN) trained on Dutch and Flemish still life paintings to create new invented images, which are printed at large scale. Using stencils to protect parts of the printed images, Calvert paints onto them. These masks create hard edges where paint meets reproduction.
The machine learning models generate forms reminiscent of still life, but distorted and unexpected. It was, in fact, a viral mutation which created many of the tulips depicted - a virus which today growers must use AI to eradicate. Like AI itself the images are seductive, but the initial beauty of the paintings is a ruse. Reproduction and painterly abstraction are indistinguishable in some places; the paintings unfold to reveal their mutations.
These blurred boundaries describe both the production and the product of Calvert’s work–even her own gendered position is unstable, since her paintings contrast flower subjects, historically suitable material for women artists, and interventions into the fields of gestural abstraction and digital media, which are both historically coded masculine.
Tulips depicted in paintings, like digital imagery (NFTs) have been subject to use as currency, and particularly ripe for economic manipulation. By recalling flower paintings, Calvert elicits their role as emblems of value speculation, futures trading, and Dutch colonialist trade and power. In turn, her work explores the way that painterly “transgression” and invention are often complicit in the expansion of speculative capitalism. Like the invisible hand of the market, AI in our lives is largely invisible. By collaborating with AI, Calvert investigates how these neural networks shape our decisions by predicting and replicating needs and desires.
Tiffany Calvert’s paintings incorporate diverse technologies, including fresco, 3D modeling, and data manipulation. John Yau, in his Hyperallergic profile, compares their “improvisational riffs and fractured views” to de Kooning. Calvert’s work has been exhibited at the Lawrimore Project (Seattle, WA), E.TAY Gallery (NY), the Speed Museum (Louisville, KY), the Susquehanna Art Museum (PA), and Cadogan Contemporary (London, UK), among others. Residencies include the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, I-Park, and ArtOmi International Arts Center where she received a Geraldine R. Dodge Fellowship. Calvert has received grants from the Great Meadows Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She is Associate Professor and MFA Director at the Sam Fox School of Design + Visual Arts at WashU St. Louis.︎︎︎ Download CV -
︎ Kimia Ferdowsi Kline
Kimia Ferdowsi Kline earned an M.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute and holds a B.F.A. in painting from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was awarded a full-tuition Danforth Scholarship.
She has mounted solo exhibitions at Turn Gallery (New York), Marrow Gallery (San Francisco), The Elaine L. Jacobs Gallery at Wayne State University (Detroit) and 68 Projects (Berlin). Select group shows include Ceysson & Bénétière, The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, CANADA Gallery, Vanderbilt University, and The Drawing Center.
In 2015 she was awarded a grant and residency through the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2018 she was honored to be nominated for a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant.
Guest lectures and teaching include Yale University, Vanderbilt University, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, SUNY Purchase, The Fashion Institute of Technology, Brooklyn College, Wayne State University, and Chautauqua Institute.
As a freelance curator, she consults for various private collectors and corporations.︎︎︎ Download CV -
︎ Lovie Olivia
Born, living and making in Houston Texas creates paintings, collages and sculptures that are an assembly of found and articulated objects. Their work mines the scarce archives of Black, Queer and Womanist experiences and projects possibility through veils, memory, gesture, and speculation. Olivia’s work hangs in numerous private and public collections including Project Row Houses, National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institute, University of Texas Austin, Houston Intercontinental Airport. She is a recipient of three Individual Artist Awards, which are funded by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance. She has exhibited at Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Frist Museum Nashville TN, The Phillips Collection, DC, Corridor Gallery, Brooklyn NY, 1969 Gallery Manhattan NY, Clamp Gallery Brooklyn NY, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston Museum of African American Culture, Houston TX, Art Pace, The Station Museum, Project Row Houses, TSU University Museum, Houston TX, Arthello Beck Gallery in Dallas TX, and more.
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︎ Esther Ruiz
Esther Ruiz (b. Houston) received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art from Rhodes College in 2011. She has shown nationally and internationally at various galleries with solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Museum Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, Chart Gallery in New York, The Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon, Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and Brooklyn Academy of Music. She has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions at galleries including Tripoli Gallery, CHART, Monaco, Sobering Galerie, Deslave Tijuana, LVL3, and the Torrance Art Museum, among others. She has been featured in The Washington Post, Art News Magazine, Art F City and VICE. She has also been a visiting artist at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, New York, School of Visual Arts, New York, New York, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Santa Barbra City College among others. Ruiz currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
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Curatorial Statement
While Calvert’s works might present as traditional floral paintings at a glance—they combine generative AI (which the artist feeds a small dataset of Dutch masters' tulip paintings) with a complex process of masking and impasto oil painting, resulting in an uncanny hybrid of the contemporary and the traditional. Kline’s work focuses on social entanglement, her materials matching her primeval themes. Through vibrant sculptural works and paintings on papyrus, wood, bronze, and ink, the artist engages viscerally with notions of embodiment, trauma, displacement, and motherhood. Olivia works in fresco-secco painting and collage, often employing found historical documents and records. Her work traces the movement of/control over Black bodies—specifically Black women’s bodies—simultaneously manifesting queer spaces of autonomy and repose. Ruiz transmutes elemental materials into expertly-fabricated neon light sculptures that are astrological, modernist, and retro-futurist all at once.


Tinney Contemporary is proud to present Hatchback Tetris, a solo exhibition featuring new works by Joey Slaughter. The show runs from Saturday, August 23 through September 27, 2025. The opening reception will be on Saturday, September 13, from 2 to 9 PM.
Joey Slaughter’s wall-mounted works materialize the immaterial, translating ephemeral phenomena into physical form. Constructed from brightly painted, CNC-cut MDF components pieced together in interlocking arrangements, these assemblages oscillate between playful exuberance and meticulous control.
The title of the exhibition correlates to a distinct image—one familiar to all cross-country road-trippers, to art handlers, to minivan-touring-bands, and a slew of other various road dogs with a habit of packing too much cargo into their imminently practical, affordable-yet-stylish, mid-size SUVs.





Central to Slaughter’s practice is an inquiry into processes of communication, translation, and transmission—the way information is transformed as it moves across systems. His works operate analogously to a waveform rendering sound visible, or to the synesthetic perception of music as color. In this sense, the works stage a negotiation between perception and materiality, opening up a space where the abstract and the embodied converge.
︎︎︎ Artist cv ︎︎︎ Exhibition list











Tinney Contemporary is proud to present Let’s Go Swimming, a summertime group exhibition, blending the extraordinary talents of Sophia Belkin, Megan Greene, Esther Ruiz, Elise Thompson, and Yanira Vissepó. The show runs from Saturday, July 5 through August 16, 2025. The opening reception will be on Saturday, July 12, 2025 from 2 to 9 p.
It’s as if the long, hot summer of the southern gothics somehow manifests its own antidote, an oasis as reprieve from the heat. Picture the swimming hole of your youth. Barefoot, clambering up worn roots of the bur oaks on the banks, carefully avoiding shattered Miller bottles and cigarette butts, up to the highest ledge. A place of inversion: the surface mirrors the sky, the branches overhead—suddenly, the illusion is shattered by the front-flip bravado of high divers, the occasional riotous bellyflop. Weightless in free-fall, violently breaking the surface, weightless again in the brisk water. Breathless, nose plugged, cheeks puffed, peering up at the surface from among the reeds. Nowhere else can hold this commingling of sanctuary and transgression—bildungsroman baptismal, the smell of dark and damp earth, dirt-weed psychedelia. Hallucinatory sun-poisoning, cool mud and water remedy—everything shimmering in heat waves, ultraviolet and super-saturated.
The works in the exhibition investigate organic forms and imagined environments through various modes of abstraction. Pools and plants, waves and wells, stones and splashes are revealed through each artists’ expressive mark-making, acute attention to detail, and innovative use of materials. Collectively, the works accomplish a sort of thaumaturgy, evoking an impossible landscape, a mirage that doesn’t dissipate as you draw closer.
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Tinney Contemporary is proud to present DARK BIG BANG, a solo exhibition by Benjy Russell. The exhibition will be on display from May 17, 2025 through June 28, 2025. The opening reception will be held on May 17 from 5 to 9 PM. A second reception will be held on June 14 in conjunction with the DADA (Downtown Arts District Alliance) Second Saturday Art Crawl.

DARK BIG BANG draws its title from the leading quantum theory on the origin of dark matter in the universe: a separate, second big bang that unleashed all the unseen and immeasurable dark energy comprising the majority of the known universe. Russell draws a parallel between this cosmological phenomenon and the root traumas experienced along our own human timelines—events that affect our everyday existence, yet are often difficult to pinpoint. These moments can stem from ancestral trauma passed down generationally, childhood trauma, past experiences of death and illness, as well as moments of "root joy," which shape how we move through life.
Mapping his own intergenerational history led Russell to uncover his Choctaw family’s involvement in the devastating and genocidal Trail of Tears, ending in the artist’s home state of Oklahoma; his family’s land allotment under the liquidation of communally-held tribal lands into privately owned properties; and his grandmother and great-grandmother’s forced attendance at a Catholic Indian Boarding School near his hometown. The latter was an instrumental tool in the erasure of Indigenous culture and the loss of generational knowledge in his family—and Indigenous families across Turtle Island (a term for North and Central America used by many Indigenous peoples).
The work in DARK BIG BANG finds Russell re-contextualizing traditional Choctaw crafts such as basket weaving, pottery, beadwork, and embroidery—crafts that use natural elements to create art through pattern and repetition. Embracing these diverse materials and practices, the artist constructs three-dimensional sculptural objects and environments, which he photographs to create lens-based "drawings." Russell utilizes in-camera effects to create lens-based works rooted in sculpture, performance, and process. His multidisciplinary practice defies neat categorization within the traditional boundaries of photography.
Russell’s varied approach and materials speak to his own complex history as a queer rural artist raised on the Chickasaw reservation, now a widower and AIDS survivor. This Venn diagram of identities and histories is mirrored in geometric goddess figures constructed from lighting gels commonly used in gay bars and nightlife culture; multi-panel pieces featuring his HIV medication photographed on velvet, reading more like embroidery than photography; kaleidoscopic sets made of mirrors and roses whose logistics are impossible to discern; and blocks of bulletproof acrylic floating in space.
DARK BIG BANG is both a meditation on trauma and a celebration of the joy that can arise from our shared human experience. Through this innovative body of work, Benjy Russell invites viewers to embark on a journey of reflection, healing, and hope—a journey from darkness into a reimagined future.
︎︎︎ View online exhibition list
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Tinney Contemporary is proud to present Serious Fun, a solo exhibition by Martica Griffin. The show runs from Saturday, July 12 through August 16, 2025. The opening reception will be on Saturday, July 12, 2025 from 2 to 9 pm. The exhibition will take place as a part of the second annual Art Between the Avenues event, in space 61 on the second floor of the Arcade.
Martica Griffin’s latest exhibition features mixed media collage works that mark a departure from her usual painting practice. This body of work emerged from a Shakerag workshop, led by local artist Jodi Hays, which reinvigorated Griffin’s long term love-affair with collage. Bringing in found materials, these dimensional assemblages build upon her patchwork style. The commonplace objects employed in their making provide artistic constraints as well as imbuing the work with a sense of immediacy. Dyed and folded paper, corrugated cardboard, and faded printed material create vibrant, textured geometric compositions that convey the playful process of their making.






Nashville, Tennessee-based artist Martica Griffin uses energetic lines, organic structures, geometric forms and sensual colors to create her works. She primarily works in abstraction on canvas and paper using a wide variety of mediums including acrylic, oil, collage, plaster and crayon. Her work is characterized by layers of color, lines of gesture and a combination of natural and architectural shapes. Her visual language reflects landscape, popular culture, and history.
A native of Valdosta, Georgia, Griffin graduated from East Carolina University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting. She has done post-graduate work at the School for Visual Arts in New York and studied with internationally acclaimed painters. Her work resides in various public and private collections.
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