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.
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︎ 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.
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︎ 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

Our booth will feature works by Tiffany Calvert, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, Lovie Olivia, and Esther Ruiz. Each artist engages art historical materials and methods across thousands of years of making.

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.

Time is out of joint. It’s difficult to discern or describe the shape of history from where we stand in the present. These works all contain some temporal contradiction that speaks to this emergent, disoriented chronology. Calvert’s work engages with our most controversial burgeoning technology but tempers it with art historical reference and disarms it with painterly craft. Kline’s materials are as enduring as her themes, yet are contextualized by contemporary color and design. Olivia’s work remixes archival documents in collage and tackles 20th-century Black iconography using renaissance era fresco techniques. Ruiz’s work—which cavorts in the patently oxymoronic playground of “retrofuturism”—collapses time with its primordial materials, conjuring beacons of a forgotten utopian vision. Taken together, the works in the show anchor us to specific moments in time, allowing us to triangulate our own chronological position.