GROUP SHOW AT TICK TACK
© Courtesy of TICK TACK
TICK TACK cordially invites you to ‘The Ulterior Narrative’ a group show, curated by the esteemed American artist Michael St. John addressing the complexity of narrative in a non-binary world.
Presenting 9 artists across different generations who live and work in the U.S.A.:
Alex McQuillkin (1980, Boston)
Suzanne McClelland (1959, Jacksonville)
Karin Davie (1965, Toronto)
Borna Sammak (1986, Philadelphia)
Darja Bajagic (1990, Podgorica)
Monsieur Zohore (1993, Potomac)
Chris Lipomi (1975, Miami)
Matthew Tully Dugan (1986, New York City)
Michael St. John (1963, Hammond)
What is necessary for a narrative?
Is a narrative left to interpretation still a narrative? What is a narrative that does not assume a simple story/ conclusion? A narrative made of a condensation of different points of view with the ulterior motive to create dialogue instead of knowing.
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Alex McQuilkin (1980, Boston)
Alex McQuilkin combines psychoanalysis, maudlin sentimentality, dark humor, and deep sincerity in her videos, drawings, objects, and installations, through which she explores the construction of female identity in Western culture.
She describes her work as “walking a really fine line, investigating the stereotyping and damning of women not directly through a male view, but as that view has been carefully woven into the social structure and internalized in women.”
Best known for her videos, in which she plays the starring role, she mines teenage and Hollywood culture to reveal the destructive effects of this stereotyping. In Fucked (2000), her breakout piece, McQuilkin presents a sex-tape, of a sort. Her face is tightly framed by the camera, she applies make-up while in the midst of the experience described by
the video’s title, so hyper-focused on her image that she cannot let go.
Alex McQuilkin’s work has been exhibited internationally since 2000. Her paintings, drawings, videos and sculptures explore themes such as the role of cultural aesthetics in defining female identity and the power structures embedded within artifice.
Recent highlights include solo exhibitions in NY and Germany and group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, KW Institute in Berlin, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, and Centre Pompidou in Paris.
McQuilkin’s work has been reviewed in the NY Times, the Village Voice, FlashArt, Art Magazine, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from New York University and is currently a professor of art at New York University.
Suzanne McClelland (1959, Jacksonville)
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Suzanne McClelland has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad since the early 1990s. Her practice includes large-scale paintings, works on paper and books, often extracting fragments of speech or text from various political or cultural sources and exploring the social, symbolic and material possibilities that reside within language.
McClelland has participated in the 1993 and 2014 Whitney Biennials and has been the subject of solo presentations at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Amy Smith-Stewart; The University of Virginia Museum of Art, curated by Jennifer Farrell; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris branch, curated by Thelma
Golden.
Her paintings are held in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Yale University Art Gallery, The Albright-Knox Gallery, and The Walker Art Center.
Awards and residencies include Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, PS1/ Clocktower, Nancy Graves Foundation Grant, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Berg Contemporary invitational Residency in Stykkisholmur, Iceland, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, Lab Grant Residency with Dieu Donne Papermill and a Visiting Artist with Urban Glass and Troedsson Villa, Nikko Japan.
Karin Davie (1965, Toronto)
Lives and works in New York City & Seattle
Karin Davie is a leading artist in the current wave of painting practices transforming the legacy of high modernism to capture the dynamics of contemporary life.
The artist is a graduate of Queen’s University, Kingston, ON (BFA, 1987) and Rhode Island School of Design (MFA, 1989). Davie received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2015).
Her work has been exhibited across North America and Europe and was the subject of a major retrospective at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo in 2006.
Other notable presentations of her work include: The Rubell Family Museum, Miami, FL, and The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2015-2017); The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2014);
Tate St. Ives International Contemporary Gallery, and Mead Gallery, University Of Warwick, UK (2011-2012); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2008); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2008 and 2012); the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2007); Mary Boone Gallery, New York (1999, 2002, 2005 and 2007); Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm (2006 and 2011); SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2004); and Projects 63: Karin Davie, Udomsak Krisanamus, Bruce Pearson, Fred Tomaselli, The Museum of Modern Art, NY (1998).
Borna Sammak (1986, Philadelphia)
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Borna Sammak obtained a BFA from New York University (2011). Sammak frequently samples from the urban fabric of his everyday surroundings and from the realms of film, television, YouTube and digital advertising. His installations, videos and wall-pieces embed and encrypt the material of daily life, splitting and recombining mundane objects and texts, signs, slogans, clothes or cartoons – into compressed metaphors and dense patterns. Through these acts of marriage and juxtaposition, currents of awkwardness, humour and doom run in parallel.
His work has been exhibited across North America and Europe and was the subject of solo exhibitions at JTT, New York; McNamara Art Projects, Hong Kong; Sadie Coles HQ, London and Tania Leighton, Berlin.
He also took part in recent group exhibitions at Museum of Moving Image, New York; Massimo De Carlo, London; 17ESSEX, New York and Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles.
His work can be found in various institutional collections such as Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; The High, High Museum of Art, Atlanta; ICA Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami; NGV National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China.
Darja Bajagic (1990, Podgorica)
Lives and works in Chicago.
Darja Bajagic incorporated pornographic imagery and aerial killer “murderabilia” in her works. Bajagics artworks opens up to conversations on complex issues such as power struggles between the sexes, censorship, authorship, and the digital landscape. Her work elicits a broad spectrum of reactions and reviews that range from cautiously
positive to harshly negative.
Bajagic’s work has recently been shown at Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers (2020); New Galerie, Paris (2020); Kaleidoscope Spazzio Maiocchi, Milano (2017); Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz (2016) and Carlos/Ishikawa, London (2016).
She also took part in recent group exhibitions including Gallerie Golsa, Oslo (2020); The Armory Show, New York (2019); The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2019); The 13th Baltic Triennial of International Art, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2018) and Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2017).
Monsieur Zohore (1993, Potomac)
Lives and works between New York and Baltimore.
Monsieur Zohore’s practice is invested in the consumption and digestion of culture through the conflation of domestic quotidian labor with art production. Through performance, sculpture, installation and theater, his practices explore queer histories alongside his Ivorian-American heritage through a multi-faceted lens of humor, economics, art history, and labor.
Zohore has had solo and two person exhibitions in 2021 at; Springsteen, Baltimore, MD and Jack Barret Gallery, New York, NY. Group shows include; New Release Gallery, New York, NY; One Trick Pony, Los Angeles, CA and The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD among others.
Matthew Tully Dugan (1986, New York City)
Lives and works in New York.
Matthew Tully Dugan is a self taught artist.
Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Loveclub, New York, NY (2021) as well as group exhibitions at 56 Henry, New York, NY (2021) and Galerie A.M.180 Prague, Czech Republic via Gern en Regalia, New York, NY (2021).
Dugan also runs a curatorial program, Art Death, in addition to producing music, zines and silkscreen media.
Chris Lipomi (1975, Miami)
Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Chris Lipomi enters into a different economy with his frequent use of found objects and adopts the persona of the artist and positioned artmaking as a self-aware performance.
Chris Lipomi studied at the University of California at Los Angeles in Los Angeles; Valand Kunstskolan in Goteborg, Sweden; and the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco. He has received the Edward J. and Alice Mae Smith Award (2003); the Lillian Levinson Scholarship Award (2002); and the Paul Sack Award for Photography (1999). Selected solo exhibitions include Makawana Omawaki at Daniel Hug Gallery in Los Angeles (2006); and Beneath the Shade of the Trees at Black Dragon Society in Los Angeles (2004). Selected group exhibitions include Pictures are the Problem at Pelham Art Center in New York (2005); The February Show at 1103 La Brea in Los Angeles (2005); Incognito at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in Santa Monica, California (2005); and Fast Forward at House of Campari in Venice, California (2005)
Michael St. John (1963, Hammond)
Lives and works in Massachusetts.
Michael St. John’s work conveys a sustained commitment to observing and re-presenting experiences of the everyday. Gathering source materials by casting an inclusive and penetrating gaze on the world through which he moves, St. John layers newspaper clippings, found images, fragmented language and everyday objects into captivating collaged portraits of the world at present. Underlying this recalibration of the growing circuit of visual information is an insightful and rigorous formal practice informed by Rauschenberg, Warhol, Ashcan School artists, and 19th-century American trompe l’oeil painting. With a dedication to recognize and commemorate the time we live in, St. John’s work reflects on notions of violence, tragedy, narcissism, racism, and indifference, drawing stimulating connections that kindle new and compassionate perspectives on contemporary culture.
St. John has shown his work extensively over the past thirty years in museums, alternative spaces and galleries throughout the United States. He has presented exhibitions at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Team Gallery, Karma, Marlborough Contemporary, Edward Cella in LA, CCS Bard, The Rubell Family Collection, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Andrew Kreps and Feature Inc.
