Voloshyn Gallery is honored to present Haunted II — the second of two exhibitions co-curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud and Gean Moreno.
Haunted II brings together four artists — Lorenzo De Los Angeles, Harold Mendez, Aneta Grzeszykowska, and Matteo Callegari — whose works are permeated by strong traces of the esoteric and the otherworldly; works, in other words, that turn the ways in which they may be haunted into potent conceptual and visual counterproposals that address and chip away at normative narratives, in order to enlarge the very ways in which we define ourselves and what the borders of our world may be.
Harold Mendez is a first-generation American of Colombian and Mexican descent. Beyond exploring stories of immigrant experience, his work engages the long arc of hemispheric history, from ancestral cosmologies to the diasporic knowledges that form such an important part of New World cultures. Working in photography, sculpture, and installation, Mendez’s objects explore cultural memory, ritual, and transnational experiences. The porous borders between fiction and truth, visibility and absence, material bluntness and poetic moods run through his work, making a case for the articulation of complex narratives as the necessary outcome of the culturally rich and deeply stratified spaces of the Americas. Mendez has had recent shows at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus; ICA Miami; Commonwealth and Council in LA; and PATRON in Chicago.
Aneta Grzeszykowska’s photographs use dark, probing humor to explore sexuality, feminism, and the construction (and violent erasure) of the self. In breaking with outdated schema and patriarchal phantasms, she retains an unpredictability and hybridity that lies beyond the confines of the dual-channel possibilities of identity, connecting that which is human with what is technical, the organic with the synthetic, male and female, alluring and repugnant. She has exhibited her work at the Venice Biennial; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Graz Art Museum, Graz, Austria; Zacheta—National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland; Ludwig Museum of Art, Budapest, Hungary; and many other venues.
Lorenzo De Los Angeles was born in Manila, Philippines and moved to the United States of America soon after. Growing up amongst a family of Filipino, catholic, medical professionals left lasting impressions that broadened into interests in art, psychology, mythology, and natural history. He graduated with a degree from Parsons School of Design and The New School for Social Research. Four solo exhibitions and over twenty group exhibitions of his work have been held at Feature Inc., Derek Eller Gallery, Ingalls & Associates, Momenta Art, Deitch Projects, MoMA PS1, Andrew Edlin Gallery, Cabinet, and Vilma Gold Gallery, among others. His work is in numerous collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art.
has been deeply informed by his stays in the Amazon rainforest in Peru. As a result of his personal experiences, the artist has aligned himself with an understanding of nature which originates simultaneously from surviving native cultures and the historical ancestral past of “advanced” societies, where humans are regarded as one of the many intimately connected parts of a whole. This perspective considers nature as an infinitely complex network of interdependent relationships, composed by an incredible variety of organisms that display intelligent behavior. Callegari holds an MFA from Hunter College, New York. He has exhibited at Thomas Bambrilla Gallery, New York, Giovanni’s Room, Los Angeles, Carl Kostyál, London, Ramiken Crucible, New York, and other venues.
