Reclining Dude

press release

Reclining Dude

Sam Crohn, Noelle Velez, Keisha Prioleau-Martin

January 3rd – Extended until February 9th, 2020
Opening Reception: Friday, January 3rd, 6:00 – 9:00pm
Curated by Keisha Prioleau-Martin

Reclining Dude is a three-person show featuring Sam Crohn, Noelle Velez, and Keisha Prioleau-Martin. Reclining dude is about the redefining of masculinity and femininity by expanding their meaning. All three artists unapologetically show people being themselves. Although their subject matter differs, these three artists change our perception of gender representation towards a plane of equality.

Ultimately, the reclining dude is an image found to have the softness, comfort, and vulnerability in a content figure. It is representative of the erosion of an unhealthy side of masculinity that affects gender as a whole. The title plays on a traditional reclining nude motif often portrayed as a woman that once provocatively suggested to the world that women were allowed to have their own sexual agency and in the larger sense: social freedom. The show supports the argument that all men and women can have allowances to be as emotionally vulnerable as they need to be and as sexually provocative as they wish. In starting this conversation The show is hoping to aid in gender equality, defeat misogyny, erode gender roles and crimes against women and those in the LGBTQ community.

Sam Crohn is a New York-based figurative artist. She earned a BFA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY Purchase in 2018. Sam has been a visiting artist in residence at Trestle Gallery. She has been featured in group shows in Brooklyn such as My Pet’s Therapist at Gallery Tutu as a collaboration with Field Projects. Sam’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures tenderly frame companionship and comfort amongst appreciated animals, humans and their loved-one. Her work is subtly humorous while the paintings recall traditional dutch genre paintings as well as modern comics.

Noelle Velez is a New York City-based painter specializing in both dreamlike figuration and vivid, graphic abstraction. Inspired by the contours and edges of her personal ecology, Noelle creates spiny, lurid environments in gouache, pigment dispersion and acrylic meant to encompass both the changeable intensity of the external natural world and the scintillating variability of the subconscious. Noelle graduated SUNY Purchase with a BFA and attended the Yale Norfolk summer session in Norfolk Connecticut.

Keisha Prioleau-Martin was born in 1995 and currently lives and works in Ridgewood, New York. She received her B.F.A. from SUNY Purchase and her work was recently had a two-person show Footloose at Ortega y Gasset projects, several group-shows in Brooklyn including In The Spirit at Jay Street Bar and Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York’s The 2018 Flat File: Year Five. Her paintings, drawings, and animations continue to explore the connections made between humans in a search for self defiant joy.

For press inquiries, please contact:
Keisha Prioleau-Martin
Co-Director, Underdonk
[email protected]

1329 Willoughby Ave #211
Brooklyn, NY 11237
L train to Jefferson St

Hours: Sat – Sun 1pm – 6pm,
and by appointment
[email protected]

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