Red Arrow is proud to present, Seven Surfaces. A group exhibition featuring Jean Nagai, Nerida Patricia, Margaret Thompson, Wansoo Kim, Lauren Gregory, Paul Collins and Desmond Lewis. Opening July 15, 2023, the exhibition continues through Saturday August 19, 2023.

Surface can be defined as the outer layer of an object, but it can also be used to indicate something that may not be what is outwardly exhibited. The surfaces where we eat, lay and live, shape and specify the spaces we occupy.

Seven Surfaces is a survey of the formal gestures and concepts being created by seven artists. Their material surfaces include found objects, cozy quilts, luscious glass beads, carved wood, carefully molded ceramics, pointillism, and earth rubbed into canvas. Underneath lies narratives of social injustice, cultural divides, body politics and intimacy, spirituality and meditation. Seven Surfaces explores the meaning of surface through multiple forms.

Jean Nagai is a first generation Japanese American artist, and has spent the last few years working between New Mexico and California. He received a BA from The Evergreen State College in 2004 and his work has been shown mostly along the West coast. By engaging in a meditative process by which the sum of many individual dots accumulate to form a larger synergic whole, Jean’s work both creates and explores a spiritual microcosm and macrocosm that shifts between the physical, digital, and political landscape.

Nerida Patricia is a visual artist and poet based in Brooklyn, NY. Patricia’s practice spans sculpture, painting, and performance. Her work draws from Peruvian and Caribbean symbolism, as well as autobiographical fragments to explore gender, race and sexual politics. She is most known for her highly detailed relief sculptures which are collaged with concrete and glass dust to create multilayered images in bas-relief that chronicle the transformation of the human and collective body in the face of marginalization. These mythologies relate physically to the human body yet abstract it and politicize the space between allegory and reflection. Nerida has studied at The New School and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Her work as been exhibited in venues such as Green Family Art Foundation, Houston; Murmurs Gallery, Los Angeles; Duplex, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Eric Firestone Gallery, New York; Monique Meloche, Chicago; Annka Kultrys Gallery, London; Museum of the Moving Image, Queens; and The Knockdown Center, Queens, among others.

Margaret R. Thompson is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in International Studies and Visual Arts at Eckerd College with a concentration in Latin American and socio-cultural anthropology. Filtering reality through her own mythology, she weaves synesthetic responses to literature, explorations of ritual and symbolism, and a reverence to the natural world into small to large narrative paintings. Her paintings—objects made of oil, wax, sand, minerals, raw pigment, and varied surfaces—depict thoughtful compositions full of spirit. Enigmatic beings protect boxes holding mysteries, transmute potions into Spring, listen to the blues by candlelight, and tell stories in a half moon half human body. They bask in hidden spaces with grand views of mother earth while elements mingle to make medicine to heal tired hearts. Wild reeds frame scenes alluding to the divine order of nature. Shrines are built to honor water, plants, and energy.

Margaret’s work is a meditation on the mystery and possibilities of our collective life force. Having lived in and constantly in awe of the coastlines of Northern California, the jungle of Mexico’s Yucatan, and the high desert of New Mexico, she makes art that asks us to appreciate the magic of creation. Her paintings have been exhibited in California, New York, Texas, New Mexico, London, Montreal, Scotland, and Tel Aviv, with forthcoming shows in London, Greece, New York, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

Wansoo Kim is a Tennessee-based artist who earned his MFA from the University of Nebraska and his BFA from Seoul National University of Science and Technology. Recent solo exhibitions include Jane Hartsook Gallery at Greenwich House (New York, NY; 2022), Watkins College of Art at Belmont University (Nashville, TN; 2022), and E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center (Nashville, TN; 2020). He is an assistant professor of ceramics at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee.

Lauren Gregory (she/her/hers) is a painter, animator, educator, and director who is best known for her technique of oil paint stop-motion animation, a way of making her paintings move. Born and raised in the mountains of East Tennessee, she began as an observational portrait painter, capturing friends and family in quick one session sittings. Lauren is the third in a lineage of southern female painters, following in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother. From these women she also learned quilting, a mode of expression that has resurfaced in recent years as a crucial part of Lauren's aesthetic.

She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009, and since then has created GIFs, looped video installations, and narrative animated shorts that have screened at MoMa P.S. 1, the New Museum, MOCA Los Angeles, and at museums and film festivals around the world. She has directed and animated music videos for artists including Toro y Moi, Leonard Cohen, and Norah Jones, and has been awarded artist residencies in Hungary, Italy, and Newburgh, New York. Lauren teaches painting and animation at Parsons School of Design, and she teaches quilting at Ox-bow School of Art and Artists' Residency. She is represented in New York by the Elijah Wheat Showroom and in Nashville by the Red Arrow Gallery. Lauren lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.

Paul Collins is an artist and teacher based out of Nashville, TN. His art practice is similar to that of keeping a diary or journal, using his daily experiences to speak truthfully about meaning, vitality, and love. Paul is best known for his ink drawings and most recently for his giant, interactive book forms. Paul has an MFA from Yale University and has been a resident at Skowhegan, the MacDowell Colony, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Hambidge Center and the Vermont Studio Center. Paul teaches at Austin Peay State University.

Desmond Lewis was born and raised in Nashville, TN and currently resides in New Haven, CT and Memphis, TN. He earned his BS from Tennessee State University, an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Memphis and an MBA from The University of Tennessee at Martin. Desmond has completed residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Vermont Carving and Sculpture Center, and Pittsburgh Glass Center. Desmond's work can be found in several public and private collections around the US including: Penland School of Crafts, Carolina Bronze Sculpture Park, City of Hickory, NC, Vermont Carving and Sculpture Center, The University of Memphis, Soulsville USA, NexAir LLC, Skowhegan Parks and Recreation, Orange Mound Neighborhood and Veterans Association, and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. Desmond is currently on the Board of Directors at the Metal Museum. He is also currently a Lecturer in Sculpture and the Fabrication Shops Coordinator in the School of Art at Yale University.