Derosia is pleased to present In medias res, a group exhibition featuring the work of Allen-Golder Carpenter, Whitney Claflin, Elise Corpataux, Kai Jenrette, Orion Martin, Naoki Sutter-Shudo, Andy Meerow, Jay Payton, and Machteld Rullens. The exhibition takes its title from the literary technique in which a narrative work opens in the chronological middle of its plot, rather than its beginning.

In Andy Meerow’s untitled work on canvas, painted and drawn marks combine with offset paint transfers and pages of the news layered into the surface. Meerow’s work is concerned as much with the accumulation of information as with its dissolution and obstruction. The aggregation of mark making and visual noise combine to create an image both harmonious and dissonant.

The accretion and transformation of ordinary material also appears in the work of Machteld Rullens, whose wall bound works fluidly navigate the space between image and object. Constructed from painted and bolted refuse cardboard, Rullens finishes each work in high gloss, polishing and crystalizing her muscular forms.

Such tactile engagements appear in the work of Whitney Claflin as well, whose painted and collaged works incorporate found metal, earrings, iron-on patches, buttons, and excerpted text from an interview with the musician Grimes. Claflin’s expanded field of production permits a diverse range of motifs: door knobs dot exhibition spaces throughout the gallery, a textile work recalls the compositions of modernism, and a lyrical abstraction blooms with color and light.

Non-representational in nature, Jay Payton’s paintings are heavily layered with oil and wax to create intricately textured surfaces. Payton’s large abstraction oscillates between appearing as an infinitely expansive night sky, and a microscopic ecosystem. The painting is alchemical and alive, mapping the immaterial onto a physical plane.

In two paintings by Orion Martin, shaped panels bookend a painting on canvas. Martin’s characteristic fetish for detail and surface create a startling interplay between object and illusion. These compositions are tributes to the stained glass works of Martin’s close friend and here too, evoke the structural order of a Mondrian painting, albeit layered, fractured, and utterly fantastical.

Fragmented layers of photographic, graphic, and painterly imagery coalesce in the works of Elise Corpataux. Intricately painted, yet imbued with the romantic lightness of a sketch, the three works evince her preoccupation with the passage of time, projection, and memory.

Allen-Golder Carpenter’s Sipper’s price is a collage of styrofoam cups and ashes that form a distorted cloud through which we see a portrait of the rapper Young Thug. In late 2024, Thug narrowly beat a life sentence after fighting a lengthy Rico trial in Georgia. He was given 15 years probation upon his release along with extensive limits on his speech and behavior, including many things that are a core part of his identity as an artist. But after a series of reckless public statements that jeopardized his freedom, he has been widely criticized for not being able to let go of his previous life. The styrofoam cups in this work reference the popular drug “lean,” a cocktail of promethazine, codeine cough syrup, and soda often consumed in styrofoam cups and heavily associated with Southern rap. Addiction, lifestyle, growth, and progress are recurring tropes in Carpenter’s work.

Kai Jenrette’s graphite on waxed newsprint works are built up slowly as forms emerge to develop unique identities from accumulated mark making. Controlled linework evokes the precision of graphic design as non representational subjects refuse categorical description. Jenrette’s elegant contours are disrupted at times by the character of the paper surface which ripples and bends, breaking their otherwise flat geometries.

An untitled wall work by Naoki Sutter-Shudo presents four successive iterations of a blue geometric shape atop an enameled support. The form, initially taken from a flattened carton of Gauloises Blondes Bleues cigarettes, is here imagined as a design for a public square and transformed into an architectural model in the style of Le Corbusier, exploring cultural attitudes towards behavior in the public sphere. A second Sutter-Shudo inclusion in the exhibition, titled Work, is a single iteration of an ongoing work comprising 106 stacked cigarette boxes, each individually wrapped in flame-retardant foil tape. A cigarette decreases a life on average by 11 minutes and as its consumption is the necessary prerequisite for this work, the fee for the work is based on the minimum wage of the artist’s state of residence: California at $16.50/hr. Each pack of cigarettes is compensated at a rate of $60.50 and hence the presentation of this group of 106 amounts to $6413.