VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The G Gallery in the Heights presents the exhibition Sparkling Relevance: Werllayne Nunes and Colin Johnson;  Show runs from February 6, 2010 thru February 28, 2010. Please join the Ggallery for the opening February 6, 2010 from 6:00 until 9:00 for "Sparkling Relevance". Ggallery is pleased to present the February artists in conjunction with the MFAH CityWide 5A (African American Art Advisory Association) Citywide Artists Exhibition. The show features work by Werllayne Nunes from Brazil and Colin Johnson from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Werllayne Nunes is a self-taught painter from Brazil. Influenced by his father’s artistic tendencies, he started painting at a very early age. As a teenager, Werllayne began to hone his other main interest—medicine— and left Brazil to study medicine in Bolivia and Spain. His travels in South America and Europe helped him to evolve as a painter and influenced his eventual decision to devote his attention fulltime to his art. Throughout his professional art career, he has participated in solo and collective exhibitions in Brazil, Bolivia, Spain, and the United States.

Artist Statement:  Faces, colors, and cultural and religious traditions from my native Brazil and other African diasporic countries are the subjects of my current series of paintings. My main interest lies in challenging the ways in which the media typically portrays peoples from the Global South. Photos and other visual images often depict a one-dimensional people whose identities are defined solely by helplessness and powerlessness stemming from their socioeconomic conditions. This recurrence of these images ascribes a superficial identity to people from these regions and fails to recognize their agency. Using these images as a starting point, I lift figures out of their depicted contexts and place them in colorful backgrounds that recall patterns of contemporary design in order to counter representations of people of the Global South as primitive. I then juxtapose these portraits with images that represent cultural or religious symbols in order to create a kind of visual magical realism characterized by the simultaneous existence of two conflicting perspectives—reality and fantasy.

The fusion of styles expresses the positive spiritual elements that can emerge from harsh physical and social realities such as poverty and repression. Through this visual strategy, I hope to reclaim and reveal the multifaceted identities of the Global South. Be it the young child in Jogo sem fronteiras (A no limits game) with her favorite toy—her homemade soup can stilts—or the old woman in Na terra de Oshumare who finds solace in her pipe, each figure draws on a small object that is part of their daily reality to evoke and affirm their inner fantasies. By representing these snapshots of personal agency, I want these figures to emanate the art of living.

Colin Johnson has been a professional freelance illustrator and gallery artist since his graduation from The Maryland Institute College of Art in the Spring of 1995. His work has received honors from Print's Regional Design Annual, The Society of Publication Design, Communication Arts Illustration Annual, American Illustration, and Society of Illustrators Los Angeles from which he received the "Gold Award" in the editorial category for the Illustration West 43 contest and "Best In Show" for the the Illustration West 46 contest. Some of his freelance illustration clients include: American Airlines, The American Medical Association, Audubon, Better Homes and Gardens, The Chicago Tribune, Converse, Epoch Films, Fast Company, The Harvard Business Review, National Geographic, The New York Times, Newsweek, Raygun, Time Inc., and U.S. News and World Report. He has recently been a part of gallery shows in: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Denver, Portland, Hamburg (Germany), Melbourne (Australia), and Rome (Italy). Colin lives and works in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota.

Pictured above:  Werllayne Nunes, Os Imperadores e o principe Logum ede, Oil on Canvas.