The Armory Show : Naudline Pierre and Fay Ray

For The Armory Show 2019, Shulamit Nazarian presents a two-person booth featuring new paintings by Brooklyn-based Naudline Pierre and sculptures and photographic works by Los Angeles-based Fay Ray.

Both artists will debut new works that utilize personal and familial history as an entry point to explore race, religion, the body, and ancestral memories. Likewise, both artists point to religious artifacts and icons alongside art historical references to insert their own mythologies amidst a pervasive western history.  

Naudline Pierre creates paintings that serve as portals into a mysterious world.
The daughter of Haitian immigrants, Pierre’s paintings are informed by religious narratives from her upbringing, and are laced with spiritual references and personal mythology. The central subject of her paintings is based on her own likeness, a ghostly representation of her own body rendered in a spectrum of colors.  Pierre has stated that she is “acknowledging the incredible history contained with my body and transferring it to a visual language co-opted from the dominant Western art historical canon.” Caught between the beautiful and the haunting, the paintings depict intimate, otherworldly scenes in which characters find themselves in moments of embrace, gaining protection and empowerment through touch.

Fay Ray explores the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity through high-contrast, monochromatic photomontages and raw, reductive sculptures.  Her photographic works indicate the presence of a body that is rematerialized through a mysterious yet systematic organization of abstract forms. For her three-dimensional works, Ray compiles cast aluminum objects, chain, polished marble, conch shells and other natural materials into suspended sculptural masses that resemble adornments of the body. Conflating worlds of worship and desire, the works borrow from the symbolism and composition of traditional religious relics and the visual language of the occult. As a Mexican-American, components of her sculptures, such as cast cacti, corncobs and quarried stone are selected from the US/Mexico border towns from which she grew up. As with Pierre’s paintings, Ray’s sculptures are imbued with personal and cultural histories, sensuality, and coded references to masculinity and femininity.