NEW YORK—HELAC FINE ART announces With(out) Judgment, a multimedia exhibition exploring the ways in which artists construct their own universes.

With(out) Judgment will be on view from June 1 - July 1, 2017 at Helac Fine Art gallery.

Danny Glass’s paintings originate from his personal encounters, from people whom he encounters in his life to the places he has been. Danny communicates a range of

emotions through compositions that are both aesthetically considered and atmospherically calculated to highlight his subject’s expressions and body language. He works from both drawings made from live observation as well as copious amounts of photographs he takes on site. For Danny, time is a key element to his work. Slowing himself down through the act of painting, the extensive image production time allows him to imbue his work with his own expression and emotions with every brushstroke across the canvas.

Influenced by a diverse academic background, Haoran Fan’s primarily black and white digital photography brings a distinct voice, integrating graphic design and traditional art making. Grounded in marketing, graphic design, and advertising, pursuits that by nature must speak to a mass audience, Haoran’s experiences have cultivated a deep understanding of the interaction between objects, humans, and emotions. Peaceful two-toned landscapes stretch across his images with touches of color that intrigue the viewer, completing the bond between the personal with one’s surroundings.

Through her ceramic installations Ella Wesly works with the concept of cultural exchange across the world. Her thrown vessels are created with cotton fabric, incorporating textiles, ceramic, and sculptural aspects to parallel the comfort one experiences around family and loved ones. Her work was born of her experience as a multicultural child in America, a voice that is especially timely in our current climate of heightened xenophobia. Through her installation she invites guests to approach her metaphorical primed canvas, engaging the audience to impart their own unique stories to a table—the natural setting where stories are shared over a meal.

The physicality of her material drives Joanne Y. Kim’s paintings; she uses a variety of media to explore each level of tactility, vibrancy, and manipulability. Joanne creates vibrant canvases with undulations of abstracted planes of paint applied with a meticulous variance. Her pieces seem to speak of an abstraction of thoughts experienced across human connection. With bright playful colors and fluid brushstrokes, Joanne’s work coalesces into a manifestation of control as she plays with the duality of nature versus nurture as a physical reality.

To Kayleigh Starr, photography, painting, and framing are all equally vital in shaping the discussion about one’s personal relationship with the world around them. Her work surrounds the context of a window into a different reality through an object as opposed to an image. She layers her pieces with a tangible surface that is abstracted in a way that plays with perception, moving between the space of the real and the imagined. Kayleigh aims to foster a more personal connection with the audience, seen in her use of family photos from her father’s time as a soldier in the Middle East. With unique media application she acknowledges the inability to take a “perfect” photo in an extreme situation, but rather she brings the situation into focus with the raw tactility that reflects the photographer’s conditions.

The work of Kiseok Kim plays with plasticity in contemporary culture—the transparent, the temporary. In observing everyday objects and graphics, Kiseok incorporates the patterns and colors that are utilized repeatedly in global media. He registers the individual’s place in media by thinking through an idealized being that is surrounded by just a suggestion of a background. The silent, expressionless figures in his work are created with an air of tension inside their rectangular finite world, arranged to express a level of unsettling contrast—much like the artist’s personal experience of negotiating the limits of universality within our broadened world.

Kate, Youhyn Jang raises questions about art and how we receive art individually, allowing the audience to reflect on the works themselves, revealing the known and experiencing the unexpected. In her own words her work embodies the poetry she creates: “Whispering things that have never been a secret; Echoing things that are not hidden; Dissolving what has not arrived yet.” – Kate, Youhyun Jang

Opening Reception: THURSDAY, JUNE 1, 6-8 PM

548 W 28TH Street, Suite 323

New York, NY 10001

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