"Curated Corners" February 7 - April 10, 2025

This spring, Johansson Projects presents a curated selection of works by artists Sheena Rose, Nimah Gobir, Lisa Rock, Andrew Catanese, Nicole Irene Anderson, Annie Duncan, Miguel Arzabe, Iván Carmona, and Susie Taylor. These artists all explore complex emotions while illustrating human and spatial connections.

Sheena Rose: In a painting style characterized by flat coloring, bold patterns from the seventies and eighties, and vivid, comic-book-like palettes and vignettes, Sheena Rose’s proud figures take up literal and figurative space, donning clothes, hair and confidence that command attention. Rose paints vignettes symbolic of her imagination and often inspired by memory, unlocking a sense of freedom and power.

Nimah Gobir: Gobir’s multi-media works trace the tapestry of her family tree while exploring the nuances of Black identity. Through personal family photographs and autobiographical histories her work hits on tender moments that are essential to humanity. Along with photo transfer techniques, she also incorporates embroidery and fabric into her pieces, symbolically representing weaving together the past and present. Paintings such as “Look Success” illustrate instantly recognizable family scenes, inviting the viewer into her childhood memories to create connections of our own.

Lisa Rock: Flattening space to merge many layers into a single plane, Rock’s paintings are distilled from photographs of her surroundings in the Bay Area. She is interested in the connection between natural and human-made forms, and her work explores the way we live between both worlds. Her paintings are bold formal studies of color, line, and composition– purposefully subverting photorealism.

Andrew Catanese: Catanese’s lush paintings call to important places in their life from the kudzu-laden landscapes of their upbringing in Virginia to the fecund environment of Northern California. Interested in how contemporary ideas of gender, race, and sexuality are deeply rooted in the death of the commons and privatization of land, Catanese’s paintings transform discarded landscapes into green spaces where plants and animals flourish. Catanese’s swirling compositions articulate their complex relationship to place and bring nuance to constructions of the self.

Nicole Irene Anderson: Anderson’s work examines the culture and motivations that brought settlers in California to this moment through landscape painting. Her paintings depict a version of California as a land burdened by a violent and emotionally loaded history. Anderson visits overlooked places that become visual metaphors for more significant societal and environmental concerns, making a case for empathy and care that should be practiced for the land that holds us.

Annie Duncan: Duncan uses ceramics to explore the nuances of femininity, vulnerability, and the body. She recreates representations of everyday objects generally associated with femininity, bringing attention to the relationship between endless consumerism and social pressure toward self-optimization. Referring to classic stories like Alice in Wonderland, Duncan’s experiments with scale confront the viewer with tongue-in-cheek potions and promises that plague expressions of femininity in the contemporary moment.

Miguel Arzabe: Arzabe makes colorful and dynamic abstractions – weavings, paintings, videos. He often starts by painting renditions of modernist paintings. They are methodically analyzed, deconstructed, and reverse-engineered. Drawing inspiration from the cultural techniques and motifs of his Andean heritage, Arzabe weaves the fragments together revealing uncanny intersections between form and content, the nostalgic and the hard-edged, failure and recuperation.

Iván Carmona: Carmona constructs organic, sculptural forms as an homage to the objects and natural features of his native Puerto Rico. In contrast to the idea of losing something in translation, Carmona recalls what he’s gained through the influence of his earliest connections to modern art. Mixing modernist influences with his medium of clay, Iván engages in dialogue with history, presenting new perspectives on forms that benefit from his love of the Caribbean.

Susie Taylor: Taylor’s work explores geometric abstraction through the tradition of weaving. Imagery, rendered by the interlacing of warp and weft, is embedded in the very structure of the cloth. The interplay of yarns produces discernible color tones and textures that support a deeper exploration of translucency, opacity, saturation and dimension. Her compositions include basic shapes like blocks and stripes to address pattern, symmetry and color interaction, and the notion that ordered systems can still flirt with chance, interruption, and improvisation.

For all inquiries, contact Johansson Projects at 510-444-9140 or info@johanssonprojects.com

San Francisco Art Fair, Booth F03 | April 17 - April 20, 2025

Johansson Projects presents Annie Duncan, Sheena Rose, Leyla Pekmen, and Lisa Rock at San Francisco Art Fair 2025, booth F03. These four artists all work in a flat graphic style that explore themes of leisure, the everyday, and collective indulgence.

Duncan uses ceramics to illustrate the nuances of femininity, vulnerability, and the body. She recreates representations of everyday objects generally associated with femininity, bringing attention to the relationship between endless consumerism and social pressure toward self-optimization.

In a painting style characterized by flat coloring, bold patterns from the seventies and eighties, and vivid, comic-book-like palettes and vignettes, Sheena Rose’s proud figures take up literal and figurative space, donning clothes, hair and confidence that command attention.

Pekman’s recreation-focused canvases emulsify influences from both east and west to mirror her native Istanbul, playfully recontextualizing sites of global commerce and culture clashes like the Bosporus Strait as zones of leisure.

Flattening space to merge many layers into a single plane, Rock’s paintings are distilled from photographs of her surroundings in the Bay Area. She is interested in the connection between natural and human-made forms, and her work explores the way we live between both worlds.

For all inquiries, contact Johansson Projects at 510-444-9140 or info@johanssonprojects.com

Images:

Sheena Rose, Dinner Time, acrylic on canvas, 30" x 36"

Annie Duncan, Instant Remedy, ceramic sculpture, 47 x 20 x 14

Leyla Pekmen, Starlight Dreams, acrylic on canvas, 31.5" x 59"

Lisa Rock, oil on canvas, 48" x 36"