June Exhibitions: Jonny the Revelator and Sarah Knight

Description

Main Gallery: Heaven is Hell a solo exhibition by Jonny the Revelator

HEAVEN IS HELL  is a provocative and deeply personal exploration of physical trauma, grief, and transformation. Highly eroticized, these themes are framed and obscured by the artist’s engagement with leather and BDSM practices. This new body of work, which includes paintings, sculptures, and photography, delves into the artist’s intimate journey with loss, self-discovery, and eroticized catharsis.

Drawing on recent personal experiences, including gender-affirming surgery and personal heartbreak, the artist utilizes fetishized forms and symbols—leather, rubber, chrome, zippers—to examine the intersections of pleasure and pain, freedom and constraint.

Artist Bio: JONNY THE REVELATOR is the artistic alias of Jonathan Virginia Green, a multidisciplinary visual artist from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Living and working in Kansas City, Mo. He uses his art to explore mechanisms of desire, pleasure, and transformation that are oriented within his experience as a queer and transgender male. His work consists of painting, sculpture, photography, and installations. He graduated from the University of Tulsa with a BFA in painting in 2011. And University of Arkansas with an MFA in 2022

Snap Space: Aberrant Radiance, a solo exhibition by Sarah Knight

Is all matter intrinsically queer in a state of transformation? By blurring boundaries between geology, ecology, and human systems,Knight hopes to reveal the hidden power of the unidentifiable with illuminated ceramic sculptures.

“As a transgender artist my experience and practice embody the continual survival through metamorphosis the queer community undergoes. I melt rocks with ceramic, studio scrap, gravel, glass, and donated broken pottery. By crushing up these materials into clay bodies, glazes, and raw ingredients, I can honor the origin stories and inevitable destruction of matter…I build fluxing, hybridized queer ecologies to honor the winding roots of identity through difficult terrain.”

Artist Bio: Sarah Knight (they/them) is a transgender artist and arts educator living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. They grew up in the San Francisco Bay area where they received their BFA from Mills College. They graduated with an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. They have been awarded several residencies, including Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, Jentel Foundation, and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.