On Thursday February 28th, a pop-up gallery event will take place in New York’s Lower East Side at 198 Allen Street featuring the work of four artists working outside of the gallery world. Grace Lang, Hydeon, Dima Drjuchin, and Graham Yarrington have taken matters into their own hands to produce Terrifying Feelings, a show organized by the artists themselves. The show will open Thursday night and run through the following day. Blink and you’ll miss it in other words. All four artists will be present in the gallery for the opening.
Terrifying Feelings is an exploration into the lush and sensorial worlds the four Brooklyn-based artists have created in order to capture the complexity of experiences such as love, pain, memory, and impermanence. All of the featured artists are visual storytellers, using characters and symbols from their personal mythologies to reveal pieces of their own histories, as well as invite introspection from the viewer. The feelings referenced within the work are not necessarily explicit, but more importantly, serve as the impetus behind creation. Terrifying feelings are the ones that are often difficult to say out loud and for these artists, visually depicting a challenging emotion can create space to find the right words. Including over 25 two-dimensional works of varying media, this exhibition seeks to unite the artists as creators of singular universes in which their innermost anxieties are reflected back through unknown creatures navigating curious and alluring lands.
While the artists all cite different “terrifying feelings” as being central to the creation of their new work, a common thread throughout seems to be the fear of loss that comes with experiencing something beautiful. Whether considering a relationship, professional stability, or physical form, the understanding that nothing lasts forever informs the dualities present within the artists’ work: beauty and decay, fear and attraction, monotony and rapture. It is with these contradictions in mind that the artists have attempted to create moments of tender reflection for themselves and their viewers –– the act of which is, in itself, a response to the uncertainty of life as an artist. On the one hand, there is the ecstasy of expressing a feeling through visualizing it. On the other, there is the anxiety of sharing that expression with an often-unresponsive world. The demand to produce, commodify, and sell can all too easily overshadow one’s love of creating. In preparing for the show, each artist actively chose to focus on the satisfaction derived from simply making marks and manifesting ideas for their own sake. The result is a collection of works that demonstrate experiments in new media, as well as deep comfort in the familiar symbols that have been present in each artist’s work for many years.
Below, Fatal Shame: The Animated Series from the warped mind of Dima Drjuchin:
“The hyperdimensional artwork of Dima Drjuchin comes bounding to life in his new animated series ‘Fatal Shame.’ Blending wit, slapstick, and a deeply sardonic tone set to original music, Dima’s cast of characters travel across the fractured multiverse with affection and recklessness, spreading mayhem, havoc, and waxing philosophically about the mundane and the great mysteries of existence.”
