Various Small Fires is pleased to present Sunburst, a group exhibition presented in collaboration with Night Gallery at our Seoul location. Bringing together new work by Night Gallery artists Andrea Marie Breiling, Mira Dancy, Samara Golden, and Robert Nava, the exhibition is defined by a spirit of chromatic exuberance. Featuring representational works alongside pure abstraction, the show takes color as a source of energy and a channel for emotion, at once building worlds of fantasy and creating a kaleidoscopic lens through which to observe and understand reality. Presented in Summer 2021, as social distancing restrictions begin to ease across the globe, the exhibition stands as a testament to renewed vitality and human endurance.
The Los Angeles-based painter Mira Dancy is known for vivid tableaux of mythic figures presented in dense geometric compositions. While her paintings have frequently shown her statuesque subjects in scenes of conflict with industrial surroundings, her new works take place within worlds of euphoric nature, pushing at the limits of representation. Dancy explains that the brightly colored forms that populate her canvases frequently depict invisible forces; here the enlivening power of the sun is the subject of her paintings, becoming one with the figures under its rays. A sculpture by Samara Golden, meanwhile, creates miniature figures from resin constructions that evoke stained glass. The figures’ evocative postures present a scene of palpable emotion and narrative tension. Pushed away from humanoid specifics, the sculptures take on a totemic quality, suggesting universal themes of compassion and care between loved ones.
Robert Nava, a New York-based painter, is known for his frenetic yet intricately structured compositions of hybrid creatures drawn from mythology, science fiction, and animals found in the wild.
