Plungers
Matt Jackson
Plungers is a new group exhibition curated by Matt Jackson featuring 12 diverse artists inspired by and embedded with surfing culture in America. With equal parts grit and breeze, the exhibition features paintings, sculpture, and photographic works that embrace the individualism and free-spirited lifestyle of wave riding today.
Plungers will exhibit works from Merrick Adams, Schuyler Beecroft, Jon Bocksel, Matt Borgia, Juan Heredia, Johnny Knapp, Stephen Milner, Momo Otani, Steven Teller, Jean Tran, and Cristina Wright, as well as curator Matt Jackson. The exhibition sits at the intersection of America’s surfing and artistic communities, taking a sharp look at how one influences the other. Jackson’s mission is to bring a kaleidoscope of perspectives together to illustrate a moment in time in this ever-evolving culture.
About the Artists:
Matt Jackson is a painter living and working in Brooklyn. He draws on history, gesture, and nature as a means of inspiration in his abstract paintings. Each piece is a series of conflicts and resolutions that aim to establish harmony through relationship and color. He takes cues from the Color Field painters, the Mission School, and the surf community that he has grown up in. He attended the Savannah College of Art & Design, where he studied illustration and printmaking. This is his first curated exhibition.
Merrick Adams is a Los Angeles-based painter and printmaker originally from Virginia. Raised by a fisherman/crabber and surfer, Adams examines his own relationship to the ocean as a cartographer of experience and place. His works examine our experiences of space and environment, as well as nuanced explorations of person and psyche.
Schuyler Beecroft is an artist based in the Outer Sunset of San Francisco, California, where he’s currently Art Directing for Mollusk, a surfing institution based in California. Aside from his AD role, he’s actively spending time in the studio creating artwork.
Jon Bocksel is a sign painter by trade and visual artist who resides in Brooklyn. He has shown his work internationally and studied printmaking at Pratt Institute.
Matt Borgia is an artist and designer currently working and living in Brooklyn, NY. Borgia’s work explores themes around familiarity, time, value and communication.
Juan Heredia is an artist living and working between Brooklyn and Rockaway, NY. His subjects are conspicuously personal. Painting is part of a larger exploration of consciousness and a quest to expand what is knowable.
Johnny Knapp lives and works in Bellport, NY. Knapp works primarily in photography and is inspired by the underbelly side of life where objects and places have a worn in life and story to them.
Stephen Milner is a San Diego-based artist working in photography, sculpture, video, and installation. He received his MFA in Studio Art as a Graduate Teaching Fellow from the University of Oregon and his BFA in Photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Milner’s work revolves around the representation of masculinity, identity and community through images, objects, fictional narratives and the human-altered landscape.
Momo Otani is a multimedia artist living and working in New York. Otani is also the co-founder of Benny’s Club, a queer surf collective based in NYC.
Steven Teller is a Florida born, ocean-minded artist specializing in street art and large-scale public murals. He creates an abstract realism that features human figures, animals, and nature in colorful geometric spaces.
Jean Tran is a ceramics artist and designer based in Lenapehoking (NY). Her ceramic practice derives inspiration from her everyday surroundings, observing the textural changes caused by forces of nature. Each resulting ceramic is an artifact of her meditative process, which centers on the acceptance of and interplay between the controlled and uncontrolled.
Cristina Wright is an artist from the coast of South Carolina and explores themes surrounding the American South, family and the black experience. Wright’s work features reality bending motifs through photo and textile mediums.
