Bill Arning Exhibitions is proud to present two Artists Preetika Rajgariah from Houston and Jean-Paul Mallozzi from Miami whose engagements with their received cultural identities are both humorous and sexy, while allowing for some more serious implications to arise slowly.
An Indian American woman raised in a traditional Texas Indian family Preetika Rajgariah's explorations of her sexuality are already unexpected and radical. She was expected to either become a doctor or to marry one, rather than partner with a queer woman artist, as she did. Her explorations of self-authored erotica websites sites like Fans Only inspired this series of self-portraits on Yoga Mats, platforms that for the first time have allowed the makers to profit from their sexual creativity, something the Third Wave feminist porn makers always hoped would come to pass. .
Indian bodies are rarely seen in the visual culture of Americanized Yoga so the artist depicts her body on the mat itself-the yoga mat being an American invention foreign and strange to India, the birthplace of the practice of yoga. Wrapped in fabrics from family saris, her erotic body claims its space there there in such a manner that it cannot be ignored. Using dance skins and adding large colorful dots derived from the game of Twister, her daily performances during the fair will extend both the humor and gravitas of her inquiry.
Jean-Paul Mallozzi's art is always a form of excavations into the past. His coming out was marked by both his terror of and assimilation into a culture of salacious gossip, produced by a welcoming albeit judgmental community. These faces are best understood as affectionate portraits of his bitchiest first gay friends...a seemingly universal experience of figuring out one's preferred way of being gay.
Mallozzi first attracted attention with his portraits of skater kids exploding into light, smoke and color. These memorable works reflected his own coming out process into a community of skaters that were best understood as heteroflexible but less than welcoming to obvious sissies or mainstream consumerist homosexuals. In his early works, the glowing selves are ready to have someone see the beauty and fire within them.
After reflecting upon his family's origins, an Italian father marrying uncomfortably into a Cuban family, the artist started looking at the first friends he made as a young gay man, eviscerating one's friends and lovers with affectionate verbal barbs, many times over strong coffee. The artist uses salt as a paint medium to indicate the unforgettable salinity of the banter, especially when directed at him.