Selenas Mountain is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition, EASY LOVER, debuting at the gallery’s new location in Ridgewood, New York. On view from September 29th through November 3rd, this show takes its title from the 1984 song "Easy Lover" by Phil Collins of Genesis and Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind & Fire.*

This group exhibition brings together eight New York and Atlanta based artists working in painting, sculpture and video. EASY LOVER features the work of Andy Cahill, Pastiche Lumumba, Heidi Norton, Mariana Garibay Raeke, Anjuli Rathod, Josh Reames, Saige Rowe and Julio Cesar Williams. 

Andy Cahill’s approach subverts traditional conventions of painting. Psychedelic compositions and traces of cartoon imagery are constructed by Cahill’s irregular studio process of pushing paint through the back of the canvas. In a complimentary vein, Josh Reames injects pop culture into his paintings. These works are an exploded taxonomy of signs, with diverse mark-making and complex configurations. Intoxicating and mysterious, Anjuli Rathod’s paintings introduce intriguing fragmented gloomy scenes. This ghostly aura is reminiscent of murder mystery narratives—filled with key holes, obscured faces, levitating limbs and floating objects. Julio Cesar Williams focuses on a familiar domestic environment, the bed. His usage of bedsheets as abstract painting reflect the wide-ranging intimacies and histories that a bed symbolizes to an individual. 

Pastiche Lumumba’s multidisciplinary work is a synthesis of sport culture aesthetics and bdsm objecthood. Lumumba’s exploration of power dynamics can be viewed through multiple lenses of class, race, sports, kink, and meme culture. Creating an atypical marriage between the ephemeral and the inanimate, Heidi Norton’s sculptures are comprised of living plants, glass and resin. Through this process time becomes frozen and stretched through organic and inorganic materials. Mariana Garibay Raeke creates abstract polymorphic sculptural forms utilizing paper pulp, plaster, and colorful pigments. The video art of Saige Rowe explores the figure and the structure of video making itself. Rowe uses video as an unlikely medium for collaging the body, space, and time.

*In 1985, "Easy Lover" was used as the theme song for the inaugural WrestleMania event, the first wrestling pay-per-view produced by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). Viewed by over one million fans on television made it the largest shown wrestling event in the U.S. at the time. This event took place at Madison Square Garden in New York City.