Tyler Park Presents is pleased to announce We Was Girls Together, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with San Diego-based artist Andrea Chung featuring the work of New Jersey-based artist Deborah Jack. The exhibition will be on view from September 18 - October 30, 2021.
We Was Girls Together, inspired by Toni Morrison’s book Sula, is a series of large-scale collages that celebrates the relationships of black women in all their complexities and displays Chung’s gratitude for them. As Chung says “Our sisterhood, our love for one another, is not always visible to the unfamiliar, nor should it always be.” She dedicates this exhibition to:
To the black women who are dismissed and appropriated at the same damn time.
To the black women who tell you to be loud.
To the black women who are loud.
To the black women who are made to compete with each other because somebody says there can only be one.
To the black women who know your success is their success, too.
To the black women who hype the shit out of you even if they don’t know you.
To the black women who are the mentors that they wish they had had.
To the black women who check you when you need checking but also when you don’t need to be.
To the black women you only know for a reason or a season but formed meaningful relationships with anyway.
To black women who mind their own goddamn business, and yours too.
To the black women whose friendships didn’t work out. But we tried.
To the black women who make their own families.
To the black women who know it’s hard enough to make friendships as adults without all the rest of this bullshit on top of it.
To the black women who don’t owe the world repair.
To all black women—and all black women means all black women.
Through a variety of different mediums, Chung’s researched-based practice explores labor and materials in their relationship to post-colonial countries, the body, and migration involving perishable and precious materials with strong underlying histories. Each piece in We Was Girls Together depicts ethnographic photographs of different relationships among the women photographed as family, friends, and partnerships collaged within a plethora of flora, shells, rhinestones, beads, and pins. In both her previous and this current series of collage works, Chung protrudes the figures present in the work with a protective barrier similar to the use of Nkisis from the Kongo, driving pins into a figure to give them power or protection and various color beads associated with Orishas that provide further protection.
Continuing the sentiment of relationships, friendships, and love in the exhibition, Chung invited friend, colleague, and fellow artist Deborah Jack to be included in the exhibition. Viewable in the gallery window room is Jack’s video piece titled The Water Between Us Remembers.. The piece is an allegory wherein memory, migration, the Trans-Atlantic slavery, borders, and re-generation are themes and flowers are metaphors for both the wounds of history and the beauty of regeneration. Viewers are introduced to a girl who is both ancestor and descendent, here (in the present) and there (in the past). Her journey begins inland and she makes her way to shore to undergo a transition, through time and distance, as the landscape imprints itself on her body. Her impulse is to perform this ritual as a form of remembering and re-membering what was lost, taken, or forgotten; traveling across visible and invisible boundaries towards the shore and the sea.
Andrea Chung (b. 1978, Newark, NJ) lives and works in San Diego, California. She received a BFA from Parsons School of Design, New York, and a MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. Her recent biennale and museum exhibitions include the Addison Museum of American Art, Prospect 4, New Orleans and the Jamaican Biennale, Kingston, Jamaica, as well as the Chinese American Museum and California African American Museum in Los Angeles, and the San Diego Art Institute. In 2017, her first solo museum exhibition took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, You broke the ocean in half to be here. She has participated in national and international residencies including the Vermont Studio Center, McColl Center for Visual Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been written about in the Artfile Magazine, New Orleans Times, Picayune, Artnet, The Los Angeles Times, and International Review of African-American Art among others. Her work is included in collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, NoVo Foundation, Cleveland Clinic Art & Medicine Institute, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Davis Museum at Wesley College, the Addison Museum of American Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Deborah Jack, is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work is based in video/sound installation, photography, painting and text. Her work engages a variety of strategies for mining the intersections of histories, cultural memory, ecology and climate change. Her work was most recently on view at TENT Rotterdam, the Perez Art Museum of Miami in the 2019-2020 exhibition The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, and Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, which opened at the Museum of Latin American Art in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited at the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Jersey City Museum, The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, and Delaware Art Museum. Residencies include a Lightwork, the Big Orbit Summer Residency. Her work has been featured and reviewed in the New York Times, Frieze, Art Burst Miami, and Hyperallergic. Deborah is currently a Professor at New Jersey City University. In fall 2021 she will present a 20-year survey exhibition at Pen & Brush in New York City.
