Awkward Threesome is an exhibition that features new work in painting, performance, and sculpture by Christine Wang, Kim Ye, and Raphael Noz. Challenging states of complicity, confusion, identity, and ambivalence, each artist examines their own process and situation. In turn, experience becomes symbolic of the contradiction between thought and feeling. As motivations surface, we grow increasingly aware of an oscillation between idealism and conflict, ambition and guilt.

Christine Wang’s work sheds light on her role as a culprit in the problems that affect her practice where painted slogans proclaiming, ‘OIL PAINTERS DON’T NEED WATER’ and ‘I AM A WAR PROFITEER’, see her straddling both the personal and social implications. Collections, sculptures, and found objects from Raphael Noz examine accumulation in relation to the loss of wealth, power, and authority in a seemingly rigged system. Kim Ye’s reproductions of studio items in latex paint appear mutated by the the quality of the process itself, existing in a perpetual state of becoming.

On the opening night there will be performances by each artist. In a continuation of his lifelong Double Portrait, Noz will paint on two canvases simultaneously, each positioned within an arm’s-length stretch from the other, in an attempt to navigate aspects of endurance, physicality, and identity. Wang and Ye utilize the atmosphere of the gallery’s Jail Cell studio as the setting for their collaborative performance, Art Scene, an homage to the painful yet pleasurable symbiosis that is artist-gallerist relationship.

Christine Wang (b. 1985 Washington, DC) received her MFA from UCLA in 2013, her BFA from Cooper Union in 2008, and studied mural painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Wang completed residencies at Studio LLC Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, and Chashama North in 2010, as well as Skowhegan in 2007. She has had a solo exhibition at Night Gallery, a three-person show at Alter Space (San Francisco), and in 2016 will have an exhibition at Galerie Nagel Draxler (Cologne). Christine lives and works in Los Angeles.

Kim Ye (b. 1984, Beijing, China) currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2012. Her work, which incorporates a variety of media, from performance, sculpture, installation, and video, has been included in recent exhibitions and performances in California at OHWOW; Walter Maciel Gallery; the Getty Center; California Institute of the Arts’ Pacific Design Center’ New Wight Gallery, UCLA Broad Art Center; and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art.

Raphael Noz (b. 1964, Los Angeles, CA) currently lives in San Francisco. He received his MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2009 and a Master of Science in Early Childhood Development. He has exhibited work at institutions in Massachusetts and Germany, The San Diego Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF Maritime Museum, Alter Space, and Root Division.