Forms of LifeTunji Adeniyi-Jones, Lonnie Holley, and Willa Nasatir

Morán Morán is pleased to announce Forms of Life, an exhibition that brings together work by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Lonnie Holley, and Willa Nasatir – a vital group of artists who create new forms and present them in the act of motion. The air stirs, thoughts shift, matter escapes, and you can feel the force of the transmission.

The pleasure in diagraming reverberates across the works of Tunji Adeniyi-Jones. The artist finely illustrates foliage in hues of blue and purple, ribboning the pattern across the canvas and brushing it up against the depicted bodies. This literal confrontation between form and field grows more entangled from painting to painting. With each repetition, the setting alters to open onto another image, unwound here and twisted there. Fecund ground and figure knit together as one nearly engulfs the other, and within these boundaries, the inert and the active coincide.

Vital transmissions maneuver in time and undulate alongside the sculptures of Lonnie Holley. Material nodes and networks of public infrastructure – roads and steelworks, labor and laborers – motivate these works. Holley attentively shapes metal; the matter is heated, flattened, and re-formed as its surface is ignited, creating sentinels. The armature focuses the gaze, and the scaffolding stares back dispersing it.

Willa Nasatir’s paintings mark an alternative point of interaction. Layers of acrylic paint congeal on the surface of the canvas and form spills over, pooling into its support – a blanket, a bull, a hand reaching to touch. Such paintings trouble a fast distinction between animal and human. Sloughing-off fixed boundaries, Nasatir sets down layer after layer of paint, blotting out the border between shapes, colors, and lines to figure forth a new body.

These artworks amalgamate within the exhibition; they alter the space between vision, tactility, and imagination. We are compelled to attend to the categories distilled, and then unsettled, by these propositions. Ultimately, the gallery space serves as a venue where these new forms meet as an ensemble cast, in the midst of motion.