Francesca Facciola, Yasmin Kaytmaz, Will Sheldon, and Wretched Flowers
Curated by Reilly Davidson
March 27 - April 30, 2021
Super Dutchess Gallery
53 Orchard St, New York, NY, 10002
Heaven is close enough when clarified. But are you prepared to touch it?
I just keep on walking until my shoes come undone
I’m afraid I might sprain my Achilles heel
My hands stay grasping at straws and instant-nows and not-yets
Encoding a spirit or being overcome by predestination
Apotheoses abound
Repeat repeat repeat repeat and the New could still emerge.
Francesca Facciola’s paintings are a window into the artist’s anamnestic capabilities.
She grounds her work in sublimated memories and surrealities. I Have Been “Sinking In” for
Eight Years Now confronts the viewer with Captain Jack Sparrow’s outstretched, disembodied
palm afflicted by The Black Spot. Beyond the iconographic candor resides the painterly
operations of sinking in and oiling out. Facciola celebrates the manipulation of medium ratio and comes to terms with her own methodology.
Will Sheldon wields an archival dexterity, culling from a bevvy of landscape blog pages
and multi generic novels. He embraces the precedents of art historical figures such as Ull Hohn and Marty Bell by indulging in vestiges and obscuring landscapes.
Yasmin Kaytmaz orients her works around notions of opposition such as decay and
rebirth. She reignites histories in order to interrogate patterns and conceive of progress. Today
as Yesterday settles into her world nicely, as precarity and fortitude are juxtaposed by way of the gate’s perceived durability and the fragility of the limbs.
The duo behind Wretched Flowers present unexpected vessels for floral arrangements.
They’ve established a practice that engages with chimeras, monsters, and cyborgs as avatars
tasked with demystifying processes of symbiosis and mutation.
Francesca Facciola (b. Staten Island, New York, 1994) Grew up in North Jersey. Suburbia.
Graduated with a BFA from School of Visual Arts 2016. Francesca has been living and working in Brooklyn ever since!
Yasmin Kaytmaz (b.1995) previously attended Parsons The New School and focused primarily on sculpture in the Fine Art Department. She is currently a living and working artist in New York City.
Will Sheldon (b. Hong Kong, China, 1990) paints, tattoos and draws houses, villages, ships,
trees, faeries, dolls, volcanos, butterflies, babies. Lives and works in New York City.
Wretched Flowers heightens our relationships to land through foraged flower arrangements,
eco-conscious objects for the home, and research-driven multimedia content. Providing an
alternative to the conventional cut flower industry (and its devastating impacts on the
environment), they exclusively use sustainably sourced plants and create vessels using
materials like ceramic, 3D-printed bioplastic, and mycelium. They’ve exhibited at galleries like
Motel in Brooklyn, and have collaborated with artists, designers, and institutions like Anicka Yi,
EDEN Power Corp., Rhizome, Gladstone Gallery, and Totokaelo. Their work has been featured in publications like Hypebeast Magazine and Vogue. The artists behind Wretched Flowers co-teach at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where they each received their MFAs in 2013.