­­­­Elijah Burgher (b. 1978) works in painting, drawing and printmaking, exploring themes of language, mysticism, and iconography. Whether expressed in detailed figurative drawings or large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas drop cloths, Burgher draws from a variety of both supernatural and aesthetic currents to achieve a highly personalized visual language inspired by European ceremonial magic. A recent addition to the gallery, Burgher’s will add a unique yet complimentary voice to our program with his investigations into sexual identity and the boundaries of the physical self. Burgher received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. His work was featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial (selected by Anthony Elms), the 2014 Gwangju Biennial (as part of AA Bronson’s House of Shame), and The Temptation of AA Bronson at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, among others. He was recently a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Fire Island Artist Residency. Burgher’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Art Review and Artforum, among others. He will be included in the forthcoming three-person exhibition For Opacity, with Toyin Ojih Odutola and Nathaniel Mary Quinn, at The Drawing Center in New York (October 12, 2018 - February 19, 2019). Burgher lives and works in Berlin.

Dinh Q. Lê (b. 1968) is best known for his deep engagement with photography as both a technology for image making and an apparatus for distributing ideological narratives. P·P·O·W will present a new “photoscroll” entitled “All the Boys in the World,” a digital collage of mixed-race gay pornographic imagery that is printed across a 150-foot roll of photopaper. Suspended three meters high and gathering in undulating folds, this monumental photographic installation explores the tactile and sensual capabilities of the two-dimensional image. This work also marks a shift in the artist’s practice, engaging more directly with global sex industries as well as the artist’s own sexual identity. Lê holds an MFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work is currently on view in the 2018 Gwangju Biennial, in Seoul, South Korea, and has exhibited at the 2013 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, PA and documenta 13, Kassel, Germany in 2012. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Carnegie Museum, PA; MoMA PS1, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, TX; and the Asia Society, NY, among many others. Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return, a traveling retrospective organized by curator Rory Padeken, is currently on view at the San Jose Museum of Art. He is a co-founder of the nonprofit organization Sàn Art. Lê lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Hunter Reynolds (b. 1959) uses photography, performance, and installation to address issues of gender, identity, sexuality, mourning, loss, survival, and healing. P·P·O·W will present iconic photographs from the 1992-94 series “I-DEA, The Goddess Within,” a historic collaboration between Patina du Prey, Reynolds’ drag persona, and documentary photographer Maxine Henryson. During their eight year collaboration, Reynolds’ HIV positive status was a pending death sentence, making the photographs a moving and poignant record of the years before HIV drugs were available. Patina is presented as a mythical figure that disrupts gender icons in order to relate to the viewer as a shamanistic transgendered embodiment of beauty, fantasy and healing. Reynolds was an early member of ACT UP and in 1989 co-founded Art Positive, an affinity group of ACT UP that fought homophobia and censorship in the arts.  His work has be exhibited at White Columns, New York, NY; Artist Space, New York, NY; Participant Inc., New York, NY; ICA Boston, Boston, MA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and documenta, Kassel, Germany. In 2017, Reynolds was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Love Light, a solo exhibition of historical and recent installations and photo-weavings, was present at Hales Gallery in the summer of 2018. His work is currently on view at the Hayward Gallery in their group exhibition Drag: Self-portraits and Body Politics, on view through October 14, 2018.

Martin Wong (1946-1999) depicted urban life on New York City’s Lower East Side, where he settled upon moving from his native California in1978. He was a prolific painter whose work functioned as a visual diary dense with recurring symbols and imagery including stacked bricks, crumbling tenements, constellations, closed storefronts and hand signals. We will present Wong Family Benevolent Association, 1990, a major painting presaging his final body of work, focused on New York and San Francisco’s Chinatowns. Wong’s work is included in museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Bronx Museum of The Arts, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Wong had a one person show Sweet Oblivion at the New Museum (1998). City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti from the Martin Wong Collection opened at the Museum of the City of New York in 2013 and traveled to the Amsterdam Museum in 2016. Wong's retrospective, Human Instamatic, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts in November 2015, the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio in May of 2016 and traveled to the UC Berkeley Art Museum in San Francisco, California in the fall of 2017.