Riikka Hyvönen, Ma Bum Bruise, 2017, Printed on Hahnemühle Museum Etching 350 g, Special Edition of 40, Signed and numbered

It's a natural thing to indulge in visually pleasing stimuli—interact to form unexpected, intense, and sometimes pleasurable aesthetic experiences. Subjectivity is at the heart of this show, the emotional tone of the artwork, and its ability to arouse emotions in you on an individual and physical level.

Strange Delights is a range of contemporary works that find abstracted ways to delve into the narrative. These artists are commentators creating habitable worlds for us, the viewer, to get lost in. This exhibition features the work of artists Riikka Hyvönen, Kyle Montgomery, Angela Ellsworth, Zoe Hawk, Keith Garcia, and Zac Hacmon.

Immerse yourself in the joy of the unexpected.

Step into the lens of Zoe Hawk's fictional worlds where the struggle to navigate the space between childhood and adulthood is theatrically awkward. Wild away into what's been called a "feminist punk fever dream" where beauty meets bruise in the hybrid sculpture/paintings series Roller Derby Kisses by Riikka Hyvönen. Explore the symbolic collision of physical and spiritual relevance in the crystal-adorned sculptures of artist Kyle Montgomery. Ponder over the conceptual work of Zac Hacmon who seeks to generate non-identity through his sculptures that call for use yet have no clear function. Indulge in Keith Garcia's paintings, where the use of color and iconography make precarious narratives seem like innocent, quirky escapist fantasies. Find an alternate to 'leaning' with multidisciplinary artist Angela Ellsworth's Wall Ticklers–her sculptures made from pearl corsage pins are strategically mounted on walls, turning ordinary spaces into potential physical pleasures.

EXHIBITION DATES
March 27 - May 16, 2020

All Artwork Now Available to View/Purchase
HERE

Audio Tours with curator, Ginger Rudolph
HERE

SOCIAL MEDIA
Instagram: @ParadigmGS // @popgeekout
Twitter: @ParadigmGS
Facebook: facebook.com/paradigmgallery

Exhibition Video Tour: 

Strange Delights curated by Ginger Rudolph from Paradigm Gallery + Studio on Vimeo.

About Keith Garcia
Keith Garcia (b.1976) My work focuses on the spatial relationships between playful color gradients, shapes, and iconography. There is a narrative built from a societal aberration––whether it’s dreamt up through deviance or kept inclose proximity of innocence, it will be left to the preconceived misunderstandings of human nature. Coincidingly note simpler times: there were things wrong with the 80’s but it was still a beautiful place. Keith lives and works in Philadelphia. He was born in Wilkes Barre, PA and grew up in the neighboring small town of Dallas. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh where he studied Psychology and Studio Arts. He also completed a Post-Baccalaureate program at the Wharton School. He’s most recently shown works at Deep Space Gallery, The Fridge DC, Pink Slime, Everhart Museum, and the West Collection.

About Angela Ellsworth
Angela Ellsworth is a multidisciplinary artist traversing disciplines of drawing, sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Her solo and collaborative works have taken in wide-ranging subjects such as physical fitness, endurance, illness, social ritual, and religious tradition. She is interested in art merging with everyday life and public and private experiences colliding in unexpected places. Her work has been reviewed in Art News, Fiber Arts, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Canadian Art, Frieze Art, Artforum, and Performance Research. She has presented work nationally and internationally including the Getty Center (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, Australia), Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw, Poland), National Review of Live Art (Glasgow, Scotland), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles, CA), Crystal Bridges (Bentonville, Arkansas), Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver, CO), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Scottsdale, AZ), and Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ.) Awards and grants include Art Matters, Franklin Furnace, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, The Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, New Forms Regional Initiative Grant, from Mexic-Arte Museum, and DiverseWorks, funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation. Ellsworth is a Professor in the School of Art in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University and Founding Director of the Museum of Walking.

About Kyle Montgomery
Australian artist Kyle Montgomery is best known for his Crystal Mary sculptures. Montgomery’s work is an intentional collision of two beliefs in physical form, combining religion and spirituality to create the ultimate icon. These sculptural works delve into ideas of re-birth and the after- life, principals and messages he portrayed in earlier collage work before transforming them into the three-dimensional.

About Zac Hacmon
Zac Hacmon (b. Holon, Israel) is an artist based in New York. He has recently exhibited at Jack Shainman Gallery, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, LMAKgallery, Petach Tikva Museum of Art (Israel), Meet Factory Gallery (Czech Republic), and Artsonje Center (South Korea). Hacmon has had residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace program (LMCC) and Salem Art Works (NY), MeetFactory Studio (Czech Republic), and MMCA National Art Studio in Seoul (South Korea). He has received the Santo Foundation Individual Artist Award 2019 and the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Visual Project Exhibition Grant 2019 and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Hacmon received an MFA from Hunter College and a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (Israel).

About Riikka Hyvönen
Riikka Hyvönen is a London based visual artist. Hyvönen is on an exploration of beauty with her expressive and thought-provoking acts of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of its various representations. Questions of representation and objectification gain duality in her work.

Hyvönen considers self-identity as a constructed mass deception that we have agreed upon. Her witty, playful and controversial work is both founded in the present while she extends commercial values in visuality to reconsider common female stereotypes and cultural assumptions on beauty. Her famous Roller Derby Kisses sculptural painting series portrayed the achievements through the intimacy of female skin and there captured the massive, momentary marks that gain new importance only inside a small group of enthusiasts.

Having her interests stemming from pop culture and aesthetics, Hyvönen’s insightful criticism reaches beyond prevailing questions of body image and feminism. She attests the ways in which popular gestures end up as mechanisms of cultural consolidation.

About Zoe Hawk
Zoe Hawk was born in St. Louis in 1982. She received a BFA in studio art from Missouri State University, and MFA in painting from the University of Iowa. Zoe’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and included in publications such as New American Paintings, Plastik Magazine, ArtMaze Mag (UK), and JOIA Magazine (Chile). She has attended artist residencies in Ireland, Norway, Belgium, and Qatar, as well as the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. Notable exhibitions include From Pangs to Pangolins, curated by Trenton Doyle Hancock (Shulamazit Nazarian, Los Angeles), SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2019 (Los Angeles), Contemporary Art Qatar (Kraftwerk, Berlin), and solo exhibition Dreaming As The Summers Die (Glass Rice, San Francisco). Special collaborative projects have included pieces for ZARA’s Women in Art clothing collection, released world wide in 2019, and the Day Dreamers Tarot deck, created for international documentary film festival TRUE/FALSE in 2020. Zoe is currently based in Columbia, Missouri.

About the curator, Ginger Rudolph
Ginger is originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She studied Communications/Journalism at Community College of Philadelphia and art history at Temple University. Ginger is a curator, artist, and writer. She is also the Founder & Editor of HAHA Magazine (High on Art, Heavy on Antics), an arts journal with a focus on contemporary and street art. As her passion for the arts grew, she co-founded HAHA x Paradigm, a civic and social arts initiative located in Philadelphia. In her free time, she writes for arts and culture journals.

About Paradigm Gallery
Paradigm Gallery + Studio® exhibits contemporary artwork from around the world with a focus on Philadelphia-based artists. Established February 2010, the gallery began as a project between co-founders and curators, Jason Chen and Sara McCorriston, as a space in which to create artwork, to exhibit the work of their peers, and to invite the members of the community to create and collect in a welcoming gallery setting. Now open 10 years, the gallery still aims to welcome all collectors, from first time to lifelong, and continues to support accessible work that welcomes a wide audience.