GAME OVER

Brian Ferreira, Yalda Foroughmand Arabi, Scott Lerner, Nitin Mukul, Opal Ong, Nicole Schonitzer 

May 12th - June 16th

Soloway Gallery is pleased to present Game Over, a group exhibition featuring paintings, sculptures, drawings, ceramics, and video installations by Brian Ferreira, Yalda Foroughmand Arabi, Scott Lerner, Nitin Mukul, Opal Ong, and Nicole Schonitzer. Game Over is the first curatorial project of artist Michael Dispensa and will run from May 12 through June 16th with an opening at 5-8 pm on Sunday, May 12th.  

In video games, a black screen with the words Game Over, You Died, Critical Failure, almost never means a unilateral dive into oblivion; It is an end, but with a promise of second chances, forced rest, and rebirth. Game over can be an external system experiencing many deaths of what was once normal, an internal struggle oscillating between unmanaged hostility and fragile truce, a conscious choice to ditch a known path for an intrepid unknown dimension, or maybe it really is a final dive into true oblivion; what gamers call permadeath.

Leading up to the show, all artists were prompted to flirt with their own definition of Game Over, making entirely new work in ways they never have before or recontextualizing current/past work to seek a fresh perspective. The experimental nature of each artist's practice captures the Game Over spirit, come to see the product of their generative deaths, respawns, and resets.  

This is not the end…

Poster image: Painting by Opal Ong            Writing by: Michael Dispensa

Brian Ferreira (b. 1994, Brooklyn, NY) is a self procalimed interdisciplinary "botch artist" working out of Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus and living in Astoria, Queens. While studying Biology at Hunter College he began taking painting classes as electives. This eventually led him to develop a deep fascination with ceramics, which soon prompted him to fully commit his studies in that direction. This new direction has led him to work in various mediums and techniques of sculpture from custom classical crown moldings, relief sculptures, and pottery. While working in fine art fabrication, he utilizes the facilities in which he works to produce pottery during off hours. Pottery that has budded into a frantic all encompassing obsession one could liken to addiction. 

Yalda Foroughmand Arabi (born in Tehran, Iran) graduated with a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently works as an artist and art educator based in Brooklyn. Yalda’s paintings bring together symbolic, personal, and imagined visuals, into multi-layered narratives that explore the politicized Iranian body and its relationship to the land. Through imaginings of abstracted and alternative realities, she meditates on themes of nature, being, displacement, and freedom. Yalda’s recent work has been shown in group exhibitions at AIR Gallery as well as in several online and in person exhibits at Paradice Palase.

Scott Lerner (b. 1995, Charlotte, NC) is a mixed-media artist whose work fuses ancient relics with science fiction technology. He received his MFA from RISD and his BA from Oberlin College. His work has most recently been included in In Response: The Sassoons at the Jewish Museum in New York and No White Walls at Yale University. He currently teaches contemporary art history at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and runs the apartment gallery East Manning Projects in Providence, RI (@eastmanningprojects).

Nitin Mukul is an American visual artist of Indian descent mapping spaces where painting and video intersect as a durational experience. He has lived and worked in Massachusetts, India, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and currently New York City. In 2020 he was Artist in Residence at Caldera Arts in Sisters, Oregon, and is the recipient of 2020 and 2023 fellowships from NYFA. His work has been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pioneer Works, The Queens Museum, Lincoln Center, The Rubin Museum, and the New York Hall of Science, among others. He has been showing with Aicon gallery in NYC since 2008. In 2020 he co-founded Epicenter NYC, a community journalism multiplatform initiative that engages, connects and informs and empowers through the power of culture and community.

Opal Mae Ong was born in Los Angeles, California. Later, Ong and her family would move across the United States, living in; Morgantown, WV; Saint Louis, MO; Louisville, KY and Philadelphia, PA. Ong’s practice considers lived experience and storytelling, presented within the otherworldly. Her recent paintings and drawings explore selfhood and complex relations to identity that embrace shape-shifting, hybridity and fragmentation. She holds a BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA in Painting from Hunter College. Ong’s most recent shows include A Spell For Refusal, a solo exhibition at Arsenal Contemporary, Tribeca (2023), and Find Yourself Alone In The Middle Of A Forest, a two-person booth at Spring/Break Art Fair, curated by Nora Boyd in Los Angeles (2022). Recent group exhibitions include F2T Gallery, Milan, Italy; She Bam Art, Leipzig, Germany; Upper Market Gallery, Sanfrancisco, CA. She was the recipient of a year long artist residency from Arsenal Contemporary (2023) in Montreal, Canada; and participated in a Grief Studies Workshop (2024) facilitated by writer and poet Fariha Róisín. Ong maintains an active studio practice and resides on Lenape Land/Brooklyn, NY.

Nicole Schonitzer (b. 1994, Chicago, IL) is an artist and curator whose practice centers around painting, drawing, and installation. Her work has been shown in New York, NY, Brooklyn, NY, Queens, NY, Chicago, IL, London, UK, and Providence, RI.  She has been featured in publications such as Create! Magazine, Saatchi Art's Rising Stars Report, Shoutout LA, and Canvas Rebel.  Later this year, she will release a book of her drawings and writings through the independent publisher Allowing Many Forms.  She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design.   She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.