Artists: Cindy Conrad, Young Joon Kwak, Tucker Rae-Grant
Exhibition title: This Ready Flesh
Venue: Mother Culture, Baxter Stairs, Los Angeles, US
Date: June 8 – 9, 2019
Photography: All images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Mother Culture
Cindy Conrad (b. 1991 in Charlotte, NC) is an interdisciplinary artist living in Los Angeles. Conrad looks to the tensions created by the simultaneous insensitivity and reverence of the ornamental. Interlacing epoxy, commercial products, chemicals, plastics, perfume, small kitsch ornaments, etc. the work mimics a sticky, mutating nature. Conrad received a BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design and is a 2021 MFA candidate from NYU Steinhardt.
Young Joon Kwak (b. 1984 in Queens, NY) is an LA-based multi-disciplinary artist working primarily through sculpture, performance, video, and collaboration. Kwak’s work aims to transform our perception of marginalized bodies by reimagining their form, functionality, and materiality—from static and bound to pre-inscribed power structures, to an expanded sense of bodies and their environs as mutable and open-ended. Kwak is the founder of Mutant Salon, a roving beauty salon/platform for experimental performance collaborations with their community of queer, trans, femme, POC artists and performers. Kwak is the lead performer in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner. Performances and exhibitions include: the Hammer Museum, The Broad, REDCAT, and ONE National LGBT Archives, Los Angeles; Regina Rex and Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Wattis Institute, Southern Exposure, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Pavillon Vendôme Centre d’Art Contemporain, Clichy, France; the Art Museum of the National University of Colombia, Bogotá. Along with Mutant Salon, Kwak was Artist-in-Residence at LACE (LA) during Summer 2018. Kwak received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Grant in 2018 and the Art Matters Grant in 2017. Kwak received an MFA from the University of Southern California, MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago, and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kwak’s work has been reviewed and featured in Artforum, Art News, Artillery Magazine, BOMB, Hyperallergic, and LA Times, among others.
Tucker Rae-Grant (b. 1987 in London, ON) is an LA-based artist working in sculpture and video. Rae-Grant’s work explores the interpersonal lives of things and their roles in the process of becoming. Incorporating queer, modernist, and Marxist ideas about subjectivity, objecthood, and time, Rae-Grant’s work creates an affective tangle of hope and compromise, community and disidentification. Rae-Grant’s work has been shown at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry (Chicago), LORD LUDD (Philadelphia), Paramount Ranch 3 (Los Angeles), Full Haus (Los Angeles), and EXPO Chicago. He records soundtracks for Dungeons & Dragons under the name, Dying Earth. Rae-Grant received his MFA from the University of Chicago and his BA from Yale University.
