Raw Meat
Art Gallery & Bookstore
45 Division Street
Second Floor
New York, NY
10002
Please email rawmeatinfo@gmail.com
to schedule visiting hours.
Current Exhibition
Press Statement:
Personal corporeality remains one of the last non-extracted spaces. A site for consented material pleasures, good horny things, or spiritually settling things. This is where the work sits. Of course, the work is also both hot and cool, straddling mediums and categories as all interesting art in its moment does. The gap between what art is and how we all feel seems increasingly fraught. Which level of hell are we in now? The categories are collapsing, and there’s no need to over-intellectualize it, sometimes we need to sit with good-looking stuff and not tell anyone about it.
Braswell uses precise, smooth airbrush gradients to mimic the artificial glow and synthetic perfection of backlit screens. The color palette relies on hyper-saturated, commercial hues and simulated lens flares that give the subjects a fetishized sheen. Angel’s work catches the shinier moments of this process by rendering these hyper-stylized figures, at times nostalgic, with seamless transitions and high-fidelity rendering especially as the previously dominant norms of social media architecture shift pessimistically. A recent work shows a bustful anime figure beckoning the viewer through a noose to their death: apt for current times.
Santiago’s drawings dip into graphic novel realms within their formal framings. Santiago plays with line weight and extreme density to create a claustrophobic mark-making effect, yet beautiful. Intricate cross-hatching and heavy black ink-washes build textures where local human and sexy demonic forms mesh together. Some of the work here is from recent graphic novel work revolving around a fictional scenario where a governmental force mutates HIV/AIDS for money, based on David Wojnarowicz’s 1996 7 Miles a Second comic book. This original source is highly abstracted and remixed from Santiago’s common themes of a multiracial indigenous Puerto Rican native people and intersecting fraught colonial and extractive histories.
Curated by Rawmeat ( @rawmeatgallery ) and Tannon Reckling ( @foreclosedgaybar ), Christian Santiago ( @lil_saantii ), Angel Lovecraft Braswell ( @angel_lovecraft ).
For early press inquiries or to receive a preview PDF of available artworks, please email rawmeatinfo@gmail.com.
