Artist Statement:
“Baubo”, a titular nod to the Pre-Hellenic goddess of bawdy jokes, explores unruly sexuality in a post-digital context. My work builds on the history of Renaissance-era erotic nude painting, updating institutionally codified languages of desire for a contemporary audience. I am invested in what it means to miss somebody in 2025, which procedures count as devotional, and what reinterpretation looks like in the endless stream of visual flotsam we consume on a daily basis. These pieces reflect the de-territorialized experience of embodiment in all its messy, frustrating, and tyrannical iterations, side-stepping a press-release-approved relationship to love in favor of far murkier fare. I’m interested in tracking the relationship between love and mourning while creating new ways to excavate personal and political identity.
*Coffee & Conversation with the artist Saturday, February 8th, 3pm
Opening reception: Saturday, February 8th, 2025, 4-6pm.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Torey Akers is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. She earned an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and an MFA in creative nonfiction at Hunter College. As an artist, she has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Arts Letters and Numbers, Penland School of Craft, AIR Studios Paducah, Surf Point and Mass MoCA. She has shown her work all over the country, most recently at AIR Gallery in DUMBO, BK. Her art criticism has appeared in This is Tomorrow, Big Red & Shiny, Two Coats of Paint, ArtsEditor, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Art Papers, White Hot, and Art Spiel. In 2015, she was named a Detroit Fellow for the CUE Foundation’s Young Art Critic’s Mentorship Program, and has also been a finalist for the Red Bull Detroit Art Writing 2018 Fellowship and the 2018 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writing Workshop. Her book, Revolutionary Algorithms: A TikTok Manifesto, is forthcoming January 7th from Grand Central Publishing. She now works at The Art Newspaper as an associate editor.
