CARLOS DELGADO, PENDA DIAKITÉ, KAYE FREEMAN, ANDREW GRAY, JAMMIE HOLMES, UMAR RASHID
& MILES REGIS.

Band of Vices is thrilled to announce Eye to Eye, a group exhibition of seven international emerging and mid-career artists who work in a variety of media including oil painting on canvas, collage, mixed media and are concerned with elevating the imaginary of their subject matter. The artists to be exhibited include Carlos Delgado, Penda Diakité, Kaye Freeman, Andrew Gray, Jammie Holmes, Umar Rashid & Miles Regis.

Eye to Eye shows that each artist controls their own narratives in order to ensure that they are not written out of art history and that their artistic voices are accurately documented and recorded. They fully engage with the heritage to figuration while maintaining a healthy relationship to the abstracted form, thus producing artwork that is individual to them.

Carlos Delgado's abstract oeuvre is involved in the subtleties of the daily existence regarding how humans relate to each other through emotional interactions.

Penda Diakité 's art is an amalgam of her bicultural experiences and influences from her upbringing in Mali, West Africa to the American West Coast. In a recent body of work, the vibrant color palette in her artwork is inspired by Malian masked dancers from a region that is thousands of years old and is said to be protected by ancestry spirits.

Kaye Freeman's oeuvre can be described as a continuously coruscating cacophony of color collisions. The vivid and vivacious emphasis on brilliant combinations exposes her to be a master colorist. There is a depth of engagement involved in this work, a truth which lies in layers oftentimes beneath the surface.

Andrew Gray is a painter and graphic designer who's interest stems from deconstructing our notions of the meaning of propaganda by using historical references. His mission is to better understanding America's fraught racial and social past and its effects on the present is another central concern.

In the case of Jammie Holmes’s acrylic and oil pastel on canvas paintings, his explorations include giving a voice to the voiceless and the vulnerable. His contemporary topics include politics, religion, and the everyday injustices that occur and he seeks to counter the degrading and widely disseminated caricatures of African Americans in popular culture.

Umar Rashid, also known by the alias Frohawk Two Feathers, perhaps is most recognized as the creator of the Frenglish Empire. Rashid imagined this fictitious country as a combination of France and England. He creates narratives of people of color whose stories have been ignored, forgotten, and discarded into the waste bins of irrelevancy.

Miles Regis is a master storyteller in his oeuvre often focusing his stories on those ever-present human emotional interactions such as love, loss, freedom, survival, and other important aspects that us humans require in order to live full existences.