Band of Vices is thrilled to announce its first exhibition of 2019, Between Two Worlds, featuring the artwork of contemporary artists Ariel Vargassal and Dominic Chambers .

This exciting pairing brings together the 2018 8th Annual Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series second-place winner Ariel Vargassal and 2019 Yale MFA candidate Dominic Chambers as their magical surrealist paintings continue to garner critical attention and praise in the contemporary art world.

Ariel Vargassal is a Los Angeles-based artist from Mexico whose artwork is focused on revealing the complex anthropomorphic qualities and relationships between humans and wild life. Vargassal’s work can be described as Surrealist in that he creates these fantastical and imaginary associations such as humans and African Wild dogs and he pushes against his conservative Catholic roots and upbringing in order to envision new avenues of dialogue regarding subjects such as sex, gender, and the naked body.

Dominic Chambers’ artwork is based on a personal journey to help him better understand where he fits in the world as a Black man of color in America. He negotiates dualities and tropes as diverse as imagination and reality, presence and absence, visibility and invisibility and America’s seeming commitment to the erasure of black masculinity, among other societal denouements. W.E.B. DuBois’s articulation of “the veil” and “double consciousness” has piqued his interest as well. Chambers explores notions of race, beauty, identity, body and space, and power dynamics in his oeuvre in order to investigate and challenge conventional and existing norms.

In Between Two Worlds , Vargassal and Chambers take the viewer on a journey in order to explore their own personal versions of the ideas associated with Surrealist imagery whether it be African Wild dogs with Campbell tomato soup cans or the metamorphosis of a human turning into a hybrid werewolf. These artists use their imaginations to bring us inventive and original associations that we have never seen or experienced before and their mastery of the large-scale painting format is breathtaking to behold.