We all have to die, grow, age, learn, experience re-birth, shine, and fade. Celebrities do so in public, is this the service they offer?

CELEBRITY brings together nine artists who explore fame, admiration, charisma, visibility, glamor, and disgust in their work. As a curator, I don’t have much background on celebrity, so I leave it to these folks to show and explore a camouflaged omnipresent structure of fame; its agonies wins, juicy strain, and strangeness.

Adam Devkota (b. 1990) is an interdisciplinary artist based in southern California practicing primarily in paint, pastel, and charcoal. His paintings, drawings, and installations explore the distortions in a society’s collective memory, and how these aberrations become calcified into history.

Rebecca Forstater (she/they) is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist whose work considers the production of current histories in digital landscapes. Her distinct ironic appropriation of celebrity culture manifests in the visceral feeling of being torn between repulsion and familiarity. Through the outward-facing aesthetic of tacky luxury and cliched reality television narrative, Forstater questions whether we can trust our own desires in a screen-based world.

Forstater received her MFA from Syracuse University and her BFA from James Madison University. Their work has been exhibited internationally and nationally with most recent shows at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles), Unrequited Leisure (Nashville), Bunker Projects (Pittsburg), Governors Island (New York), Das Giftraum (Berlin), and Monte Vista Projects (Los Angeles). In addition to her individual art practice, Forstater is part of the art collective, Double Double Project, is a co-founder and curator of Trophy Room Project Space, and is the co-chair of Grants, Scholarships, and Finance at the New Media Caucus.

Emma Gray is fascinated by the environment and conditions of the human psyche, what it means to inhabit skin and bone and how this relates to our climate both internally and externally. Oscillating between portraiture and landscape, Gray primarily paints in oil, as often as her busy life allows. She has worked in contemporary art in many iterations, as an advisor and curator, building private collections and working in depth mentoring and fostering the careers of a small group of artists. Her Los Angeles project space Five Car Garage, established in 2013, has been extensively covered in the media. A former editor of ArtReview who studied at University College London and studied portraiture at Heatherley Art School, London, she has been painting quietly for decades.

Julie Henson is an artist whose work explores the relationships between performer and audience, narrative and myth, and the connection between the stage and the retelling of parables. Recently focusing on the ways in which female pop stars and celebrities embody ideals of class, race, and gender to their fan bases, her work uses theatrical tropes and stage materials to consider how shared beliefs are acted out throughout culture. Having grown up in a religious family, many of her references generate from an exploration of her early childhood experiences attending a hyper- performative megachurch, employing rudimentary theatrical techniques to bring the imagery and sound of culturally shared beliefs into space through sculptures, video, and installation.

Henson (b. 1983 in Charleston, SC) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2011. Solo exhibitions include the Neon Museum, Las Vegas, the Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Art, Buffalo, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, the Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina, Yes Ma’am Projects, Denver, and SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York. Henson has participated in group shows at numerous museums and spaces including Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art, Los Angeles, the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance; and the Visual Art Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

Henson’s work has been reviewed in Variable West, The Steidtz Magazine, Elephant Magazine, Artforum, and Hyperallergic. She was a 2021 nominee for the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, a 2017 nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award, and 2019 Artist in Residence at The Neon Museum, Las Vegas and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson.

Darian Johnson: “Painting of tigers. Bruce Lee. Hulk. Iron Man. Batman. Captain America. Batman. Spider-man. Superman. Rocky. Dragons. More motorcycles. Red car. Monster trucks. George Michael. John Cena. John Cena. Paint Rocky. Yeah! Bruce Lee. Spider-man. Yeah!” vaultartstudio.org/darianjohnson

Guy Oliver’s work is rooted within a framework of self-portraiture, and explores notions of masculinity, identity, comedy and tragedy, taking a highly personal but irreverent working approach. The work integrates and then dissects areas of popular culture: cinema, sport, politics, popular music, stand-up comedy and art history act as the recurring subject matter.

Guy OIiver (b. 1982, London) lives and works in Margate. He graduated from the Royal College of Art (MA Painting) in 2015, and his interdisciplinary practice employs video as well as text, painting, collage and performance. He was recently shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2021 and was the recipient of the Jerwood/Film & Video Umbrella Award 2020. Solo exhibitions include Hindsight, Jerwood Space, London (2020), And You Thought I Was Bad?, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2018), Live From San Quentin, Random Access Gallery, Syracuse, New York (2018) and Did You Think I’d Leave You Dying?, Chalton Gallery, London (2017). Recent group exhibitions and screenings include Sports Casual, Palfrey, London (2021), The Year Everyone Died, Daata x New World Symphony, Florida (2021), Don’t Touch Me, Newcombe House, London (2020), Virtual Cocoons, Specter, online (2020) and Culture Caveat, Art Night, London (2019).

Amanda Struver (she/her), b. 1990, builds her practice by constructing or altering environments for her to engage in incisive interactions with presentations of self. Her work often calls into question fortified lines between animal, creature, human, mutant, and object. Within these realms, she embodies and expands upon characters that invade and disrupt. Since 2020 Struver’s practice and research has focused on human infatuation of cetaceans. Specifically, dolphins and their mythical/mystical attributes. Struver received her MFA in Studio Art from Syracuse University in 2018 and has exhibited internationally in Germany, London, Los Angeles, and New York. She has participated in the SU:VPA London Residency, The University of East London Project Space residency at Trinity Buoy Wharf, as well as Bunker Projects in Pittsburgh, PA. Struver currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Sean Regis Traynor: “I want people to think they love my art, and I want them to think it’s lovely, and fantastic, and phenomenal. I love to draw stuff that I’m thinking about doing that day, so that I never get bored anymore.”

Charlie Wallace: “I like Whitney Houston. The Bodyguard. And Cinderella with the Black Singer.I feel uncomfortable with my body. Whitney Houston died in a bathtub from all drugs. And Joan Collins died of breast cancer. And Michael Jackson died. And Tina Turner died. Did you hear Tina Turner? Why would Tina Turner die? Ike and Tina Turner. Sang Proud Mary. Freddy Mercury and the Temptations.Diana Ross and Frank Sinatra. Billie Holiday. They’re all in Heaven.”