Strange Worlds, Gardens of Earthly Delight

Feb 9 - 12, 2023

QiPO Art Fair

Bucareli 68
CDMX Center
Mexico City

[Image List]

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles is pleased to present the work of five of its members in Strange Worlds: Gardens of Earthly Delight, at QiPO Art Fair, Mexico City 2023.

The exhibition features the work of Carl Baratta, Cait Finley, Ricardo Harris-Fuentes, Anita Kucharczyk, and Alex Paik. In different but parallel germinations, each artist’s work is preoccupied with creating a world within their work.  On the surface, Carl Baratta’s paintings appear to be sweet colorful quattrocento-esque pastoral landscapes, but hidden in their forests and glades something strange is afoot.  Cait Finley mines the work of Hieronymus Bosch, the celebrated genius behind the haunting early renaissance masterpiece “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, as well as geological motifs in search of how humans process the passage of time and other ontological questions.  Ricardo Harris-Fuentes explores liminal spaces found in the cracks between non-ordinary realities encountered in shamanic journey work, deep meditative states, and psychedelic explorations.  Anita Kucharczyk’s oil paintings explore light’s mystical, sacred, and intimate qualities. Focusing on how the luminous properties of an object can alter our perceptions of reality. Using modular geometric abstraction and painted paper, Alex Paik explores the terrain of possibility and interdependence in his site-specific wall installations, with interests and influences that range from classical music and race to martial arts and community building.  Together these five artists present different gardens from which to view the world, each offering its own sweet fruits and cautionary notes.

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Carl Baratta
carlbaratta.com

I curate, I am a current member of 5 different collectives, and love organizing large-scale exchanges with additional programming, both nationally and internationally. I also teach and paint and somehow I am still alive. If you want to see some recent projects please go check out:

b-la-connect.org
tigerstrikesasteroid.com/tagged/5x5
highbeams.art

Cait Finley
caitfinley.com

Cait Finley is an American artist working in Montana.

She/her/they/them hopes to solve environmental destruction through pleasure.

Her work is about the differences between human perceptions of time, and geological time. Using sculpture, writing, video, and performance, she fantasizes about kinships with entities much larger and more nebulous than herself. Preferring to think of things like petroleum, capitalism, and global warming as entities in order to see more clearly how they can fit within human narrative timelines. And exploring the ways humans attempt to speed up and slow down geological time to more comfortably align with our corporeal, fleeting understanding of being.

Finley received an MFA in Sculpture from Syracuse University in Syracuse NY and a BFA in Ceramics from The University of Montana in Missoula MT. Exhibiting nationally at Mana Contemporary, Chicago IL; Art Helix, Brooklyn NY; CB1, Los Angeles CA; Cornell University, Ithaca NY; The Montana Art Museum, Missoula MT, and internationally at Bunsunrad Gallery, Bangkok Thailand and Das Gift, Berlin Germany. She has been the recipient of The Freeman Asia Fellowship, Mansfield Fellowship, and granted artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass CO, OxBow in Saugatuck MN, as well as the Turner Residency in Los Angeles CA.

Ricardo Harris-Fuentes
ricardoharrisfuentes.com

Ricardo Harris-Fuentes is a Los Angeles-based artist, curator, and educator who makes light-sensitive paintings that are designed to function as portals for healing and transformation.  His work is based on his experiences with altered states of consciousness encountered in Buddhist meditation and Shamanic Journeying.  His work has been exhibited in several one-person and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad.  Most recently, he was featured as one of “22 Artists to Collect in 2022” by Saatchi Art and mounted a solo presentation of his work at gallery ALSO entitled “A Floating World.”  Harris-Fuentes has held teaching positions at Santa Monica College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received his MFA in 2010 and was the recipient of the Anne and George Siegel Graduate Fellowship, and Cal State LA where he currently teaches in the Department of Art.  Ricardo is also a Co-Director and member of the artist collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid that operates independent exhibition spaces in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Greenville, SC.  In August of 2022 he curated the exhibition “Plant-Based” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles that explored the healing properties of plants and indigenous wisdom traditions that harness the power of plants for radical personal, ecological, and social transformation, among other themes.

Anita Kucharczyk
anitakucharczyk.com

Anita Kucharczyk is a Polish multidisciplinary visual artist whose light-based artworks are deeply connected with their environments. With her meticulous study of site-specific lighting, she aims to blur the line between fine art, new media art and exhibition space.

Anita received two Master’s Degrees, in Fine Arts (2015) and Media Arts (2016), from The Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland. She is currently based in Los Angeles, a member of TSA LA, and—in addition to her studio practice—works as an Art Director at The Experiential Co.

Alex Paik
alexpaik.com

Alex Paik is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. His modular, paper-based wall installations explore the adaptability, impermanence and interdependence of forms, color, and structures. He has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally, with notable solo projects at Praxis New York, Art on Paper 2016, and Gallery Joe. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at BravinLee Projects, Ruschman Gallery, and MONO Practice, among others.

Paik is Founder and Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces and organizes Correspondence Archive, an online series of conversations between artists of color.