Sallow, Strata: 2016-2020, + Together

Minneapolis artist Nancy Julia Hicks returns to HAIR+NAILS with Sallow, a show of new sculpture and print-based hybrid works that run parallel to their poem of the same name. In this fantasy, a volcano sprouts from the ground in a small town in West Texas where an oil derrick once stood. The precarity of the body and the tension of our relationship to the earth is expressed with materials such as silicone stretched to its limit, human hair, dirt, and motors that jostle the objects and destabilize the room.

In her first exhibition with the gallery, South Korean-born artist Dahn Gim presents Strata: 2016– 2020, a room installation covered in black-and-white photocopies of her immigrant documents. At its center is a polished, floor-to-ceiling column, meticulously crafted through processes of compressing, curing, rolling, turning, and sanding layers of documentation that serve as evidence of Gim’s journey to be recognized as an artist in the U.S. This column reveals both the erosion of personal security and the resilience gained by navigating the complex realities of the immigrant experience.

In the gallery’s downstairs space, HAIR+NAILS’ Fontaine and Van Loon have curated the group show Together with retuning artists Jonathan Herrera Soto (New Haven CT/NYC), Lamia Abukhadra (Beirut/Chicago), Daniel Ludtke (Tallahassee FL) along with Nailah Taman (Los Angeles) in their first show with the gallery.

ARTIST BIOS:

Nancy Julia Hicks (they, them) is a non-binary installation and performance artist and educator from Houston, TX and based in Minneapolis, MN. Through visualizing the body as object they illustrate and negotiate infliction of pain on the environment, space, and other bodies.
They’ve exhibited work at Hair and Nails, the SOIL gallery (Seattle), the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Dreamsong, Nightclub at Night, Waiting Room, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the Concourse Gallery, the Soap factory, the Highpoint Center for printmaking, the Soo visual arts Center, and other locations.
https://www.nancyjuliahicks.com/
Instagram: @nancyjuliahicks

Born in Busan, South Korea, and raised in Canada, Dahn Gim moved to Los Angeles in 2013 and is currently based in Minneapolis. Her work reflects the dual perspectives of being both an insider and an outsider, intricately woven into the tapestry of her life as a “forever foreigner,” shaped by the nomadic ebb and flow of perpetual immigrant status. Exploring the complexities of hybrid identity, Gim engages with various materials to grapple with the friction and fragmentation of assimilation and dislocation. Deeply informed by self-inquiry during times of dispersion, uncertainty, and a longing for belonging, she transmutes her ideas across multiple mediums, including video, sculpture, participatory drawings, durational performance, and installation.
After completing her MFA in Media Arts at UCLA, Gim has exhibited her work at prominent venues in Los Angeles, including the Hammer Museum, Steve Turner Gallery, AA|LA, Human Resources, Barnsdall Art Gallery, Gas Gallery, Camera Obscura Art Lab, Kala Art Institute, Brand Art
Library, and Angels Gate Cultural Center. She has also shown her work internationally at venues such as Somerset House (UK), Post Territory Ujeongguk, Space One, Dongdaemun Design Plaza (South Korea), Basis (Frankfurt); Rabindranath Tagore Centre (India) and ifa-laboratory (Belgium). Additionally, she has participated in various international art festivals, including Currents New Media, the UCLA Game Art Festival, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Other Places Art Fair, Now Instant Image Hall, and the LA Art Book Fair at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, as well as Art Souterrain and Now Play This at Somerset House. Recently, Gim was awarded the 2024 McKnight Visual Artists Fellowship.
http://www.dahngim.com
Instagram: @dahngim

Jonathan Herrera Soto (b. 1994) holds a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. Recent solo exhibitions of Herrera Soto’s include “Twice the Legal Minute” at Hartford University, “All at Once” at Brown University, and “In Between /Underneath” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He is a recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, Yale Prison Education Initiative Fellowship, and was awarded the 2023-24 Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts at Hartford Art School. http://www.jonathanherrerastudio.com
Instagram: @produce.work

Lamia Abukhadra is a Palestinian American artist currently based in Beirut and Chicago.
Her practice studies how disasters can resurrect and generate new forms of perception, collectivity, and resistance, often using the Palestinian context as an urgent microcosm. Within her drawings, prints, sculptures, texts, and installations, she embeds speculative frameworks which bring to light intimate and historical connections, poetic occurrences, and generative possibilities of survival, mutation, and self-determination.
Lamia graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BFA in interdisciplinary studio art in 2018. She is a 2019-2020 Home Workspace Program Fellow at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut as well as a 2021– 2022 Jan van Eyck Academie Resident in Maastricht. Her work has been exhibited in Minneapolis, Chicago, Beirut, and Berlin. Lamia is a 2018–2019 Jerome Emerging Printmaking Resident at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, a 2019 resident at ACRE and the University of Michigan’s Daring Dances initiative, and a recipient of a 2017 Soap Factory Rethinking Public Spaces grant. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.
Abukhadra is also a cultural worker and currently holds the position of Art and Communications Director at Mizna (St. Paul, MN).
http://www.lamiaabukhadra.com
Instagram: @lamiaabukhadra

Nailah Taman (b. 1993. Minnesota) is an Egyptian American artist + cultural worker based in Los Angeles. They graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2015 with a BA in Visual Arts and was a member of PF Community Studios in Minneapolis from 2022-2024. Their work explores ancestral collaboration, tactility, Shapes and un-language, often emerging in sculptural forms. They are an avid collector of objects deemed precious by their own criteria. Nailah is a recipient of a 2024 MSAB Creative Individuals Grant, and has previously displayed work at Cue Arts Foundation (NYC), Public Functionary (MN), Form + Content (MN), Pro Arts Oakland (CA), Stay Home Gallery (TN), amongst others.
http://www.nailahtaman.com
Instagram: @everything_coming_up_roses

Daniel Luedtke is an interdisciplinary artist and musician living in Tallahassee FL. He received an MFA in Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelors Degree in Music Performance from Augsburg University in Minnesota. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at Florida State University. Luedtke’s interdisciplinary work illustrates ways that health, mortality and bodily pleasure are quantified, categorized and assigned value. These ideas are often illustrated by emphasizing the physicality of printed images in installations and other flat-but-dimensional objects. He has been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums such as the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Tom of Finland Foundation (Los Angeles), Museum of Art and Design (New York), the Schwules Museum (Berlin), Alabama Center for Contemporary Art (Mobile), Museum of Contemporary Art (Jacksonville). His work has been published in printmaking anthologies by Princeton Architctural Press and Chronicle Books. http://www.dnml.org
Instagram: @dnmldaniel

OPEN GALLERY HOURS:
Walk-ins welcome: Thursdays/Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays 1:00- 5:00 starting November 24.
Also, appointments can be scheduled via hairandnailsart@gmail.com.

Image: (detail) LAMIA ABUKHADRA Message to Mother (2023) pastel on paper.