Samantha Nye and Todd Stong
Samantha Nye and Todd Stong
Split Fountain
January 18 – March 1, 2025
1 Rivington Street, New York
Split Fountain pairs the work of Samantha Nye and Todd Stong in the first joint exhibition of their work. Nye and Stong are Philadelphia-based artists who share a friendship and rich dialogue that is strongly influenced by art historical themes, citing narratives and visual sources from Baroque, 19th and 20th century art, and pop and camp visual culture in their work. Both artists foreground the centrality of queer actors in familiar stories of art, pleasure, and history.
In Split Fountain, Nye presents three new oil paintings depicting women in lavish states of desire and repose. Adapted from lifestyle photographer Slim Aarons’ work from the 1940s to 1990s–in which beauty and affluence appear available to only a select few–Nye coyly reimagines Aaron’s privileged spaces populated with older female and non-binary figures. In her 2022 exhibition with the gallery, Attractive People Doing Attractive Things in Attractive Places, Nye’s paintings’ compositions were action-packed and overflowing with revelers. Here, solitary or paired figures are languid and dreamy, set in intimate interior spaces replete with a baroque excess of patterns, fabrics, fruits, and fauna.
Stong presents work from a series of monotypes begun during his graduate studies in Rome that reinterpret the life of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the 18th century art historian who dedicated himself to the study of ancient Greek and Roman statues and spearheaded the Classical Revival. Over the past three years, Stong has imagined a historical fiction that is encyclopedic, personal, and epic in scale, exploring details of Winckelmann’s biography as a gay man in 18th century Germany and, later in life, in Rome. Male figures are depicted at work and at play, surrounded by classical sculptures, lush gardens, and in the most recent work, as tangles of angels and men that ascend and descend against cloudscapes. A new body of small-scale frescoes further develops imagery of celestial peril and rapture, while harkening to the grand allegorical murals of Italian baroque and renaissance painters that both Winkelmann and Stong encountered while living and studying in the Eternal City, two and a half centuries apart.
The title of the exhibition, Split Fountain, refers to a printmaking process used to create a smooth gradient between multiple colors by running a brayer over the separate ink colors repetitively, deftly employed by Stong throughout his work in this show. The title also playfully suggests colorful and erotic themes that appear in both artists’ work– celebrating ecstatic moments of bodily agency, freedom, and joy.
SAMANTHA NYE
Samantha Nye makes work in painting, video, and installation, creating compelling dialogues between queer identity, mid-century references, and camp sensibilities. Her work is currently included in the important survey Queer Histories at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Julia Bryan-Wilson. In 2023, Nye was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her ambitious video project Femininity, part four in a series in which Nye refashions Scopitone films from the 1960s as queer utopias, casting only women in their sixties or older. Filmed at the famed The Belvedere Guest House, an exclusive resort for gay men on Fire Island, the video in-progress features legendary performance artist, playwright, and former Warhol superstar Penny Arcade as the lead role, a cover song written and performed by Peaches, and local casts from the Cherry Grove and Fire Island community. The project was recently written about in The New Yorker.
Recent solo exhibitions include CANDICE MADEY, New York (2022) and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2021). Her work has been reviewed in Art News, BOMB Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Brooklyn Rail, The Boston Art Review, Dazed Magazine, Elephant, The New York Times, and Vogue Brazil. Her work is in the collections of The Arnhem Museum, The Netherlands; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Tufts University Art Collection, Boston. Nye has an MFA in painting from Columbia University, New York (2018), and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Boston (2010). Nye was born in Hollywood, FL in the 1980s.
TODD STONG
Todd Stong is an artist, educator, curator, and writer based in Philadelphia, PA. He received a BA in Visual and Literary Arts from Brown University in 2014 and an MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art and Temple Rome in 2022. He has been a fellow at Yaddo, The Lighthouse Works, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, as well as an Apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. He was the 2023 Cindi Royce Ettinger Fellow at Second State Press.
Group and two-person exhibitions include spaces such as the Woodmere Art Museum and Commonweal Gallery (both in Philadelphia), Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin, and SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, New York. He is an adjunct professor of printmaking, drawing, and design at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and Delaware County Community College, a contributor to Title magazine, and a Co-Director at Fjord Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. He was born in Trenton, NJ in 1991.
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