Love Letter to my Teenage Bedroom
Didi Rojas, Megan Nugroho, Natalie Ochoa, Flora Wilds, Charlotte Fox, Lucy Luckovich
Curated by Marge Rendell
August 10 - September 3, 2023
Shelter is thrilled to present “Love Letter to My Teenage Bedroom”, a group exhibition featuring Charlotte Fox, Lucy Luckovich, Megan Nugroho, Natalie Ochoa, Didi Rojas, and Flora Wilds, curated by Marge Rendell. Utilizing a variety of mediums and processes, these six artists are all driven in some way by obsession.
Combining innocence with chaos, “Love Letter to My Teenage Bedroom” derives from the aesthetics of girlhood. Through distortion of beauty and commodity, the exhibition combines varying views of the contemporary ideologies of femininity - and in many ways is a love letter to a teenage girl’s bedroom. Fictionalized reality, purity, learned aesthetics of gender roles and the commodification of identity are shown through paintings, drawings, and sculpture.
Depicted both onscreen and in J-14, the teenage girl’s bedroom has always held an intense importance. From The Virgin Suicides to Mean Girls, nothing signifies more power to a girl growing up than her own candy-colored haven. Complicating mass- production vs. the artists’ hand, as well as relationships between the digital and the physical, these works play in a space of distorted reality.
Spring Serpent
Megan Nugroho
2023, Colored Pencil on Handmade Paper
8.5 x 11 in
June Rain
Megan Nugroho
2023, Colored Pencil on Handmade Paper
8.5 x 11 in
Nightlife
Megan Nugroho
2023, Colored Pencil on Handmade Paper
8.5 in x 11 in
Megan Nugroho (b. 1998) is a Chinese Indonesian artist based in New York. Her recent works explore themes of wildness, the natural and the alien body as a way to question the human connection to the environment. She creates colored pencil drawings as a way to evoke a childlike and magical perspective. Nugroho was an AXA Art Prize Finalist and she has shown her work in the New York Academy of Art, Fortnight Institute, 80WSE Gallery and more. Her work has recently been featured in Artmaze Magazine, Friend of the Artist, and Visionary Art Collective. Nugroho holds an MFA from New York University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sorry for my behavior. I’ve been diagnosed with silly girl disorder.
Didi Rojas
2023, Ceramic, 12 x 7 x 7 in
Who is she?
Didi Rojas
2023, Ceramic, 12 x 10 x 5 in
Let’s be real. The most interesting part of a truck is who is in the passenger seat.
Didi Rojas
2023, Ceramic and Enamel, 12 x 5 x 5 in
Didi Rojas (b. 1993 Cali, Colombia) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Rojas has exhibited all over New York, including The Museum of Arts and Design, Launch F18, The Hole, and Hannah Traore Gallery. She received her BFA from The Pratt Institute in 2016.
4 slabs, 1 bottom (one)
Flora Wilds
Found cement slabs and previously worn bikini bottoms
7 x 5 x 5 in
50 shirts, 1 top
Flora Wilds
Previously worn button up shirts and previously worn bikini top
30 x 28 x 48 in
4 slabs, 1 bottom (two)
Flora Wilds
Found cement slabs and previously worn bikini bottoms
7 x 5 x 5 in
Flora Wilds (b. 1993) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She grew up in San Diego, and her work is continually informed by her youth spent in Southern California. Wilds’ practice is committed to a collaboration with found materials, including previously worn clothing, purses, quilts, and other textiles. She works with objects that have disparate and gendered histories, pop-cultural associations, and that reflect capital and its pace. Wilds is often thinking about the language surrounding commodities, handmade labor traditions within textile production (fast fashion v. quilt making), and gestures that complicate the Minimalist sculptural cannon.
Untitled 1
Natalie Ochoa
Digital embroidery on canvas with satin and velvet
Untitled 2
Natalie Ochoa
Digital embroidery on canvas with satin and velvet
Untitled 3
Natalie Ochoa
Digital embroidery on canvas with satin and velvet
Natalie Ochoa (b. 1990 Miami, FL) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She draws from her Colombian heritage to confront fears, anxieties, and vulnerabilities through the mediums of embroidery and sculpture. Her works serve as a form of therapy- allowing her to express her feelings and juxtapose past pain with bright colors and naive imagery creating a unique world where contradictions exist simultaneously. Ochoa received her BFA from School of Visual Arts in 2016 and has had solo presentations at Blade Study (NY) and Cat Box Contemporary (NY).
Spiral
Charlotte Fox
2020, Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in
Sad Lamp
Charlotte Fox
2020, Oil and acrylic on canvas , 20 x 16 in
Charlotte Fox (b. 1994, New York City) received her BFA in 2016 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a focus in painting. Working predominantly with oil, Fox’s work playfully explores experiences of repulsion and desire through the lens of fantasy and fragmented or fictionalized self-narrative. Her process uses several visual references such as personal photography, vintage porn and old films and cartoons, which are later digitally collaged together before being painted in oil. Fox lives and works in New York.
Behind the Green Door
Lucy Luckovich
2023, Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in
The Devil in Miss Jones
Lucy Luckovich
2023, Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in
Lucy Luckovich (b. 2001 Atlanta, Georgia) uses oil painting to explore her complicated relationship with femininity. With themes of virginity, objectification, and oppression she builds a visual language meshing elegance and beauty with the darkness and fear that accompany a feminine identity. Within these observations, she confronts both her desire to revel in her identity and also her resentment for it, allowing these contradictory feelings to coexist. Luckovich currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia where she is attending Georgia State University to earn her BFA in painting.
