Eye Lounge is pleased to present With all my love + guts, an exhibition of works by Mikey Foster Estes, a member of the downtown Phoenix collective. The exhibition will be on view December 20 – January 12, 2020, with an opening reception on Friday, December 20 from 6-9 PM.
The exhibition brings together three never-before-exhibited text works produced between 2015 and 2016 in New York City. Documenting banal occurrences while also transforming them through narrativization, the works playfully stage a simulation of the affective relationship between language, image, and object.
In a drawing from memory, the artist forms a connection with a discarded piece of tape while running an errand on Fifth Avenue. Rock documents the purchase, and subsequent refund, of a stone at an art supply store. The space is further activated by White rose, a text-based performance that will happen in the gallery at undisclosed times each week.
With all my love + guts, the work from which the exhibition takes its name, displays a selection of greeting cards exchanged between the artist and his late mother. The title references the signature line on a birthday card made by the artist. The cards span across several years and represent narrative fragments of the artist’s time spent living in NYC.
This collection of ephemera and writing considers absence and presence as two interwoven states of being. The objects, defined by their absence, ceaselessly refer to another time and place.
Mikey Foster Estes (born 1991, Park Ridge, IL) is an artist whose practice is rooted in the everyday and spans across the disciplines of performance, photography, sculpture, video, and writing. His work has been exhibited at Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Fine Art Complex 1101, Tempe, AZ; ASHES/ASHES, Los Angeles, CA; among others. He has performed and screened his work at experimental venues throughout Phoenix and New York, and was recently included in Phoenix Art Museum’s public programming at CityScape in Downtown Phoenix. His short essay, “Private Rainbows: A Reading,” was published in an issue of Tongue, Taste, Appetite, a biannual exhibition in book form organized by TWOFORTY in Brooklyn, NY. In 2016, he participated in the SOMA Summer residency program in Mexico City, which focused on the subject of the archive. He received his MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York, and his BFA from Arizona State University. He lives and works in Tempe, AZ.