Jeffrey Meris: Assotto:ottossA

François Ghebaly New York is proud to present Assotto:ottossA, Jeffrey Meris's debut solo exhibition at the gallery's Lower East Side space. Haitian-born artist Jeffrey Meris inhabits a unique syncretism in his work. Drawing from across disciplines and both personal and historical contexts, Meris uses sculpture (as well as installation, performance, drawing, and site-specificity) to bridge timescales, geographic place, folklores, and epistemologies of care. His newest exhibition, Assotto:ottossA, centers a posthumous conversation with the pioneering Haitian-American poet and AIDS activist Assotto Saint. A key figure in the cultural arts and Black Gay movements in New York in the 1980s and early 1990s, Saint drew extensively from Haitian and diasporic spiritualisms in his exaltations of queerness and resistance. The exhibition features two ongoing bodies of sculpture, Geodesics and AM. Grounded in Meris' fearless, kaleidoscopic approach to artmaking, works from both series are made altar-like through material and formal nods to West African masking traditions, Caribbean visuality, caretaking, geometric abstraction, and the unabashedly Black queer femme sensibility of Saint himself.