Presented by Zach’s Crab Shack

Ále Campos and Jordan Deal

09 August - 14 September 2024

Opening Reception:
Friday, August 09, 6-9pm

Performance by Ále Campos at 7:30pm

Curated by Jameson Paige & Zach Hill

FJORD is pleased to announce our move into a new gallery, still in the same 1720 N 5th St. building, but closer to the front of the building and in a larger space. Located at Suite G2 right next door to our friends at Mission in Arts, we are hard to miss.

For our inaugural exhibition, we welcome Zach's Crab Shack, a traveling curatorial project featuring queer artists from throughout Philadelphia and beyond. Founded in 2022 by artist and curator Zach Hill, Zach's Crab Shack has shown seven amazing exhibitions across a wide range of media. We are so thrilled to host exhibition number eight, apparition, with works by Ále Campos and Jordan Deal, co-curated by Hill and Jameson Paige.

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How do we visit upon our past selves, or those we have yet to become, and what are the means we employ to arrive there? In Apparition, artists Ále Campos and Jordan Deal contend with the complexity of selfhood through personal image archives and performance residues. Each artist leverages the formal integrity of the frame and grid to notate seriality’s importance in how the self is composed differently from one moment in time or context to the next. Collections of media images, organic matter, and facial impressions in varying processes of decay or preservation become relics of bodily experience. Video elements engage with artistic lineages such as Mario Montez aka René Rivera and James Baldwin, encouraging these historical figures to become conductive fixtures by which Campos and Deal relate deeper to their own interiority.

For Campos, in the rosotros series (2023–ongoing), post-performance make-up wipes become an archive of their drag persona Celeste. Each effigy is a distorted facial impression and recalls the particularities of how Celeste has been conjured across time. SCREENTEST I : CELESTE (2024), reminiscent of Warhol’s favored interview medium, is a slowly unfurling spool of Campos transforming into Celeste. The emotional and mental arrival to their drag persona charts a questioning of selfhood and its affective fracturing.

In Deal’s installation eat pray love, to the other side of an astro black kinda myth II (2024), a tapestry of precariously contained images and objects are draped and projected over with a video of media excerpts and field recordings. The tapestry creates a grid-like taxonomy of repurposed images and organic matter sheathed in plastic and separated by duct tape. Considering how to “Black” consciousness, Deal pulls images from many sources, highlighting social dance and gatherings, ironic humor, and sociopolitical effects. These representational artifacts sit next to molding breads and peppers, many of which are encased with water and urine. For Deal, encrypting these signifying images and objects in bodily refuse questions their cultural solidity, proposing instead a contingent state between life and death. An apparition is both a ghost and a ghost-like image, likening the fullness of presence to the flatness of an image.

However, apparitions are also the appearance of something remarkable, unexpected, or otherworldly. Campos and Deal’s works sit in this liminal definition, considering the weight of images and bodily relics, and how to transform them. Discretely arranged, even if precariously, and taken together as a sum of their parts, each artist creates a complex arrangement of self against the backdrop of history, identity, and personal mythography. These add up to an instability or in-flux notion of selfhood that is perpetually changing, a fearsome and cathartic concept of somatic experience.

Zach’s Crab Shack

is a queer contemporary art gallery hiding behind the facade of a campy beach-side crab stand. The shack has existed as two walls in the corner of a drag festival, a miniature model, an 8x10ft galvanized steel shed in the backyard of The Arts League, and continues to traverse various venues and forms. ZCS has been dishing up delicious programming since 2022 that focuses on platforming LGBTQ artists and curators.

Allergic to crab? TOO BAD!! Zach’s Crab Shack is open and ready to serve the public.

Zach’s Crab Shack @zachscrabshack

About the Artists:

Ále Campos (b. 1994, Los Angeles, California) is a multidisciplinary artist and performance maker whose elastic studio practice is anchored in the vernacular of drag and their persona, ‘Celeste’. They generate live performance works that are often rhapsodic and mediated by technology, often involving or unfolding into the mediums of sculpture, sound, text, video and installation. Drag is the lens through which they consider performance making: they consider the stage and its borders, the malleability of the gaze, how to de/construct an image, the various states of in/visibility and how to handle time. Playing with optics and the boundaries between audience and the performing-body, allows them to explore the varying scales of vulnerability. Ultimately, their work dissects the psyche by declaring liveness and performance modalities as the catalyst for moving through states of becoming.

They received a BA from Bennington College (2016) and an MFA in Performance at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2022). Their work has been shown at the Hyde Park Arts Center, NO NATION, Comfort Station, Heaven Gallery, Ruschwoman, Jude Gallery, Roots & Culture, Elastic Arts, SITE/less (Chicago, IL), Lane Meyer Projects (Denver, CO), Collar Works (Troy, NY), September Gallery, The 405 Project (Hudson, NY), Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany), SS Gallerie (CDMX), BMOCA (Boulder, CO), Pamplemousse Gallery (Richmond, VA) They’ve attended ACRE Residency and are a recipient of the 2022 James Nelson Fellowship Award at SAIC and the City of Hudson’s Tourism Board Grant (2021). They were a 2023 BOLT artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition and were named one of the ten New City 2023 Breakout Artists of Chicago. They are currently a lecturer in Performance at SAIC and are an active, participating member of the drag and nightlife community in Chicago and are currently a resident performer / co-producer of Rumors, a monthly event that showcases some of the city’s premiere performers and DJ’s.

ale-campos.com @celestes.wrld

Jordan Deal is a multidisciplinary practitioner and alchemist. Their investigative practice uses performance, sound, film, and their body as a conduit between unseen forces and the materializations of socio-political structures and mythologies. Deal has presented performance work internationally such as at Cafe OTO London, Performing Arts Forum France, Judson Memorial Church NYC, the Center for Performance Research BK, NY, and Icebox Project Space Philadelphia. They have exhibited sculptural and sonic installations at Fleisher-Ollman gallery (Phila, PA), Vox Populi (Phila, PA), Grizzly Grizzly (Phila,PA), Fleisher Art Memorial, amongst others. They have recently been selected as a 2023-2024 Artistic Fellow at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, invited to be a 2024 recipient of the BASC residency and performer in the Performance Mix Festival #38, and was a Fall 2022 research fellow at Amant Foundation in Brooklyn, New York, where they continued their investigations of chaos force. Deal’s films have been part of selections in Blackstar Film Festival, Icebox Project Space, Vox Populi, Center of Performance Research, LA Indie Fest, and Paris Film Festival.

jordandealart.com @jordandealart

Co-Curators

Jameson Paige is a curator and writer based in Philadelphia. He is interested in contemporary art’s engagement with spatial politics, history, negotiations of identity, and problems of representation. Paige regularly produces interdisciplinary public art projects, while recent exhibitions have been presented at Universidad de las Américas Puebla through BienalSur (MX) and the Charlotte Street Foundation (US). His writing has been published by Hyperallergic, Cultured, Burnaway, Public Parking, The SEEN, Contango, among others. He has held previous positions as Curatorial Fellow at the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice, and as Assistant Curator for the Envisioning Justice Initiative in Chicago. He is currently the Curator of Public Practice at Mural Arts Philadelphia and teaches in the School of Art, Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design, the New School.

jamesonpaige.com @jameson_p_

Zach Hill is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator working between sculpture, drawing, and moving image. He has been awarded the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship and Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship along with residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Bunker Projects, RAIR, Elsewhere Museum, and Stove Works. His work has been exhibited at The Haggerty Museum of Art, Flux Factory on Governors Island, Peep Projects, Stove Works, Vox Populi, Moravian University, and VisArts among other spaces. Hill holds a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Fine Arts and the Digital Arts & Sculpture Technician at Haverford College. He is the Head Chef and Owner of Zach's Crab Shack, a queer contemporary art gallery hiding within the facade of a campy, beach side crab stand. Hill lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

zach-hill.com @bottomaspirations