Thick Pile
Lyndsay Bloom / Jessica Buie / Cat Gunn / Sarah Hotchkiss / Thomas Macie / Morgan Mandalay / Megan Mueller / Chris Warr
May 13 - June 17, 2023

Thick Pile was a group exhibition curated by BEST PRACTICE Creative Director Joe Yorty that brought together the work of eight artists from San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin, Texas. Thick Pile consisted of works in painting, sculpture, collage, photography, and video. The exhibition was not conceptualized around any distinct theme or topic, but rather assembled at the instinctive whim of its curator.

Pile is a word used in the soft flooring industry to define the length of the fibers and loops in a carpet or area rug. A thick pile carpet, because of its abundance of fibrous material, offers maximum comfort while magnifying its capacity to accumulate filth over time. The curator’s intention was not to connect the works in this show through these concomitant but conflicting themes of luxury and revulsion, one that is central to his own studio practice, but rather assemble the exhibition in much the same manner that he accumulates materials and ideas for his own artworks. Using intuition, he has gathered and arranged these works in the gallery to attempt an exchange through approximation between objects and images that may initially seem disparate. His aim was to cast a light that may reveal nuanced approaches to reading and experiencing each of the works in this exhibition and, more generally, each artists’ studio practices. And, for him, whether or not his attempt was effective, he can rest assured that the gallery was filled with a lot of very good art.

Lyndsay Ellis Bloom (b. Florida, USA) is a filmmaker and artist working in experimental cinema and film installation. Bloom earned her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2006, with an Elliot Lash Memorial Prize for ‘Excellence in Sculpture,’ and her MFA from the University of California San Diego in 2016. Bloom’s process involves putting media archeology into practice, investigating physical properties of celluloid film, and considering intersections between film processing techniques and digital technologies. Bloom's work has screened in venues such as SFMOMA, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Cineteca Tijuana at CECUT, CineMarfa Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, and TIFF. Bloom attended artist residencies including MAAS Artist Residence in Nijmegen, SOMA Summer in Mexico City, The Handmade Film Institute on Orcas Island, and Film Farm in Ontario.

www.lyndsaybloom.com
@lyndsaybloom

Jessica Buie's dense collages and paintings use magazine clippings, Pinterest mood boards, click-bait and pop-up ads, religious imagery, tabloids, crime reports, official Kodak photography guides, film and television stills, and more, giving them a nostalgic but disorienting effect. Often Buie's work features recurring motifs such as women with weapons, women committing crimes, puns and colloquial expressions especially from the American south where she is from, 90s American actresses, reality television, and Dutch still life painting. Contrasting the gendered tropes in today's oversaturated culture of images with cut-up, glued, degraded, and painted-over materials, Buie's work gives a sense of breakdown in a world where images can no longer be relied on as truth. Her work references mythical stories, such as Medusa and her three sisters, alongside contemporary narrative tropes like the "dead woman found in a lake" often featured in detective procedural television. Once her found images are applied to canvas, alongside many layers of paint and glue, the canvas is photographed. The resulting image is printed, framed, and shown as a traditional photograph.

www.jessicabuie.com
@_____buie

Originally from Baltimore, Cat Gunn is a transmasc nonbinary artist living and working in southern California. Grappling with the intersection of an untold familial history and a queer personal history, Gunn extends a series of gestures of ancestral offerings, material investigations, and creative-fictional poetics that together contemplate endless possibilities across various temporalities.

Gunn received a BFA in Painting and an MA in Professional Studies (Art History Concentration) from Towson University. They are a MFA Candidate in Visual Arts at University of California San Diego, where they have expanded their practice into the realms of ceramics and sculpture.

www.catgunn.com
@mango__hot__sauce

Sarah Hotchkiss is a San Francisco artist and arts writer. Recent exhibitions include Altered Perception, a three-person show at the ICA San José; a two-person show with Gianna Commito at Marrow Gallery, San Francisco; a solo show at Friends Indeed, San Francisco; and group shows at Best Practice, San Diego; Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco; and Guerrero Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in the San Francisco Arts Commission’s public art program and she has attended residencies at Skowhegan, ACRE, KHN Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. From 2020 to 2023, she co-ran an exhibition space on a 6-by-12-foot billboard in San Francisco called Premiere Jr. She is the senior associate editor for KQED Arts & Culture, the Bay Area's NPR and PBS affiliate.

www.sarahhotchkiss.com
@sahotchkiss

Thomas Macie (b. 1995 San Diego, CA) received his BFA in 2021 with an emphasis in printmaking from California State University Long Beach. His interdisciplinary practice uses found objects as the impetus for works on paper, paintings, and sculpture that interrogate the place of desire, escape, and truth in contemporary American consumer society. By relying on a process of collecting, resuscitating, and using the detritus of consumption he challenges the supposed inherent value attributed to objects. 

www.thomasmacie.com
@thomasmaciethomasmacie

Morgan Mandalay is an artist and teacher in the Arts in Corrections program Project PAINT at Richard J. Donovan State Prison and Centinela State Prison. Additionally, he manages the nonprofit arts-focused reentry program Designing Creative Futures in San Diego, CA. Morgan's practice as an artist is grounded in his own experiences with the criminal legal system as a teenager, dealing with themes of growth, transformation, and shame. Mandalay has exhibited internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Wild Palms (Dusseldorf, GER), Klowden Mann (Los Angeles, CA), Extase (Chicago, IL), and BWSMX (Mexico City, MEX) among others. His work has been included recently in group exhibitions at 1969 Gallery (New York, NY), The Valley (Taos, NM), Flag Foundation (New York, NY), Deslave (Tijuana, MEX), H.G. Inn (Chicago, IL), Bahamas Biennale (Detroit, MI), DAMA (Turin, ITA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego . He was a 2018 Fellow of Shandaken Project’s Paint School in New York, NY, and received his MFA from University of California San Diego the same year.

www.morganmandalay.com/
@morganmandalay

Megan Mueller (b. 1982) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2015), a BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University (2008) and a BA in Political Science from George Washington University (2004). Mueller’s work has been exhibited at various national and international venues including The Fulcrum Press, The Brand Library, Charlie James Gallery, Noysky Projects, Dalton Warehouse, Field Projects, New Wight Gallery at UCLA, High Desert Test Tests, GLAMFA, Transformer, TSV Berlin, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art.

www.meganmueller.com
@m.e.g.a.n_m.u.e.l.l.e.r

Chris Warr lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been shown in the United States and abroad, including: San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA; CEART, Tijuana, Mexico; CEART, Ensenada, Mexico; Orgy Park, NY, New York; Mesa College, San Diego, CA; Actual Size, Los Angeles;  Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine, CA; Helmuth Projects, San Diego, CA; SPF15, San Diego, CA; XVY Art Design, San Diego CA. He was the cofounder and Gallery Director of Space4Art, a studio and gallery complex in San Diego California from 2010- 2015. He participated in the Parkfield Residency in 2013 and is a recipient of the UCI UGS grant and the Elizabeth Byolin Award. He received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts and his BA from San Diego State University.

www.chriswarr.com
@christoph_warr

Joe Yorty is an interdisciplinary artist who employs a range of materials, objects, and methods to make work that largely addresses the anxieties and absurdities of American domestic culture. Including sculpture, collage, video, and photography his studio practice grapples with the stuff of thrift store refuse, last-minute estate sale deals, and the occasional dumpster dive to rub against the pathos of the ceaseless search for fulfillment in the accumulation of things that, to a large extent, defines the American experience in the 21st century. His work has been shown on both coasts of the United States and some places in between. 

Joe was born in southwest Utah, raised in Southern California, served 11 years in the U.S. Navy, and received an MFA in Visual Art at University of California San Diego in 2013. He currently lives and works in San Diego where he serves as the founding Creative Director for the non-profit gallery and project space BEST PRACTICE.

www.joeyorty.com
@joejoejoe_yorty