Eyes, Mouth, Wings
ON VIEW
JUNE 27 - JULY 27, 2025
JUNE 27 - JULY 27, 2025
North Loop West is honored to present Eyes, Mouth, Wings, a two-person exhibition of work by Hank Ehrenfried and Marty Williams. Both artists use collage as a method of translation and transformation, framed through queer identity and the shifting presence and obfuscation of the figure—considering how we witness personal and collective histories not as linear narratives, but as events cut, folded, and stacked atop one another.
Ehrenfried paints collections of papers he's accrued since childhood: photographs, old art auction catalogs, pages from gay erotica magazines, manga, childhood artworks. He pins the arrangements to his studio walls and paints them from close observation, tearing and overlapping specific imagery to reconstruct the figures held in the source material and map new spatial relationships. The paintings gesture toward trompe l'œil, down to the screw and nail holes, residual marks from previous paintings, and torn painter's tape the wall has accumulated over time.
Marty Williams—a woodworker and surfer based in Los Angeles—layers photographs on transparent film with mulberry paper, rare wood, and found oceanic materials like driftwood and abalone shell. Using a self-timer, he photographs his own body from behind, reproducing himself as an anonymous, silhouetted figure, then transfers the images to film and layers them into hazy, spectral compositions that both transpose and obscure the figure. The wood, milled from scraps at the frame shop where he used to work, matters as much as the imagery: playing with woodgrain and natural chatoyance, Williams builds parallels between found material, the surface of water, and the transparency of the film, and considers his place within the typically hyper-masculine worlds of woodworking and surfing.
The exhibition's title draws from Walter Benjamin's 1940 "On the Concept of History," written from his experience as a Jewish man in wartime Europe. Benjamin takes Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, 1920—a work he owned and lived with for years—as the lynchpin of his
Hank Ehrenfried (b. 1992, New Jersey) is a painter and currently resides in Oklahoma City, OK. He holds a BFA in Fine Art from Carnegie Mellon University (2014) and a MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute (2019). He has exhibited nationally and internationally with solo exhibitions at Vardan Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) AuxierKline (New York, NY), Quappi Projects(Louisville, KY) and Welcome Gallery (Charlottesville, VA), as well as group exhibitions at Fierman (New York, NY), Fredericks & Freiser Gallery (New York, NY), Semiose Galerie (Paris, FR), and Turley Gallery (Hudson, NY), among others. Ehrenfried has completed residencies at The Macedonia Institute in Chatham, NY and Trestle Art Space in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been written about in publications such as Whitewall Magazine and Two Coats of Paint and has been featured in New American Paintings. He is currently an artist in residence at Artspace, Untitled in Oklahoma City, OK.
Marty Williams (b. 1998, Laguna Beach, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on woodworking based in Los Angeles, CA. He began his sculptural practice by shaping and glassing surfboards in Orange County. In 2023, Williams joined the fine art framing team at Los Angeles’s Paradise Framing and since has built his own woodworking practice. He will be an artist-in-residence on the island of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands this summer 2025.
Installation view, Touching Grass, IZZY LEE, Los Angeles, CA. November 21 – January 3, 2025.
Images courtesy Josh Schaedel.
Images courtesy Josh Schaedel.