Zevitas Marcus is pleased to announce the opening of Cosmic Traffic Jam, a group exhibition featuring the work of twenty artists of color for whom painting is a potent language of examination, resistance and change. The exhibition was organized by Alex Jackson, Umar Rashid and Steven Zevitas.

If the divisive policies of the current administration have moved anything forward, it’s the active causes of damage that essentialism and individuation bring. Historic and deep-seated issues are addressed in the reductive, binary, and fearful vocabulary of profitable versus unprofitable, black versus white, us versus them. This language forces us into an eternal vicious cycle, where we continue to produce and reify the same ideas, structures, and answers repeatedly in the name of “progress.” Painting offers a detour through and/or around language, where the picture may thwart our normative conception of knowing and understanding. It is within the slippage of language that we may begin to imagine a freedom decoupled from the notion of Freedom produced under the genocidal regime of the transatlantic slave trade.

Counter to the hyper-speed professionalization and exploitation of young artists in exchange for iPhone-ready politics and microwave-oven-paintings, Cosmic Traffic Jam brings together a group of young painters from a variety of backgrounds and aesthetic viewpoints aimed at carving out spaces for sustainable contemplation. These artists are bound together by a shared belief in the capacity of figurative painting to scramble our codes of identification, even if temporarily, to form a space of immense entanglement, where recognition of flesh, body, space, and time become bound up in each other to create new ways of understanding. Butting-up different stances, beliefs, and aesthetic strategies, these artists put forth various propositions about what it means to be living, seen, recognized, and subjected to the construct of the authentic self. Cosmic Traffic Jam is an exhibition for deep reflection on how exclusion and incorporation are two mechanisms of the same imprisonment.