OCHI is pleased to participate in The armory show to take place at the Javits Center in New York, NY from September 6 through 8, 2024, with a VIP Preview to take place on Thursday, September 5th. The gallery will feature a solo presentation of new work by b chehayeb in booth F23, located in the Focus section. Curated by Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator at The Kitchen, Focus highlights the work of artists engaged in radical strategies such as poetic interventions into interdisciplinary forms and cultural exchange with avant-garde histories.

The gestural forms in b chehayeb’s new cycle of semi-abstract paintings emerge as the artist sifts through memories, focusing on a period of adolescence subsumed by the complexities of girlhood. Nearly recognizable objects plucked from chehayeb’s childhood landscape in small-town Texas—cowboy hats and boots, horses and horseshoes, snakes and ladders, candles, notebook paper, traditional Mexican cuisine—materialize across each surface and anchor non-linear narratives into amorphic spaces. This index of recurring symbols guides the artist as she navigates sensory experiences and emotions, while reconstructing scenes within a malleable painted ether—“painting as failed poetry”, chehayeb notes. A voracious reader with a strong affinity for language, chehayeb began to write at a young age and received degrees in both poetry and painting, but eventually “the fracture in my writing practice led to visual experimentation and painting”.

Fostering an autobiographical constellation, chehayeb named this body of work tomboy tejano blues with tomboy and Tejano—a Spanglish portmanteau of Texan and Mexican also referred to as Tex-Mex—as self-identifications and “blues” as an expression of the emotional nature of growing up (though the musical genre known as the blues also has roots in Texas). The paintings within chehayeb’s tomboy tejano blues introduce several new symbols to her expanding lexicon: stars, softballs, trophies, and chones. The lone star of the Texan flag has morphed into an all-seeing nonbinary entity tumbling through memories, with the five points representing limbs and a head—chehayeb and her stars find bodily autonomy and individuality, even in a land rife with gendered binaries. Similarly, softball became a haven from enforced femininity, where chehayeb was rewarded (with trophies) for embracing less conventional qualities like physical strength and power. Chones—a nonbinary Spanish word for underwear— float through paintings, often decorated with red flowers. chehayeb has embraced chones as a symbol of hyperfeminity that gives form to the awkwardness and disconnection she felt as she encountered traditional girlhood. Working in concert, chones, stars, softballs, trophies, and the other symbols of tomboy tejano blues offer insight into the fluidity of selfhood while offering solace and inspiration to anyone who finds themselves belonging, however only in pieces, to a multiplex of languages and cultures and identities.

b chehayeb (b. 1990, Dallas, TX) received her MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2020 and her BFA in painting with studies in creative writing from the University of North Texas in 2013. chehayeb has been awarded grants and residencies from organizations including Soho House, Red Bull Arts, and the Lower East Side Printshop in New York, NY; The Studios at Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA; Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT; Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency Award in Troy, NY; and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, VA. chehayeb’s work has been featured in various publications including Town & Country, Forbes, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, Elle Décor, Dallas Modern Luxury, D Magazine, Hyperallergic, Glasstire, Maake Magazine, and Hypebeast. chehayeb lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is represented by OCHI.