Artdaily_ Rowan University Art Gallery is presenting Multiplicities, a dynamic new group exhibition featuring Naomieh Jovin, Tommy Kha, Wendy Red Star, and Leonard Suryajaya. This exhibition presents photography that through humor, theatrics, and playfulness reframes and fractures conventional, binary perceptions about culture, race, and gender. Multiplicities is on view from November 7 - December 21, 2022.

In Multiplicities, each artist explores stereotypes of their own cultural heritage and origins in order to break down misconceptions and shift the narrative of what it means to be who they are as multidimensional Americans. Naomieh Jovin, a first-generation Haitian-American photographer, utilizes appropriated photos from old family albums collaged with her own photographs to illustrate how we carry the experiences of our past and our family’s past in our bodies. Tommy Kha’s theatrical photographs balance precariously between comedy and tragedy, being and performing, and the mundane and the absurd to examine how we construct belonging and otherness. Wendy Red Star uses herself in her self-portrait series as a subject capturing the humor and playfulness integral both to Crow culture that pokes fun at the boundaries between conceived authenticity and stereotypical portrayals of Native subjects. Leonard Suryajaya tests the boundaries of intimacy, community, and family by placing his subjects in elaborately staged settings full of competing patterns and colors that create photographs that are tender and critical, bound up with the struggles of familial authority and self-identity. Through their diverse, interactive, and layered work, all four artists reexamine conventional perceptions about culture, race, and gender identities.

Multiplicities is co-curated by Danna Singer, Chad States, and Mary Salvante, in collaboration with the Rowan University Photography Program.

Additionally on view is Expanded View, an ancillary showcase of selected photographic works from university students nationwide. A collaboration between Rowan University Art Gallery and the University’s photography program, Expanded View will features approximately thirty works that have been selected for display between November 16 - December 10, 2022 in conjunction with the Multiplicities exhibition. Juried by multidisciplinary artist and photographer, Genevieve Gaignard, Expanded View features photography that both formally and conceptually question ideas of representation while focusing on how a sense of play and theatricality complicate and transcend assumed narratives of identity.