Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to present Portions, a solo exhibition featuring the work of Kemar Keanu Wynter, organized by Norm Paris and Jackie Hoving.

Born in Crown Heights in 1995, Kemar exists at the cusp of two histories; one that is rich and generations-long in Jamaica, and another, young and burgeoning within New York City. Tethered between the Antilles and the Five Boroughs, Wynter leans on the culinary hybridity born from being of these two spaces to find his home amongst the cuisine. The velvety surface and sinuous marks of Wynter’s oil pastel-based paperworks are building blocks to a visual Patois with which he articulates the sensorial experiences associated with cookery. Each portion presented in the gallery archives a meal integral to the home—be it the uproarious friday night dinners of his youth on CarrollStreet, or afterschool trips to the chicken spot on Crown and Utica. The intimacy of cookery—the preparation, the service, the scents, tastes and varying tongues, the heat—be it a gentle kindling or an engulfing furnace—is lovingly imbued into each surface.

Change is inherent to these paintings. The largest works in the show, Macaroni Pie and Stew Peas, have been halved, packaged and transported in strips to be reassembled on-site. Within the boorish jostling of transit, both works accrue new qualities to the surface that further expand the vernacular of marks that meander each grommeted void. Wynter writes, “These works in their morphology echo the eternal mutability of Black folk, who in their homes and enclaves across the Atlantic and beyond exist jubilantly and radically in defiance of extinguishment and definition”. These artworks, these portions, laden with ciphers and code switches, have sweet and diaristic stories totell within the whorls of their unctuous surfaces.

Kemar Keanu Wynter (b. 1995, Crown Heights) is a Jamaican-American artist and cultural worker from Brooklyn, New York who earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing at the State University of New York at Purchase College. Wynter is a recipient of the Navarro Council of the Arts Grant and fellowships at the Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency and Vermont Studio Center with upcoming fellowships at Flux Factory, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Art Quarter Budapest. Exhibitions include Five Plus One, POWDERFREEVACUUMSEALED, OVR (2020, solo), Afterimage, Maake, OVR (2021) and Flavor Profile, Border Patrol, Portland, ME (2019). Portions is Kemar’s first solo exhibition in New York City.

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