Presence Interrupted

Billy James Joyce, Brooke Kanther, Sarah Lee & Kellie Romany @ Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar is pleased to present Presence Interrupted, a group show featuring work by Billy James Joyce, Brooke Kanther, Sarah Lee & Kellie Romany. All four painters utilize techniques to mediate touch in direct painting. Whether through collage, air brushing, verso painting, or pooling drops, each artist explores a range of the medium's materiality by interjecting distance into their intimate relationship with paint.

Please join us for the opening on Friday, September 15th from 7-11 PM.

Billy James Joyce (1983) is a painter based in Chicago. In 2017 he received his MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. In early 2018 he will present a solo exhibition at Devening Projects and Editions.

Brooke Kanther is an artist, writer and curator based in Milwaukee, WI. She received her MFA from The Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. She has been a visiting critic at Milwaukee Institute for Art and Design, Carnegie Mellon University and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has shown at Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL; EXPO Chicago, IL; Julius Caesar, Chicago, IL; Union League, Chicago, IL. She was a contributor to the 2014 Whitney Biennial catalogue, published by Yale Press. 

Sarah Lee (b. 1988) received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recently graduated with her MFA from the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has recently exhibited a solo exhibition, Unoriginal sublime, in THE MISSION PROJECT (Chicago, IL) and Playing the field, in Gallery WON (Seoul, South Korea) She lives and works in Chicago.

Kellie Romany is an abstract, non-representational, figurative painter interested in bodily representation, materiality, and the history of the painting process. She received a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008. Romany has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Sullivan Galleries in Chicago, Parade Ground Gallery in New York, Alice Yard in Trinidad and Tobago, Amel Bourouina Gallery in Berlin, Germany, and Minninger Gallery in Cologne, Germany.