12.01.2023 — 01.06.2024
FLORA & FLESH
Josh Cabello, JD Raenbeau, Josh Rabineau
CLOSING PERFORMANCE: Saturday, January 6th at 5PM, please join us
Lauren Powell Projects is thrilled to present FLORA AND FLESH, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Josh Cabello, JD Raenbeau, and Josh Rabineau. The exhibition will be on view from December 1st, 2023 - January 6, 2024.
Through a variety of painting and sculpture, FLORA AND FLESH confronts art history's fixation on a romanticized 'paradise lost,' plunging headfirst into the wild, raw passions of nature through a defiantly queer perspective. Thematically linked through their incorporation of aesthetics of play, mythology, and decorative arts, the artists usher in a sensibility of “Queer Rococo” – confronting the dark, frothy opulence of the traditional Baroque style while offering distinct windows into their respective queer lens, personally examining of what it means to be a “gay man” in this day and age.
FLORA AND FLESH traverses the intricate dynamics between masculinity, femininity, sexuality, and gender, dissecting the portrayal of the "male body" within nature's unforgiving embrace. The works on view delve into the paradoxes of the body and the untamed wilderness, unraveling themes of innocence and peril, ecstasy and
agony, exaltation and abject. Figurative and abstract elements entwine in a raw, visceral display, highlighting the queer body’s simultaneous belonging and subservience to the natural environment.
Josh Cabello (b. 1997, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist born and based in Los Angeles whose work focuses on creating queer sanctuaries. He paints lush, imagined gardens, conjuring a world where anyone who enters can be still, commune with oneself, and be engulfed by nature. Josh received a B.A. in Visual Art from Brown University in 2019. He has exhibited at venues including Art Share LA, Los Angeles, CA; Lauren Powell Projects, Los Angeles, CA; SoLA Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; the Cohen Gallery, Providence, RI; and Rare Cafe, Los Angeles, CA. He most recently was selected to curate and exhibit in a group show at Fellows of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, as a 2022 Curator’s Lab Recipient.
JD Raenbeau (b. 1985, Stony Brook, NY) currently lives and works in Rocky Point, New York. He received his MFA from The School of Visual Arts where he received the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for Exceptional
Achievement in Art Practice and he holds a BFA from Alfred University. Raenbeau has exhibited his work in New York City, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and New Mexico with his most recent solo exhibition at Lauren Powell Projects in Los Angeles. His work has been featured in New American Paintings, Artists in Square Magazine and Sensitive Content Magazine. He was most recently an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center and will be attending residency at The Golden Foundation for The Arts in July 2024.
Josh Rabineau (b. 1997, Los Angeles, CA) is a visual artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Primarily working between processes of casting, mold-making, and prosthetic makeup and utilizing materials such as silicone, resin, urethane, and hair Rabineau creates works and seeks out materials that allow him to play between dualities of perfect/imperfect, reality/artifice, human/non-human, innocent/evil, animate/inanimate, industrial/organic, gorgeous/grotesque. Josh received his BA in Sculpture and Digital Design from Wesleyan University in 2020.
