MONTI8 is thrilled to announce ‘Would?’, a group show featuring works by Talya Brookman, Kira Scerbin, Nicholas Grafia and Kim Myungchan, opening on September 12th.

In this exhibition, the artists and the viewers are asked to reflect on intentionality, randomness and outcomes. Through different artistic practices, each artist imagines how people can react to a specific hypothetical situation. Not everything in life is under our control, sometimes we determine our own life but, some other times, we have to face situations that just happen.

The course of the events is constantly influenced by the constrast between willing and luck, but what really makes is the difference is how we behave in certain circumstances. Many elements can have an impact on this behavior: for instance, our relationship with the landscape, with history (personal or universal), with social and political events, with animals or other human beings. The decisions we take, the path we walk, what we join or reject, everything is determined by the way we choose to act.

The purpose of this exhibition is try to answer the question ‘what would I do if…?’ regarding to an imaginary or real circumstance, that can be connected to life, culture, nature or anything else the artist wants to investigate.

Talya Brookman’s painting is influenced by her experience though different countries – she was raised between London, Los Angeles and Australia – and through an abstract gesture she reflects on the way landscapes and memories are carried and how they have an impact on her work. Her subjects keep a trace of the landscape, being inspired by patterns found in nature and using material such as natural mineral pigments, which help create a balance between coherence and uncertainty.

Kira Scerbin paints unnatural and eerie figures whose body floats on the pictorial surface without a context. The background of the canvas, in fact, doesn’t represent a natural or urban landscape, amplyfing the ambiguity that each body conveys. Merging imagination with her own life and experience the artist creates uncanny scenes, where often the presence of her figures seem to be dominated by chance.

Working with different practices as painting and performance, Nicholas Grafia explores the relationship between history and the contemporary culture and how past and present can

coexist. Being a German/Filippino/ American young man, Grafia considers his origins as a starting point of the investigation of issues such as diaspora, cultural memory and identity. Nevertheless, his personal experience is only an aspect of a more complex analysis, where the characters on his canvases carry so many meanings and historical, cultural, social and artistic referencies.

Kim Myungchan reflects on how living in the digital era shapes our perception, but the diaspora is the most significant experience for the artist, who represents fragments of human bodies and objcts seeing as a trace of time. Vulnerability and dialogue creating a strong tension, also suggested by the contrast between the elegance of the subjects and the roughness of the industrial scaffolds where the paintings lay on.

Four different points of view offer the viewers new keys to reflect on our behavior and how we determine ourselves. Through painting as the only medium, personal experiences, historical events and geographical influences shows us the complexity of our time.

The exhibition will open on September 12th and will be on view through October 17th.