Gearbox Gallery
Contemporary Art
THIS BITTER EARTH
Curated by Demetri Broxton
Featuring: Richard-Jonathan Nelson and Natalya Burd
February 17 to March 26
Meet the Artists and Curator Reception:
Saturday March 5, 1 to 4 pm
Curator and Artist Conversation at 2 pm
Richard-Jonathan Nelson
Natalya Burd
About the Curator
Demetri Broxton is the Senior Director of Education at Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, CA. Born and raised in Oakland, Broxton has over 20 years of experience working in the fields of education and the arts. He served as curator for the City of Berkeley’s Civic Arts galleries from 2013 to 2020. His largest curatorial projects include Decoding Identity, which he co-curated at MoAD in 2009 and Past Forward, at the African American Art and Culture Complex (SF) in 2010. Broxton is also a practicing fine artist represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, CA. Demetri graduated from San Francisco State University earning an M.A. in Museum Studies with a dual emphasis on Education and Curatorial Practice. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UC Berkeley with a major in Art Practice and minor in Education.
About the Artists
Richard-Jonathan Nelson is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses textiles, video, and digital manipulation to create alternative worlds of speculative identity. His work is multi-layered, chromatically intense and mixes images of the natural world with reference to hoodoo, queer culture, and Afro-Futurism. He uses his constructed worlds to examine the overlapping spheres of culturally perceived identity and the emotional memory of what it means to be a queer black man. Thereby creating a limbic space free from the weighted accepted western cultural reality, and able to examine the unspoken ways systems of power persist.
Born in Savannah, Georgia (1987) and working in Oakland, CA Nelson received his MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. His work has been exhibited at Southern Exposure, Embark Gallery, Root Division in San Francisco, and Aggregate Space in Oakland.
Natalya Burd is a San Jose, CA based visual artist. She is an active traveler, and her work is an homage to our natural world. Her work is a reflection on the relativity of time, space, and light. By using iridescent paint mediums and playing with the reflective quality of plexiglass and mirrors, she pushes the boundaries of flat surfaces, creating a shimmering atmosphere that evokes gleams of fleeting moments in time.
Burd was born in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, which at the time was a republic of the USSR. After graduation with distinction from the Kirghiz State College of Art and later The Stroganov Moscow State Academy of Arts and Industry (Monumental Painting and Decorative and Applied Glass), she emigrated to the US in 1996. She made her way to the Pacific Northwest where she earned a BFA from Oregon State University, followed by an MFA from the University of Washington. She has had one and two-person exhibitions at the Jack Fischer Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Cabrillo Gallery (Cabrillo College, CA), Sarah Spergeon Gallery (Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA) Art Object Gallery (San Jose, CA), and Wiseman Gallery (Grants Pass, OR). She has participated in numerous group shows in the USA, Germany and Russia. Burd is represented by the Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco.
