The exhibition “Atomic Banana: Emotion and Heirospliffics” (October 20th- December 1st, 2018) is the artist Gerry Mak’s exploration of symbols, the emotion of art practice, and the age of information overload. During the course of his life, Mak remembers watching the Challenger explosion, Tiananmen Square, the LA riots, and countless other global spectacles live on TV. The curator (Joy Davis) and the artist want to the audience to understand how a human’s visual lexicon connects us with one another. He uses realism and abstraction in his work to conjure the symbols of industry, fame, emotion, and chaos at varying scales. 

Gerry Mak b. 1979 is a visual artist based in Westchester County, NY. His work is largely influenced by media spectacle, propaganda art, and advertisement. He has painted his entire life. A product of the psychedelic whirlwind of Internet Age pop culture, Mak draws from propaganda, advertisements, street art, and folk art to explore themes of identity in the Chinese diaspora as well as politicized trauma in contemporary America.