OUTLET Fine Art in collaboration with CODIFY ART is pleased to present WORK. Featuring work by Jarrett Key, Jon Key, and Kat JK Lee, and facilitated by Leandro A. Zaneti, please join us for an opening reception Friday July 8 from 7-10pm. The exhibition will continue through July 24th.

CODIFY ART is a Brooklyn-based collective of multidisciplinary artists whose mission is to create, produce, and showcase work that foregrounds the voices of people of color, particularly those of women and queer people of color.

This is Work. A reaction to present realities, a mirror to identities both projected onto and embodied by alterity. The work of inhabiting an identity. It is declarative; it is a claiming of space by queer, POC bodies through the art object. Through manifold mediums and styles, CODIFY confronts the multiplicity of its constituents, its greater communities, and society at large. As an exhibition, Work. is a stand in for these selves; Work. is a representative, an icon, an effigy. Through bodies and permanent impressions on paper, repurposed imagery and cloaked soundscapes, CODIFY investigates, as individuals, the diversity and nuance within an identifier and upholds, as a collective, its larger histories.

Jarrett Key’s hair painting series marries performance and visual art through codified movement, tempera paint and a ponytail, straightened with a hot comb. This literal “hairbrush” transcribes the movements and gestures of the embodied tool. Each mark on the canvas is a signature of identity, a relic of performance. Jarrett will perform a site specific rendition of his “Hair Painting.” The culminating piece will be on display, accompanied by video documenting the painting/performance process.

Kameron Neal's work investigates the intersection of ritual, performance and identity through film. With repetition and layering, his films denature the original source to bring attention to the personal trials of the creative process. Kameron's "Hair Painting" collaboration with Jarrett Key is an act of translating, documenting and reinterpreting history with an affirming gaze. These films provide a frame for an intimate exploration of growth and self-empowerment.

Jarrett’s accompanying I AM/AIN’T I series is defined by its use of text and oil paint to create narratives of strength and courage in a time of despair and vulnerability. The print series investigates the value of black lives, from slavery to present day.

Jon Key explores the tension and fragmentation of identity in his work. Through photography, collage, and color he creates intimate portraits that recount the experiences of confronting his own queerness, blackness, southerness, and family. Similar to how identities do not merge seamlessly or portray one person, his collage elements are not subsumed when placed against each other, yet still read as one body. Through the themes of love, pain, dislocation and abuse, the work reflects the resolve of the physical and emotional self.

Projections, distortions, transparencies, ghostly objects that suggest a texture only for fingers to meet with glass—these are the markers of Kat JK Lee’s work: simulations of self-portraiture, where the self is not necessarily a portrait. Like navigating-public-arenas-whilst-marginalized, each piece is an exercise in obfuscation, a presentation dependent upon a halfhearted deception of the senses. With interpolation as necessity and speculation as creed, Kat constructs a non-binary, second-gen, bi-coastal canon for themself with Google (mis)translations, Easter egging, and evolutionary adaptations that are less bodyhacking and more fursona, all couched in the vocabulary of a Korean-American science fiction. An amalgamation of narratives, Kat’s work employs technology as confidante, survival as futurity, and reclamation as an act of genesis.

The members of Codify Art are Sharina Gordon, Jarrett Key, Jon Key, Kat JK Lee, Chantel Whittle and Leandro Zaneti.

OUTLET Fine Art is an exhibition space in Brooklyn dedicated to presenting innovative and dynamic programming. They host monthly exhibitions and workshops designed to engage and inspire through a comprehensive arts experience. At the root of OUTLET, they believe in promoting creativity through exhibitions, collaborations, and out-of-the-box explorations