Tri-Star Arts is pleased to present the current exhibition in their main gallery at the historic Candoro Marble Building. A two-person show, Tennessee Triennial: RE-PAIR - part of the Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art, is composed of multimedia works by Kenturah Davis (Los Angeles, CA, USA / Accra, Ghana) and Rubens Ghenov (Knoxville, TN, USA). It opened on Friday, January 27, runs through Sunday, May 7, and will include public receptions and events held over the course of the exhibition (updates forthcoming).

Curated by Brian R. Jobe, this exhibition was conceived with the 2023 Tennessee Triennial’s “RE-PAIR” theme in mind, authored by Consulting Curator María Magdalena Campos-Pons. For Jobe, the artists' work interrelates beautifully due to their shared use of text, actual and implied, in an expansive way. He says, “They push text together and re-form presentations of language, expression, and communication. Davis and Ghenov challenge our recognition of pictorial imagery and create other worlds that invite us in from different angles and facets.”

Tennessee Triennial: RE-PAIR at Tri-Star Arts additionally features an outdoor sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas. Saverio and Daisy (Navel) by Hank Willis Thomas, has been installed by Tri-Star Arts on the grounds of the Candoro Marble Building to sync with the exhibitions on view, extending the conversation outdoors to an accessible public space adjacent to the driveway entrance. It will remain on the grounds through June 2023.

Kenturah Davis is an artist working between Los Angeles and Accra (Ghana). Her work oscillates between various facets of portraiture and design. Using text as a point of departure, she explores the fundamental role that language has in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us. This manifests in a variety of forms including drawings, textiles, sculpture and performances. Davis was commissioned by LA Metro to create large-scale, site-specific work was permanently installed on the new Crenshaw/LAX rail line, which opened in 2020. Her work has been included in institutional exhibitions in Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe. Davis earned her BA from Occidental College and MFA Yale University School of Art. Davis was an inaugural artist fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, CT.

Rubens Ghenov was born in São Paulo, Brazil and immigrated to the US in 1989. He holds a BFA from Tyler School of Art (1999) and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2010). Ghenov has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at Morgan Lehman Gallery (NY), Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami (FL), Marginal Utility Gallery (PA), Ortega y Gasset Projects (NY), Geoffrey Young Gallery (MA), Whitespace Gallery, (GA), Hoffman LaChance (MO), Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery (TN), TSA Brooklyn (NYC), Crosstown Arts (TN), Woodmere Art Museum (PA), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PA) amongst others. He has been featured in Art in America, Hyperallergic, Bomb Magazine, Village Voice, ARTSATL, The Tennessean, Title Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Ghenov was the recipient of the Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2019. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976 Plainfield, New Jersey; lives and works in New York, New York) is a conceptual artist focusing on themes relating to perspective, identity, commodity, media and popular culture. His work often incorporates widely-recognizable icons - many from well-known advertising or branding campaigns - to explore their ability to reinforce generalizations developed around race, gender and ethnicity. Thomas created one of his most iconic photography series in 2006, B®anded, where he superimposed bodies of Black men with the Nike swoosh logo recalling the history of branding slaves in America as well as the literal and figural objectification of Black male bodies in contemporary culture. A trained photographer, over the past several years, Thomas’ practice has evolved to incorporate a variety of media including mirrors and retroreflective vinyl - an industrial material rarely used in the arts - to challenge perspectives in his work, exploring 20th century protest images and often overlooked historical narratives. Many of these protest images are activated by flash photography playing with role reversal by having the viewer step into the position of image maker. By adding multiple, hidden layers, Thomas also asks the view to consider who is included in history and who is erased, revealing the complicated nature of storytelling and the bias of history. Influenced by social history and the hard-fought, perennial battle for equality in all areas of his work, Thomas co-founded For Freedoms with artist Eric Gottesman in 2016 as a platform for creative civic engagement in America. Inspired by American artist Norman Rockwell’s paintings of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (1941) - freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear - For Freedoms uses art to encourage and deepen public explorations of freedom in the 21st century.