Dallas Invitational

CFGNY is an artist collective whose research based practice takes the form of image making, installation, sculpture, and performance to expand ideas of racialization and subjectivity. Founded in 2016, the collective continually returns to the term “vaguely Asian:” an understanding of racial identity as a specific cultural experience combined with the experience of being perceived as other. 

CFGNY is composed of Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kirsten Kilponen, and Tin Nguyen. Recent exhibitions, performances and projects include Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York (2025); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2024); PIN-UP Magazine, Milan (2023); SculptureCenter, New York (2022); Japan Society (2022); Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2022); X Museum, Beijing (2021); Auto Italia, London (2021); RISD Museum, Providence (2019); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2018). In October 2024, CFGNY was named Frieze London’s Focus Stand Prize winner for its presentation with Hot Wheels, Athens and London.

Guillaume Dénervaud’s works are often composed in dense, though congruous, arrangements of ambiguous motifs that evoke plant matter, machine parts or cellular structures. His paintings and drawings are visions of systems and environments that collapse distinctions between the organic and the built, the microscopic and the galactic.

Guillaume Dénervaud (b. 1987, Fribourg, Switzerland) lives and works in Paris. He studied at the École des artsappliqués, Geneva and at HEAD, Geneva. Dénervaud’s solo shows include Antenna Space, Shanghai (2024); Gregor Staiger, Zurich (2024); Atrata, St. Croix Chapel-Angles-sur-l’Anglin (2024); Atrata, Paris (2024); Swiss Institute, New York (2023); Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2023); Centre D’édition Contemporary (CEC), Geneva (2021); Balice Hertling, Paris (2019); Alienze, Lausanne (2019); and Hard Hat, Geneva (2018). Group exhibitions include Toward the Celestial: ICA Miami’s Collection at 10 Years, ICA Miami, Miami (2024); Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty, Pernod Ricard Foundation, Paris (2024); Don’t Worry, This Will All Be Over Soon, Gregor Staiger, Milan (2023); La main-pleur, Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg (2022); Des corps, des écritures, Musée d’art Moderne de Paris (2022); Aquarium, Maison Populaire, Montreuil (2022); Les formes du transfert, Les Magasins Généraux, Paris (2021); Emblazoned World, Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2021); Le sain ennui, BQ Gallery, Berlin (2021); Your Friends and Neighbors, High Art, Paris (2020); and L’Oranger, LiveIn- YourHead, Geneva (2017). Dénervaud participated in the Swiss Institute residency program, New York (2021). His work is in the collections of the ICA Miami; MAMCO, Geneva; FMAC, Geneva; FCAC, Geneva; and the Musée d’art Moderne de Paris. He is a 2023 recipient of the Swiss Art Awards.

Covey Gong’s work is attuned to “fluctuating relationships between material goods, passing from novelty to familiarity,” in the artist’s words. His recent sculpture has intricately taken stock of such transformations of the everyday via abstract metal armatures, disused fabrics, and extra lengths of thread.

Covey Gong (b. 1994, Hunan, China) lives and works in New York. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. Gong’s solo and two-person shows include: Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2024); SculptureCenter, New York (2024); Derosia, New York (2023); Lubov, New York (2022, with Eli Ping); And Now, Dallas (2019); Bodega (Derosia), New York (2019); Salt Projects, Beijing (2018-19). Recent group exhibitions include: The Hollow and the Receptive, ADZ, Lisbon (2024); Double Threshold, Winter Street Gallery, Edgartown (2024); To Breathe, To Walk, Murmurs, Los Angeles (2024); Leaking Heaven, Laurel Gitlen, New York (2023); Under the Volcano II, Lomex, New York (2022); When the World Becomes Flesh, Baader Meinhof, Omaha (2022).

Olivia Hill’s paintings of the local landscape are both observant and odd; her brightly-lit desert scenes look accurate yet otherworldly. Referencing her own photos and screenshots of aerial images from Google Earth, Hill evinces the outdoor environment through a combination of strategies. Tightly rendered formations in pictorial space are layered in among expressive painterly marks that activate the material surface of the canvas.

Olivia Hill (b. 1985, Hinsdale, IL) lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include Terraform, Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2024); and Strike-Slip, Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2022). Recent group exhibitions include One Hundred Percent, organized by Aram Moshayedi, Los Angeles (2025); Water & Flower, Wilding Cran, Los Angeles (2024); About Painting III, Rolando Anselmi Gallery, Rome (2023); A Particular Kind of Heaven, Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles (2023); Storm Before the Calm, Praz Delavallade, Los Angeles (2022). She received her MFA from the University of California, Riverside in 2019 and her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006.

Parker Ito is a Yonsei/Gosei Japanese American artist, à la mode, living in San Francisco and working in Los Angeles associated with Post Internet or Zombie Formalism, depending on who you ask. In the years gone by he has exhibited his oeuvre in galleries, museums, and coffee shops on four continents and will continue to exhibit his work in the future (hopefully). His website is: www.Parker.sex

Parker Ito (b. 1986, Ventura, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at the Foundation Vincent van Gogh, Arles (2023); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2016); Times Museum, Guangzhou (2016); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2014); Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing (2018); Primary, Nottingham (2018); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2015); and Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Trondheim (2013). Solo and group exhibitions of his work have been presented at Bel Ami, Los Angeles; Rose Easton, London; Beijing Art Now Gallery, Beijing; Holiday Forever, Jackson; White Cube, London; Lubov, New York; Château Shatto, Los Angeles; Galeria Mascota, Mexico City; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Team Gallery, New York and Los Angeles; Air de Paris, Paris; Three Star Books, Paris; Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco; and CF Hill, Stockholm. Ito’s work is included among other in the following collections: Aishti Foundation, Beirut; University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago; Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; Domus Collection; The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; New Century Art Foundation, Shanghai; PCP Collection, Taipei; and Sandretto Foundation, Turin.

Amedeo Polazzo stages physical and philosophical worlds of imaginary momentos and dreamlike vignettes. Polazzo employs a fresco-secco method to paint temporary wall murals that draw attention to the ephemeral qualities of an exhibition. Upon these walls he also hangs more lasting paintings on canvas. In contrast to the fresco murals, the works on canvas–which appear to be torn from a lost or discarded scrapbook–find their form through the gradual building up and erasure of layers of pigment, tempera, and oil to create a time-worn effect.

Amedeo Polazzo (b. 1988, Starnberg, DE) is an artist based in London.  Recent selected exhibitions include Herald St., London (2025); Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2024); Museo Triennale Milano, Milan (2023); Andrea Festa, Rome (duo show) (2023); Lore Deutz, Cologne (2023); Los Angeles, Günsterode (permanent installation) (2022); Loggia Loggia, Munich (2021); Galleria Materia, Rome (2021); Kavanagh, Buenos Aires (2021); Quadriennale, Rome (2020); Villa Massimo, Rome (Permanent Installation) (2020); Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2019). Amedeo Polazzo holds a scholarship from the Villa Massimo, German Academy in Rome (Praktisches Stipendium) and was an artist in residence at CCA Andratx in Mallorca, Spain and Urra in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Chadwick Rantanen modifies conventional cultural symbols to suggest other versions of a perceived reality. Informed by Rantanen’s upbringing inside the community of Jehovah’s Witnesses, his projects re-envision the religious organization’s rejection of the cross and other icons. In a series of laser-cut, plywood sculptures, the artist extracts staircase designs from various dollhouses, toys, tabletop games and crafts. Rantanen assembles these into a morphology, cataloging the vernacular particular to these fantasy constructions. Displayed together, they describe a medium of emulation, transition and transcendence.

Chadwick Rantanen (b. 1981, Wausau, WI) lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna; Museo Pietro Canonica, Rome; Standard (Oslo), Oslo; Essex Street, New York; Michael Benevento, Los Angeles; BelAmi, Los Angeles; Overduin and Co., Los Angeles; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago. Group exhibitions at Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zurich; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; Tanya Leighton, Berlin; Luhring Augustine, New York; CLEARING, Paris; Swiss Institute and Kunsthaus Glarus; SculptureCenter, Long Island City; Artists Space, New York.  Work is in the collections of the Walker Art Center, ArtNow International, Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Albright-Knox. Reviewed in Mousse Magazine, Frieze, Artforum, La Times, Art in America, New York Times, Flash Art, CARLA.

Leigh Ruple draws and paints signifying quirks of the spaces the artist occupies in her neighborhood of Brooklyn, illuminated and in shadow. With their highly defined planes and sharp focus, she demonstrates an interest in American Precisionism, but sidesteps the modernist movement’s iconic depictions of industry, rather taking cues from its practitioners’ lesser-known and more intimate scenes. Ruple’s work also diverges from Precisionism’s cool disdain for personal narrative; she renders symbolic and sensitive scenes. The resulting works operate both as contemporary snapshots, signified by the details left in (the fixed-gear bike, the Brooklyn rooftop, patio furniture, the disco ball…) and as generous, timeless depictions of urban life.

Leigh Ruple (b. 1984, Painseville, OH) lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions include Bel Ami, Los Angeles, CA (Forthcoming); PAGE (NYC), New York (2022 & 2019); Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York (2018). Selected group exhibitions include Women in Paris, Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2021); Club Damfino, PAGE (NYC), New York (2019); Big Painting, Patrick Parrish, New York (2019); The Picture Is A Forest, Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer, Vienna (2019); Practice, Vacation, New York (2019). Her work has been reviewed in Artforum and The Architect’s Newspaper.