Soco Modern: Paintings from Pan-demon-ium

Ethan Woods' Soco Modern glorifies its already well-furnished walls with an exhibition by Jennifer Balkan, featuring a brilliant array of portraits created in inks and oils while most of us were baking bread or binge-watching something on Netflix during the height of COVID lockdown. "I’ve juxtaposed painterly voluminous figures and faces of real humanity with bits of narrative, flat two-dimensional and illustrative lines of comic, graphic contours that provide context," says the artist. "Some of the figures exist within the environs of nature and natural events – some cataclysmic, some threatening, and some predatory – yet rendered in carnivalesque color, leaving the viewer with feelings of comfort and hope."