THE LONG NOW

Ground Floor Contemporary is thrilled to present The Long Now, an exhibition of new works by Renee Hana Plata, Ignacio Michaud, and Bryce Speed.

Renee Hana Plata, an Alabama native, received her BFA from Atlanta College of Art, her MFA from Tyler School of Art, and an MSEd from Bankstreet College. Hanan Plata maintained a painting studio in NYC for twenty years. In 1981, she joined a group of abstract painters represented in the exhibition Painting Up Front, curated by Thomas Leavitt at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY. Recent exhibitions include a 2023 solo exhibition at Scott Miller Projects and a group exhibition at Space One Eleven in Birmingham, Alabama. In her paintings, color, form, and composition directly engage the viewer and Hanan Plata’s practice is a dedication to repetition and an exploration of the act of painting.

Ignacio Michaud, born in Chile in 1979, is contemporary painter exploring prehistory. Michaud uses the Surrealist method of automatic drawing to create an index of images to paint. He systematically organizes these drawings within the square and the rectangle of the canvas, aiming for compositional structures that can sustain tension between drawing and painting. His current painting project is built on the premise that our experiences can be reduced to bits of information and that a method relying on quick and spontaneous decisions can bring forth greater narrative precision. Michaud received his BFA from Universidad Catolica de Chile and is represented by Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta. He lives and works in Atlanta, GA.

Bryce Speed creates paintings that are simultaneously both abstract and representational. His works are occupied with a larger idea of structure and parts, creating an image of containment and movement. Each piece uses a personal pictogram language that is steeped in the intersectionality of nostalgia, queer identity, and early twentieth century abstraction. In 2017, Speed had a solo exhibition at the North Wall Arts Center in Oxford, UK. In 2022, his work was curated into the exhibition A Plot, Hatched by Two at the Warbling Collective in London, and Art of the South 2022 at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville. Speed is represented by the Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans, LA and is currently an Associate Professor of Art in Painting at the University of Alabama.