Opening Reception: DADS

DADS brings together artists Wes Lang and Eddie Martinez for a collaborative exhibition nearly two decades in the making. The two first exhibited together in Belgium in 2008, but their creative dialogue traces back even further to a 2005 Chicago exhibition. Twenty years later, Lang and Martinez reunite to celebrate that formative moment and reflect on the parallel paths they have traveled since—years marked by friendship, fatherhood, and a shared devotion to the immediacy of making. Though their practices have evolved along distinct visual and conceptual lines, both artists remain deeply rooted in gesture, intuition, and personal mythology.

Lang’s drawings channel the iconography of post-pop Americana through a distinctly Daoist lens, where impermanence, renewal, and self-realization guide his imagery. Figures such as skulls, reapers, horses, and Indigenous chiefs recur as emblems of freedom and transformation—renegades who have carved their own paths despite adversity. At first glance, his memento mori may appear to dwell on mortality, but deeper engagement reveals a more compassionate purpose: to remind viewers of life’s brevity. Layered with handwritten mantras drawn from the Tao Te Ching and the teachings of Ram Dass, Lang’s compositions meditate on transience while affirming the quiet power of awareness. In his universe, each mark becomes an act of faith—a visual reminder to remain centered amid change and to be grounded in one’s capacity for renewal.

For Martinez, drawing is a daily, spontaneous process, which serves as a vital component of his studio life and imaginative output. His works on paper pulse with the same raw, expressive energy that define his larger body of painting and mixed-media production. Stylistically evocative of mid-century abstraction, Martinez's layered compositions include recurring figurative elements—a visual vocabulary that includes skulls, blockheads, and oversized eyes—that emerge from a vigorously drawn ground. Using Sharpie, ink, pastel, and acrylic, Martinez builds each composition through accumulation and revision, allowing forms to emerge, dissolve, and reappear. His personal iconography emerges from memory and observation, rendered with an immediacy that bridges drawing and painting. 

Together, Lang and Martinez reveal a shared ethos rooted in the physical act of making. Both embrace imperfection and spontaneity, allowing the process itself to guide meaning. The exhibition unfolds like a call-and-response between two artists who have grown alongside each other—friends, fathers, and peers—each tracing a distinct yet parallel search for authenticity through their chosen language of form and mark.

DADS is less a meeting of styles than a convergence of sensibilities. It reflects on the bonds that shape artistic practice over time, on friendship as continuity, and on drawing as an act that captures the fleeting rhythms of life itself. In bringing their work together again, Lang and Martinez offer an intimate meditation on legacy, devotion, and the enduring conversation between art and experience.