Flo Brooks is a painter of modern life. Their practice can be considered as a revising of traditional genre painting: at the very centre of each painting is a personal reflection on work, leisure and the in-between. Speaking of their approach, Brooks has said: “It feels fundamental to think critically about the ways we connect with each other, and what this might look like in our own lives. I make sense of things through lived experience, through intimate relationships and the communities I’m part of, whether that’s the rural community I grew up in, queer and trans communities, art networks or my blood family”.

Working with acrylic, either on shaped wooden panels or appliquéd onto found fabric, Brooks’ practice explores trans and gender non-conforming histories. Embedded in the materials of domestic space, which they describe as ‘the first space of dreaming, fantasising, worlding,’ each work originates from fragments of the depicted figure’s lives, gleaned from newspaper clippings, autobiographical descriptions and visits to the places they lived or worked. Collaging together different places, eras and individuals, Brooks’ works resist simplified representations of trans and gender non-conforming lives. Rather they open up a flexible space for the unfolding of multiple perspectives, shifting identities and evolving relationships. They are not historical portraits but dream-like scenarios: fragmented, mutable, incomplete.

In 2023, Brooks opened their celebrated solo show at Spike Island, Harmonycrumb. The exhibition explored speculative entanglements between Brooks’ own life and the experiences of different historical figures, including military leader Joan of Arc (1412-31), ‘female husband’ Charles Hamilton (1721-46), and physician Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (1915-62). “Brooks’s merging of bodies speaks to strength in numbers, potentiality and polyphonic narratives. The juxtaposition of historical figures with these portrayals grounds Brooks – and, by extension, his contemporaries – within a long lineage of trans and queer ancestry.”

Prior to Spike Island, Brooks presented solo shows at Brighton CCA, Tramway, Glasgow and Cubitt Gallery. In 2023, Studio Voltaire in collaboration with This is Clapham and Lambeth Council, unveiled Brooks’ first public commission, Inner Bark Out. Their work was also included in the acclaimed exhibition Kiss my Genders at the Hayward Art Gallery. 

Brooks has opened two solo exhibitions at Project Native Informant: Be tru to your rec, 2022 and Scrubbers, 2018. For Art Basel: Statements 2024, Project Native Informant are presenting a solo booth of Brooks’ new body of works. 

Artist, writer, musician and performer Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987, Bryan-College Station, Texas) excels in probing dormant and marginalized histories, narratives and technologies to challenge discourses around contemporary perceptions of identity, futurity and politics.

Through painting, photography, text and video, she has defined a singular aesthetics of language that often plays into a digital, Tumblr-ised visual identity, a kind of collaged rap and visual rapture. Huxtable’s practice offers a key critical voice on identity, as well as, specifically, her own identity as a black trans woman. Her work comments on different forms of reality through the lens of her personal structural experience. Inseparable from the political, the personal is our opportunity for disobedience, and Huxtable plays with this concept through her ever-evolving portrait of selfhood.

Huxtable is concerned with the way in which marginalised groups are ‘forced to be their own saints’. Hinged on empathy, desire and agile distortion as a political and social paradigm, Huxtable’s motive re-examines our understanding of ‘the image’ and ‘the human’. Her works pool together references from science fiction, queer nightlife, Internet subcultures, folklore, fetishes and Furry fandom, into portrayals of intersectionality and speculative social archetypes as a method of resistance and liberation.

In 2022, Project Native Informant presented AKIMBO SPITTLE. In the exhibition, Huxtable places her own body at the centre of mythologising scenes; the printed and overpainted canvases set against hallucinogenic landscapes render her figures half human, half animal. 

Huxtable’s recently opened solo exhibition HEADS & TAILS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR ICONICITY presented the artist with the opportunity to broaden the cast of characters populating the canvases. From the exploration of her own image in the previous show, Huxtable here takes the work a step further; an exercise in world building if you will, resulting in a universe of her own creation.

In 2017, Huxtable published Mucus in My Pineal Gland, a celebrated volume of poems, performance scripts and essays. In the same year, MUMOK and Huxtable published Life: A Novel, a collaborative science-fiction narrative with artist Hannah Black. 

Her works and performances have been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Hayward Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Brooklyn Museum, New York; ICA, Boston; MoMA PS1, New York and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, amongst others. 

Her work can be found in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem and Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm.