FAN CLUBS




July 9 - August 14, 2026

Amanda Atria
Alina Bliumis
Skyler Chen
Drew Dominguez
Joshua Jobb
Ruba Nadar
Serena Nickson
Maïa Régis
Melissa Ríos
Nicolas Shake
Brandon M. White
Gordon Winarick






JOHS NY is pleased to present FAN CLUBS, a group exhibition exploring the architecture of worship and the iconography of fandom and devotion, opening on Thursday, July 9th at our NYC space.

In this exhibition, the artists explore how participation in fan clubs, organized religion, sports teams, and collectives are all modes of belonging. It poses questions about when the architecture of a fan club takes the shape of a cult. When does devotion become religion? By design, there is a kind of parasocial structure in which fans feel genuine intimacy with someone who does not know they exist. Fans of the same celebrity often form intense communities with one another, making the celebrity almost a pretext. The real belonging is horizontal, between fans, rather than vertical toward the idol.

The fan is constitutively passive: they watch, they feel, they suffer vicariously. The athlete or performer acts. A deep psychological transaction takes place, in which the fan delegates their own unlived potential to the person on the field or stage. The athlete becomes a vessel for everything the fan might have been. The athlete becomes a symbol for a god.

The word fan is a wound in language. Clipped from fanatic, itself descended from the Latin fanaticus, meaning “inspired by a deity” or “belonging to the temple,” it has been scrubbed of its religious charge and reassigned to the bleachers, the arena floor, and the streaming queue. As a crowd erupts after a goal, a congregation rises during a hymn, or a stadium full of strangers chants a single name in unison, you are witnessing the same phenomenon wearing different clothes. The question Fan Clubs asks is not which of these is more legitimate: the sacred or the secular, the devotional or the recreational, but rather: what separates a healthy fan community from a cult? Is it power? Is it the ability to leave?





SELECTED WORKS




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Installation views by Shark Senesac






ABOUT THE ARTISTS



Amanda Atria - (Santiago, Chile, 1995)
Atria works with seemingly outdated techniques and materials of semi-industrial manufacturing. Her practice explores how these processes thrive outside the scope of hegemonic centers, revealing the wheels of history in motion. Through her work, she examines the presence of the singular within the industrial, investigating the expressive, cultural, and formal resonances embedded in mass-produced objects. Atria holds a BFA from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited in New York City, New Haven, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. She is currently based in New Haven.


Alina Bliumis-  (b. 1972)
New York-based artist who received her BFA from the School of Visual Art in 1999 and a diploma from the Advanced Course in Visual Arts in Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy in 2005.

She has exhibited at SITUATIONS, NYC; the Musée national de l’his- toire de l’immigration, Paris, France; the First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Busan Biennale, South Korea; Tokyo Biennial, JP; Assab One, Milan, Italy; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY; Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris; Centre d’art Contemporain, Meymac, France; The James Gallery, The Graduate Center CUNY, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH; Museums of Bat Yam, Israel; The Jewish Museum, NYC; The Saatchi Gallery, London; Botanique Museum, Brussels; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and MAC VAL/Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France.

Her works are in various private and public collections, including MAC VAL - Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France; Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia; Bat Yam Museum for Contemporary Art, Israel; The Saatchi Collection, UK; The Harvard Business School, USA; The National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia; Morgan Stanley Art Collection, New York, NY and Missoni Collection, Italy. Bliumis work has been reviewed in Artforum, ART - Das Kunstmagazin, ARTNews, AnOther Magazine,Vogue Italia, Hyperallergic and Art and Climate Change (World of Art) by Maja Fowkes, ReubenFowkes, Thames & Hudson.


Skyler Chen - (b. 1982, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan)
Skyler Chen has established himself as a compelling voice in contemporary art, currently residing and working in Rotterdam, Netherlands. His practice delves deeply into the complexities of identity, particularly focusing on the intersections of sexual expression, queer experiences, and the societal pressures inherent in cultural and familial frameworks. This background informs a significant portion of his artistic exploration, providing a foundation for his distinct visual language.

Chen’s career has seen a steady progression marked by an unflinching honesty in confronting deeply personal and often taboo subjects. His artistic development is characterized by a persistent inquiry into the journey of self-understanding amidst conflicting expectations. He adeptly uses his paintings to create dialogues around what it means to reconcile personal desires with external realities, especially within Eastern cultural contexts where duty often plays a significant role.

Through his works, Chen critiques the superficiality often associated with certain Western ideals of liberation, contrasting them with the more profound search for self-knowledge rooted in one's heritage. His notable exhibitions at international venues underscore his growing impact, demonstrating his ability to connect intensely personal narratives with broader societal discussions about identity and belonging.


Drew Dominguez - (b. 1990, Sacramento, CA)
Drew Dominguez is a 2026 MFA graduate of Hunter College in New York City. His work spans photography, collage, sculpture and most recently painting, after spending 6 months attending the historic École des Beaux Arts in Paris during his second year at Hunter. Through these different practices he explores themes of accessibility, aspiration and performativity. His work prods, without ever clawing, leaving the viewer with an uneasy sense of having to determine their own position in relation to the piece they confront. Dominguez’s work has been shown in New York and Paris, with two solo shows at the project space Pompei in 2020 and 2023.


Joshua Jobb -  Mexico City, 1984.
Joshua Jobb’s works develop from the drift and recognition of public space. Travel, play, language, walking, and observation of the environment are significant triggers for constructing aesthetic and material strategies that become installations, photographs, sculptures, paintings, videos, interventions, and more. In line with the avant-gardes of the 20th century, Jobb’s work pursues the union of artistic objects with everyday life, and he achieves this by incorporating everyday objects into artistic life. Jobb replicates the ways of artists who work hand in hand with their context, from precariousness, making use of materials that chance and wandering put in their hands, to then transform them into artistic objects through minimal action and the “poetry of the absurd.” In summary, it could be said that Jobb’s production testifies to practices close to those of a city chronicler, with multiple and formally playful outputs.


Ruba Nadar - (b.1998)
Ruba Nadar is a London and New York based artist working across painting and collage. Nadar holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2024) and a BA in Art History from Barnard College, Columbia University (2021). Her practice draws on personal and public archives, Egyptian cinema, and queer image cultures to explore tenderness, physicality, and memory through processes of cropping, layering, and reassembling. Her work has been exhibited at Pipeline Gallery, London, UK (2026); OHSH Projects, London, UK (2026); Studio/Chapple, London, UK (2024); Safehouse, London, UK (2024); Guts Gallery, London, UK (2024); Parent Company Gallery, New York, USA (2023); and Louise McCagg Gallery, Barnard College, New York, USA (2021).


Serena Nickson -  (b. 1997)
Serena Nickson is a New York-based painter whose work explores identity and memory, focusing on how personal and familial histories become altered through recollection and how the past continues to inhabit the present. Through emotionally charged portraits, gestural figurative landscapes, and quiet interiors, Nickson investigates themes of absence, longing, and nostalgia. Nickson has exhibited at Eric Firestone, Jill Newhouse, Westbeth, and Lux Feminae, with works held in both private and institutional collections. She received her BFA in 2020 from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

Maïa Régis- (b. 1995, Paris, France)
Maïa Régis is a painter based between London and Sicily. She studied Fine Art at the Chelsea College of Arts (BA, 2017) and Painting at the Royal College of Art (MA, 2019). Working across London and Palermo, Régis develops a practice that merges figuration and abstraction, reality and fiction, in compositions driven by visual rhythm, material intensity, and narrative ambiguity.

Her paintings oscillate between opposing energies—dramatic and joyful, violent and vibrant—bringing together elements of everyday life, food, characters, weapons, religious iconography, and domestic objects alongside vivid abstractions and humorous forms. This plurality is deeply informed by her environment in Palermo, where she lives and works in a decaying Baroque palazzo that stood abandoned for more than fifty years. The tension between faded grandeur and raw urban life, beauty and poverty, excess and decay, continually shapes her imagery and gestural language. Concerned with movement between cultures, visual languages, and emotional states, Régis creates paintings that vibrate with life: unstable, open-ended environments rich in heterogeneous references and contradictory emotions. Approached as living collages, these charged atmospheres are translated into paintings that remain deliberately unresolved, inviting multiple interpretations.


Melissa Ríos- (b. 1986, Costa Rica)
Melissa Ríos (b. 1986, Costa Rica) is an artist based in Mexico City whose practice centers on painting and drawing. Working between figuration and abstraction, Ríos develops a surreal visual language marked by moments of emotional catharsis, where intuition, memory, and imagination converge within carefully constructed pictorial spaces.

Her paintings depict dream-like scenes populated by recurring figures, fragmented bodies, and symbolic elements that resist linear interpretation. These compositions function as emotional landscapes rather than narrative settings, allowing sensation and affect to take precedence over fixed meaning. Ríos’s use of color is central to this process: her palettes are saturated yet restrained, generating a quiet intensity that heightens the emotional charge of each work. Black spaces frequently appear within her compositions as acts of rupture: gestures of resistance that open the image toward ambiguity, depth, and imaginative projection.

The artist’s sensitivity to spatial organization and compositional balance is informed by her academic background in architecture and graphic design, which subtly underpins the structure of her paintings without overtly determining their form. Through layered processes developed from drawings and collages, Ríos constructs images that oscillate between control and release, clarity and discovery.

Ríos has presented solo exhibitions including In the Margins of What You Call Reality (JO-HS, New York, 2024), Realities in Dialogue / Realidades en diálogo (JO-HS, New York, 2023), and Más allá del mundo que existe (Cuarto 37, Costa Rica, 2021). Her work has been included in international group exhibitions such as Hybrid Vistas (Nika Project Space, Dubai, 2025), Inner Lives (Salon 21, New York, 2025), Anatomías (GARNA Gallery, Madrid, 2025), These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ (Room57 Gallery, New York, 2024, curated by Christine Mack) and The Imaginary Made Real (Berry Campbell Gallery, Curated by Paul Laster, New York).

She was a Semi-Finalist for the Erarta Foundation and ZONAMACO Art Prize (2024) and has participated in artist residencies at the Mack Art Foundation (New York, 2024) and JO-HS (Mexico City, 2022). Her work has been featured in Vogue, Galerie Magazine, Cultured Magazine, and ONDA MX. Visit artist’s page ︎︎︎


Nicolas Shake - (b. 1981, Northridge, CA)
Nicolas Shake lives and works between Los Angeles and Pearblossom, CA. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include: Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles; Galerie Timonier, New York; Rogers Office, Los Angeles; and Brant/Timonier, Palm Beach, FL among others. Shake was an artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in 2019. He will be the subject of an upcoming solo exhibition with Galerie Timonier, New York, in the fall of 2026.


Brandon M. White  (b. 2000, Boston, Massachusetts) 
Lives and works in New York City. White studied at Parsons School of Design and has exhibited internationally. His work is held in private collections throughout the United States and Europe. A figure waits. A face appears and disappears. A door remains closed. Throughout White's paintings, the event sits just outside the frame, and the images offer few explanations. The paintings often begin as transfers - photographs, fragments, and remembered images pressed into the surface, then scraped back, layered over, and reworked until little of the source remains. What survives feels familiar but difficult to place. Rooms seem occupied by something hard to name. People become images. Images become evidence. The ordinary takes on the atmosphere of a rumor. His work moves through spaces shaped by ritual, expectation, and authority. The paintings hang suspended between anticipation and aftermath, refusing access to either. What emerges is not a story but a condition.


Gordon Winarick - 
Gordon Winarick is a New York–based artist whose work explores stillness, harmony, and the space between moments. His paintings and sculptures are built through careful attention to color, scale, proportion, and dimension. There is a quiet musicality in the way elements relate to one another, where tone, rhythm, and balance create a felt sense of alignment within the composition. The harmony is meant to be experienced rather than explained. His work is spiritual in intention, not in symbolism. He is interested in helping the viewer reconnect with themselves and experience a quiet internal alignment through the harmony of the piece. The work functions less as an object and more as a space for reflection. Silence is both a theme and a tool in his practice. He is drawn to what he calls the in between, the moments of apparent nothingness where clarity and truth often surface. By reducing excess and allowing space to remain open, Winarick invites viewers to slow down and meet themselves within the work. He lives and works in New York.