The Candy Store
Work by John deFazio and Leigha Mason
Curated by Jarrett Earnest

Opening reception: Thursday June 3rd, 6:00 - 9:00 PM

The Candy Store brings together ceramic sculpture, drawings, collage, and hundreds of sculpted candies that explore the complicated tangles of desire and death in contemporary life. In the digital era, when many are excited about the disembodied nature of the Internet and indulgence in technological fantasies of "curing" death, these two artists movingly present work about the psychological experience of embodiment and the importance of our own mortality.

John deFazio combines mythology, art history, and Pop culture to forge funerary urns dedicated to figures diverse as John F. Kennedy Jr. and Madonna. These meticulously crafted objects drenched in cotton-candy colored glazes often explore gay aesthetics. Also on display are a series of 100 "Xerox collages," each illustrating a different canto of Dante's Divine Comedy. John deFazio teaches sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of the Art. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Museum of Art and Design, New York, and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the deYoung Museum, San Francisco.

Leigha Mason will be creating an entire candy shop in the gallery space, complete with hundreds of resin and sugar candy sculptures that contain fingernails and hair. Drawings and videos accompany the installation elaborating the persona of the store's fictitious owner Sharon Mae Folly, a former Snow White impersonator fired because of her increasingly aged appearance, creating a complex and deeply felt celebration of childhood fantasy. Mason attended the San Francisco Art Institute and the New School, New York. She currently lives in Brooklyn.