WICKED GAME
ANNABELLE PARRISH
JORDAN SEARS
June 12th - July 2nd 2026
Opening Reception: June 12th 6-8pm
Annabelle Parrish, Untitled, 2026, Oil on canvas, 72 x 57 in
Wicked Game brings together new paintings by Annabelle Parrish and Jordan Sears, two artists whose works explore seduction, performance, and the unstable power dynamics embedded within looking.
The title operates as both metaphor and framework: a reference to desire as performance, but also to hunting, pursuit, and the shifting relationship between predator and prey. Across Parrish’s paintings in particular, bodies appear staged, exposed, or suspended within ambiguous scenarios that oscillate between empowerment and vulnerability. The women in these works are never entirely passive — they seduce, confront, and perform — yet they also appear watched, pursued, or offered up to the gaze. Desire becomes transactional, theatrical, and sometimes dangerous.
Drawing from visual languages associated with noir cinema, staged photography, true crime imagery, advertisements, and personal memory, both artists manipulate familiar imagery into scenes that feel psychologically charged and emotionally elusive. Humor, tension, glamour, and menace coexist within highly controlled surfaces.
Parrish’s paintings embrace an exaggerated theatricality, where sensuality becomes inseparable from discomfort. Suggestive gestures create images that feel simultaneously intimate and artificial, as though frozen mid-scene within a larger unseen narrative.
Jordan Sears’ paintings resemble translucent fabrics clinging to wet skin — surfaces suspended between concealment and revelation. Figures emerge and dissolve through thin layers of color, as if seen through water, sweat, plastic, or synthetic veils. Her compositions compress and abstract the body until it becomes uncertain whether we are looking at flesh, reflection, fabric, or memory itself. Seduction in these works is inseparable from distance: the image invites proximity while continually slipping out of focus.
Together, the works examine the erotic as a site of projection, control, vulnerability, and performance — where power constantly shifts hands, and where the line between hunter and hunted becomes impossible to fully locate.
Jordan Sears, Lateral, 2026, Oil on canvas, 72.5 x 17.5 in
ARTISTS BIOS
Annabelle Parrish (b. 2001, Nashville, TN) is a painter based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work draws from an early and formative exposure to intense and often unsettling imagery—family field trips to true crime locations, classic film noir, and haunting Polaroids taken by her photojournalist grandfather. Encountered casually in childhood, these visual references inform a practice that balances darkness with theatricality, resulting in paintings that feel both playful and psychologically charged.
Parrish’s compositions embrace staging and narrative, transforming sources associated with violence, mystery, and documentation into scenes marked by wit, exaggeration, and emotional ambiguity. This tension between subject matter and tone allows her work to oscillate between familiarity and unease, inviting viewers into a world where menace is softened by humor and artifice.
She received her BFA in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Recently, Parrish has been included in numerous exhibitions and fairs presentations, such as : NADA NYC with IRL Gallery (2026), Untitled Summer at Chelsea Walls Gallery, New York, NY (2024), and Little Things at Swan Coach House Gallery, Atlanta, GA (2024).
Jordan Sears (b. 1993, Tulsa, Oklahoma) is an oil painter whose work explores the intersection of image, memory, and materiality. Drawing from a vast archive of found imagery—including advertising photography, film stills, fashion editorials, and vernacular photographs—Sears investigates the tension between representation and abstraction, transforming familiar visual languages into psychologically charged compositions.
Working through a process of extraction, cropping, and color manipulation, Sears isolates fragments of bodies, garments, and environments from the polished vernacular of consumer culture. By translating these images into the slow materiality of oil paint, she suspends their circulation and invites closer consideration of how desire, memory, and perception are constructed. Her paintings occupy a space between seduction and disruption, where atmosphere and ambiguity challenge the viewer's relationship to the image.
Originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Sears received her BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute. She was the 2024–2025 Jesse Howard Fellow at H&R Block Artspace, where she presented her solo exhibition In a Blink, and is currently pursuing her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond, Virginia.
Recent exhibitions include In a Blink at H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City (2025); Gift at IRL Gallery, New York (2025); The Shape of a Second at Painters Painting Paintings (2025); Late Breaking, the 2026 MFA Candidacy Exhibition at VCUarts, Richmond; and Wicked Game, a two-person exhibition with Annabelle Parrish at IRL Gallery, New York (2026). Sears was also presented by IRL Gallery at Untitled Art Miami Beach in 2025.
Jordan Sears lives and works in Richmond, Virginia, where she continues to expand her exploration of contemporary image culture through paintings that delicately balance memory, perception, and psychological presence.
