Tutu Gallery is pleased to announce a one night stand with Ezra Benus and Chloe Rees: Tell Me Where It Hurts, opening June 9, 2023, 6-9 PM.

 

Ezra and Chloe will be showing 2 installations and 8 paintings about extreme desires, inspecting intimate relationships of power, pain, and care. In his installations, Ezra utilizes devices from areas of bodily care, such as sex toys, supportive structures, and medical supplies to question the value of normativity. These items, sometimes conventionally undignified but crucial to many individuals’ day-to-day (un)functionality, are brought to the center of attention through vibrations and other sensory experiences. Chloe draws inspiration from Internet culture and its portrayal of romance and power dynamics, contrasting hard and softcore imagery to interrogate archaic standards of sexuality, morality, and social status. A sense of humor pervades motifs of longing, fetishization, and control, acting as both a coping mechanism and a way to disarm violence. 

 

Together, their work challenges the widely accepted definition of personal health and healthy relation, asking who is worthy of pleasure, and how pleasure is perceived.

​

For details contact April tutugallery.meow@gmail.com

​

​

​

​

Ezra Benus studied at Hunter College and has lectured and consulted at universities and art spaces such as Red Bull Arts in Detroit, Hunter College Art Galleries, Eyebeam, SUNY Purchase, CUE Art Foundation, York College, Princeton University, and UT Austin. Benus was an Erich Fromm Fellow at Paideia Institute in Stockholm, and the first Access and Adult Learning Fellow in the education department at the Brooklyn Museum. Their practice is cradled by embedded Jewishness, queerness, and sickness as purviews and navigational tools in this world. 

Chloe Rees is a Chinese-American artist living in Brooklyn NY. She graduated from Pratt Institute and has been in various DIY art shows. She likes love, sex, debauchery, and spirituality.