March 3 - 28, 2026
Public reception: Friday, March 6 from 6-8pm 

Chozick Family Art Gallery is pleased to present HYMNAL: my trans hymen and other hims, Avery Z. Nelson’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show debuts a new series of oil paintings which translate psychological states and emotionally charged somatic experiences into visual vocabulary. The works are guided by Nelson’s highly intuitive process which responds to the initial memory, as well as new sensations that arise while making. The artist describes this method as ‘painting from inside the painting’.  

Nelson has long explored ways to open up the presumptive flat plane of the canvas. Using layers of paint and rhythmic brush marks Nelson constructs multi planar sites where the boundaries between body & landscape and abstraction & figuration are porous and ever-changing. Each painting contains a complex system of gesture which reveals traces of the artist’s movements while inviting viewers to place themselves in the action. This manifests in spectrums of broad strokes of color and networks of delicate line work. A single mark can simultaneously evoke multiple bodily references – arm is also leg, and the profile of a face doubles as butt cheeks, depending on perspective.  

Color is tied to sensation and employed to convey lived experiences while acknowledging the always-vanishing present.Nelson has become known for exuberant palettes of vibrating greens, bodily reds, and deep blues that refuse to be still. Here, Nelson introduces moments of stark contrast. Matte blacks edge in not as absence but as a pause or way to reset the field.  

The title of the exhibition underscores the importance of language throughout Nelson’s paintings. Their studio is filled with handwritten notes - a phrase, an idiom, a homophone, or a slippage -jotted down while reading, looking, and rethinking. The logic – which is playful yet rigorous – also references framing in early film and photographers like Muybridge as well as the Möbius strip. These aren’t citations as much as working structures and ways of thinking through time, movement, and illusion.

For over a decade, Nelson has used painting to reflect on what it means to inhabit a body in time. To be in motion, to be doubled or tripled, to exist in fluid states. When Nelson first came out as trans, fragmented bodies and architecture were at the forefront of their paintings. Just as the paintings presented in HYMNAL: my trans hymen and other hims activate a reciprocal relationship between painter and canvas, Nelson revisits earlier modalities in this body of work.  

Throughout HYMNAL: my trans hymen and other hims seeing becomes feeling and feeling turns back into thought. The paintings are generous and seductive and reward slow looking as image and language fold into one another.

For more information contact rebekah@chozickfamilyartgallery.com