September 4 - 7 2025
Booth P48 - PRESENTS Section
The Javits Center, New York
September 4 - 7, 2025
Chozick Family Art Gallery is proud to announce our participation in the 2025 edition of The Armory Show with a two-artist presentation of new works by Elbert Joseph Perez and Christopher Paz-Rivera, on view in the PRESENTS section, booth P48. Together, the artists present urgent, deeply personal bodies of work that probe the social, political, and historical forces shaping contemporary life—while offering space for empathy, vulnerability, and connection.
Perez’s new series of oil paintings extends ideas explored in his concurrent solo exhibition TO HELL WITH THE GANDER (Sept 2–27, 2025, Chozick Family Art Gallery). A self-taught artist whose practice has developed alongside his work as an auto body mechanic in his father’s garage, Perez paints with an unflinching, darkly humorous eye on the fractures of modern life. Drawing on philosopher Alain Badiou’s concept of “metapolitics”—actions that serve the collective good rather than individual gain—Perez reflects on the consequences of hyper-individualism, ideological rigidity, and moral complacency.
His allegorical compositions balance fragility and power, often replacing human figures with animals to create a symbolic distance that invites reflection. Birds, cows, and butterflies stand in for our biases, contradictions, and instincts, revealing how quickly conviction can curdle into violence or protection into destruction. Works on view reference Orizuru paper cranes and paperdoll chains—symbols of hope that double as indictments of political apathy; grazing livestock unaware of the burning landscape behind them; and primordial forms such as the egg or skull.
Working across painting, drawing, installation, and sculpture, Puerto Rican artist Paz-Rivera reflects on and celebrates his life in New York, the relatives who immigrated before him, his relationship with his home island, and living between the two cities. Each piece interweaves personal history with broader questions of belonging, colonial legacy, and the shifting cultural and economic landscape of communities facing gentrification. For The Armory Show, he debuts a new series of colored pencil drawings on wood panels, installed on artist-made wall-mounted shelves reminiscent of family photograph displays or memorials—structures that unify the works and extend them into the viewer’s space.
The series questions Puerto Rico’s “internal logic”—what the island represents historically, what it is now, and what it means to be Puerto Rican. Drawing from his own photographs and moments of cultural significance, the works include: a recreation of high-wire artist Karl Wallenda during his final performance in San Juan, poised between triumph and fatal fall; a scene from his aunt’s strip club, where the artist once worked as a bouncer before converting the building into EMBAJADA gallery—a story of personal reinvention and the loss of family history to gentrification; a self-portrait floating in floodwaters, evoking both the serenity and instability of diasporic life, with climate crisis lurking beneath the surface; and a “found sculpture” of a souvenir T-shirt reading “Puerto Rico, Enchanted Island” placed beneath an excavated computer hard drive, a poignant reflection on the collision between foreign tech industry incursions and the island’s fragile natural beauty.
While their mediums and subjects diverge, both Perez and Paz-Rivera address the contradictions of our time with honesty and care. Each invites viewers to reckon with uncomfortable truths—and to imagine, through art, a more empathetic and connected world.
For more information contact rebekah@chozickfamilyartgallery.com
