Steve Turner is pleased to present In My Bag, a solo exhibition by Kansas City-based Bianca Fields that features new paintings of screaming animals that the artist considers stand-ins for the psyche of her six-year-old self, one who spent hours watching “Tom and Jerry,” an American cartoon that portrayed the rivalry of Tom, the cat and Jerry, the mouse. Tom is the protagonist in many of Fields’s works, and because he barely spoke, Fields imagined his speech, something she continues to do in these works. Fields, working with intense passion along with a well controlled silent concentration, felt as if she was conjuring up her own internal demon. The resulting works have thick flourishes of lustrous colors, accents of copper that mirror the artist’s complexion, as well as scratched lines and text that convey violence and vulnerability, something that Fields routinely experiences as an African American woman.

Bianca Fields (born 1995, Cleveland) earned a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art (2019) before relocating to Kansas City. She had a solo exhibition with Dragon, Crab and Turtle, St. Louis (2021) and has had work included in group exhibitions with Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2021); L21, Palma de Mallorca (2021) and Galerie Droste, Paris (2021). This is Fields’ first solo exhibition with Steve Turner.