SACRAMENT PRESENTS
Exit Wound
Artists: Emma Beatrez, Todd Bienvenu, Jack Drummond
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 10, 2025 | 7:30–9:30 PM
Exhibition Dates: April 10 – June 10, 2025
Location: 144 10th Avenue, New York, NY 10011
Contact: sacramentny@gmail.com
SACRAMENT, in partnership with Urbana Gallery, is pleased to present Exit Wound, a group exhibition of paintings by Emma Beatrez, Todd Bienvenu, and Jack Drummond.
Exit Wound refuses recuperation. It is not a return to form. It is a rupture: painterly, psychic, and cultural. The works on view pull from the residues of contemporary experience—surveillance ephemera, suburban hauntings, charged collapse—and ask not what painting can mean, but what it can withstand.
This is not a show about the apocalypse. It is a show staged from within it. The world has already shifted. What these three artists offer is not an escape hatch or a nostalgic retreat, but a brutal, ecstatic commitment to the image as a living trace. If there is a shared language here, it is the image made unstable: iconography that bruises, glitches, leaks.
Emma Beatrez paints like a fever dream of suburban folklore: home video stills, midwestern iconography, and open-source media rendered with a strange, devotional heat. Cheerleaders, unicorns, bonfires—figures and emblems suspended between sincerity and surrealism. Beatrez’s work doesn’t mine nostalgia so much as ritualize it. Each image feels part spell, part relic—intimate, cryptic, and charged with transformation. The violence here is quiet. Less spectacle than invocation.
Todd Bienvenu paints with a kind of reckless intimacy. His canvases are loud, loose, and full of sweat: beach scenes, brawls, sex, shame. What might read as slacker hedonism is something stranger and more sincere—a kind of painted reckoning. Bienvenu’s figures appear mid-chaos or post-coitus, bruised and buoyant, disarmed by their own appetites. The gesture here is not bravado. It’s survival. He paints like the party’s over and someone forgot to turn off the lights.
Jack Drummond works with the aesthetics of surveillance and the psychosis of distance. His paintings, drawn from CCTV footage and other low-res source material, depict liminal zones of contemporary dread: bank lobbies, gas stations, roadside shoulders. Figures are anonymized or obscured. Context is drained. Rendered in muted tones and airbrushed haze, the images become spectral—stripped of narrative, heavy with suggestion. If Beatrez gives us ritual and Bienvenu gives us the body, Drummond gives us its disappearance. These are not scenes. They are residues of watching.
Together, these artists form a kind of uneasy triangulation: the ceremonial, the corporeal, the ghosted. Exit Wound is less a resolution than a pulse—held in the aftermath. They don’t tie things up—they bleed, slow and insistent, like a wound that refuses to close.
For further information or images, please contact sacramentny@gmail.com
