Virtual Opening: Join us on Instagram Live for a virtual opening on August 8th at 5PM PST. During the opening, Eilen Itzel Mena will be talking about her practice and the inspiration behind her exhibition. https://www.instagram.com/leiminspace/ After the opening, you may schedule a virtual visit with the gallery via Zoom. Contact: leiminspace@gmail.com Zoom Meeting ID #: 810 7235 8303 and Password: 011294 Leimin space is pleased to present: Eilen Itzel Mena’s Inner Eye: Alignment, Perfection, Completion, her first solo painting exhibition. Informed by abstract expressionism, surrealism, and practices within the African Diaspora, Eilen Itzel Mena presents a new body of paintings along with a site specific installation rooted from a combination of her meditations, dreams, prayers, conscious, and sub-conscious. Experimenting with a variety of mediums such as acrylic, oil, sequins, on canvas and wood, Mena is guided by her spiritual practice, Ifa [a Yoruba system of divination], numerology, and African Diasporan symbology. As most of her works are floating head portraits in exterior settings, she attempts to convey a visual representation of spirit and energy in open space. The solid backgrounds and pattern like environments ground the abstract motifs and hovering figures that stem from the spiritual, ancestral, and dream realms that influence her everyday life. In many of the works, we see images that speak to universal language and the African Diaspora such as cowrie shells, rainbows, crosses, eyes, hearts, clouds, birds, flowers, smiley faces, and black and brown faces. Challenging Western art history as an Afro-Latina, Mena puts herself in conversation with American, Black, and Latinx art history as her work is deeply informed by her upbringing in Dominican Republic, the South Bronx, her experiences in Brazil, El Salvador, and her most recent home base in Los Angeles. Specifically with Inner Eye: Alignment, Perfection, Completion, Mena brings to question how she can convey the spirit via painting; In what ways can she utilize physical materials to serve her spiritual practice and be used as a tool to connect and communicate with herself and her ancestors?; How can she intuitively utilize painting and abstraction to resist, meditate, and reclaim while protecting her energy and practice? With these new works, Mena gives the public a view into the her vivid realm and ultimately her journey in becoming her version of a more aligned, perfect, and complete being via art making.