Curated by Xrstine Franco and Henry Ivany Aguilar

In it's inaugural photo show, The Language Mobilizaiton Factory Gallery + Darkroom presents well known and emerging photographers who explore the medium through a variety of techniques.  Whether it's a silver gelatin print, images on wood, sewn photographs, or images projected on fabric.  These artists use the ephemeral nature of light and shadow to discover the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary. 

Featuring : Andrew K. Thompson, Greg Rook, Henry Ivany Aguilar, Xrstine Franco, Hali Espinoza, Max Feckerall, Justus Milhon, Taylor Stephens, Ilir Zeneli, Edward Lance Montgomery, Steve Beswick, Mario Ricardo Ramirez, Tommy Lei and more!

F/8 Photo Show

The LMF Gallery & Darkroom

Exhibition Opening:
Puppet Master's Playground
Curated by Cain Carias (Puppetmaster213)

Goethe-Institut LA Project Space
1901 W. 7th St., Los Angeles, CA 90057

Join us, Puppetmaster213 (Cain Carias), and community artists on Thursday, July 10th, 2025 from 7-9:30 PM for the opening reception for the exhibition PUPPET MASTER'S PLAYGROUND.

Puppet Master’s Playground is a creative and interactive installation curated by Cain Carias (PuppetMaster 213), designed to inspire the community through puppetry, art, and storytelling. Including a diverse selection of works including paintings, photography, textiles, repurposed dolls, and handcrafted materials, this immersive experience showcases one-of-a-kind marionettes that reflect the vibrant culture and spirit of Los Angeles. Visitors can expect to explore custom-built puppets on display, participate in workshops to create their own puppets, and engage in conversations around identity, community, and creativity.

Additional accompanying programming includes includes performances, workshops, film screenings, neighborhood cleanups, community cookouts, and collaborations with local artists—making it more than an exhibit; it’s a movement centered on unity, imagination, and reclaiming public space through art.

Admission is free.
All ages are welcome.
Light refreshments provided

PROGRAM:
6:30 PM Doors open.
7:30 PM Welcoming + Introduction
8:15 PM Puppetmaster's Performance 
9:30 PM End of Event

Cain Carias, 
also known as PuppetMaster213, is a Los Angeles-based puppeteer, artist, and community storyteller originally from Tijuana, Mexico. Raised in the heart of MacArthur Park, Cain developed a raw and authentic puppetry style that blends marionette traditions with the soul of Los Angeles street culture—lowriders, murals, hip hop, and everyday barrio life. He was personally taught by the legendary Bob Baker and spent over 15 years performing at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, where he found purpose and mastered his craft. In collaboration with Ms. Reyes Arte (Lil G’ Dolls), Cain brought to life El Triste and La Smiley—iconic puppets that represent struggle, love, and survival in brown and immigrant communities. Through his movement, Puppet Master’s Playground, Cain creates spaces that uplift the community with shows, workshops, cleanups, and storytelling rooted in lived experience. His work proves that puppetry isn’t just entertainment—it’s a way to heal, educate, and represent life in Los Angeles.
 
PUPPET MASTER'S PLAYGROUND
is on view July 10 - Sept 4, 2025 at the Goethe-Institut LA 
1901 W. 7th St., Los Angeles, CA 90057

During Office Hours: 
Tuesday–Thursdays: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Fridays: 10:00 am – 3:00 pm 
The Goethe-Institut is closed July 25 - August 10, 2025

Secure, free Parking is available at Metro/Retail parking structure with rear entrance to the Goethe-Institut located at
674 S. Westlake Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90057

Public transport is possible with the red line to MacArthur Park/Westlake stop. Using carpool or ride-share options are appreciated.

PUPPET MASTER'S PLAYGROUND is part of the Neighborhood Interpretive Center, a hyperlocal initiative of the Goethe-Institut LA of cultural programs that focus on and uplift the MacArthur Park/Westlake neighborhood and surrounding areas.


Puppet Master's Playground

Goethe-Institut LA

ratio . Trey Ross, Shuai Yang, Cesar Herrejon, Joey Serricchio, Sue Shu, Saun Santipreecha. 

“I am at last beginning to be housed like a human being.”

But only because I’m finally far enough away to feel your vertigo. My grasp on me. (I’m on hold.) Or, at least I’m finally close enough to start drifting away, at last. I am my moon (I’m mooning myself? Probably just getting waxed.) And still sunburnt from watching my flames, seeing my city burn. Anyway, I’m out of touch by now… losing my grip. (Seriously I’ve been sick for months.) 12 Caesars, or 16 Candles?

But only because “I LOVE MY EMERGENCY” as much as you do.
Because “an alabaster fidget is impossible to imagine….”

	 Nevertheless they spent a long time wanting to fuck statues
         And having hair that didn’t move when a wave came.

         Nobody fucking understands, when the building coughed up the white 
         Rubble of everything, whitening us with its dust, a little blood on our lips
          We were the real’s dead mimes. Or stained minutes.

secants stained with alabaster’s word. A toothy smile,                                                                         , a forked tongue.

But like I said—I am at last beginning to be housed like a human being. This was something the Roman Caesar Nero said when entered his newly built palace Domus Aurea (Latin for “Golden House”) for the first time. This decadent palace was built in the direct aftermath of the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE. A fire for which he was justifiably blamed since it was all too conveniently started in the core of the city: exactly where he wanted to clear land for the building of Domus Aurea. 
	According to the Gossip Suetonius, the story infamously goes that Nero played the fiddle while he watched Rome burn, drunkenly spectating “the fire of Rome for three days from the Maecenatium Tower, rejoicing, and saying ‘the beauty of the flames’; dressed as a cithara-player, he sang the entire Sack of Ilium.” Finally, he had his house worth its weight in gold.
	In 68 CE he died by (assisted) suicide. His secretary, a freed slave, helped him stab himself in the throat. 
	His last words were: “What an artist dies in me!”

Within a decade of being built, the palace had been stripped of all its valuable materials: including, gold leaf, marble, and bronze fittings. His immediate successors restored the land to public use.

Now back to beginning to be housed like a human being (in public)….“Hello, welcome!” 
	Your entry will be logged. Your steps measured. Your gaze traced.
Usually, when I walk through a door, I usually keep going (I’m supposed to fit through its frame). Usually, when I sit, the chair usually withstands my fall. Usually, if I read these letters, they should usually be close enough to see.
	Equipped with techniques of my body, their dysfunction is never a failure—but their hyperfunction destroys me. (My dysfunctions become ‘specialities’ and “special needs”: I generate a surplus each time I don’t become something already built.) Like an immune system, any ‘functional’ process shits where it eats and a balance must be maintained: a pacemaking ratio of inputs to outputs. Bijection, surjection—and especially injection. But the pacing moves faster than the function, so it gets hyped… blown out of proportion. A blow-up doll turning blue. Like a body, it shits where it fucks and fucks where it eats but never skips a beat. (Never forget: any system always rhymes!)

Usually, one pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small. Either way, you’re on target for elimination of the threat. You’re an illuminati: “The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic, [the Caesar].”

Either way, we are at the end of the Seizers, the settler’s lifespan.                                                               (Postictal.)
	
	So at last I am beginning to not be housed like a human being.
After all, “One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.”
	After all, “The struggle of our times is one between the overrepresented figure of Man … and the human, who must now struggle to free itself from this overrepresentation.” A human being that’s more than the human.

After all, we are still in search of the length of lost time.
After all, what an artist dies in me.

__________________________________________________ 

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trey ross (b. 1999) grew up in the Silicon Valley. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

His work engages ceramic and lithographic processes in an experimental practice that explores the natural, technological, and magical.

[His recent solo exhibition Future Fossils was presented at Long Play Contemporary in Santa Monica, CA in 2024.]

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Shuai Yang (b.1998, Beijing, China) is a New York-based visual artist. Practicing across sculpture, printmaking, drawing, painting, and installation, she investigates the conflicts between the lived nature and man-made laws, specifically challenging the system of measurement. Yang received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University School of the Arts and a BFA in printmaking from Massachusetts College of Art. She has exhibited her work in a three-person exhibition at Eli Klein Gallery (New York) and has shown at Hudson River Museum (New York); Lenfest Center For The Arts (New York); Society of Arts and Crafts (Boston); Chambers Fine Arts (New York); Storage Gallery (New York); LATITUDE Gallery (New York); theBlanc (New York); DeCA Foundation (New York); Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami); Abigail Ogilvy (Los Angeles); Accent Sisters (Jersey City); among others. Her work is collected by the Hudson River Museum (New York) and the Artemizia Foundation (Bisbee, Arizona). Yang has received reviews and interviews from Impulse Magazine, White Hot Magazine, and VENTI Journal, and has given talks at the Pratt Institute and the Massachusetts College of Art. She is a recipient of the GlogauAIR Artist-in-Residence (Berlin, Germany), Vermont Studio Center Residency (Vermont, U.S.), Nars Foundation International Artist Residency (New York, U.S.), Rockella Artist Residency (New York, U.S.), Morty Frank Travel Award, and Donald C. Kelley Travel Award.

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Cesar Herrejon is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder focusing on mixed media painting and drawing. He is from Birmingham Alabama. Growing up in the deep south, Cesar was involved in the skateboard culture around his teen years and draws influences from these childhood experiences into his work. Currently his work also explores materials foreign to academic artistic expression that parallel and enrich his cultural heritage. He often uses defamiliarized quotations from culture in his work like the surrealism that he finds deeply rooted in Mexican Culture. Art is the only thing that has interested him, and it is the only thing he has found to feel passionate about and build his identity with. His studies and research included printmaking incorporating it with painting and drawing.

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Joey Serricchio is a conceptual artist and sculptor working across interdisciplinary mediums, currently living and working in Los Angeles County. Their practice explores systems and infrastructures—both tangible and intangible—operating at various scales, from the intimate to the expansive. By focusing on the banal and fleeting, the monumental and inescapable, the tender, the callous, the vast, their work invites a closer look at the systems and forces that shape our lives.

Their work is rooted in questions of permanence, safety, and inevitability, often taking the form of assembled sculptures, temporary installation, or systematic intervention. Through these mediums, the artist seeks to reveal the mundane moments that turn into emergencies.

Joey Serricchio holds a BFA in Fine Art from ArtCenter College of Design. Their work has previously been exhibited at Kylin Gallery, Tropico de Nopal Gallery, and sidebitch Project Space.

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Sue Shu (she/her) was born in Shanghai, China. In 2023 Shu starts to immigrate to America. Shu lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Shu is a process-based artist who makes multi-medium sculptures. She received her BFA in fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 2022 and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Southern California. Sue Shu (she/her) was born in Shanghai, China. In 2023 Shu starts to immigrate to America. Shu lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Shu is a process based artist who makes multi-medium sculptures. She received her BFA in fine arts from California Institute of the Arts in 2022 and is currently an  MFA candidate at University of Southern California.  Shu is the recipient of USC Roski Departmental Fellowship. Shu also received the Macomber Travel Award to in 2024 to travel to Jingdezhen to research and learn techniques of the ramie fabric.Shu had her first solo show When the Monster Speaks in 2024, at Attom Gallery in Lincoln Heights. Her riso zine was collected by LACA. Shu had her thesis exhibition we are becoming clouds in March 2025.


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Saun Santipreecha (b. 1989, Thailand) is a composer, interdisciplinary artist, and writer who works at the intersection of image, sound, and body. He has had two solo exhibitions at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary in Los Angeles, CA (Dandelye—or, Beneath this River’s Tempo’d Time We Walk (2023), and …These Things That Divide The World In Two… (2024)) as well as a solo exhibition in Rome, Italy (Per/formative Cities, A Nest of Triptychal Performances (2024)). He recently had his first institutional commission for a sound and sculpture installation in the ADN East German guardhouse at the Wende Museum (2024). His work has been in various group exhibitions in South Korea, New York and Los Angeles. 

His compositional work in film, television, and fashion—many of which he worked on under the pseudonym S. Peace Nistades—has been screened in over thirty film festivals worldwide including the Cannes Film Festival as well as at New York, Paris and LA Fashion Weeks. He has worked in numerous capacities in the music department for a number of composers including John Debney, Danny Elfman, The Newton Brothers and Abel Korzeniowski.

He was invited to speak at the 9th Annual Conference of the Samuel Beckett Society—Beckett and Justice—at California State University, Los Angeles on the panel Beckett, Justice, and Thai Artist Saun Santipreecha in conversation with Beckett scholars Katherine Weiss and Feargal Whelan (2024) and has also served as an Industry Mentor at Musician’s Institute (2020-2022).

He is currently based in Los Angeles and continues to work with artists and specialists across disciplines including film, fashion, and performing arts. 

{Biographical information courtesy of the artists.}

____________________

Image Caption: Trey Ross. Metal plate etching on porcelain, with glaze, metal oxides, lustres, stains, and frit. 4.5 x 3 inches. [Detail (macro).]References

________________________________________

References (in order of appearance):

Ariana Reines, The Cow, (New York: Fence, 2006), 18. Excerpted and deranged fragments from “I LOVE MY EMERGENCY.”

“He sang to the accompaniment of his lyre while his city was consumed by fire.” —Cassius Dio, Roman History 62.20.2⁴. “It is said that he often sang the tragic lines from the ‘Sack of Troy’ in stage dress from a private stage… while the city was in flames.” —Suetonius, Nero 38³

Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, rev. J. B. Rives (London: Penguin Books, 2007), Nero 38 “...et incendium Romae triduum nocentissimo proposito spectavit e turre Maecenatiana laetus et ‘pulchritudinem flammarum’ ait, indutus citharoedici habitu decantavit Iliacenam exitu omni.” (‘He watched the fire of Rome for three days from the Maecenatium Tower, rejoicing, and said ‘the beauty of the flames’; dressed as a cithara-player, he sang the entire Sack of Ilium.’)

Tacitus, The Histories, trans. Kenneth Wellesley (London: Penguin Books, 2009), Book I, §18. "The pleasures of Nero’s reign had absorbed huge amounts of public and private property... but the new emperor restored much to the people and to the state.”

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 37.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 387.

Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 260.


ratio

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary

A Group Exhibition on Intimacy, Aging, and the Search for Meaning in a Hyperconnected  World.

Mash Gallery is proud to present Forever After? A bold and emotionally resonant group exhibition that reimagines cultural icons, personal memory, and human connection through the lenses of aging, intimacy, and identity.

In an era defined by constant digital stimulation—where online personas simulate closeness and social media performs intimacy—Forever After? turns inward. Featuring a diverse roster of contemporary artists, the exhibition explores what it means to truly connect in a world where attention is abundant, but presence is rare.

While the visual languages in this show range from surreal portraiture and subversive pop imagery to meditative stillness and symbolic realism, the artists share a common inquiry: What happens when we embrace the natural progression of life—its aging, solitude, and emotional complexity—rather than escape it?

A central thread running through the exhibition is the transformation of beloved childhood characters—formerly frozen in the fantasy of youth—now reimagined with wrinkles, wear, and world-weariness. These playful yet piercing reinterpretations challenge our nostalgia and cultural denial of time’s passage. Even Disney characters, the show suggests, are not immune to decay, self-doubt, and reinvention.

But beyond the satire lies something more intimate. Through painting, sculpture, mixed media, and immersive storytelling, Forever After? asks: How does aging shift our sense of self? How do we reconcile our private realities with public ideals? And in a culture addicted to youth, how do we find meaning in becoming?

“True intimacy is not the absence of solitude,” says gallery founder and curator Haleh Mashian. “It is the capacity to be with ourselves—fully, honestly—and still reach outward. This show reminds us that being alone is not being lonely. It’s being all one.”

Forever After? is both a celebration and an unmasking. It’s a visual meditation on relevance, impermanence, and the shared vulnerability beneath our curated façades. At its heart, the exhibition is an invitation to pause, reflect, and reclaim the parts of ourselves we’ve been taught to hide.

FEATURING Artists
Ancsa Weide
Gâteaux & Toiles
Alison Hyman
Arron Sheppard
Keerthana Kumar
Maico Camilo
Joanna Pilarczyk
Michael Vilkin
Odysseus Krum

Forever After?

Mash Gallery

The Keystone Gallery presents, Complementary, a collaborative exhibition featuring Courtney Wynn Cooper & Loren A. Armstrong. Complementary focuses on color relationships and the artists’ ability to create emotional landscapes for imagined interior and exterior spaces. 

As individual artists, Cooper and Armstrong’s practices explore parallel themes of color, form, and composition, with a shared affinity for the surreal in the ordinary. When their work is integrated, a vibrant color palette emerges, translating complex subconscious narratives. 

Cooper’s work is often driven by structural explorations in color, while Armstrong’s focus is on translation of the ephemeral life inside of structures. In conversation and practice, their work aligns to discuss the “body and spirit” of homes, rooms, and compositions. Complementary expands on these themes, which they have both long explored, separately and together. 

Courtney Wynn Cooper & Loren A. Armstrong: Complementary

Keystone Gallery

The source material for The Secret Gospel Church of Phallic Worship (2025) by Mexican artist Renata Petersen (b. 1993, Guadalajara, Mexico) is an aggregate of archival materials, including pamphlets, publications, photographs, and other ephemera, used by new religious movements and fraternal orders in California to spread their ideologies and recruit new members. The installation of comic-inspired drawings on ceramic tiles tells the story of groups such as David Brandt Berg’s The Children of God, the People’s Temple of Jim Jones, and Unarius (Universal Articulate Interdimensional Understanding of Science). The artist’s iconographic study recontextualizes the figureheads and doctrines of cults, secret societies, and fringe religious groups in a nonhierarchical, unified field. The title, The Secret Gospel Church of Phallic Worship, is taken from St. Priapus Church, a San Francisco-based religious organization founded in 1979. The still-active church preaches phallic worship and avoidance of sexual frustration to its congregation of mostly gay men. Such themes of sexual and libidinal liberation permeate the history unearthed by Petersen. 

Enveloping the walls of the gallery, the installation recalls religious spaces such as the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy, where, in the early fourteenth century, Giotto di Bondone covered every surface with frescoes depicting the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ. Petersen’s church-like environment is similarly immersive and visually overwhelming, like many experiences in the twenty-first century—religious and otherwise. Petersen’s depiction of “sacred stories” of the twentieth century teems with polygamy, avarice, sexual exploitation, and the hippie aesthetics that characterize the California spirit of religious exploration. The Source Family’s infamous leader, Father Yod, appears at the installation’s center, a conceptual focal point that Giotto reserved for Jesus Christ. Petersen’s centering of Yod—whose vision extended beyond a spiritual commune and into psychedelic rock music, entrepreneurialism, and health food—draws a connection between the cult leader’s ambitions and the current atmosphere of lifestyle brands, social influencers, and upscale grocers that sell a way of life to their followers. Petersen’s role becomes that of hagiographer, chronicling the underbelly of contemporary religious thinking and documenting new-age icons that might otherwise be forgotten.

Hammer Projects: Renata Petersen

Hammer Museum

Brand Associates​,​ in partnership with Brand Library & Art Center, is pleased to announce the opening of​ "Brand 53: ​​​53rd ​​Annual National Juried Exhibition of Works on Paper​​​" at​​​ Brand Library & Art Center​. The exhibition includes over 100 artworks chosen by juror Sigrid Burton,​​​ ​​a widely exhibited artist engaged in the local art community​​. 

We will be welcoming new artists to "Works on Paper" as well as reconnecting with artists from past years; all are offering us the opportunity to explore the versatility of the paper medium.

​​Gallery admission is free and open to the public during library open hours. On-site, limited, free parking is available. Brand Library & Art Center Hours: Tuesday - Thursday, 11:00 AM - 8:00 PM, Friday & Saturday, 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM, Closed Sunday, Monday & holidays. Learn more about ​​"Brand 53"​​ at​​​​​​​​ https://www.brandlibrary.org/gallery

Brand Library & Art Center is located at 1601 W. Mountain Street in Glendale, CA.  ​​​  

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​Accessibility features:   
​Brand Park features six (6) handicapped parking spaces, four (4) are located adjacent to the Brand Library building. Attendees may be dropped off adjacent to the library side entrance if all spaces are occupied. For other access needs, please contact Brand Library & Art Center at (818) 548-2051 or at Gallery@GlendaleCA.gov five (5) business days in advance and we will make every effort to assist you.​​ 

​​

Brand 53: 53rd Annual National Juried Exhibition of Works on Paper

Brand Library & Art Center

Mother Memory

Curated by Toti O’Brien

Anita Getzler
Gina Lawson Egan
Peter Liashkov
Marina Moevs
Nadege Monchera Baer
Toti O’Brien
Melinda Smith Altshuler
Nancy Kay Turner
J Michael Walker

"Mother Memory" is a group art exhibit organized by contributing artist Toti O’Brien. The exhibit explores both memories of mothers, mothering, and motherhood, as well as the idea of memory (our human faculty to recall, revive, and reinvent what is no longer accessible to the senses) as a matrix.

In what ways does memory mother us? To what extent does it create us, shaping who we are and what we do? Does it nurture us? Protect us? Can it heal us? Can it instruct and guide us? "Mother Memory" features work by nine Los Angeles-based artists, each bringing their unique perspective to the chosen theme through a variety of artworks. These pieces expand the core concept, introducing echoes of legacy, ancestry, motherland, mother tongue, and — last but certainly not least — the present and future of our wounded Mother Earth.

The exhibition is complemented by a poetry-and-performance event that will take place at Wonzimer Gallery on Friday, August 22nd, from 7pm-9pm. The event will showcase a performance ("Sound Shadows") by artists Cindy Rinne and Katia Hage, a video performance by artist Anita Getzler, and a combination of live and remote readings by seven poets:

Cynthia Anderson
Katerina Canyon
Shahé Mankerian
Toti O’Brien
Alexis Rhone Fancher
Miriam Sagan
Kathabela Wilson



Mother Memory

Wonzimer

Simchowitz is pleased to present True Romance, a solo exhibition of new large-scale paintings by Swiss artist Gabrielle Graessle, at Hill House, Pasadena. Please join us for an open house and reception on Saturday, July 26th from 11am–4pm – RSVP for address and parking information.

Gabrielle Graessle lives and works in a small village in southern Spain, where her creative practice is deeply entwined with her daily life—her home, her studio, her dogs, and her inner world. Her paintings reflect this porous relationship between self and setting. Her home is not a retreat from the world, but a stage upon which her distinctive visual language comes to life. Often working across multiple larger-scale canvases at once, Graessle constructs her compositions through layers of memory and imagination. She doesn’t aim for literal depiction but seeks instead an emotional truth: a vivid evocation of the energy, glamour, and strangeness that memories can hold.
In True Romance, a series of automobiles takes center stage—sleek, stylized, and brimming with narrative. The works trace back to a childhood memory of her father’s best friend, Hans G., a flamboyant figure who drove a Mini Cooper for everyday use and a Ferrari and Lamborghini for everything else. Though the exact models have faded from memory, the impression remains. The cars are icons—not just of luxury, but of a time, a place, and a masculine mythos that shaped her early understanding of adulthood.
This memory unfolds into another: her father’s annual pilgrimages to the Geneva Auto Salon, returning home with stacks of glossy catalogs and previews of the year’s newest models. Graessle absorbed the visual culture that surrounded these events—the polished chrome, the theatrical presentation, the women in miniskirts with rehearsed smiles. Her painting Salon de Genève sans hôtesse, for example, critically and playfully reimagines these scenes by omitting the ubiquitous “hostess,” calling attention to the spectacle and its gendered constructions.

Graessle’s interest in pop-cultural iconography—particularly cars like the Ford GT 40 and Ferrari Daytona—places her work in conversation with Pop Art’s fascination with consumer spectacle. But unlike Warhol’s mechanical detachment, Graessle’s paintings retain a hand-drawn urgency and personal resonance. Her use of acrylic, glitter, spray paint, and exaggerated proportions suggests a blend of Pop’s visual vernacular with the raw, instinctive energy of Art Brut and outsider traditions.

While her subject matter is rooted in both pop culture and personal history, Graessle’s deeper project is an exploration of raw, intuitive expression—unfiltered by academic theory or aesthetic polish. There is a childlike (but never childish) spontaneity in her work: a deliberate return to freedom, where conventional rules dissolve. This spirit is echoed in her materials and occasional text, applied in ways that are both purposeful and instinctive. Vivid colors dominate, not to seduce, but to assert. Her canvases are expansive, immersing the viewer in a world that is at once intimate and strikingly universal. Each work feels less like a standalone image and more like a piece of a larger constellation—a story unfolding in nonlinear fragments. Viewers are encouraged to bring their own memories, projections, and associations into the work. Interpretation becomes a shared act, echoing the layered, open-ended nature of her compositions: ambiguous, playful, and charged with possibility.

True Romance captures the texture of a life filtered through decades of image-making. These are not documents of reality, but of feeling—records of what lingers rather than what occurred. The result is a world both strange and familiar, painted not from observation, but from what refuses to be forgotten.

______

Simchowitz is pleased to present Harvest under the sun, Douglas Knesse’s first solo exhibition at Hill House, Pasadena. Please join us for an open house and reception on Saturday, July 26th, from 11am–4pm – RSVP for address and parking information.

Harvest under the sun is a meditative exploration of discipline, devotion, and transformation. For Knesse, who lives and works in a coastal city along Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, painting is more than expression—it is a quiet, enduring practice and a form of spiritual communication. “Painting has always been a way for me to communicate what words could not reach,” he says. “It is in this quiet space that I connect with the spiritual field, accessing the divine to give thanks, to lay down
my fears, to ask, and to speak new paths into existence.”

Knesse’s layered compositions resist finality. Built through repetition and reflection, they evolve, bearing traces of previous gestures. Working across acrylic, oil stick, spray paint, and pastel, he balances vibrant color and organic forms with generous use of negative space. Many works are painted on truck tarps—surfaces marked by use and history—which bring a grounded, corporeal quality to the paintings and deepen their relationship to labor, weathering, and renewal.
His imagery—leaf forms, rhythmic notations, and transient blooms—draws from the natural world but also points inward, toward an interior field of spiritual attunement. In works like TINHA UMA PALMEIRA NA PAISAGEM I, and the cloud drew my strength, this tension between external landscape and internal transformation becomes palpable.

Knesse’s practice resonates with multiple currents in art history. The gestural immediacy of his mark-making evokes Abstract Expressionism, while his use of modest materials and nontraditional supports—particularly in works like Window to paradise and Eruption and garden flowers—recalls the poetic materiality of Arte Povera. At the same time, his quiet emphasis on presence, perception, and process aligns him with Brazilian Neo-Concrete artists, whose works foregrounded sensorial experience and personal transformation.

Though rooted in a specific ecology, the exhibition speaks broadly to cycles of effort and emergence. Each piece carries the memory of what came before and the potential of what may come next. These works honor unseen labor: the slow accumulation of energy, gesture, and faith that precede visible change. Rather than seeking resolution, Knesse creates space for uncertainty, stillness, and spiritual inquiry. In this way, Harvest under the sun offers more than paintings—it provides a patient, reverent record of becoming.

Gabrielle Graessle: True Romance | Douglas Knesse: Harvest under the sun

Simchowitz Hill House

Please join us at the Angels Gate Cultural Center Gallery Saturday, July 26th from 1–4pm for the opening reception of Fluid Dynamics, a group exhibition curated by Katherine Shanks. Featuring works by artists from Los Angeles and New Orleans, Fluid Dynamics examines the mutability and movement of identity, ideology, information, and spirituality.

Los Angeles and New Orleans are two metropolitan areas deeply influenced by their relationships with water, albeit in very different ways: Los Angeles navigates its scarcity while New Orleans grapples with its abundance. Both also have long and complicated histories with oil—its extraction, the environmental and public health effects of that process, and impact on the economy and transportation systems in each region. Their inhabitants experience fluidity in more personal ways. We are constantly using liquid metaphors to express the mutability and movement of identity, ideology, information, and spirituality. Artists in Fluid Dynamics include Hannah Chalew, Ben Cuevas, Leslie Foster, Felli Maynard, Renee Royale, Nancy Voegeli-Curran, Demi Hanad Ward, and Sterling Wells.

This exhibition is supported by the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, the LA County Department of Arts and Culture, the Mellon Foundation, and the Perenchio Foundation.

Fluid Dynamics will be on view in the gallery through September 13, 2025, with free public visiting hours Thursdays through Saturdays, from 10am to 5pm. Please note that pets are not allowed inside our buildings. For questions, please email gallery@angelsgateart.org.

Accessibility

Please note that portions of Fluid Dynamics are in areas of the gallery that are currently only accessible via stairs. A virtual walkthrough of the full exhibition will be available on a tablet at the front of the gallery.

About Angels Gate Cultural Center
Angels Gate Cultural Center (AGCC) emerged from a group of San Pedro artists in the 1970s that created art studios and exhibition space within the WWII era army barracks of Angels Gate Park near the Port of Los Angeles. Today, AGCC hosts over 50 artist studios in addition to a variety of programs to engage the diverse communities of the Los Angeles Harbor region, including arts education in local schools, community classes, cultural events, and exhibitions of contemporary art. More information about AGCC is available at angelsgateart.org.

Fluid Dynamics

Angels Gate Cultural Center

And/Or Gallery and Dem Passwords are pleased to present "The Worst Rave in the World," a collaborative installation of animatronics and multi-channel video by Matt Barton and Extreme Animals (Jacob Ciocci and David Wightman).

The front gallery at “The Worst Rave in the World” consists of a four-channel video projection synced to a 17-minute, four-channel audio track playing back in quadraphonic sound. The music and projections surround a slew of animatronic figures and a DJ booth-like setup. The smaller back gallery contains a single figure staged in a chillout room of sorts, accompanied by a single-channel video with audio.

While their individual artistic and stylistic approaches vary, all three artists are connected by how their work engages with our technomediated society — their maximalist approach to extracting novelty from the vast conceptual space between the banal and the sublime reflecting the extremes at both ends. “It’s either heaven or hell,” Ciocci notes.

Barton often works in kinetic sculpture, combining found objects with motors and armatures to create figures existentially caught in repetitive, mechanical loops. He spent his formative years immersed in the 1990s skate subculture of the Midwest — an experience that helped shape his raw, intuitive, "anything goes" sensibility. During this time, Matt also worked at the animatronic-themed pizza and video game franchise Chuck E. Cheese, performing at children’s parties as the mouse mascot in full-body costume.

Extreme Animals primarily work with sound and video, combining high-energy electronic music compositions with internet-informed video art. Their work shifts between “found” sources and authored work, resulting in something both familiar and new. The band/collective has participated in the American underground experimental music and art scene for over 20 years. Like their sampled sources and cultural reference points, the Animals have consistently embraced an open attitude — performing everywhere from house shows to national museums and beyond.

“The worst rave in the world” is really a question. Maybe this is, in fact, the best rave in the world? The show plunders from the failures and noise of contemporary culture, which, when recombined, is no longer bad or good, but instead forms a “secret third thing”.

A series of human-scale figures are positioned throughout the gallery, herking and jerking in place— awkwardly gyrating to the disjointed, arrhythmic musical accompaniment. The audio and video create an encompassing mess of contrasting connections and exuberant references; DJ drops, crickets, intimate YouTube confessions, and other stock sound effects are all woven together to compose an utterly contemporary, embarrassing tune.

The dancers move in ways that are almost lifelike— but definitely wrong. If Plato was right when he said, “Dance was a gift from God,” then this is like the beginning of Gremlins when the father brings home Gizmo, or that viral video of the kid unwrapping an avocado at Christmas. Out of all this clutter emerges a song—like a Magic Eye poster at a suburban mall—that, if you squint or stand far enough away, might just take you there.

Matt Barton lives and works in Colorado Springs where he is the Co-Director of Visual Art at University of Colorado - Colorado Springs. Barton holds a Master's in Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon and has exhibited work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; the Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe; and the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh.

Jacob Ciocci is a multimedia artist and musician. Ciocci is a founding member of the art collective Paper Rad whose work in the field of net.art helped ignite the genre. Ciocci has had solo exhibitions and screenings with Foxy Productions, New York; Interstate Projects, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Nightingale Cinema, Chicago. He has exhibited and performed at a range of venues, including MOMA, the New Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

David Wightman lives and works in New York City, New York. He has performed at the Hirshhorn, the Stone, Anthology Film Archives, Museum of Moving Image, MoMA, and the New Museum. He has been awarded grants, residencies, and honors from Rhizome, HarvestWorks, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival, among others.

Show #38: The Worst Rave In The World

And/Or Gallery

An exhibition of paintings and works on paper from the artist’s Fotos y recuerdos series, which reexamines photographs and ephemera from the artist’s childhood in the 1990s and early 2000s. 

Abel Rodriguez: Aguante

Charlie James Gallery (2nd location)

I—body brings together artists tracing the body as tension, memory, and transformation. Through fractured forms and tender materials, the exhibition dwells in what’s unfinished—where identity is felt, not fixed; held in rupture, resistance, and becoming.

Featuring works by: Young Joon Kwak, Kim Ye, Alungoo Xatan, Marley White, Masha Sheinina, Talya Petrillo, Kiko Thomas, Winter Dior, Danica Ribi, Emilie Dashe, Sophia Beall, Zoe Zhou, Raymond Ren.

I-body

Cevera Yoon Gallery

Keystone Gallery presents Nothing Ever Happens Until It Does, a new solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist Joel Zuercher. It’s his third show with the gallery, and his first since the Eaton Canyon fire in January 2025 destroyed his home and much of his archives.
The work in the show reflects a truth Zuercher now knows firsthand: life can shift from calm to catastrophe in an instant. Using found materials, paint, and dyes, Zuercher builds layered surfaces, then tears, scrapes, and peels them apart through dé-collage, revealing hidden fragments beneath. The process mirrors the unpredictability of disaster—the act of destruction giving way to unexpected clarity.
In the wake of the fire, these pieces took on new meaning, speaking to loss, resilience, and the strange pull of watching chaos unfold. Nothing Ever Happens Until It Does is both a record of what was lost and a testament to what survives. 

Joel Zuercher: Nothing Ever Happens Until It Does

Femmebot is an interdisciplinary art exhibition that merges speculative and science fiction with the visual arts to create an immersive experience that challenges dystopian narratives and explores the utopian potential of our future. Drawing inspiration from science fiction literature, ecofeminism, and post-humanist theory, this exhibition transforms a 4,000 sq. ft. gallery into a lush, sensory-rich environment that encourages contemplation on the future of our society beyond capitalism.

While contemporary news cycles often fuel anxieties of societal collapse, Femmebot dares to offer an alternative vision—one where feminine energy, imagination, and vibrant aesthetics counterbalance fatalistic narratives. The exhibition leans into speculative world-building to inspire optimism, shifting away from critique-laden discourse towards an experience that invites participation, engagement, and creative exploration.

Set against a changing Los Angeles backdrop, the art of Femmebot will challenge dystopian tropes and reimagine possibilities for a future shaped by communal consciousness, resilience, and artistic reinvention.

Image: @oliviajaneart

FEMMEBOT 

Lucky Cat Labs

Hans Wendel 
Sheng Lor 
Alvaro Aguilar 
Sigrid Qian
Maithili Chaturvedi 
Xu Shuai
Mahedi Anjuman

A Sanctuary for Art, Stories, and New Beginnings
Unveil Gallery is proud to present Welcome to My Den, the final exhibition in our current space before we move into a new chapter, embracing a fresh model, an expanded vision, and more opportunities for artists and audiences alike.

The exhibition invites viewers into the “den” as a symbolic and physical space: a shelter of comfort and introspection, a cocoon for transformation, and a site of quiet confrontation with one’s own memories, fears, and hopes. Here, the gallery itself becomes a sanctuary, not only for art, but for human connection, storytelling, and the possibilities that lie ahead.

Welcome to My Den brings together seven artists whose practices span drawing, painting, textiles, installation, sculpture. Each transforms the gallery into a layered environment, offering intimate encounters and unexpected thresholds. Together, their works affirm the gallery’s role as a place where ideas can rest, shift, and grow.

Featured Artists
Hans B Wendel — is a Los Angeles–based architectural designer, artist, and educator whose work moves between architecture, art, and design. From contributing to high-profile projects such as Kanye West’s Yeezy domes to exhibiting in Buenos Aires and Los Angeles, Wendel bridges visionary spatial concepts with cultural narratives. His practice reflects a
deep commitment to material exploration, collaborative making, and the poetics of built space.

Sheng Lor — is a Hmong textile artist whose sculptural and painterly works unravel memories, dreams, and folktales shaped by displacement and resilience. Born in a Thai refugee camp to parents who survived the Secret War in Laos, Lor translates hidden histories into patterned surfaces, engaging with both personal and collective trauma as sites of beauty, endurance, and transformation.

Maithili Chaturvedi — re-authors icons of Hindi cinema into intimate, pseudo-self-portraits that explore desire, performance, and the feminine gaze. Working with velvet to manipulate color and light, she transforms the cinematic Woman into a conduit for reflections on agency, spectacle, and self-mythology.

Sigrid Qian — constructs dreamlike thresholds between waking and unconscious states. Her layered oil paintings on canvas and fabric merge domestic familiarity with ethereal ambiguity, creating soft portals into spaces where memory, myth, and spirit converse.

Mahedi Anjuman — is a Bangladeshi-born, Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her sculptures, assemblages, and video works emerge from an intuitive engagement with context, examining the dualities of mind and body, self and other, through material presence and spatial negotiation.

Shuai Xu — works across painting, land art, sculpture, and installation to engage with presences that resist definition. By holding space for what remains unspoken or unseen, Xu creates perceptual environments where revelation and obscurity coexist, and the act of seeing is intentionally incomplete.

Álvaro Aguilar — is a multidisciplinary artist from Mexico City whose work investigates color, perception, and cultural commentary through painting and installation. Trained at the Centro de Arte Mexicano and with a background in both art practice and commercial strategy, Aguilar’s exhibitions span Mexico and abroad, earning him a nomination for Mexico’s National Prize for Arts and Literature in 2019.

A Closing that Opens
As our final exhibition in the current space, Welcome to My Den is both a reflection and an opening—a moment to honor the intimacy and experimentation nurtured here, while stepping into a future of expanded horizons. We invite you to linger in this den, to see it as a shared refuge for art, for connection, and for all that can yet emerge.


For press inquiries, images, or additional information, please contact:
info@unveilgallery.com

Welcome to My Den

Unveil Gallery

TAG Gallery presents IMPROPER IDEOLOGY, a groundbreaking exhibition and concert series by visual artist Pam Douglas and composer-poet Raya Yarbrough, on view September 3–27, 2025. The mother-daughter duo merges painting, sculpture, poetry, and music into immersive experiences that confront grief, cultural erasure, and environmental collapse with radical tenderness and artistic defiance.

“Improper Ideology unfolds in intertwined forms—the fusion of poetry and painting, and its expression as an exhibition and an artist’s book,” writes art critic Shana Nys Dambrot in the exhibition essay. “Each stands alone, yet all elements mirror and magnify one another—layers of testimony shaped by the enduring creative dialogue between visual artist Pam Douglas and her daughter, singer/songwriter Raya Yarbrough.”
Their collaboration began in 2018, when Douglas’s Artifacts of Grace inspired a poetic response from Yarbrough. Since then, their creative dialogue has evolved into a non-hierarchical practice in which image, text, and sound coexist across installation, performance, and print. The result is a multi-sensory environment that viewers experience like a poem or prayer—quiet, layered, and deeply resonant.

Douglas’s mixed media works—crafted from silk, wood, charcoal, and acrylic paint on raw linen—don’t illustrate Yarbrough’s poems; they embody them. Longer texts unfold across multiple sculptures, drawing the viewer into movement and reflection. In For So Long, seven tree branches emerge from the gallery wall, each bearing fragments of verse. I Wish You This Afternoon surrounds visitors with six hanging panels, forming a cocoon of imagery and language. Spiritual, altar-like environments evoke memory, mourning, and transformation.
Yarbrough’s poetry—lyrical, precise, and unflinching—explores displacement, survival, and identity. Her words echo inherited trauma and collective resilience: “I remember a place I’ve never been / but I exist because of it.” Known for her work on Outlander, Battlestar Galactica, and The Rings of Power, Yarbrough brings her voice and musicality to four evening performances, singing her poems accompanied by a string quintet. These concerts extend the exhibition into sound, animating the space with emotional urgency and grace.

While rooted in personal history, Improper Ideology transcends biography to address broader social truths. Douglas and Yarbrough offer not escape but engagement—art as a space of inquiry, care, and resistance. The exhibition affirms that beauty and protest are not opposites, but partners.

An accompanying artist’s book offers a more intimate way to encounter the work beyond the gallery. All proceeds from art, books, and recordings will benefit organizations working toward compassion and justice.


Pam Douglas ǀ Raya Yarbrough: Improper Ideology

The Artists' Gallery (TAG)

Experience the special exhibition Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me after hours and groove to the beat between two performance stages on two levels of the museum. With musicians selected to compliment Gibson’s vibrant artworks and converse with his powerful themes, PAST + FUTURE = PRESENT, Pt. 1 features Snotty Nose Rez Kids, the raucous and upbeat Haisla hip hop duo, and Black Belt Eagle Scout, the introspective and cinematic Swinomish/Iñupiaq indie rocker, both on the lobby stage. 

Upstairs in Oculus Hall, renowned electronic musician Jlin debuts a series of three collaborative compositions featuring recordings made by Navajo/Diné musician Glen Begay and the Bearspring singers, specially commissioned for the evening by The Broad. Footwork musician DJ Noir sets the tone for the evening with an opening set. Beverages and snacks are available for purchase outside in East West Bank Plaza.

PAST + FUTURE = PRESENT, Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 feature a thoughtfully selected lineup of musicians who have made their mark on the club, concert, and tour circuits within the past decade, channeling a liberatory future through music and powerful performances that honor culture and ancestry. Throughout the two-part festival-style series, hip hop, experimental, pow wow, indie, electronic, and soul music coexist like the vibrant and inspirational words and colors in Jeffrey Gibson’s PAST + FUTURE = PRESENT (2024) and other artworks on view in his exhibition.

Tickets: $25 available at https://ticketing.thebroad.org/events/2cc21008-edef-6ffb-f463-26230d97b824

Image: Joshua White

 Summer Concert at The Broad featuring Snotty Nose Rex Kids, Black Belt Eagle Scout, and more

The Broad 

The Broad presents Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me, a special exhibition of the artist’s multidimensional work, adapted from its original presentation at the U.S. Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, where Jeffrey Gibson was the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States with a solo exhibition. Gibson’s first single-artist museum exhibition in Southern California, The Broad’s presentation includes over thirty artworks joyously affirming the artist’s radically inclusive vision. The exhibition will highlight Gibson’s distinct use of geometric design and saturated color alongside references to 19th and 20th century foundational American documents and modern music, critiquing systemic injustices and imagining a more equitable future. The show will be on view in the museum’s first-floor galleries from May 10 through September 28, 2025.

Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me

Featuring works by:

John Baldessari 
Judy Chicago
Daniel Gibson
Eddie Martinez
Allan Mccollum
Ed Moses
Bruce Nauman
Joan Nelson
Hilary Pecis
Lari Pittman
Roland Reiss
Ed Ruscha
Barbara T. Smith
John Sonsini
Jonas Wood

Image: Eddie Martinez "Untitled (white out)," 2024. Lithograph and Silkscreen, 24" x 34", Edition of 45

Outstanding Prints from Cirrus: 1973-2024

Cirrus Gallery

In the first major exhibition in Los Angeles dedicated to the art of Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), Lisson Gallery presents a selection of the artist’s seminal compositions, including vibrant gouaches, and dynamic suspended sculptures, and a rare oil painting. Highlighting the formative years of Oiticica’s career, the exhibition charts his trajectory from early geometric abstraction to immersive environments that transformed the viewer’s experience with art and space.

While living in Washington, D.C., from 1947 to 1949, Oiticica was first introduced to the art and theories of Paul Klee, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian at the National Gallery of Art. At sixteen, he began studying under artist Ivan Serpa at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and soon joined the Grupo Frente (1954–56), a collective of innovative artists led by Serpa. Oiticica’s earliest works—gouache on cardboard—reflect both his fascination with European modernism and his engagement with Grupo Frente. United in their rejection of academic and figurative Brazilian modernism, the Grupo Frente embraced experimentation and explored diverse abstract and constructivist visual languages. Their approaches emphasized color, structure, and technical innovation—sometimes diverging sharply from one another. Among the works in the exhibition is a rare Grupo Frente-period gouache on masonite painting by Oiticica, exemplifying the visual strategies and material processes that defined the collective.

Throughout 1957-58, Oiticica continued to analyze the roles of color, structure and space in the production of his iconic series of Metaesquemas (a title that translates roughly as ‘metaschemes’ or ‘metastructures’). These comprise multiple variations upon a basic structure – usually rectangular or rhomboid shapes arrayed in a tentative grid over a single underlying color. Only six Metaesquemas were made in oil on canvas, and of these, only four survive. Metaesquema (1958) is a single vertical instance, consisting of two columns of rectangles arrayed in brick-like tiers against a grey-blue background. The individual shapes tilt in defiance of the grid, as though the ordering logic of the composition was beginning to unravel. The semblance, in this painting, of a real-life edifice – its spatial depth tentatively implied by the vertical centreline – anticipates Oiticica’s shift into three-dimensional structures. 

This variation in his work culminated in the creation of the Spatial Reliefs, suspended structures conceived as “paintings in space” that activate volume, color, and the viewer’s movement. Made from cut and painted wooden planes, these works extend the logic of painting into three dimensions, creating new spatial-temporal relationships between artwork and observer.

By the early 1960s, Oiticica was redefining the very purpose of art. His immersion in the everyday life of Rio’s Mangueira favela led him to develop “environmental art”—works that embraced participation, embodiment, and social experience.  Whether in the Grupo Frente gouaches, the Metaesquemas or the intricate volumetric structures of the Spatial Reliefs, his work of the 1950s and ’60s harbors a generative tension – that of constituent elements poised between coherence and dispersal: between autonomous art object and inchoate world. In this regard, the works precede the radical deconstructive impulse of his multi-sensory architectural environments of the 1970s.

While this exhibition marks Oiticica’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles, his art has received significant institutional recognition in the region. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) holds in its collection two Metaesquemas from the late 1950s, as well as a Penetrable from 1979. In 2010, Oiticica’s iconic blue-lit swimming pool installation from 1973, a collaboration with Neville D’Almeida, was featured in Suprasensorial at the Museum of Contemporary Art. His influence continues to expand: this December, Dia Beacon will restage Oiticica’s monumental installation Grande Núcleo (Grand Nucleus), NC3, NC4, NC6 (1960–63), alongside a selection of other major works.

Hélio Oiticica

Lisson Gallery

AMPHI Gallery is pleased to present When The Music's Over - the debut solo exhibition of new works by Catherine Wang. The Los Angeles-based artist’s expressive paintings create threads of tension between nature and built space, moments of joy and danger, melancholy and exuberance. Wang’s still lives and landscapes are imbued with the exhilaration and foreboding of young adulthood. 

A recent MFA graduate from the California Institute of the Arts, Wang’s work beautifully balances emotive, painterly gestures and grounded tightly rendered moments to give the viewer a glimpse of a story.  Scenes of suburban Los Angeles engulfed in overgrown, abstracted vegetation echo the painterly marks of embers and flame. Intimate still lives depict bedrooms and living spaces displaying vibrant, multi-faceted portraits of their inhabitants just out of frame. Thrumming with energy from the discomfort of change, Wang’s visual world offers a sharp wit and sensitivity. 

Like a snippet of an overheard conversation in passing, each of the paintings provide a piece of a narrative or a fleeting feeling made physical within Wang’s compositions. Largely devoid of human figures, their work often feels like the viewer has just arrived in the instant everyone has left - cigarette butts or a lingering trail of smoke trailing behind. Remnants of small rebellions, a scrawled bit of graffiti or litter, lend the work a note of nostalgia and melancholy.

Frenetic and chromatic Wang’s paintings capture movement within the suburban landscape, a piñata blurs precariously against an eerily lit tree or embers fluttering in the Santa Ana winds. A deep sense of impending change and growth is present in the works included in the exhibition. Within those heavy moments is also a large dose of levity and humor. The artist states, "Many of my paintings are about situations that I can’t control, whether that’s personal or environmental. If you’re coming up against things that are so overwhelming and devastating, what else can you do but crack a joke? And it seems insignificant but humor can stave off so much fear and pain.”  Encapsulating the swirling beauty, chaos and difficulty of the present moment, Wang’s paintings are a celebration in the apocalypse, a joyful dance as the last notes of the music end.  

About the Artist
Catherine Wang (b.1998 Lakewood, CA) is a painter based in Los Angeles. They earned their Bachelor of Arts and Science degree in Computer Science and Art Practice from Stanford University in 2022 and their MFA from the Art Program at California Institute of the Arts in 2025.

Join us for the opening reception on Saturday, August 23, from 5 to 8 p.m. The artist will be in attendance, with a DJ set by Cross. The exhibition will be on view from August 23 to October 4. For additional press inquiries or materials please contact Lu Chen at luchen@amphigallery.com. 

Image: Trying Not to Scratch, 2024. Oil on canvas, 60 × 96 in. (detail)
Courtesy of the artist and AMPHI Gallery.

Catherine Wang: When The Music’s Over

AMPHI gallery

LAUNCH Gallery is proud to present solo exhibitions by Linda Arreola and Rochelle Botello whose work celebrates an exploration of life through contemporary abstract painting, drawing and sculpture. Linda Arreola’s Almost Home, draws on her appreciation of architecture and form, specifically ancient Mesoamerican architecture, as the underlying foundation of her work.  Her paintings are built using primary colors and elemental geometric forms to construct maps for, and recall memories of, her life’s artistic journey. In Wild Child, Rochelle Botello’s series of drawings materialize after hours in the studio surrendering control and embracing the unknown while putting ink, graphite and acrylic paint to paper. Her new sculpture, born from less permanent materials like cardboard, wood, tape and paper, examines the relationship between form and space while mirroring the fragility and inevitability of life.


Linda Arreola presents Almost Home a new series of paintings and sculptures that reference the idea of a journey. Moving toward this new destination, Linda is returning to the beginning while seeking a sense of completion and ultimately finding a place of belonging.

"In this series I introduce two concepts. The first concept is that the paintings include what I call, “word bubbles”, similar to the ones seen in comic strips holding the words spoken. The “word bubbles” call attention to the idea of speaking, or having something to say. A voice perhaps from the subconscious suggesting an inner journey. 

The second concept are pieces that include a single word or hieroglyphic-like word symbols. The words mainly reference “street names”. These street names, are of familiar or significant pathways I have frequented. These street names tie together the place I exist, creating a communion of neighborhoods and people signifying a locale and placing my existence in a particular territory. Together, the works are not only expressions of an interior and exterior journey but are also intended to provoke inquiry into who we are and where we are from."



A new sculpture and drawings in Rochelle Botello’s Wild Child further express her ability and willingness to surrender to the present moment of discovery, wonder and curiosity. She is embracing the unknown. The result is an honest and original record of our time and place. Rochelle is fascinated in the special, individual space between time and memory, the known and the unknown.   

"I construct sculptures through intuitive impulses while playing with the relationship between form and space. I use materials such as cardboard, wood, tape and paper that retain an ephemeral quality that I find equally compelling and absurd. The impermanence of my forms mirrors the wondrous inevitability of life. 

Like my sculptural work, my drawings evolve from an intuitive impulse. I make a mark. Then make another. I allow each mark to inform the next move. I build up the surface by overlapping lines, shapes and spontaneous gestures. Through this process of overlap, repetition and movement, the compositions suggest the act of being present. Here and now, time and memory. 

The new work reveals states of both being and becoming that echo the contradictions of everyday life: the real and the imagined, control and letting go, strength and vulnerability, stability and instability."



About the artists: 
Linda Arreola was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the hills of El Sereno, a suburb northeast of downtown Los Angeles where she continues to reside in the home she grew up in. As a child, Arreola was quiet and introspective, not really active in art making, but interested in art for the emotions it stirred in her. Arreola credits her father as the greatest influence on her career as a painter, and her studies in architecture.

Traveling to Mexico for the first time at the age of nineteen, and then again in the early 1980s, Arreola became fascinated with ancient Mesoamerican urban centers and temple pyramids. Her visits to the archaeological sites of Teotihuacán, Tula, Chichen Itza, Palenque, and Monte Albán marked the beginning of a heartfelt connection and artistic bond with Mesoamerican architecture, which has informed her work throughout her career. After returning home, Arreola embarked on a mission to recreate the sensations and emotions she experienced while viewing the architecture, sculptural forms, and geometrics found in ancient Mesoamerican art. She began by building wooden structures, using unfinished wood and steel cables to study suspension and how forms can be held in space with tightened cables. As she later came to understand, these were exercises in manifesting energy by the control of tension in these three-dimensional forms. They are beautiful sculptural forms, echoing both Mesoamerican and Japanese aesthetics in their built simplicity. She titled the work of this period, Parts of the Whole and with this series and other built paintings and sculptures she would complete her B. A. in 1980 and her M. A. in 1985 at Cal State University Los Angeles. Parts of the Whole would also be the pivotal work in her portfolio that gained her admission to the school of Architecture at U.C.L.A. where she would earn an M. A. degree in 1991.

According to Arreola, she’s always been a builder, and that the study of architecture with its line drawings of plans and sections had a big impact on her. Rather than painting, she works by building and layering her works with paint, thinking of her work as architecturally inspired built constructions. Her influences have been diverse and many, including Japanese architect Tadao Ando, Minimalist sculptors Donald Judd and Agnes Martin, abstract expressionist sculptor, Louise Nevelson, and painter, sculptor, mixed media pop artist, Jasper Johns. ~ by Sybil Vanegas



Rochelle Botello is a Los Angeles based visual artist working across mixed media, sculpture and site-specific installations. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, extending Japan, Berlin and South Korea. She has exhibited with Holter Museum of Art, Torrance Art Museum, Bakersfield Museum of Art, Coagula Curatorial and Durden and Ray to name a few. Her exhibitions have also been reviewed in the LA Times, The Huffington Post, Whitehot magazine, Artillery Magazine and Coagula Art Journal. Botello holds a MFA from Claremont Graduate University and a BA in Sociology with an emphasis in Social Psychology from University of California, Santa Cruz.

Linda Arreola: Almost Home | Rochelle Botello: Wild Child

LAUNCH LA

For her first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, British artist Christina Kimeze will present new paintings that explore the complexity of interior spaces, both domestic and psychological. Vibrant and uniquely textured, her canvases depict ethereal interiors, landscapes and figures—either solitary or intimately connected—with an air of mystery and mutability. Tactility is an essential element of these works. 

On a foundation of suede matboard, Kimeze combines dry chalk, oil pastel and wet paints, crushing and merging her mediums into the fabric ground. The technique gives Kimeze’s paintings an atmosphere of indeterminacy that underscores her subject matter: the shifting, transient nature of memory and shared experience.  

Recurring motifs, such as abstracted foliage and architectural arches, create delineation within the paintings and are Kimeze’s tools for blurring the lines that exist between the personal and public. In some of her more recent works, Kimeze draws inspiration from the resurgence of roller skating in Black communities in the UK, seeing it as a metaphor for flight and freedom. Through her paintings, she captures the sensation of gliding through space while also reflecting on the tension of existing between two states—both grounded and soaring. 

Image: Christina Kimeze "Carnival" 2025. Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard. 102 x 81 cm / 40 1/8 x 31 7/8 in © Christina Kimeze. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Deniz Guzel

Christina Kimeze: Long loops

Hauser & Wirth | WEHO

Join us to celebrate the opening of our exhibitions, ‘Luchita Hurtado. Yo Soy’ and ‘James Jarvaise & Henry Taylor. Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked’ at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles.

The Education Lab: ‘Mentoring Moments’ will provide a space to explore the transformative power of mentors and teachers, responding to the special relationship between Henry Taylor and his mentor James Jarvaise.

The galleries and Education Lab will be open from 7 – 9 pm with music by DJ XL Middleton and cash bars and food for purchase in the courtyard by Manuela, the gallery‘s onsite restaurant.

Entry is free. Please register in advance so we can anticipate visitor numbers.

About ‘Luchita Hurtado. Yo Soy’
Over the course of her eight-decade career, Venezuelan-born, Los Angeles-based artist Luchita Hurtado (1920 – 2020) committed to a lifelong journey of personal and artistic evolution defined by ceaseless experimentation. Though personally connected to a vast network of internationally renowned artists and intellectuals—including Mexican muralists, Surrealists, members of the Dynaton movement, feminists and artists in the Chicano/Latino art scene—Hurtado remained an independent and largely private, but highly prolific, creator.

Opening in June, ‘Yo Soy’ (‘I Am’) will be Hurtado’s first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles. Including never-before-shown works, this presentation will bring together paintings and drawings from a pivotal moment in the artist’s evolution: Inspired by the surge of feminist activism in LA, Hurtado held her first solo exhibition at the Woman’s Building in 1974, debuting her Linear Language series of expressive, geometric word paintings. In works that were cut up and meticulously resewn, she shared her exploration of pattern, mysticism, the earth and the cosmos.

Accompanying ‘Yo Soy’ will be a selection from the Luchita Hurtado archive, including original exhibition and artwork documentation, as well as ephemera from organizations such as the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists, Womanspace and the Woman’s Building.

About ‘James Jarvaise & Henry Taylor. Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked’
‘Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked’ is the first exhibition to put the work of Henry Taylor in dialogue with that of his teacher James Jarvaise. Composed along loosely thematic lines and consisting largely of paintings, this major installation will span the 1950s to the present, with new works created especially for the show by Taylor, whose interest in landscape, alongside the figure, will be freshly explored.

A California regionalist, who taught generations of students at schools in and around Los Angeles, James Jarvaise (1924 – 2015) gained national acclaim when his abstract landscape paintings were featured in the historic 1959 exhibition ‘Sixteen Americans’ at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. One of today’s most celebrated painters, Henry Taylor credits Jarvaise with having been the first to recognize his talents, as a community college student in the early 1980s: it was Jarvaise who insisted that he take himself seriously as an artist. Taylor accordingly enrolled at CalArts but continued to bring his work to Jarvaise for his valued critiques.

This is the first exhibition of Taylor’s work to take place at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles and represents an idea he has long carried: to pay homage to the artist James Jarvaise who saw something special in him.

Image: Henry Taylor

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Photographs will be taken at this event for use on the Hauser & Wirth website, social media and in other marketing materials.

Luchita Hurtado: Yo Soy | James Jarvaise & Henry Taylor: Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked

Hauser & Wirth DTLA

NOON Projects is honored to present “The Hom(o)stead Act: Kaiserpanorama”, a monumental new project by multidisciplinary artist Yuval Pudik. Opening September 12, 2025, the exhibition reimagines the 19th-century Kaiserpanorama—a circular stereoscopic viewing device and precursor to cinema—through a queer, post-digital lens. Composed of sculpture, film, and social space, Pudik’s work is both archival and speculative: a machine for queer memory, refracting images of history, intimacy, and desire through collective spectatorship.

At the heart of Pudik’s research is a meditation on the act of looking—how images structure collective imagination, and how queerness can re-center the cultural narrative. Rather than linear storytelling, Pudik approaches language and images as mutable materials, capable of recombination into new constellations of meaning. The project’s title plays on the Homestead Act of 1862, an instrument of settler colonialism and American expansion, reconfigured here as a “Hom(o)stead”—a proposition for queer futurity, belonging, and shared cultural space.

The exhibition unfolds in three parts. The first is a monumental sculptural reconstruction of a Kaiserpanorama, fabricated from recycled cardboard. This custom-built device invites viewers to peer through glory-hole lenses, transforming spectatorship into a communal, erotic act. Within the viewing holes, Pudik presents a three-hour film composed of over 15,000 screen recordings. Fragmented, lush, and durational, the film unfolds as a queer archive—where desire, humor, trauma, and beauty overlap and recombine.

The third act of the project, The Cavity, transforms the inside of the sculpture into a performance space / reading room / gay bar. Conceived as a site of gathering, it extends the viewing machine into lived social exchange, reclaiming hospitality and nightlife as integral to artistic production. Here, community and spectatorship collapse into one another, shifting the exhibition from object to experience, proposition to practice.

Public programs accompany the exhibition throughout its 2-month run. On September 13th and 14th, The Cavity will host a two-day Pop-Up Tattoo Shop with artist and tattooer Joshua W. Rains, who has created original flash designs inspired by Pudik’s installation. On October 19, in collaboration with Del Vaz Projects, will present a screening of Messages, Messages (1968) by Steven Arnold, shown through Pudik’s Kaiserpanorama. Additional programs will convene artists, thinkers, and audiences in conversation, activating the installation as a living site of queer exchange.

Yuval Pudik (b. 1978) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans drawing, photography, sculpture, neon, mail art, and film. His practice navigates the space between poetics and the political, using beauty and technical precision to invite viewers into dialogue. His identity as an immigrant and queer person informs a perspective that is both intimate and incisive—an outsider’s clarity paired with a longing for belonging. Pudik has exhibited internationally and has been featured in Art in America, BUTT Magazine, ARTnews, and Sang Bleu Magazine. He currently lives and works in New York.

For more information email info@noon-projects.com

Yuval Pudik: The Hom(o)stead Act: Kaiserpanorama

NOON Projects

Wonzimer is proud to announce  Mitologías de un Niño Mexicano (Mythologies of a Mexican Boy), the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Vasco Del Rey. Born in southern Mexico and raised in Los Angeles, Vasco has spent the past three years developing a visual language rooted in rupture, ritual, and remembrance. The series exhibited is fueled by the tension between presence and absence—between a Mexico remembered only through childhood memory and a life built far from it. In this space between geographies, Vasco constructs not a narrative but a mythology. Paintings emerge as offerings rather than answers, rich with motifs that resist fixed meaning.

Figures are stripped down and devotional, suspended between tenderness and ache, the personal and universal. The result is not a linear story, but a visual theology shaped by intuition, migration and the quiet insistence to be seen.

At its core, the work grapples with longing—for family left behind, for a home that no longer exists and for a sense of belonging with a fractured identity. Vasco mythologizes the immigrant experience, layering personal history with archetypes. Vasco’s figures appear as vessels, saints, and prayers. They carry both beauty and burden. The body is central: contorted, reaching, weeping, blooming. Often faceless, his figures carry the weight of two homes, two tongues, and the emotional scar tissue of distance. Mythologies of a Mexican Boy is not about nostalgia. It is about what memory does in absence, how it stretches, stains, and sanctifies. A boy’s recollection of his motherland, fused with the strength gained through perseverance, becomes a timeless mythology. Vasco Del Rey’s work is a mythic reconstruction of memory, identity and romance anchored in the psychological weight of the immigrant experience. Wood pallets become a major source of inspiration, the artist finds what was left unseen and transforms them into altars. This act mirrors the immigrant experience itself: the strength to carry without praise, the grace to endure without recognition. In elevating what is often discarded, Vasco offers a quiet reverence for lives built in the shadows, turning survival into a sacred form of expression.

Though deeply personal, this story echoes across countless others—lives marked by displacement, resilience, and love. Vasco does not claim to speak for all, but he aims to paint what many carry silently. In doing so, he hopes to create space for reflection, empathy, and a reimagining of what it means to belong in a world where belonging is never simple. This body of work is a radiant invocation of the enduring mythic spirit woven through all people, histories and cultures - a force that refuses erasure.



Vasco Del Rey: Mitologías de un Niño Mexicano

Ancestral Futures explores how materiality, memory, and ritual are infusing contemporary Arabic design practices, weaving ideas across worlds and time. These are objects of enchantment.

Shaped in collaboration with Emirati curator Fatma Al Mahmoud, the exhibition brings together leading voices in Middle Eastern art and design from Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the UAE. Featuring work by Sara Aahli, Abdulla Buhijji, Tamara Barrage, Sultan Bin Fahad, Wafa Al Falahi, Omar Al Gurg, Areen Hassan, Talin Hazbar, Layth Mahdi, Maktoum Al Maktoum, Pots & Pines, Kawther Al Saffar, Neda Salamanpour, and Nuhayr Zein.

Across the Middle East, reverence for materiality has long been rooted in a direct relationship with the land, with aesthetics grounded in sensorial experiences of light, shadow, scent, sand, and other elemental forces. Today, in an age of technological evolution and cultural displacement, the language of ancestral materiality seduces us back to play, reimagined in ways that bridge cultural memories with contemporary curiosities.

Ancestral Futures invites us to mine memory as material, creating tomorrows that honor yesterday in every step.

The exhibition is built around three curatorial clusters, grouped to dialogue across shared material or conceptual terrain:

Material Memory 
Where sand, stone, metal, and glass become storytellers.

Ritual & Resonance
Objects become vessels of belief, care, and continuity.

Nomadic Adaptation
Design as adaptation: scalable, modular, in motion.

Ancestral Futures is paired with a curated selection of fashion and objects that extend the show’s spirit: Iranian jeweler Lina Jahanpanah’s silver brooches for living flowers; antique textile jackets by Moroccan artisan brand Zoubida; and modular fashion by QASIMI, where Hoor Al Qasimi and Māori artist Emily Karaka joined forces to create a collection exploring Indigenous connection, political oppression, and land loss.
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Friday Gallery will host an opening reception Friday June 27th from 7-9pm during the LA Design Festival, with a curator-led tour of the work alongside key artists and designers from the exhibition.

RSVP: https://partiful.com/e/6vNcVXGhwnbEWA8pxJtK

Ancestral Futures: On Memory

Friday Gallery

Murmurs is pleased to present Pallbearer, a solo exhibition by Y. Malik Jalal opening Friday, September 5th from 5–8pm in the main gallery. This new body of work continues Jalal’s exploration of interiors and the tensions between domestic and vehicular space. For this exhibition, he turns toward fantasy, the poetics of ruin, and the economy of loss, drawing from the material languages of junkyards and found photography. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Y. Malik Jalal (b. 1994, Savannah, Georgia) utilizes traditional craft and collage techniques to explore themes of Black history, power and humanity. By merging materials like steel and iron with an index of found photos depicting Black American family life in unexpected and intimate moments, he addresses the transformation of industries and inequalities, referencing both the legacy of metal artisans in the South and pop culture. His work combines African customs with violent American events, incorporating symbols from advertising and Black horror to reflect collective anxiety. Influenced by Islam, Christianity, and Spiritualism, Jalal’s art forms a multifaceted expression of Blackness, drawing from diverse perspectives and critiquing societal norms. 

Y. Malik Jalal lives and works between New York and Atlanta, Georgia. He earned his MFA from Yale University in 2024 and his BA from Oglethorpe University in 2016. Recent exhibitions include MARCH, New York, NY (2024), April in Paris, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2024), Jack Barrett, New York, NY (2024), Yossi Milo, New York, NY (2023), et al., San Francisco, CA (2023), Coleman Art Center, York, AL (2021), Institute 193, Lexington, KY (2021), Alabama Contemporary Art Center, Mobile, AL (2021), among others. Jalal has curated group exhibitions at The Hi-Lo Press and the High Rise Exhibition.

Image: Y. Malik Jalal "SPAN NO. 2," 2024

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Murmurs is pleased to announce The Spigot Makes the Mouth Real, a solo exhibition by Laura Stinger opening September 5th from 5-8pm in the front gallery. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

The Spigot Makes the Mouth Real explores the hidden intersections of resource extraction, AI, energy storage, and ecological grief through ceramic sculptures and performance. Central to the exhibition is their study of the lithium mining process, both as a material reality and a metaphor for the emotional and physical toll of extractive systems. Their work examines how bodies, tools, and technologies are entangled in cycles of labor, loss, and commodification. By revealing the invisible material and emotional residue of these processes, Stinger asks us to reconsider our complicity and capacity for care.

Laura Stinger (b. Palo Alto, CA) is an LA-based artist who holds an MFA in Ceramics from Cal State University Long Beach in 2024 and a BFA from NYU School of the Arts in Experimental Performance in 2012. Recent exhibitions & performances include Zaratan Contemporary, Lisbon, Portugal; Pieter Space, Los Angeles, CA; Performance Space 122 New York; The New Museum, New York, among others. 

Y. Malik Jala: Pallbearer | Laura Stinger: The Spigot Makes the Mouth Real

Murmurs

Have you ever seen the optical illusion of the rabbit that turns into a duck? At first glance, it appears to be one animal, but then your mind shifts, transforming the rabbit’s ears into the bill of a duck. Suddenly, you begin to see both, oscillating between the two. This illusion, referenced in E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, illustrates how perception constructs meaning. Gombrich argues that the image isn’t definitively either animal and never claims to be; yet our minds insist on alternating between both.

Upon visiting her studio in London, sprawled with books and binders - their contents meticulously organized - post-it notes strewn against every surface, and an eight-foot word map across one wall offers a rare glimpse into the complexity of her practice. Ortuño’s sources of inspiration span classical art, art history, philosophy, theosophy, nature, and more. They include figures such as Kandinsky, Heraclitus, Yves Klein, and Maurice Tuchman, as well as organic elements like tree leaves and votive candles. In particular, for her first exhibition in Los Angeles, she finds a connection to Tuchman’s LACMA Exhibition and its accompanying book, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Paintings 1890-1985. The show explores abstract art’s connection to religion, mysticism, and occultism, in particular, the shift of the eon into the age of Aquarius. These references are internalized and carried into her studio, where they marry with memories of Ortuño’s upbringing on a sugar plantation in Central America.

In this same London studio, thousands of miles from her native Costa Rica, pigmented marble powder is layered upon a series of solid wooden blocks. These reliefs, cloaked in color, light, and shadow, evoke the feeling of canyons carved into the earth, the density of a lush forest, or the softness of velvet. In each work, the viewer senses the tension of oppositional forces pushing and pulling at each other to find the balance of nature. Her art speaks to a personal and cultural splitting, a search for belonging in a world that feels both familiar and alien.

Make Room is proud to present Ceremonias, a new collection of works by Costa Rican-born, London-based artist Pia Ortuño. This is the first solo exhibition for the artist with the gallery and in the United States.

As a sculptor and painter working in abstraction, Ortuño embraces improvisation - her works cracking and evolving into unpredictable natural patterns. Paired with spiritual symbols, the result establishes a sense of duality inherent in form and meaning. The pieces hold onto their physicality as objects, formed and moved by human hands, and resist becoming simply a visual illusion. One can see the lines between each block of wood, creating an array of fissures out of which pours the brightness of the marble dust, like cracks in the surface of volcanic rock.

Her Costa Rican identity and the country's landscape are central to her practice. Alive with bugs, animals, and intense flora, the region’s diverse ecosystem, rugged terrain of volcanoes, and thick rainforest shape a conversation between natural and cultural environments.  These forces that come from the earth are deeply connected to the indigenous art of the region and continue to be prevalent in Ortuño’s work. This connection is central to the spiritual beliefs of the indigenous people of Central America as they have merged under the subjugation of the Spanish colonization and Catholic missions.

This body of work transcends one singular influence. Religion is, unsurprisingly, a key theme of the work; the paintings exist as images inspired by the cultural vibrancy of San Jose. Studying eighteenth-century prayer books, a reimagined image of the Virgin Mary as the “La Virgen de Guadalupe" informs the conceptual framework and palette of the exhibition. This becomes evident in pieces like “Cabeza de agua,” where the saturated color blue and its form evoke the feeling of the ocean as well as the royal blues of the virgin's shawl; the texture creates both the ripples of waves as well as the folds of pigmented cloth.

Latin America is so profoundly influenced by the Catholic church that it encompasses all aspects of life. Art, of course, is no exception. Pia speaks to the fact that growing up, the limited access to fine art was found in a church. Looking up at the ceilings of churches and taking in their powerful architecture while in mass was a way to teach herself about art. The sanctuary of the church later became, in her practice, a powerful place of memory and community that informs her work today.. She merges the aspects of precolonial art, like the bright colors that reflect the nature of the region and the floral patterning of their traditional painting and textiles, into the depictions of catholic imagery. Imbuing native culture into accepted media is a practice that she reflects on in her work. Referencing its powerful history of control, displacement, and cultural exchange.

While impacted by religion, nature, and text, this body of work can be further understood as improvised non-representational abstractions. Like the rabbit-duck illusion, the paintings embody a similar duality. They gesture toward subject matter and lived experience, simultaneously asserting their independence as abstraction. These pieces forever remain undefined. They are reminiscent of the earth and of religion, yet render emotion in their simplicity. Their strength lies in this ability to be read by many - one could gather so much more from their own experience. The viewer could draw a sense of raw beauty, bewilderment, or fluctuating mental states. Each panel could be steps to a dance, or instructions to a ritual. Meaning and narrative in the colorful forms and tactile feeling in the textures create an idea that goes beyond a single relation. Pia Ortuño’s works are connections between people and the world around them.

Image: Pia Ortuño, Puentes Colgantes, 2025, Marble dust, pigment, and ink on wood, 36¼ x 31½ x 2 in, 92.00 x 80.00 x 5.00 cm, PO.25.05

Pia Ortuño: Ceremonias

Make Room

UNIVERSE 25

On the top floor of the newly renovated Mortality Inhibiting Environment, the angels (aka the “beautiful ones”) pissed freely. Unlike the previous iterations of The Kingdom Heaven (of which there were only whispers), Universe 25 represented a revolution in post-mortal technology. A new air conditioning unit had been installed, along with a rooftop water fountain. The pearly gates looked pearlier than ever

Our colony had it all. The grapes were peeled and abundant. The clouds, hypoallergenic. The sunlight fell evenly across the surface of the afterlife, flooding every shadow and crevice until the world gleamed with the merciless geometry of a lab-grown diamond, settling over the enrichment areas and pellet troughs with a methodological exactitude whose perfection spoke of God.

There were only a few angels to begin with. Gimlet eyes. Whip tail. She Whose Fur Shines Like Sunlight on Ripened Grain. Not that any of us had ever seen grain, ripened or otherwise. Our names were handed down by anonymous forefathers who had lived short and brutish lives in the mouldering cellars and abandoned barns of antiquity.

We were happy together in the Mortality Inhibiting Environment. Great vaulted windows contoured the sky. Chandeliers throbbed in their sockets, like hives teeming with glass stars.	Despite the abundance of available real estate, we built our nests close together, from spit and paper. Our destiny was manifest in every sense of the world. We thought little of our previous lives.

Sure, the incessant harp music got a little cloying from time to time, and despite the daily replenishment of sawdust, there was the ever-present fug of sour urine which never quite faded. But we soon forgot what it was like to go hungry, to feel cold. The abundance of nourishment and freedom from predation meant there was little to do but indulge in idle copulation. We begat one another, and soon began to multiply. The corridors of the Mortality Inhibiting Environment echoed with fresh data points jostling one another in their haste to ride The Great Wheel, and gleefully nipping at one another’s tails.

It wasn’t long until the Big Names began to arrive. We’d already had a few itinerant monks and repentant sinners. But everything changed when the philosophers began to establish themselves. First came Socrates, followed closely by Plato and Aristotle. Florence Nightingale arrived one day, with her puffy hat and overlarge candle. Soon, you couldn’t turn a corner without knocking over Newton, or stepping on Martin Luther’s frankly gargantuan tail. Bach had a nasty falling out with Princess Di, who bit him viciously, raising a welt on his tail, which turned septic and had to be amputated.

Thomas Aquinas took a virulent dislike to Gandhi, and the two of them fought tooth and nail over Joan of Arc, who retreated deep into her nest and refused to emerge. A pack of troubadors banded together and began to roam the corridors in search of female companionship. Mother Theresa birthed
a litter of seven, and ate all but one of them, who took to pacing the corridors, crying vain entreaties to God, asking why he had forsaken us. God took notes and entered the relevant data into his spreadsheet.

Eventually, our population began to dwindle. Fighting broke out in the upper stories. Shakespeare and his gang of thugs took control of the water fountain. Mothers abandoned their young, and the few who survived formed roving theological packs, squabbling incoherently over vague points of religious dogma. The remaining angels turned celibate and cloistered themselves in private quarters, growing thin on beauty and sunlight, while the floors below descended into chaos and squalor. We retreated to the ground floor, taking turns to guard the door. She Whose Fur Shines Like Sunlight on Ripened Grain grows wearier with every passing day, and Gimlet Eye has a permanent limp, from where Da Vinci bit him savagely on the ankle.

Our sawdust is replenished daily, and our water troughs are regularly sanitised. But despite our abundance of material wealth, God seems more remote than ever. Occasionally, he takes one of us away to weigh us and record our measurements. But he no longer intervenes, not even when Helen Keller’s head was crushed beneath The Great Wheel in a mechanical malfunction.

I do not know what is worse. To feel as if we have disappointed God, and he has turned his back on us in anger. Or that his experiment could be considered a success.

— Hera Lindsay Bird


Ursula Bradley (b. 1997, Auckland) lives and works in London. She gained her BFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in 2021. Solo exhibitions: “High- Rise,” Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); “Working,” Envy, Wellington (2025); “Down and Out in Paris and London,” Heart Galerie, Paris (2024); “Hoarders,” Satchi & Satchi & Satchi, Auckland (2022). Group exhibitions: “The Dowse Art Museum,” Lower Hutt, Wellington; “Three new artists,” Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland; “Lindy walks to Countdown Mt Eden,” Envy, Wellington, New Zealand (2022).

Ursula Bradley: High-Rise

Cheremoya

Following the successful 2024-2025 solo exhibition of HOUSE OF at Craft Contemporary Museum in Los Angeles we’re excited and honored to present SCHISM, Ramekon O’Arwisters’ first one-person exhibition at PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY in DTLA!

SCHISM, by definition, is a fracture, division, disharmony in beliefs or rules by which we live and understand relationships, politics, religion, community. The choice of SCHISM as a title is not so much a reflection of discord within O’Arwisters but an acknowledgement of chaotic shifts and swings in predictability and safety. Targeting, overreach, and coded responses are not new to Black Americans; finding ways to navigate being Black and Queer between the hazards is the theme of this upcoming exhibition, a watery ground of coded abstraction. On view in the exhibition will be the artists’ iconic bound leather sculpture, Black on Black; tapestries from the Bound in Black series and selections from their B&W self-portraits!

Ramekon O’Arwisters abstract sculpture and tapestries dive into the abyss and the beautiful. With large sharp ceramic shards knotted together using shredded fabric and black zip ties, the sculptures stand as cultural totems, embodying the couture of drag, Black culture, African American quilting and religion.  Growing up in Jim Crow South during the Civil Rights Movement, O’Arwisters had a safe haven, quilting with his Grandmother where he was “embraced, important and special.” These early memories prompted his nascent series of unique crocheted/ceramic sculptures, Mending (2016).

In his 2019 series Cheesecake, O’Arwisters transformed his sculpture from something broken, to fully determined and self-aware. Being Black and Queer, the full complexity of the moniker Cheesecake, used to objectify an attractive, sexualized man or woman was not lost to O’Arwisters. Instead he embraced it, subverting the demeaning implication in describing his said, “objects”. Combining lacy, embellished fabrics with ceramics contributed by students and faculty from California State University at Long Beach, O’Arwisters sculptural hybrids embodied both danger and seduction in this bold ‘coming of age’ series.

Bitten (2022), takes off and embellishes upon Cheesecake and Flowered Thorns, 2020-21. With Flowered Thorns, O’Arwisters exaggerates sharp ceramic shards to align with the biblical reference of Adam and Eve, the symbol of original sin derived from sexual pleasure. Bitten continues with soft and sharp elements as he laces implements of punishment and threat throughout the sculpture: black zip ties, rope and clamps. O’Arwisters recontextualizes danger as an erotic entanglement of sexual fantasy and play, placing the sculpture on a new metaphoric plane.

Schism promises to be just as provocative and breathtaking!

Ramekon O’Arwisters: SCHISM

Patricia Sweetow Gallery

American artist Danielle Orchard is known for her luminous, stylized paintings of female figures that draw from the language of analytic Cubism and modernist art. Working from her studio in Massachusetts, Orchard explores the complexities of the female experience through fragmented forms, intimate gestures, and richly layered compositions. Her paintings challenge traditional portrayals of women in art history, offering a perspective shaped by her own life as both a woman and a mother.

For her upcoming solo exhibition at Perrotin Los Angeles, Orchard presents a new body of work centered on the depictions of motherhood. These paintings continue her dialogue on the female nude—not as an object of observation, but as an active subject of narrative, memory, and interiority. With a refined yet expressive approach to color and form, Orchard creates spaces where the psychological and painterly realms merge, offering nuanced portraits of intimacy, exhaustion, quiet resilience, and transformation. 

Image credit: Danielle Orchard, Boats in a Storm, 2025. Oil on linen, 168 x 219 cm | 66 x 86 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin. Photographer: Guillaume Ziccarelli. 

Danielle Orchard

Perrotin

Baert Gallery is pleased to announce Metabolizing Machine, Ai Makita's first solo exhibition exhibition with the gallery.

Ai Makita is a Tokyo-based painter whose work explores the border of artificial and natural, drawing inspiration from the relationships between human technology and the sublime. Makita received an MFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2013, as well as an MFA from Tokyo Gakugei University in 2010.

Recent exhibitions include Form and Matter, Tokyo 8min, Tokyo (2025); A Thousand Ways to Objecthood, Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art, Taichung (2025); The Coming World 2025–2075, GYRE Omotesando, Tokyo (2025); 人工的神々 – Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God, PARCEL, Tokyo (2024); Prosthetic Gods, The Something Machine, New York (2024); and Interspecies, Mitsukoshi Contemporary, Tokyo (2024). She has participated in residencies at The Fores Project (London), ART CAKE (New York), Residency Unlimited (New York), and the Varda Artist Residency (Sausalito). Makita’s works are included in the collections of the Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts, Chiba Bank, and the Takahashi Collection.

Image: 

Ai Makita: Metabolizing Machine

Baert Gallery

In recent decades, technological advances have supercharged surveillance. Online, personal data are automatically collected and analyzed on a mass scale. Algorithms watch, listen, track, and identify people, complementing and sometimes replacing human eyes and ears. Powerful combinations of surveillance software and hardware, such as surveillance cameras outfitted with real-time facial recognition, are conquering public spaces. These technologies are often misleadingly presented as though they were pure innovation and have no history.

The exhibition Counter/Surveillance traces the historical roots of such surveillance devices and methods, and the Cold War dynamics that shaped and spread them. It explores the precursors of current biometric surveillance in Cold War manuals for police, border guards and spies; in forensic portraiture; and in the little-known early history of computer facial recognition, revealing links between forensics, science, art, and popular culture. It also traces similarities between Cold War surveillance devices and methods used in East and West, from miniature cameras and listening devices to forensic composite kits. These not only point to a shared technical history, but are also indicative of exchange, inspiration, and imitation across the Iron Curtain. Technical exchanges with allies in the Global South ensured further international dissemination.

Then as now, the skills and tools of secret services were sometimes mirrored by the creativity of their targets. Throughout history, dissidents, activists, and artists have found ways to “watch the watchers” in order to evade, criticize, and expose them – sometimes using the very same surveillance methods and tools deployed against them, from covert photography to profiling and encryption. Others repurposed surveillance tools to make art or created artworks that correct and reclaim the distorted narratives that emerge from personal surveillance files. By showing the rich history of such acts of countersurveillance, the exhibition calls attention to the many ways in which people have reclaimed agency, it celebrates human ingenuity vis-à-vis state control, and it shows how art can be an inspirational signpost in the process. 

The exhibition includes artwork from Sadie Barnette, Paolo Cirio, Asya Dodina & Slava Polishchuk, Graham Fink, Ken Gonzales-Day, Damara Inglês, Yazan Khalili, Verena Kyselka, Gerhard Lang, Francisco Masó, Decebal Scriba, Liat Segal, Nedko Solakov, Xu Bing, Yang Jian, and Mail Art from the Mail Art Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt, Berlin. 

Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency was curated by Wende Chief Curator Joes Segal and science historian Marieke Drost.

The exhibition is made possible with support from Getty through its PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative. The Wende Museum is participating in the PST ART Climate Impact Program.

Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency

The Wende Museum

House of CoHit is pleased to announce Underlying Current, a group exhibition curated by Eli Consilvio, opening on September 19, 2025. The exhibition explores the unseen forces shaping our collective mood in a moment of rapid change and contradiction, bringing together four contemporary artists whose practices engage with turbulence, resilience, and renewal.

Underlying Current traces today’s emotional landscape, balancing unease with quieter pulses of hope. Rather than documenting events, the exhibition considers the invisible energies that shape perception and experience: the push and pull between fragmentation and connection, fear and optimism. Through drawing, painting, photography, and ceramics, the show invites viewers to move between parallel streams of thought and feeling, asking: Which currents carry you forward, and which do you resist?

Gregory Siff’s work blends abstraction, pop iconography, and handwritten text, creating layered visual diaries alive with urgency. His work embodies humor, memory, and coded meaning, offering a visceral entry point to the exhibition.
Samuel Bayer brings a cinematic sensibility to his mixed-media works. Scarred, layered, and emotionally charged, his works carry both intimacy and unease, anchoring the exhibition’s darker spectrum with a raw weight of personal experience.

Richard Nam’s ceramic sculptures and paintings combine playful pop references with humor and nostalgia. Infused with joy and absurdity, his works diffuse tension and spark delight, offering moments of release within the show.
Negar Zonoobi’s layered paintings and works on paper weave together personal histories and collective memories. Her practice reﬂects both intimate narrative and broader cultural experience, adding a deeply resonant voice to the exhibition’s exploration of unseen forces.
Together, these artists embody the dualities at the core of Underlying Current, guiding visitors through an installation that shifts from intensity to stillness, turbulence to reﬂection.
About the Curator

Eli Consilvio is an independent curator based in Los Angeles. With a background in contemporary art programming and cultural strategy, he has organized exhibitions that highlight both emerging and established voices across painting, photography, performance, and installation. His curatorial approach centers on intimacy, storytelling, and creating exhibitions that resonate on both personal and communal levels. Underlying Current continues this trajectory, offering a space for reﬂection while aﬃrming his commitment to shaping exhibitions that feel urgent, accessible, and deeply human.

About House of CoHit
House of CoHit is a contemporary gallery rooted in Los Angeles and committed to expanding the deﬁnition of what a gallery can be. The space champions cross-disciplinary collaboration, spotlighting artists, designers, performers, and cultural thinkers whose voices are vital to the city’s creative fabric. Rejecting the traditional gallery model, House of CoHit embraces a responsive and inclusive approach—supporting bold, relevant practices that reﬂect the diversity and complexity of Los Angeles. More than an exhibition space, it is a catalyst for dialogue, visibility, and momentum, working closely with artists to ensure their work is both seen and collected.

Image: Negar Zonoobi "Fleeting lightness" 

Underlying Current

House of CoHit

Gallery Luisotti is delighted to announce Arlene Mejorado’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. The show is a culmination of years of cultural, geographical, and familial investigations by Mejorado of the place she has called home since her birth and the various archives left behind by her relatives. The exhibition is primarily comprised of nine framed photographs, with elements of sculptural installation. The story told by the exhibition is as much a personal statement as it is an uncovering of a specific relationship to the landscapes and cityscapes of Los Angeles.

The show opens with a diptych setting the stage for the works to come. The fabric backdrop exists as static and moving—between showing the city and a shadow of the artist.

Image caption: Arlene Mejorado, Picture of My Tia Maribel Held on My Back, 2025

Arlene Mejorado: Here is the land in me / Aquí está  la tierra en mí

Gallery Luisotti

Ross Caliendo's landscapes depict a surrealistic world via vibrant, textured paintings. He uses a rich color palette and thick impasto, using a stick—rather than a brush—to apply oil paints atop acrylic backgrounds. The artist sources his reference images from friends and their Instagram accounts. Caliendo isn’t interested in the initial photographs or the specific sites they depict, but in how those images allow him to experiment with the principles of painting.  

Nasim Hantehzadeh's paintings draw on both personal and collective memory, with particular focus on liminal states of being. Raised in Iran until early adulthood, they later returned to the US, where they were born. Their diasporic experience created a sense of cultural duality that is visible in the hybrid forms of their painting and drawing. They bring together freewheeling figurative elements in compositions that allude to Paleolithic cave paintings, indigenous art from Mexico, and ancient Persian rug patterns.
 
LaRissa Roger's multimedia work looks at the intersections of culture, identity, and embedded forms of colonization expressed through perception and psyche. Combining aspects of memory, history, and personal experience, she expands and complicates the capaciousness of blackness by challenging the politics of hybridity, authenticity, and visibility as an Afro-Asian woman. By using materials that reference colonial histories, Rogers re-contextualizes them to grapple with the entanglements of belonging and fugitivity, beauty and horror, life and death, opacity and transparency, care and resistance.

Image: Ross Caliendo, California, 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas with artist painted frame, 82 3/4 x 119 in (210.3 x 302.3 cm)

Ross Caliendo: Peace Fellow | Nasim Hantehzadeh: Tickles, Dance, and Goosebump Blooms | LaRissa Roger: Dust of the Streets

Night Gallery South

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present The Morning After The Fire Swept Through, a solo exhibition by Ashwini Bhat. This body of work continues Bhat’s ongoing, field-based project Assembling California, a deeply personal and ecological mapping of presence, transformation, and ritual.

The exhibition features new bronze and ceramic sculptures, photographs, sound, and text, created in close relationship with the land Bhat inhabits in Northern California. Since relocating from Southern India to the Bay Area during the 2017 Tubbs Fire, the artist has embedded her practice within the rhythms of the land and the aftershocks of catastrophe.“It was a violent introduction,” Bhat reflects,“but the resilience of both the community and the redwoods inspired me to stay. I grounded my life and my practice here literally in the bay mud.”

Living off-grid in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain with her partner, poet Forrest Gander, Bhat has spent recent years restoring their property to native habitat and observing the slow, often imperceptible cycles of nature. Her work has evolved in tandem with this attentiveness, moving inward: “The project became an inward search, a quiet animistic calibration of self with land, body with form.”

Bhat returned to simple, grounding rituals. “Each morning I walked with my cats, then entered the studio and rolled a small ball of clay in my palms—just to feel something,” she says. These gestures became 108 beads forming a spiral rosary in clay and bronze, joined by breast-shaped seed pods, cast Rudraksha, and calla lilies.

The calla lily emerges as a central motif throughout the exhibition. Though non-native, the plant thrives on Bhat’s land, dying back in the fall only to return each spring. “Dormancy,” she writes, “is not absence. It is self-containment. A sovereignty.” Her sculptures trace the calla’s life cycle—bud, bloom, burst, as
metaphors for sensuality, decay, and regeneration. Many rise from imagined wildfire, using scorched earth as their origin. Others recall artistic and spiritual lineages, from Georgia O’Keeffe to the 12th-century mystic Akka Mahadevi, who walked naked into the forest to find the sacred in trees.

Each medium of clay, wax, and bronze act as a translation of form and migration. “These are portraits of my body, but also the land’s. Of women, mythic and real. Of my mother, who tucks a flower into her hair each morning.”
The Morning After The Fire Swept Through is not a declaration but a gesture. A listening. A divination. A bell rung gently. As Bhat writes, “What I offer here is not a solution, but an attention. A reaching.

Ashwini Bhat: The Morning After The Fire Swept Through

Shoshana Wayne Gallery

Herman Cherry, the Abstract Expressionist painter (1909-1992) began his long and multi-faceted art career on the West Coast, first studying with the Synchromist painter and cutting-edge Modernist Stanton MacDonald-Wright at the Art Students League of Los Angeles in 1926 and by 1930 migrating for a spell to New York and studying under the famed American Scene Regionalist and raconteur Thomas Hart Benton.

“It wasn’t that he taught me color,” recalled Cherry in describing the Snychromist’s influence, “he made me see color.”
 
A Los Angeles critic at the time wrote that the League under MacDonald-Wright’s watch “would become the locus of Modernist thought, teaching and inspiration in Southern California.”

It all rubbed off on the young artist in ways that helped forge his singular vision, acting as a kind of springboard from Synchromism’s interplay of color and music to new waters.

“I think when an artist gets older,” recounted Cherry to Harlan Phillips in an Archives of American Art oral history interview in 1965 when Cherry was 56 years old, “he finds his technique. He finds his way, and he more or less sticks by it…because that seems to work best for what he has to say. All he wants from a medium is for it not to get in the way.”

By that prime time of his life, Cherry had traveled extensively across Europe, living and painting for a time in Paris where  the likes of Joan Mitchell and Paul Jenkins partied and drank hard whiskey at Cherry’s studio, explored and photographed the prehistoric paintings  in the Lascaux caves with the filmmaker Alain Resnais and chalked up any number of experiences that any dyed-in-the-wool bohemian would be proud of.

Around the time of that first oral history interview, Cherry already had significant exposure in the New York art scene, included in the historic Ninth Street show in May 1951 organized by artist members of The Club-- the downtown hot bed for New York School era artist debate and frolicking-- and the impresario and future super star dealer Leo Castelli, exhibited his series of Black Paintings at Eleanor Ward’s path breaking Stable Gallery in 1955 and soloed twice (in 1959 and 1960) at the Elaine Poindexter Gallery. 

Along that hard scrabble way, Cherry gained membership in The Club, brought in by Philip Guston who Cherry first knew from his Los Angeles days in the 1930’s when he ran the Stanley Rose Gallery in Hollywood, a tiny off-shoot of the eponymous bookstore that was a storied Bohemian refuge and where Cherry gave the likes of Guston and Reuben Kadish their first solo exhibitions.

Those kind of stellar credentials would seemingly have made Cherry a kind of downtown art star but several things got in the way, most notably the emergence and take-over by the Pop Art movement in the early 1960’s that overnight snuffed out and replaced the brawny reign of the Ab-Ex era. 

“But I think the artist,” recounted Cherry in tart reaction to that new movement, “has lost his role as a revolutionary in a certain sense, a malcontent, which was partly his role. It wasn’t a malcontent because he was a cynic or unhappy or anything like that. It’s just that he refused to accept anything until he discovered it for himself. And when he discovered it usually was quite different than anybody else’s discovery …and those values are all down the drain now.”

Coming in part on the hardened heels of his Black Paintings series, the new work collided in shocking contrast to its past as say the leap from van Gogh’s Potato Eaters to his rapturous landscapes in Arles and Auvers.

Those breathless leaps and bounds of his practice come into clearer focus in Cherry’s own words: “I always seem to be in a landscape I was never in before so I have to rediscover the way to get to it, that place I vaguely see. I have to make my own roads and sometimes I go the wrong way. But I’m always willing to take the chance.”

The viewer can take in these few morsels of Cherry’s biography and use it as a lens to better see and take in his stunning abstract work, teeming in glowing color and graphic precision that were executed in the early-to-mid 1960’s and now still fresh and potent six decades from new.

“Bandaide” from 1963, in oil and charcoal on canvas, two chunky biomorphic-like forms in milk chocolate shades and held together, just barely, by a slim rectangle of powder blue ‘tape’ and hence the title.

The sly humor also speaks to the challenge of uniting the floating forms—otherwise, they’d drift apart like wandering cumulous clouds.

On the far left of the 50 by 40 inch canvas, a lozenge of gold/orange color grips the edge and possibly attempts to escape the confines of the canvas.

(Franz Kline recalled Cherry, “…was the first to make  me fully aware that the image in the picture could go past the canvas and thus destroy the picture’s edge.”) 

“Untitled (Anthropomorphic Forms)” also from 1963 is denser and more brightly hued in sunglass needing shades of blood red, orange citrus and forest green, all seemingly snugly packed in kissing close forms.

Two of the just off-center elements bring to mind Brancusi’s “Kiss” but evoke more of a full-on snog.

“Bulging Forms” in oil and charcoal on canvas and scaled at 60 by 50 inches exude a Venus of Willendorf bulk though sharply and shapely delineated by curving black lines that form fit around the competing shapes.

Though completely abstract, the composition breathes out a kind of pulsating sensuality. 

“Jazz” from 1963 and similarly scaled, projects a very different beat with its striking contrast of a tightly packed chromatic quartet of yellow forms placed against a darker hued background and deftly separated by conforming black lines.

The influence of jazz as an art form played a big part in Cherry’s mature work, no doubt colored by his own discovery of the jazz haven Five Spot off the Bowery that became a haunt for Cherry and his downtown artist friends.

Cherry’s work from the first half of this ’60’s decade brims with more evocative titles such as “Secret Chamber” that speak to the artist’s sophisticated literacy and poet-like intelligence.

Writing on the occasion of Cherry’s 1959 exhibition at the Poindexter Gallery, the artist’s close friend, the avant-garde composer and choreographer Lucia Dlugoszewski deftly captured Cherry’s practice at that time and beyond: “…it hangs awkward and delicate with the brutality of the clean and clear with the transparent ambiguity of immediacy.”

A fresh look at the vibrancy of these color-charged paintings and powerhouse black and white collages on coated paper in pencil and India ink, place his work and reputation on a higher plane than where he stubbornly and steadily traveled.

-0- 

Judd Tully
New York
2025

Image: Herman Cherry, Bent Arrow, 1965, Oil/Charcoal on Canvas, 60" H x 50"

Herman Cherry: A Different Kind of Abstraction

Sebastian Gladstone

The work of Mire Lee fuses volatile substances with traditional sculptural materials and industrial remnants to produce haunting objects and installations. Equally beautiful and grotesque, her sinuous compositions twist into positions that evoke bodies, entrails and skeletal forms and touch upon notions of psychological tension and trauma. Following upon Lee’s major installation at Tate’s Turbine Hall last year, Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Mire Lee: Faces

Sprüth Magers

Robert Pruitt: Corpus

Vielmetter Los Angeles

Polly Borland: Blobs and Bod

Wilding Cran Gallery

Image: Rando Aso, Intimate Space, 2025. Ceramic 14 1/8 x 23 5/8 x 16 7/8 in, 36 x 60 x 43 cm

Rando Aso

Nonaka-Hill | Highland

“Water is important to people who do not have it,” Joan Didion wrote, “and the same is true of control.” She was talking about California, and the impressive machinery–“the aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains”–that has, since the early 20th Century, made American life as we know it to be plausible in the West. Those means of control are the subjects of Luke Rogers’ new paintings, a body of work that traverses the distance between dams in Oroville and Antelope Valley, the Jawbone siphon in the Sierras, the Los Angeles aqueduct, and the sink in his studio. Both plumbing and what Didion calls “plumbing on a grand scale”: the system of pipes, big and small, that deliver drinking water to his glass. 

Taken from her 1977 essay, “Holy Water,” Coughing in the pipes is how Didion describes the sounds of a well that has gone dry. In the world of Rogers’ paintings, the phrase evokes alarm sounding beneath the image, a sense that something is going terribly wrong. Even before we see the title of Flood, what appears to be an overflowing sink also conveys, in the paisley of light swirling across a black pool, a greater landscape of disaster. Rogers moved to LA nearly a decade ago, and has made it his chosen home. Questioning the utilities and structures that make the city habitable is one of the ways he has naturalized himself to the place. That experience lends the intimation of disaster in his work an unassuming quality, a truthfulness. They are not ‘about’ global warming, they simply live with droughts and wildfires and earthquakes, as everyone in California does. His work is essayistic in this way, a vision of ‘normal life’ during ecological catastrophe, rooted in a personal conflict between painted material, his eye, and his hand. 

His formal and conceptual approach is one of minimizing the difference between things, giving ostensibly disparate subjects - clothes tumbling in a dryer, a pot of boiling water, dams, shipping containers - equal weight. In Oroville, sheets of water descending the dam are as sturdy as the manmade systems that harness and apportion them. The network of pipes he finds at home are as substantial as the 200 meter pipe that carries water from the eastern part of the state to the city. Meanwhile, in Concrete. Water. Dirt, vaporous sprays dissolve into the air with the same soft power as light sunburning concrete, or gleaming on copper pipes in Plumbing, or concentrating into a globe of heat in the center of a metal gate in Harcourt. To render sameness between things we might believe to be contradictory is part of the ecological awareness Rogers brings to looking, never quite differentiating the part from the whole, the object from the environment, the sink from the dam.

Each artist endures successive educations, formal or informal, that complement, revise, affirm, or erase their earlier lessons, earlier selves. In LA, Rogers has learned a way to synthesize these different selves without entirely resolving them on the surface of the painting. This is part of what makes them so compelling. He shows us the conflict between his hand’s unconcealed markmaking and an omniscient vision averse to the hand. His color searches to describe experience, yielding unexpected feeling from his source materials: his palette, which tends away from major-chord primaries toward the more unsettled minor chord, can tilt greens and yellows sickly or lurid, and bridges the cheery brightness of California with the unnatural and surreal darkness of wildfire smoke. Then there is the question of control itself. Rogers seemingly finishes and unfinishes the painting at once, giving tangible, weighty shape to his images and then letting them, at times, fall back into the mere physicality of paint, moments where brushstrokes, drips, and thin washes betray the illusion of the painting’s image. In this deference to the possibilities of paint, as well as in his subject matter, Rogers recalls Courbet’s series of grotto paintings from the 1860’s, The Source of the Loue, which are as much about the dynamism of the eye - how paint can capture the experience of looking - as they are descriptions of a ramshackle mill and adjoining infrastructure, rough-hewn rocks, trees, and water.

In Rogers’ approach, we find a dialectic between what a painting is and what it could be. Each thinking-doing that is the act of painting becomes a proposition to be contradicted by another mark, another decision, a conflict that might lead us toward some truer vision of the world. That this process is, to an extent, undisguised, allows irresolution to be constituent of his subjects. In the seeing-feeling-thinking that is beholding his paintings, we are prompted to wonder: what is the world? What could it be? 

Almost a decade before “Holy Water,” in 1970, Didion gave an account of her tour of the Hoover Dam. The Bureau of Reclamation guide clarifies the image she has been trying to fix in her mind: of the dam transmitting power and releasing water long after humans are gone, “a dynamo finally free of man.” In the peopleless world of Rogers’ paintings we find such an image. All that is left of the force of human activity are its consequences.

Henry Chapman
August 2025

Image: Under the Sink, 2025 Oil on canvas 52 x 48 inches

Luke Rogers: coughing in the pipes

Moskowitz Bayse

Trampoline: Annie Bielski marks the artist's debut in LA and will feature new paintings, works on paper, and painted silk lampshades by the NY-based Bielski.

Annie Bielski: Trampoline

North Loop West

Musichead Gallery is proud to present Oasis: Be Here Now, a special exhibition celebrating the return of Oasis and their long-awaited Live ’25 Tour. Coinciding with the band’s highly anticipated Rose Bowl shows, the exhibition features rare, early photographs by legendary British music photographer Kevin Cummins, captured just before the release of Oasis’ landmark debut album, Definitely Maybe.

The exhibition officially opens Thursday, September 4, 2025, at Musichead Gallery in Los Angeles and runs through October 28. To mark the occasion, the gallery will host a series of special events:

Calendar of Events:

Thursday, September 4, 10 AM–6 PM:

The exhibition opens to the public at 10 AM, inviting fans to explore the early visual identity of a band on the brink of cultural takeover. Reserve your tickets via Eventbrite.

Thursday, September 4, 7–8 PM: Artist Talk and Book Signing with Kevin Cummins
Hear Cummins discuss his work and new photo book Oasis: The Masterplan, followed by a book signing. Tickets required. Pre-order the book to attend.

Friday, September 5, 7–9 PM: Opening Reception
Celebrate the launch of Oasis: Be Here Now with music, refreshments, and a chance to meet fellow fans. Free with RSVP via Eventbrite. RSVP to Opening Reception.

Saturday, September 6, 11 AM–5 PM: Special Rose Bowl Weekend Gallery Hours
View the exhibition and get excited for the Rose Bowl concert with fellow fans before the show. Reserve your tickets via Eventbrite.

Sunday, September 7, 11 AM–5 PM: Special Rose Bowl Weekend Gallery Hours
Soak up the Oasis energy and revisit where it all began ahead of the second Rose Bowl performance. Reserve your tickets via Eventbrite.

As NME’s chief photographer throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Cummins helped define the visual identity of seminal Manchester bands including Joy Division and The Smiths. His work with Oasis came at a pivotal time, not only documenting their rise but also helping craft their public image.

Cummins will be at Musichead Gallery to open the exhibition and host an artist talk and signing for his newly released photo book Oasis: The Masterplan. The publication offers an inside look at the band’s early image-making process, capturing the raw spirit of Oasis at the edge of superstardom.

Photographs from the exhibition, signed copies of Oasis: The Masterplan, the limited-edition exhibition poster (Oasis: Be Here Now, only 500 printed), and select vinyl will be available for purchase.

The exhibition’s title, Be Here Now, evokes more than a nod to the band’s third album. It is an invitation for fans to reflect on the roots of Oasis’ enduring cultural impact. As the group reunites for the first time in over 15 years, this exhibition offers an opportunity to revisit the creative spark that made it all possible.

Kevin Cummins: Oasis Be Here Now

Musichead Gallery

Babst Gallery is pleased to present "RIDE", a solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Vanessa Conte. This is Conte’s first solo exhibition since her solo museum exhibition, "BREAKNECK" at Kunstbunker: Forum fur zeitgenoessische Kunst in Nuremberg in 2023.
 
In this new body of work, Conte eschews geographic and scenic markers, allowing the canvas-space to remain fully open and immersive, governed by its own gravitational laws and spatial logic. Contained within this space are life-sized female figures in modern clothing that surge through and move beyond the physical and painted frames of the canvas, creating moments of tension and release.
 
Conte’s densely layered painting surfaces behave like seismographic recordings, registering the kinetic energy of kicking, falling, and floating figures. The space around the figures reacts with bold calligraphic strokes and luminous ripples of color that reverberate to the edges of the canvas. At times, the boundaries of the body are completely dissolved, subsumed in the color-field of the surface. Other times, Conte strips the figure down to its skeletal core. This push-pull between gestural line and painterly form is as much a conversation about painting as it is the figures’ narrative trajectory.
 
Also included in the exhibition are Conte’s works on paper, where the physical qualities of the graphite and oil-stick draw attention to Conte's active drawing process. In these works, the paper’s bare surface can be seen even when the figures—either fully rendered or defined by a single line—grapple with the vibrant, muscular marks of oil stick.

Vanessa Conte studied painting and art history at New York University, where she graduated with a BS in Art History and Studio Art in 1999 and later moved to Los Angeles to study at UCLA, where she received her MFA in 2004. She began her exhibition career in Germany, where she has since exhibited at Kunstmuseum Baden, Solingen; Kunst im Tunnel at Kunsthalle Duesseldorf; Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg; Halle fur Kunst, Luneberg; Sammlung Philara, Schmela Haus, and Van Horn Gallery, Duesseldorf. After moving back to Los Angeles in 2009, Conte earned her MA in Linguistics at Cal State University, Long Beach and subsequently continued to regularly exhibit in Europe. In 2023, Conte had a large-scale solo exhibition at Kunstbunker: Forum fur zeitgenoessische Kunst, Nuremberg. Conte has also exhibited at venues in Los Angeles, such as California State University, Dominguez Hills, the Torrance Art Museum, the Chan Gallery at Pomona College, Commonwealth and Council, Human Resources, and Night Gallery.

Vanessa Conte: RIDE

Babst Gallery 

de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of mixed-media wall works and sculpture by Matthew Kirk in Los Angeles. In Kirk’s first solo exhibition with de boer, the New York-based artist presents large and medium-scale works evoking art historical antecedents from Henri Matisse, Christopher Wool, and Joe Fedderson as well as traditional pictography, abstraction, and the cultural memory of his upbringing. The exhibition’s title, In a Time of Darkness, This Is Wonderful News, captures the spiritual optimism embedded in Kirk’s process that leads with joy, clarity, and connection.

Honoring both a contemporary aesthetic and the cultural imagery of his childhood, having been born in Arizona, and relocating to the Wisconsin shores of Lake Michigan, Kirk balances vivid formalism with personal symbolism. Recurring silhouettes of feathers, trees, moons, and limbs appear and reappear across the panels, embedded in shifting environments of sky blues, flat blacks, and fluorescent pinks. The surfaces evoke graffiti, pattern languages, and craft traditions that dwell in the space between recognition and mystery, between mark and meaning. Kirk channels a history of image making grounded in landscape, spirit, and signal, updating it through urban materials, vibrant color, and compositional fragmentation.

In a Time of Darkness, This Is Wonderful News, Kirk scales up these dialogues, and his arrangements become compositions that hum with rhythm and coded energy. They feel simultaneously ancient and now, analog and digital, sacred and irreverent. The title becomes more than poetic, it suggests the function of the work itself, a flare of identity and meaning, sent up amidst the static and urgency of contemporary life.

Image: Matthew Kirk "A Day of Stillness," 2025

Matthew Kirk  In A Time of Darkness, This is Wonderful News

De Boer Gallery

Poppy Jones: Sans Soleil

Overduin & Co.

Image: Joshua Petker The Gentleman, 2025 (Detail)

Joshua Petker: Hyacinth Canyon | Fabian Treiber: I Take The Whole Damn Place With Me

Anat Ebgi | Mid-Wilshire

A Monumental Retrospective Celebrating Four Decades of Intergalactic Chaos
Curated by Bob Gorman & Roger Gastman

BEYOND THE STREETS proudly announces LET THERE BE GWAR, a sprawling retrospective showcasing the 40-year legacy of the legendary art collective and shock rock band, GWAR. Opening September 13 and running through November 2, 2025, this exhibition is a free-to-attend deep dive into the outrageous universe that GWAR has spent four decades constructing through music, performance, and subversive visual art.

Born from a group of punk musicians and visual artists working out of an abandoned dairy building in Richmond, Virginia, GWAR emerged in 1984 as a hybrid of heavy metal theater and absurdist sci-fi mythology. Hunter Jackson, a VCU student crafting costumes for his film Scumdogs of the Universe, joined forces with musician Dave Brockie—and what began as a one-off stunt evolved into a full-blown, blood-splattered empire of art, performance and chaos.

LET THERE BE GWAR chronicles this intergalactic saga through the most comprehensive assembly of GWAR artifacts ever seen. The exhibition features: Handcrafted costumes, instruments, weaponry, and stage props, video installations, monumental set pieces and spew tanks, a monster toilet, artwork, and rare ephemera. Every square inch of the gallery transformed into the GWAR universe

With characters like Oderus Urungus, Techno-Destructo, BälSäc The Jaws of Death, Beefcake The Mighty, Slymenstra Hymen, Jizmak Da Gusha, Berserker Blothar, and even a crack-addicted T-Rex named Gor-Gor, just to name a few… the band has not only carved out its niche but obliterated expectations for what a musical performance can be.

“For 40 years GWAR have mounted a misanthropic critique of American culture dressed up as shock rock. This collection of artifacts offers a sense of the unique punk inspired anti-art aesthetics of underground comics, science fiction fandom, role-playing games, and satirical splatter flick nerdishness at the heart of the band.” Says GWAR.

GWAR's legacy includes two Grammy nominations, appearances on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, NPR's Tiny Desk Concert, TEDx, Beavis and Butt-Head, video games, comic books, and even a GWAR-themed bar in their hometown. With millions of concert tickets sold and dozens of self-produced films and documentaries, their cultural footprint extends far beyond music.

“This isn’t just a music exhibition,” says curator Roger Gastman. “GWAR represents one of the most successful long-term art collectives in American culture, and their influence on both underground and mainstream entertainment is undeniable. They came to destroy... and ended up creating something eternal.”

LET THERE BE GWAR is a celebration of DIY creativity, artistic rebellion, and collaborative world-building. Whether you’re a lifelong Bohab (GWAR fan) or simply curious about a band that makes splattering the audience with blood (is it fake?), tasteless jokes, decapitations of world leaders and pop stars and aliens’ part of their live set, this is the definitive gateway into the wild, weird, and wonderful world of GWAR.

Along with the exhibition BEYOND THE STREETS and GWAR will be releasing a co- branded collection. Including a new expanded version of the sold out 400-page book – LET THERE BE GWAR that comes with a limited edition 7” record, a collection book of GWARS classic Mind Control Monthly newsletter, apparel, limited edition prints and much more.

ABOUT BEYOND THE STREETS
Founded by Roger Gastman, BEYOND THE STREETS is an art-driven cultural and educational movement celebrating mark-making. Celebrated for its immersive exhibitions and boundary-pushing programming globally across Los Angeles, New York, London, and Shanghai, BEYOND THE STREETS believes in art as resistance, as storytelling, and as a powerful force for connection. BEYOND THE STREETS pushes the very idea of art beyond any preconceived boundary and are THE DEFINITIVE VOICE OF SUBCULTURE.

ABOUT ROGER GASTMAN
Equal parts historian and disruptor Roger Gastman is a curator, urban anthropologist, collector and filmmaker. He has dedicated his life to educating, entertaining and solidifying the cultural importance of graffiti as a significant contemporary art form.

Gastman served as a producer of the 2010 Academy Award-nominated film Exit Through the Gift Shop, and the co-curator of the first and largest graffiti exhibition, Art in the Streets, held in 2011 at the MoCA in Los Angeles. He has published magazines and produced over 100 books. He is the founder of BEYOND THE STREETS, the premiere exhibition of graffiti, street art and beyond. Rolling Like Thunder, his latest documentary which highlights the Freight Train Graffiti movement, is currently airing on Showtime.

ABOUT BOB GORMAN
Bob Gorman has been a member of GWAR since 1988, serving many roles including being Bone Snapper in the current live shows. He also serves as the band archivist and author of the GWAR monograph LET THERE BE GWAR.

MEDIA CONTACT
High-resolution images and interview opportunities available upon request. Amanda Bessette: amanda@beyondthestreets.com

LET THERE BE GWAR

Beyond The Streets

DON'T LOOK Projects is pleased to present Thank You Universe, May I Delight You, a solo exhibition by Tess Jenkins, whose work offers an ecstatic celebration of the chaotic, confusing, and paradoxical nature of the human experience. Through a joyfully excessive and texturally rich practice, Jenkins presents paintings that are the remnants of an intuitive and improvised process. Her work explores the profound and discrepant experience of living as souls condensed into temporary human forms.

Thank You Universe, May I Delight You invites viewers to find joy in the messy, contradictory, and beautiful reality we've been given.

Tess Jenkins: Thank You Universe, May I Delight You

DON’T LOOK Projects

Jeff Soto

KP Projects

Roberts Projects is pleased to present What Does Webster’s Say About Soul?, an exhibition by Esmaa Mohamoud and the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. Featuring a suite of new sculptures that build upon Mohamoud’s rich visual lexicon, this exhibition considers the loss of innocence experienced by Black youth and how these experiences become imprinted on the body, mind, spirit and soul.

Known for her conceptual practice that incorporates familiar objects and symbols from Black visual culture—including football equipment, peacock chairs, lowriders and butterflies—Mohamoud reimagines her source materials by transforming their scale and layering cultural references to recontextualize their interpreted meaning. The exhibition’s title comes from Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken word poem Comment #1 (1970), which earnestly describes the violence of racial and social inequality in America during that time. The deep significance of soul, and the harm that can be inflicted on it, is what Mohamoud’s sculptures examine from the perspective of Black children who must navigate a world that robs them of their innocence.

In combination with lighting effects, mirrored reflections and the gradual decay of organic matter throughout the exhibition, Mohamoud’s figurative sculptures poetically evoke legacies of generational trauma while also allowing for moments of beauty and introspection. In I Can’t Forget You (My Whole World Turns Blue), a teenage boy in a hooded sweatshirt stands with his arms outstretched, alluding to both images of tragic gun violence and heavenly ascension. Mohamoud explores the confrontation with death and its psychological impact in …NUMB, in which a young boy sits cross-legged while holding a lifeless pigeon. The work’s profound depiction of a child’s first contemplation of mortality is heightened through the power of the viewer’s interpretation.

This duality of meaning and implication runs throughout the exhibition and is expressed through Mohamoud’s choice of materials. Her use of shea butter assumes a novel form through the addition of charred animal bones, which create the black pigmentation seen in many of the figures. The shea butter sculptures create a strong contrast with works made of polished granite such as The Souls of Black Folk, a recreation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ renowned book which was published in 1903. The reflective surface and tangible weight of the material create a gravitational force in the gallery that pulls viewers into a singular world of Mohamoud’s creation, one that centers the importance of both collective experience and personal reflection.

About the Artist

Esmaa Mohamoud (b. 1992 London, ON, Canada; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is a conceptual artist working at the intersection of sculpture and installation. Her sculptures explore the politics of race and identity through references to and recontextualizing of objects from popular culture. Making use of materials that carry both personal and historical significance, Mohamoud creates symbolically rich and metaphorically complex works that consider the legacy of racial violence and the possibilities for future renewal.

Solo exhibitions include What Does Webster’s Say About Soul?, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (2025); Complex Dreams, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI (2024); Let Them Consume Me In The Light, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL (2023); It Cannot Always Be Night, Arsenal New York, NY (2022) and Esmaa Mohamoud: To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat (2019-2022), Museum London, Ontario, Canada, travelled to Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ottawa Art Gallery, Winnipeg  Art Gallery and Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada. Group exhibitions include Sports Culture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2024), travelling to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR and Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Resistance Training, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum (2023) and In These Truths, Albright-Knox, Buffalo, NY (2022).

Mohamoud’s work is featured in numerous public collections, including the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec, Canada; Museum London, Ontario; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Manitoba, Canada, among others.

For additional information regarding Esmaa Mohamoud, please visit robertsprojectsla.com or contact Mary Skarbek, Senior Director at mary@robertsprojectsla.com or 323-549-0223.

_____

Roberts Projects is pleased to present Fables, Guineps and the Sweetness of Unknowing, an exhibition of recent works on paper by Suchitra Mattai and her second solo presentation with the gallery. Created with Mattai’s singular approach to collage that blends different traditions of craft and cultural references, the exhibition adopts the literary form of the fable as its organizing structure to consider the enduring resonance of moral tales today.

Drawing on her Indo-Caribbean heritage, Mattai’s multidisciplinary practice employs techniques such as embroidery, needlepoint and beading to create vivid and formally complex works that straddle the line between two- and three-dimensionality. In previous bodies of work, Mattai has made use of representational aesthetics from Indian miniature paintings while also referencing the subject and form of European pastoral landscapes and portraiture. Building upon this creative exploration, these works on paper also examine the history of ornamentation by sourcing examples from 19th-century academic volumes that represent the colonial practice of essentializing diverse cultures and traditions through a set of pictorial conventions. The process of collage allows Mattai to remain connected to the specific histories embedded within her materials—including pieces of embroidery, book pages and fragments of sari tapestries—while also attempting to unify them with new and inventive compositions.

The use of narrative conventions has been central to Mattai’s process of reenvisioning her ancestral legacy, seeing them as repositories of historic meaning that can be reinterpreted and reimagined for the present. Mattai has looked to the history of fables—such as Aesop’s Fables and The Panchatantra in particular—for a conceptual framework to explore how society continues to make use of the character types and morally weighted meanings so often found in these stories. While still evoking the landscapes and architecture of European painting, Mattai’s collages interrupt those spaces and the formal implications they carry. This process of merging representational strategies which invokes a specific tradition of craft and artistry reflects Mattai’s broader project of considering how cultures have influenced one another through periods of migration.


Fables, Guineps and the Sweetness of Unknowing highlights the ongoing significance of collage for Mattai, with each work presenting a rich layering of ideas, textures and materials which convey the infinite curiosity at the heart of her practice. The form of collage itself and its consistent fragmentation of space into different zones of style and technique reflects the artist’s effort to create a visual language—a new ‘future space’—where the regional traditions of her ancestry can be preserved as they contribute to a contemporary consciousness and moral reckoning.

About the Artist

Suchitra Mattai (b. 1973, Georgetown, Guyana; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist who explores how memory, myth and oral traditions can be harnessed to unravel colonial and patriarchal narratives. Drawing on her Indo-Caribbean roots, Mattai combines richly colored textiles, found objects, beads and more to create two- and three-dimensional works that offer a reimagined vision of the past that centers the perspectives of women and people of color, especially those from South Asia.

Recent solo exhibitions include Suchitra Mattai: The Fall, Joslyn Museum, Omaha, NE; Suchitra Mattai: with abundance we meet, Brooks Museum, Memphis, TN; Suchitra Mattai: she walked in reverse and found their songs, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, travelled to Seattle Asian Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Suchitra Mattai: Myth from Matter, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Suchitra Mattai: Bodies and Souls, Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL and Suchitra Mattai: We Are Nomads, We Are Dreamers, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY. Select group exhibitions include the 36th São Paulo Biennial, 2025; Back To the Earth, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Wired for Wonder, Kidspace Children’s Museum, Pasadena, CA; Allegedly the worst is behind us, Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; The Appearance: Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean, Americas Society, New York, NY; A Garden of Promise and Dissent, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora,1990s-Today, MCA Chicago, Chicago, IL, travelled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA.

Mattai’s works are represented in the permanent collections of Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Denver Art Museum, CO; Kiran Nader Museum of Art, Delhi, India; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Tampa Museum of Art, FL; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI and Wake Forest University, NC, among others.

For additional information regarding Suchitra Mattai, please visit robertsprojectsla.com or contact Mary Skarbek, Senior Director at mary@robertsprojectsla.com or 323-549-0223.

Image: Esmaa Mohamoud 

Esmaa Mohamoud: What Does Webster’s Say About Soul? | Suchitra Mattai: Fables, Guineps, and the Sweetness of Unknowing

Roberts Projects

Ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” emerged as a defining artistic genre during Japan’s Edo period (1603–1868), an era of significant cultural transformation. Initially centered on the vibrant urban life of licensed pleasure quarters—depicting kabuki theaters, teahouses, and brothels—ukiyo-e gradually expanded in subject matter in response to shifting social interests, increased domestic travel, government censorship, and contact with Western art. Themes came to include nature, landscapes, poetry, literature, and folklore.

Rising Sun, Falling Rain traces the evolution of ukiyo-e printmaking and the later shin-hanga movement, featuring over eighty prints from the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts by renowned artists such as Katsukawa Shunshō, Utagawa Toyokuni, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, and Kawase Hasui. These works exemplify the technical mastery and aesthetic refinement of Japanese woodblock printing, which profoundly shaped global perceptions of Japan’s cultural legacy and fostered enduring engagement with its historical narratives.

Rising Sun, Falling Rain: Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts

 Eric Nash

AR OPEN
Augmented Reality Exhibition feat. "Diddle My Skittle" (LA) by German artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan

Venice Public Art Walls, Venice, CA
Free admission

AR Open invites you to immerse yourself in the world of augmented reality artworks blending into the scenic views of Venice Beach – all with your own cell phone. AR OPEN features artworks by Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Jeewi Lee, Pixelated Realities, Dennis Rudolph, Benedikt Terwiel, Jonas Wendelin, and others.

At the heart of the exhibition stands the piece DIDDLE MY SKITTLE (LA), commissioned by the Goethe-Institut. This AR sculpture delves into themes of gender, power, and alternative world orders, transporting the world-famous Hollywood sign to Venice Beach. It serves as the backdrop for this unique, interactive, site-specific art experience. Jordan's work confronts traditional male dominance, featuring a flying manta ray-like creature that symbolizes female empowerment and resistance against patriarchal structures. Initially inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the piece has evolved to address broader issues of gender inequity and the male gaze in cities such as Moscow, Berlin, Hollywood, and beyond.

FOR DETAILED INFO, PARTICIPATING ARTISTS AND A TUTORIAL HOW TO VIEW THE AR OPEN PLEASE VISIT: https://bit.ly/ARopenLA

PLEASE NOTE: 
The site-specific installation is only accesible on location at the Venice Public Art Walls
This is a web-based project viewed via AR-enabled smartphone or tablet (2017 or newer) using mobile data.

Attendees must bring their own smartphone or tablet.

No apps are needed to access the installation.
Upon arrival at the Venice Public Art Walls, open www.ar-open.com on your compatible smartphone or tablet.

The map and the works and further instructions on how to view all installations can only be found on the mobile version of the project: www.ar-open.com

All artworks are part of Augmented Studies, an AR program exploring the potential of augmented reality for contemporary art. Based in Berlin and operating internationally, Augmented Studies has produced numerous public art projects and has been running the exhibition series AR OPEN in Al-Zawraa Park in Baghdad since 2021 and in Berlin's Tiergarten since 2022. 


AR OPEN LA

AR Open @ Venice Public Art Walls

Augmented Reality Exhibition
AR OPEN
Sun, 02/25/2024 -Wed, 12/31/2025
Venice Public Art Walls

Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Diddle My Skittle (LA), 2024, AR Installation, Venice Beach
feat. Diddle My Skittle (LA) by German artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan

AR Open invites you to immerse yourself in the world of augmented reality artworks blending into the scenic views of Venice Beach – all with your own cell phone. AR OPEN features artworks by Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Jeewi Lee, Pixelated Realities, Dennis Rudolph, Benedikt Terwiel, Jonas Wendelin, and others.

At the heart of the exhibition stands the piece DIDDLE MY SKITTLE (LA), commissioned by the Goethe-Institut LA. This AR sculpture delves into themes of gender, power, and alternative world orders, transporting the world-famous Hollywood sign to Venice Beach. It serves as the backdrop for this unique, interactive, site-specific art experience. Jordan's work confronts traditional male dominance, featuring a flying manta ray-like creature that symbolizes female empowerment and resistance against patriarchal structures. Initially inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the piece has evolved to address broader issues of gender inequity and the male gaze in cities such as Moscow, Berlin, Hollywood, and beyond.

PLEASE NOTE: 
The site-specific installation is only accesible on location at the Venice Public Art Walls
This is a web-based project viewed via AR-enabled smartphone or tablet (2017 or newer) using mobile data.
Attendees must bring their own smartphone or tablet.
No apps are needed to access the installation.
Upon arrival at the Venice Public Art Walls, open www.ar-open.com on your compatible smartphone or tablet
The map and the works and further instructions on how to view all installations can only be found on the mobile version of the project: www.ar-open.com

All artworks are part of Augmented Studies, an AR program exploring the potential of augmented reality for contemporary art. Based in Berlin and operating internationally, Augmented Studies has produced numerous public art projects and has been running the exhibition series AR OPEN in Al-Zawraa Park in Baghdad since 2021 and in Berlin's Tiergarten since 2022. 

AR OPEN Augmented Reality Exhibition

For her first Los Angeles solo exhibition in two decades, British artist Anj Smith will debut new works that explore the connections between art, mysticism, female agency and philosophy. Rich in detail, color and texture, Smith’s new paintings collapse strict definitions of portraiture, landscape and still life while allowing elements of each to coexist. 

Amid ecological devastation, her wildly feral settings, ambiguous nudes, and exotic flora and fauna urge the possibility of a contemporary transcendence. Smith draws upon sources as disparate as the myth of Narcissus, the writings of philosopher Simone Weil and short stories by medieval poet Marie de France, disrupting expectation within a present-day cosmos all her own.

Anj Smith: The Sequin-Strewn Night

Taking inspiration from art historical genres, ranging from French rococo and Italian baroque to abstract expression, British artist Flora Yukhnovich’s paintings explore materiality and process through cascading forms that shift between representation and abstraction. For her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Yukhnovich will present her latest body of work, a series of canvases inspired by Bacchanalia. 

Addressing the excesses of consumerism and popular culture, her lush, swirling brushstrokes evoke the dynamism and intense corporeality of both ancient and contemporary hedonism. A catalogue featuring an extensive selection of illustrations by Yukhnovich, along with a text by curator Eleanor Nairne, will accompany the exhibition. 

‘Bacchanalia’ at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles will coincide with ‘Flora Yukhnovich's Four Seasons’ at The Frick Collection in New York (3 September 2025 – 9 March 2026), a site-specific mural in response to François Boucher’s Four Seasons series.

Flora Yukhnovich: Bacchanalia

Made in L.A. 2025 is the seventh iteration of the Hammer’s signature biennial exhibition that showcases artists practicing throughout the greater Los Angeles area. The 28 participants in the exhibition present work not only made in the city but also grounded in its complex and unfolding terrain. Neither myth nor monolith, Los Angeles is many things to many people, and its dissonance is perhaps its most distinguishing feature. The works presented in this year’s biennial include film, painting, theater, choreography, photography, sculpture, sound, and video. Attitude draws them together: Each engages with this city in ways alternately literal, formal, material, and metaphoric. Conceived or made in Los Angeles, they are of this city and nowhere else.

The Artists
David Alekhuogie 	
Pat O’Neill
Black House Radio / Michael Donte	
Will Rawls
Greg Breda	
Brian Rochefort
Widline Cadet	
Amanda Ross-Ho
Carl Cheng	
Gabriela Ruiz 
Alonzo Davis	
Alake Shilling 
Ali Eyal	
Nicole-Antonia Spagnola
Hood Century / Jerald Cooper	
Mike Stoltz 
Hanna Hur	
Peter Tomka
John Knight	
Freddy Villalobos
Kristy Luck	
Kelly Wall
Patrick Martinez	
Leilah Weinraub
Beaux Mendes	
Bruce Yonemoto
Na Mira	 
New Theater Hollywood / Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel	
 
Made in L.A. 2025 is organized by Essence Harden, independent curator, and Paulina Pobocha, Chair and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago and former Hammer Museum Robert Soros Senior Curator, with Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow, curatorial assistant.

The exhibition is made possible by the Mohn Family Foundation and members of the Hammer Circle. Major support is provided by The Billy and Audrey L. Wilder Foundation, Miky Lee, and Mark Sandelson. Generous support is provided by The Fran and Ray Stark Foundation; Bill Hair; Susan Genco and Mitch Kamin; J.P. Morgan; Dori Peterman Mostov and Charles Mostov; and Orange Barrel Media. Additional support is provided by The Buddy Taub Foundation, Dennis A. Roach and Stephanie Roach, Directors; McCrea Foundation; Sherry and Joel McKuin; the Pasadena Art Alliance; The Rhonda S. Zinner Foundation and Jonathan Segal; and Michael Silver.

Made in L.A. 2025

This fall, The Broad presents Robert Therrien: This is a Story, the largest museum exhibition of the late artist’s widely-adored work to date, on view November 22, 2025 to April 5, 2026. Therrien’s meditations on scale and material are a deeply influential and well-known approach within the field of contemporary sculpture, significant to The Broad’s own identity as a museum, and long admired by visitors of all ages. The installation will showcase Therrien’s personal vocabulary of images and symbols—from enormous tables, chairs, and dishes, to intimate drawings of snowmen, birds, and chapels—as they become a language of continuous creation and transformation for the artist over time. Featuring more than 120 works spanning five decades, the exhibition offers unprecedented access to the artist’s exploration of scale, memory, and perception, just miles from the downtown Los Angeles home and studio space he operated out of for close to thirty years beginning in 1990. Many of the works on view, including those created just before Therrien’s untimely death in 2019, have never been featured in museum exhibitions and will offer new avenues of understanding his practice.

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

Robert Therrien: This is a Story

Between 1957 and 1963, the artist’s father built a modernist house in a small coastal village in Cuba. The time period spanned the Cuban Revolution, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the United States embargo against Cuba, a political context that in various ways reflected the story of the house. This house, in which Martínez Celaya’s family waited for exile, now serves as an official wedding venue, carrying with it the contradictions and the scars of the Communist Revolution and its aftermath. 

The installation The Sextant is a smaller-scale recreation of the house, which will serve as an embodiment of the cultural, architectural, and emotional responses to the Cold War in the Caribbean. The aspect of recreation, re-staging, and artifice of the installation is critically meaningful. The model of the house shines a light on the question of authenticity as well as the gap between what is reality and what is a dream, and reveals tensions that are present in all our lives but have a particularly profound relevance to the experience of those who lived in communist countries during the Cold War. 

Moreover, the installation explores concepts such as the interiority of memory, the self refracted through the experience of home, and the mysterious, painful, and radiant world of childhood. It also investigates the relationship between lived experience and memory, the way a work of art negotiates the distance between witness and participant, and selfhood that is, at least in part, otherness. 

Finally, the work explores the intersection of Utopia with everyday concerns, as well as the question how individuals and societies negotiate or absorb the failure of dreams. The installation is both a primary experience and an allegory for the evolution of our hopes and illusions. 

Enrique Martínez Celaya is an artist, author, and former physicist whose work has been exhibited and collected by major institutions worldwide. He is Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California, and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. His work is held in 58 public collections internationally. Martínez Celaya is the author of nine books, including two volumes of his Collected Writings and Interviews, 2010-2017 and 1990-2010. His work has been the subject of 14 monographic publications. He is the founder of Whale & Star, an evolving idea of social interaction and responsibility, whose imprint is internationally recognized for its books in art, poetry, art practice, and critical theory. 

Image: Enrique Martínez Celaya, The Sextant, 2023, preliminary installation sketch. Courtesy of the artist

Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Sextant

ICE Out of LA brings together artists in solidarity against injustice. 

Proceeds will support families impacted by inhumane immigration raids.

Painting by: José Flores
Paisanos, 2025
Acrylic on wood
32 × 48 in
@serol7

ICE Out of LA

John Doe Gallery

featuring Gabriel Cohen, Calvin Miceli-Nelson, and Pedro Alejandro Verdin

Every person has to have a code. It is what allows people to unlock communication and connect with one another. We create our nests, our bubbles, our safe spaces. But nothing is actually safe, is it?

The world is on fire. Do you feel inflamed, too? I sure as shit do.

History is lived by all people. It’s written by those with voices. It’s edited and revised by those with power.

We live and we die and give in to time. At night, we convince ourselves that when we awake all will be fine. But borders are closing as quickly as our neighbors’ minds.

- Keith J. Varadi, July 2025

PERSONAL POLITICKS

Gene's Dispensary

Timeshare is pleased to present Learning Curve, a three-person exhibition including work by Alexa Almany, Karl Haendel, and Pamela Ramos. The term “learning curve” was introduced in the early 20th century by T.P. Wright, illustrating progress as a steady rise in skill over time. Simultaneously, Jean Piaget was writing about learning as a series of punctuated shifts rather than a smooth ascent. Children don’t simply accumulate knowledge along a clean trajectory - they alternate between assimilation and accommodation. These phases often include regressions and contradictions, where previous understandings break down before new ones emerge. This discontinuous, recursive structure complicates the understanding of a “learning curve” as steady or incremental progress. Instead, development appears as a jagged, looping path.


Alexa Almany’s Love, alexa is a series of wall drawings composed of the artist’s childhood diary entries between 2000 and 2003. In these works, Almany meticulously mimics her early penmanship, staying true to the immature dexterity in the original entries while scaling them up to span from floor-to-ceiling. The text itself is simultaneously sincere and humorous - reflecting on awkward childhood encounters with adult rules and categories.


Karl Haendel’s drawing, A Sunday Afternoon on the Eastside of Los Angeles (2023), reinterprets Seurat’s historic pointillist composition A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86). Haendel meticulously renders the landscape of the composition in graphite, while his daughter populates the scene with figures using ink. Her improvisational marks disrupt the compositional precision of Haendel’s dutiful interpretation of the original, infusing the work with a sense of spontaneity, curiosity, and intergenerational collaboration.


Pamela Ramos includes a group of small-scale sculptures built from repurposed toys between 2018 and 2025. The head of Bart Simpson, Spider-Man, Mickey and Minnie Mouse are attached to fuzzy limbs and placed on plastic tricycles with battery packs and wire wrapped around their bodies. While their scale and material evoke toys of early childhood, their assembly produces an uncanniness. When activated, the sculptures chaotically cycle around the room or in circles until their batteries die, playfully placing themselves within the installation.

LEARNING CURVE

Timeshare

Cecilia Z. Miguez: A Thousand Years in One Night
July 10 – September 6, 2025

Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Cecilia Z. Miguez: A Thousand Years in One Night. On the evening of January 7, 2025, the deadly Eaton Fire ignited and rapidly spread, ravaging the foothill communities of the San Gabriel Mountains. Amongst the thousands of structures destroyed were Cecilia Z. Miguez’s Altadena home and studio, where scores of her bronze, wood, and found object sculptures were damaged or lost entirely to the blaze. This exhibition showcases what survived, albeit transformed by the fire: bronze torsos and limbs, glass cups and marbles, and the artist herself. Miguez has reworked and reimagined her salvaged sculptures, which proudly bear the scars of the inferno on their beautiful, imperfect forms. They tell a powerful story of resilience, reincarnation, and the healing power of creative work. 

Miguez’s figures are no less captivating for their blistered patinas and melted and missing parts. Instead, they are ever more enthralling for these lacunas as they defiantly string a bow with arms clipped at the shoulder, sport the liquefied remains of limbs as a glimmering headdress, and offer a ripe pomegranate from the void of an empty chest. Their ghostlike gestures are inscribed in air, whispering headless secrets and linking absent elbows in companionable silence. Miguez does not disguise, but elevates their transmutations, adorning the twisted and scarred metal with gold leaf and delicate glass microbeads. She embraces the weld marks of transplanted heads and hands as vital emblems of her figures’ strength and perseverance.

“Nature,” in Miguez’s words, “got to be my partner for a night,” as the fire accelerated the decay that all materials must endure with time. Objects that were once raw ores refined by heat, pressure, and the hands of the artist into bronze sculptures of great beauty were subjected again to these immense forces, enticed back toward their naturally chaotic states. With Miguez’s intervention, they are forged anew once more, rising from the ashes of their ordeal to live on with renewed energy and purpose.

Works by Cecilia Z. Miguez are included in the permanent collections of the Long Beach Museum of Art; the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Montevideo, Uruguay; and el Ministerio Transporte (MTOP), Montevideo, Uruguay, as well as in numerous private collections.

Louis Stern Fine Arts is the exclusive representative of Cecilia Z. Miguez.

Cecilia Z. Miguez: A Thousand Years in One Night

Louis Stern Fine Arts

Fade to West
Paul Jasmin & Todd Weaver

July 10 through September 6, 2025
Exhibition Reception: Thursday, July 10th 
Exhibition Walk-through with Todd Weaver: Saturday, July 12th 

Fade to West is a photographic exhibition that brings together the visionary work of Paul Jasmin and Todd Weaver—two artists who have made tangible the fleetingness of Los Angeles’s beauty and sunsets.

Though neither artist was born in California, both were drawn to a city as radiant and restless as them. Now deeply rooted in its culture, they embody its essence—capturing not only its landscapes and people, but its elusive atmosphere. The exhibition pairs Jasmin’s evocative portraits and cinematic vignettes with Weaver’s ethereal scenes of nature, offering a dual portrait of a place defined by light, youth, and transience.

Jasmin helped define the visual language of Los Angeles, staging moments of youth and intimacy against the soft glow of the city’s ambient warmth. His photographs are imbued with compassion and quiet curiosity, revealing a version of the city that feels personal, suspended, and tenderly observed.

Weaver, meanwhile, explores the edges of California—its windswept dunes, sunlit surf, and shifting horizons. Through analog processes and in-camera experimentation, his work transforms familiar vistas into one-of-a-kind impressions—each frame a meditation on movement, time, and atmosphere.
Together, Jasmin and Weaver render California not as an ideal or illusion, but as a living, breathing place—one that glows brightest in moments that never last.

Fade to West was developed in collaboration with Paul Jasmin prior to his death, and we are honored to present it as intended—celebrating his artistry and his enduring love for the city of Los Angeles.

Paul Jasmin (1935–2025) was an American photographer, illustrator, and educator whose work distilled a precise and evocative vision of beauty. Born in Helena, Montana, Jasmin began his career as a painter and actor before turning to photography in the 1970s, encouraged by his friend Bruce Weber. Drawn to themes of youth, innocence, and sexuality, Jasmin created dreamlike tableaux that transport viewers into a world of seductive beauty and languid allure. Set largely in and around Los Angeles, his images explored the tension between aspiration and reality, reflecting a lifelong fascination with glamour, the American dream, and fleeting moments of becoming. His editorial and commercial work appeared in Vogue, GQ, W, Interview, V Man, Teen Vogue, Vogue Hommes, and in campaigns for APC, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks, Nordstrom, and others. He published three monographs: Hollywood Cowboy (2002), Lost Angeles (2004), and California Dreaming (2010, Steidl/7L).

Jasmin was also a dedicated teacher at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, where he mentored generations of emerging artists with a quiet rigor and an unshakable belief in the power of imagination. Known affectionately as “Jazz” by his friends and students, he brought the same sensitivity and elegance to his teaching as he did to his images. Jasmin passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles on May 24, 2025, at the age of 90. 

Todd Weaver (b. 1970) is an American photographer recognized for his expressive use of color and intimate portraits of artists and musicians. His work is distinguished by a bold and exploratory approach to color, which brings emotional depth and vibrancy to his images. Weaver began his career under the mentorship of established photographers including William Claxton, Ellen von Unwerth, Herb Ritts, Steven Klein, and Randee St. Nicholas. Developing his own distinctive style, he has created portraits of figures such as André 3000, Lita Albuquerque, Paz Lenchantin, Devendra Banhart, and Father John Misty, and collaborated with brands including Nike, Veuve Clicquot, and Cadillac. His first monograph, 36 (2018), features portraits taken with a vintage half-frame camera, emphasizing spontaneity and intimate moments.

More recently, Weaver has focused on Southern California’s surf culture, creating atmospheric, analog portraits that explore the relationship between surfer and wave. Combining experimental film techniques with a strong compositional sensibility, Weaver has participated in several group exhibitions and has been selected multiple times for the American Photography Annual. His work has also been included in two recent publications by Taschen.


Fade to West: Paul Jasmin & Todd Weaver

Fahey/Klein Gallery

What does it mean to be a body shaped by screens?

The Museum of Human Touch is a speculative fiction project by Agustin Rosa in an imagined future where intimacy with our devices has deepened into full codependence. In this future, screens have replaced direct experience and our connections, to our bodies and others, have thinned into abstraction.

The Museum acts as an archive, presenting unearthed machine-body interfaces from this near-far future. These artifacts are designed to suggest the eroticism and ambivalence of interface: the libidinal pleasure of caressing a screen, the seduction of a device that always responds. But also the violence of that contact, the way interface surveils, flattens and remakes our bodies and identities.

The interfaces are crafted by remixing the debris of digital consumerism. Mashed packaging materials and spray foam serve as new skin that envelops obsolete gadgets, medical tubing and digitally printed body parts. This deliberate material manipulation glitch-disrupts the relentless logic of global commerce by transforming the mundane refuse of consumer culture into vibrant prosthetics that provoke new bodily imaginaries.

Informed by glitch feminism and transhuman theory, the work resists fixed categories. It practices an embodiment that is fluid, prosthetic and mutant. As digital oligarchies reprogram what it means to be human, the Museum offers new anarchitectures of selfhood: messy, layered and sticky. The body not as a fixed product but as an always becoming.


Agustin Rosa: The Museum Of Human Touch

Persons Unknown

In his first solo museum exhibition, Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Awol Erizku (b. 1988, Gondar, Ethiopia) focuses on pioneering American Muslim human rights activist El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) as a subject of personal inspiration and complex cultural significance. Awol Erizku: X is composed of new and recent works, including photographs, sculptures, works on paper, a film, and an installation of historic letters and archival materials. Together, they collectively convey the artist’s view of Malcolm X as a metaphorical prism of faith, masculinity, and transformation, and a key figure connecting the United States and Africa. Erizku posits his singular Afrocentric aesthetic, something he refers to as “Afro-esotericism,” as a means to link ancient mythology, diasporic tradition, and contemporary culture and to explore the expanded contours of Black spirituality, self-definition, and image making.

Awol Erizku: X is organized by SCAD Museum of Art and curated by Daniel S. Palmer, Chief Curator, SCAD. The CAAM presentation is organized by Cameron Shaw, Executive Director, CAAM.

Awol Erizku: X

California African American Museum (CAAM)

Public art installation at the River Station Roundhouse turntable

LACE is proud to present Carlo Maghirang’s ANITO, a public art installation at LA State Historic Park, on view starting next weekend, from August 23–September 7, 2025.

Inspired by the same idol he encountered as a child during a near-death experience with his grandfather, this collection of figures and the parts that comprise them tells a playful narrative on identity-creation. ANITO is a continuation of a series that remaps his connections to his country through the self, linking memories to spirituality and myth.

Activations of this work include two public programs at the park:
Saturday, August 23, 1PM, performance by Jobel Medina
Saturday, August 30, 1PM, performance by Anna Luisa Petrisko

Light refreshments will be provided. We are also happy to host our friends at White Rabbit Truck, who will be offering Filipino fusion bites during ANITO’s activations.

Support for this program is provided by Karen Hillenburg, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, California Arts Council, and the National Performance Network.

Carlo Maghirang: ANITO

Los Angeles State Historic Park

Since 2009, Durden and Ray has been curating shows with artists in LA and from around the globe. For the first time in its history, the respected artist/curatorial collective invited new artists  to show in their gallery via an open call. 

After accepting applications for SPOTLIGHT24, the Durden and Ray member committee reviewed the applications and selected two artists to host concurrent solo exhibitions in the gallery. We are thrilled to announce the two winning artists are Shannon Freshwater and Nadine Schelbert. Join us on August 16th from 7-10pm at Durden and Ray gallery to experience a presentation of work by both artists. 

Shannon Freshwater grew up in Las Vegas and was raised by Mormons, Southern Baptists, and hippie artists. She has an aesthetic interest in the façade, both physical and psychological and is attracted to the ruptures within normalcy and a tension between objects, characters, spaces, and timelines. High and low, old and new, found and crafted equally intertwine in her work without hierarchies. Shannon uses AI image generators to visualize ideas and scenarios that are then replicated and made physical as sculpture, costume, video, and installation. While the uncanny dread, confusion, and horror found in AI imagery is reflected in her work, the technology remains a specter in the background, unseen in the final product. The function of repetition, obsessive attention to detail, rhythm, and pattern transforms anxieties and anger into a meditative act for Shannon but not necessarily for the viewer. Her work has been described as confrontational, unnerving, absurd and often psychologically dark. She has a BFA in Illustration from Art Center College of Design and an MFA in sculpture from Cal State University Long Beach. She teaches at Cal State University Northridge and at Art Center College of Design.


Nadine Schelbert is a Swiss artist based in Los Angeles. She holds degrees from Lausanne Hotel School in Switzerland and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and is currently pursuing an MFA in ceramics and sculpture at California State University, Long Beach. Born in Berlin and raised in Zurich and Geneva, Nadine has lived and worked in Japan, Hong Kong, and Ecuador before settling in Los Angeles. Her international background and early training in art, combined with professional experience in hotel management and design, continue to inform her fine art practice. Nadine’s work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in Los Angeles and internationally.
