Paintings, Drawings & Tapestries by Lucien Dante Lazar

Sculptural Works by Cybele Rowe, Patrick Nickell, Ann Weber, & Cheyann Washington

 Wonzimer Gallery presents “Mother and Child: A Portal,” a new exhibition opening July 11th. Inspired by a meditation on Raphael’s Tempi Madonna, artist/curator Lucien Dante Lazar discovered the "portal" in the space between Mary and Jesus – an opening into humanity and divinity.

This exhibition explores the Mother and Child archetype as both tender human connection and exalted spiritual reality, inviting viewers to consider this timeless bond as an entry point into new ways of sensing and perceiving.

“Working with the Mother and Child opens the door to an expansive creative field,” says Lazar. “I’ve discovered an unfolding stream of imagery, understanding, and insight—into myself and into the wider scope of reality.”

“Mother and Child: A Portal” features new paintings, drawings and tapestries by Lucien Dante Lazar, guiding the exhibition’s vision. These are complemented by distinct sculptural works from each of the other distinguished artists: Cybele Rowe, Patrick Nickell, Ann Weber, and Cheyann Washington. Each artist brings their unique material and aesthetic approach to the theme, creating a rich dialogue that deepens the exhibition’s exploration of this enduring relationship.

This exhibition aims to reveal the Mother and Child archetype as a gateway for our times, offering the possibility of reimagining culture itself.



Mother and Child: A Portal

Wonzimer

David Zwirner is pleased to announce Empress of Night, an exhibition of new and recent work by Marcel Dzama, on view at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles.

Dzama’s recent works are fantastical visions of a lush and at-times ﬂooded world where anthropomorphized animals and dancing ﬁgures are set against dense junglescapes and expansive skies. References to Francisco Goya and surrealist poet Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)—one of Spain's most important and celebrated writers—are evident throughout these compositions, suggesting parallels between the war-torn and uncertain eras in which those artists lived and the political, social, and ecological upheavals of our own. Some works make direct reference to the rise of authoritarianism in the world today, while others use allegory as a critical means of commenting on growing threats to democracy and human rights. Dzama made these works late at night—as is his nocturnal working style—and many are set against dark skies that contain celestial visions of stars and moons. Evoking a sense of joy and wonder, these nightscapes suggest hope and possibility even during times of unrest.

A centerpiece of the exhibition is Dzama’s 2023 ﬁlm To live on the Moon (For Lorca), which was originally commissioned by Performa for that year’s iteration of the recurring performance festival in New York. The ﬁlm opens with a theatrical recreation of the 1936 assassination of Lorca by the Nationalist forces of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. In 1929, Lorca authored Trip to the Moon, a screenplay composed of seventy-three narrative vignettes ﬁlled with love, violence, and mysticism. Though it was never produced as a ﬁlm, Lorca’s screenplay is viewed as a surrealist masterpiece. Dzama’s ﬁlm, an homage to Lorca, mixes dreamy ﬁgures and imagery—including depictions of the moon that recall Georges Méliès’s seminal early ﬁlm A Trip to the Moon (1902)—with themes of life, death, violence, and resurrection.

For this presentation, the ﬁlm is projected at a large scale within the main gallery, where a viewing area—draped in midnight blue fabric and furnished with bean bag chairs—invites visitors to linger and engage with the work at their own pace. Select drawings adorn the walls, dramatically illuminated to echo the ﬁlm’s lyrical and hypnotic tone.

Among the new drawings are several large-format works, some of which are ﬁlled to the brim with animal life, which serve as a reminder of the toll being taken on the planet and its effects on all
life-forms. These include The sleep of reason produces monsters (2025), which makes direct reference to Goya’s famous 1799 print of the same title, and Blue water blues (2024), an absorbing, nearly monochromatic triptych that shows an underwater scene rife with marine life. I never came from your rib you came from my vagina (2025), another large-format triptych, presents a jubilant display of womanhood, which reads like a celebratory rejoinder to some of the more noxious strains of hypermasculinity that are increasingly prevalent in society today.

Dzama’s presentation in Los Angeles—his ﬁfteenth solo exhibition with David Zwirner since joining the gallery in 1998—marks a notable return for the artist. His ﬁrst solo exhibition ever was held at Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, in 1997, and his last solo show in the city was more than twenty years ago. The exhibition also coincides with Marcel Dzama: Dancing with the Moon, a major survey of the artist’s work at the Pera Museum, Istanbul, on view through August 17, 2025. Dzama will also debut a new zine that will be released concurrently with the exhibition.

Since rising to prominence in the late 1990s, Marcel Dzama (b. 1974) has developed an immediately recognizable visual language that investigates human action and motivation, as well as the blurred relationship between the real and the subconscious. Drawing equally from folk vernacular as from art-historical and contemporary inﬂuences, Dzama’s work visualizes a universe of childhood fantasies and otherworldly fairy tales.

Dzama was born in Winnipeg, Canada, where he received his BFA in 1997 from the University of Manitoba. Since 1998, his work has been represented by David Zwirner. Dzama has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad. His recent solo exhibitions include Marcel Dzama: Ghosts of Canoe Lake, which was on view at McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, in 2023 and traveled to Contemporary Calgary, Alberta, and the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg. In 2022, a solo presentation of the artist’s work, Marcel Dzama: Viviendo en el limbo y soñando con el paraíso was on view at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ), Mexico. Marcel Dzama: An End to the End Times was on view in 2021 at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Georgia. Also in 2021, the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland, presented an exhibition of the artist’s work entitled Marcel Dzama: Tonight We Dance.

In 2021, MTA Arts & Design unveiled a commissioned mosaic by the artist, No Less Than Everything Comes Together, that is permanently on view at the Bedford Avenue Station in Brooklyn, New York.

In 2016, the artist created the costume and stage design for New York City Ballet’s The Most Incredible Thing, a performance based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. Coinciding with the performance, Dzama also created an installation in the Promenade of the David H. Koch Theater as part of the New York City Ballet Art Series, titled The tension around which history is built.

Works by the artist are held in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; and Vancouver Art Gallery. Dzama lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Image: Marcel Dzama, The sleep of reason produces monsters, 2025
© Marcel Dzama Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner


Marcel Dzama: Empress of Night

David Zwirner | 606 N Western

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to present POSITIONER, a solo exhibition of new works by Paul Mpagi Sepuya. The exhibition marks Sepuya’s third exhibition with the gallery and will be on view from May 31 through July 19, 2025.

Positioner (noun) is defined as “one that positions” and as “a mechanical device for placing or holding a body in position during an operation.” In Sepuya’s photographs, there are numerous “positioners” or “support structures” that anchor his compositions in the studio space: his own body, tripods, props such as benches or stools, mirrors, curtains, and stainless steel gazing balls. These “positioners” are stabilizing forces within Sepuya’s photographic space as the viewer orients themselves within the space of the image. The gazing balls reflect an outward image of the scene behind the camera or the space behind the image, both revealing and underscoring the studio space and the process of image-making.

Sepuya utilizes the gazing ball, a centuries-old object turned industrialized prop, to interject into the process of perception and representation. In Conversation with Gazing Ball (_DSF8251), two figures with gazes cast downwards flank the gazing ball situated in the center of the image which reveals the photographer’s studio in a fisheye lens perspective. The black curtain backdrop dramatizes the centrifugal force of the gazing ball’s refracted space and focuses the viewer’s attention on the object and figures surrounding it. Sepuya thus centralizes the idea of the photographer and the positioner occupying space within the frame of the image, rather than being positioned as a controlling force outside of the image.

Referencing the visual ploy of reflection used to illustrate sculptural space in pictures, Sepuya also refers to 19th-century photographic customs of positioning a mirror at an angle to reveal the figure or object in the background. This reference point extends Sepuya’s examination of the image and image-making space and critiques the relationship between the model and photographer. Sepuya creates a symbiotic relationship between the photographer and the photographed, positioning his camera and himself strictly in relation to his friends, focusing on seeing themselves as opposed to being seen by the viewer. This subtle shift in power dynamics creates a space for Queer bodies’ self-actualization and aims to make bodily autonomy visible in the process of image-making.

The impulse to make the mechanics of the photographic process visible is also explored in Sepuya’s dye-sublimation prints. These works, the majority of which were taken at night with white light, are negative images. The negative image creates a forensic quality, making evident the physical marks (like smudges on the mirror) and heightening them. These imprints suggest a taxonomy of the photographic process and unveil the often unseen elements of the pictorial space.

The works in POSITIONER are burgeoned from years of experimentation in the studio and collaboration with friends. Focusing on smaller scaled works, Sepuya’s photographs are an intimate, yet powerful portrait of his community, threading numerous themes into a singular and compelling aesthetic.

About the artist

Paul Mpagi Sepuya was born in 1982 in San Bernardino, California, and lives and works in Los Angeles. He received an MFA in photography at UCLA in 2016. From 2000 – 2014, Sepuya lived and worked in New York City, receiving a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004.

Sepuya’s work is in the permanent collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; MOCA Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Guggenheim Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the International Center for Photography, New York; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Carnegie Museum; among others. Solo museum exhibitions include Exposure, at Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, England; Double Enclosure at Fotomuseum Amsterdam (2018); Paul Mpagi Sepuya, a survey of work from 2006-2018 at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Recent museum exhibitions also include the Whitney Biennial 2019; Being: New Photography 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art (2018); Trigger at the New Museum, New York (2018); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Texas; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Sepuya will also have a solo show with Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) this fall. Aperture published a major monograph on Sepuya’s work in 2024, Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Dark Room A–Z with texts by Sepuya and Gökcan Demirkazik.

Sepuya’s work has been covered and published in ​ARTFORUM​, ​Aperture, ​The ​New Yorker, The ​New York Times,​ ​Art Review​, ​Frieze​, ​Art in America,​ ​Monocle,​ ​Osmos,​ The ​Nation​, among others. He was a recipient of the 2019 Rauschenberg Residency. He is the Associate Professor in Media Arts at the University of California San Diego and has taught at CalArts and Bard MFA.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: POSITIONER

Vielmetter Los Angeles

Luke Agada, Jackie Amézquita, Miguel Arzabe, Saif Azzuz, Jackie Castillo, Lenz Geerk, Aaron Glasson, Koyoltzintli, Suchitra Mattai, Evan Nesbit, Wendy Red Star and Noah Schneiderman.

Roberts Projects is pleased to present Back To the Earth, a group exhibition of artists whose work emerges from a symbiotic relationship with their environment. Featuring painting, drawing, sculpture and installation alongside a rotating selection of video works, this exhibition considers how artists use organic materials, found objects and elemental forces to engage in an ongoing dialogue with the natural world.

For centuries, human civilization has harnessed the Earth’s natural resources to develop tools, architecture and technology; over time, the environment reclaims and alters these man-made creations through erosion, weathering and other natural phenomena. This cycle of degradation and regeneration transforms the landscape into a new entity, allowing artists to re-envision corroded forms by imbuing them with aesthetic value and philosophical meaning.

Each work in the exhibition offers a unique perspective on this dynamic exchange. Artists that model sustainable methods of production glean their surroundings for materials to create assemblage works with profound epistemic resonance. Paintings and sculptures incorporating handmade dyes, found objects and raw pigments evoke lines, shapes and textures that are found in nature while transcending boundaries between abstraction and surrealism. Other works reflect on how these environmental forces are not merely observed, but internalized—how the land becomes an extension of the self, even as we continue to shape and inhabit it. Environmental phenomena such as sedimentation and seed dispersal parallel Indigenous histories of migration, displacement and assimilation, which are echoed in works made from soil and other organic matter.

As explained by critic and novelist John Berger in his book Ways of Seeing (1972), "Art does not exist in isolation; it grows, transforms and decays alongside the landscapes that nurture it." Back To the Earth fosters a deeper understanding around these ineffable forces of nature, and the multitude of ways that artists merge with and draw inspiration from the land.

Back To the Earth

Roberts Projects

“I feel that my work follows in the tradition of love for the natural world, obsession with the painted universes we create, and a reverence for the mystery of imagination itself. There will always be a place for a new image, another symbol for what it feels like to be immersed in the seasons and spectacles of the earth: alive to the beauty and also the danger in our universe.” - Sharon Ellis
 
Michael Kohn Gallery is thrilled to present a collection of Recent Paintings by California-based artist Sharon Ellis. This exhibition of intimate imaginative landscapes showcases Ellis’ affinity for the natural world, offering a visually poetic rendering of indescribable environmental phenomena and the earthly sublime through saturated colors, veinous lines, and masterful symmetry. Developed over five years, this new body of work is a highlight in a career spanning four decades. Recent Paintings is on view from June 17 through August 9, 2025.
 
The elements in Ellis’ lush visions are cast like characters in a play. Through what the artist describes as a “completely irrational series of decisions,” a simple focus on the time of day or season is transformed into an optical incantation. Ellis’ romantic world features blankets of glimmering stars hovering over sinuous mountains, their folds rendered like draped fabric, or the scarlet hue of the harvest moon peeking through the vegetal gestures of towering trees. Works like Fairy Garden, the first of this series, are not representational; though they embody the spirit of camaraderie between nature and humans that transcends language. 
 
Leah Ollman writes, “To describe Fairy Garden —or any of Ellis' paintings, really—strains language. It seems as though it shouldn't be so hard, because the forms declare themselves with unusual precision. The hues are radiant, vigorous. The surface is pristine, Ellis' ultra-soft brushes leaving no visible tracks. There is no vagueness or murky indecision. There are no false leads. But words comparably crisp, definitive and controlled miss the astonishing sense of surrender that the paintings attest to, and induce.”
 
The reverie lies further in Ellis’ immaculate planes; up to sixty layers of alkyd paint create impenetrable, luminous surfaces that hide all traces of the painter’s hand. Ellis’ abstractions owe as much to the physical process as to her artistic predecessors. Among her influences are painters Joseph Stella, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, and Charles Burchfield. These early American modernists inherited the European traditions of Romantic landscape, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau but were intensely devoted to expanding the potential of abstraction in the pictorial realm. This radical ability to synthesize the conventions of naturalistic forms with inventive compositions is fundamental to Ellis’ work.

Sharon Ellis: Recent Paintings

Kohn Gallery

As part of the In Situ series, Make Room is proud to present Holes In the City, a new collection of paintings from Brooklyn-based artist Youngmin Park. These paintings capture urban life from the perspective of the smallest observer, the unbothered eyes of a fly, to separate the viewer from the business of daily life.

“I was seeking holes in the city. Holes create a space where we are set free from the spectacle, they serve as a place for rest and wandering. Therefore, ironically, they are a space that you have to actively seek out, not a given space.” - Youngmin Park

It is difficult to separate life in a city from labor. The visuals of industry are all around us. They dominate the skyline, in turn dictating the pace of our lives. Park paints smoke stacks and stoplights as symbols of urban life that separate us from natural freedom. This is portrayed through the motif of the fly, an animal that is ignorant of these forces. The fly meanders through the air, pausing and resting as it pleases.

These pieces present a calmness to the viewer. They put the beiges and greys of the city against the soft yellows and blues of an evening sky. This captures a contrast between the constraints of man-made architecture and the lightness of the atmosphere. These skylines are presented alongside stoic portraits and figures with flies replacing or obstructing their eyes. They long for respite from the constant hustle of life, while feeling guilt for this same desire.

Each work creates a hole for the viewer to see into and take a moment of contemplation. In the titular piece, Hole in the City, a red fly sits centered in space, floating in the street between two rows of houses. The fly is encircled in gray spotlighting the hole created through the structures of the city, leading to the sky and clouds in the distance. Driving home from work or an evening walk becomes a moment of stillness and beauty. Looking Inside the Buttonhole, draws the eye into the smallest holes we carry. Faces and flies look back at you through these buttons, allowing your vision to linger in the space created.

We invite you to find a place to rest, a place where you can forget about all the nonsense of the city. High above the city, inside our own sanctuary.

IN SITU: Youngmin Park: Holes in the City

Make Room

Performance on Paper features prints and drawings created at the intersection of music and dance by some twenty artists active from the 1960s to the present, primarily from the Grunwald Center and Hammer Contemporary Collections. It explores how works of art on paper can store sound and movement, becoming lasting visual records of ephemeral sonic and dance experiences.

The exhibition includes works activated by performance, such as graphic notations and choreographers’ scores; drawings and prints that are physical representations or evocations of music and movement; collaborations between visual artists, musicians, and dancers; as well as drawings that are the physical trace or embodiment of performance. Some artists to be presented are Laurie Anderson, Jennie C. Jones, Ann Hamilton, Channa Horwitz, Christian Marclay, Tom Marioni, Jason Moran, Meredith Monk, Julia Phillips, Allen Ruppersberg, and Kandis Williams.

Performance on Paper

Hammer Museum

House of CoHit is pleased to present "Thorns In Your Side," a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Iranian-born artists Haniko Zahra and Affsoongar, opening July 11th.
 
Affsoongar’s small-scale line drawings, rendered in a limited color palette, and Zahra’s larger oil-on-canvas paintings share a fascination with storytelling, symbolic imagery, and the complexities of interior life. Both artists build their visual universes from small, seemingly ordinary moments or materials, transforming them into charged, layered tableaux where humor, violence, and desire intermingle. While distinct in style and sensibility, both sets of work explore the tension between surface innocence and inner unease, crafting visual worlds fraught with vulnerability, danger, myth, and memory. Both artists begin with a preliminary sketch that loosely lays out the composition; details, colors, and forms are allowed to emerge gradually as the work takes further shape. Their practices also share a quality of emotional excavation — turning inward to process the tensions of selfhood, femininity, and cultural memory, then offering the results as uneasy gifts to the viewer.

Haniko Zahra & Affsoongar: Thorns In Your Side

House of CoHit

CUTTING THROUGH SPACE
Bjarni Sigurbjörnsson: Works on Paper (2003–2004)

ECHOES OF HELLISSANDUR
Victoria Chapman: Photographs (2025)

El Nido by VC Projects is pleased to present two exhibitions in dialogue: Cutting Through Space by Bjarni Sigurbjörnsson and Echoes of Hellissandur by Victoria Chapman. Each artist draws from the Icelandic landscape—its stark beauty, elemental forces, and contemplative rhythms—to create work that bridges the internal and external, the material and metaphysical.

Bjarni Sigurbjörnsson: Cutting Through Space – Works on Paper (2003–2004)
This rare exhibition marks the first U.S. presentation of Sigurbjörnsson’s large-scale works on paper from 2003–2004. Influenced by Chinese aesthetic philosophy, the artist treats paper as “the skin of space,” using ink, charcoal, and water to create gestural compositions that explore transformation, tension, and the metaphysics of mark-making. 

Additional works from his Black Soar Cutting series further investigate elemental alchemy through the layering of salt, ink, and oil paint. A recent painting, Hugarhold (Mind-Field) (2022), connects early and current philosophies within a vivid field of color and gesture.

“The juxtaposition between unmixable materials—creating patterns—and my deliberate actions is the prime vehicle in my creative process.” — Bjarni Sigurbjörnsson

Cover image caption: Bjarni Sigurbjörnsson: Panmixia 3, 2003-4, mixed media on paper, 31 ¼ x 23 ½” 

Victoria Chapman: Echoes of Hellissandur – Photographs (2025)
Following a meditative retreat in the remote Icelandic village of Hellissandur, Chapman presents a new body of photographs that respond to the region’s landscape and mythic atmosphere. Developed in close dialogue with Sigurbjörnsson, these images are not documentarian but intuitive—emotional impressions shaped by solitude, conversation, and elemental encounters. Moss, stone, lava, and light become portals to memory and transformation.



Bjarni Sigurbjörnsson: Cutting Through Space 

El Nido 

But listen to me, O Islands in the air, I have made even of your biology—a lily.
—Mina Loy, Islands in the Air

Cheremoya sits within a three-mile radius of the City of Angels’ Griffith Observatory and Forest Lawn Cemetery—sites that channel energies essential to the iconoclastic writer, artist, and designer Mina Loy’s lifelong engagement with the celestial and the terrestrial. Under her Stellatric signs, the gallery has become an island of contemporary fissionscape debris, internal blooms, rose hips, architectural fragments, wreck sites, and moons.

The phrase islands in the air draws the exhibition’s conceptual perimeter while evoking the essence of Loy’s multi-faceted literary and artistic practice. It is the title of one of her fugitive autobiographical novels that describes coming to be an artist. In it, she depicts her first artwork: a sculpture of her baby sister as a feeding bottle and made from a needle wrapped with thread to form a little tough white belly. In the 1950s, approximately the same time as she worked on her novel, Loy gathered trash from where she lived on the Bowery and transformed it into mixed-media collages that mirrored her literary practice of salvaging meaning from social wreckage. From tin cans, mop heads, rags, and other detritus, portraits of her neighbors emerged. She called this series refusées, combining refugees with the French refuser(to refuse), refuse (waste), and refuge (harbor). 

Born in a London suburb in 1882, Loy built a remarkable creative life despite her oppressive Victorian upbringing, continual economic precarity, and immigration as part of the wave of refugees fleeing fascism in Europe. She persisted, created, and thrived within ongoing ruin wrought by systems that nearly a century later show no signs of abating.

The works assembled here echo Loy’s creative defiance. Bridget Hamel’s submerged body, a graphite map seeped in images of US nuclear submarine wreckage sites, has been gently severed. Once separated, the image can only continue when a third panel is placed between the two halves. Naoki Sutter-Shudo’s Corridor offers arcaded space as both idea and structure, which the body-mind converses with but is not defined by. In translating Carl Andre’s monumental “Philemon” from prison letter to Philomène’s empowered love, Sutter-Shudo reveals Io’s name in a process that extracts, as Loy once wrote of Gertude Stein, a radium of the word. Vanesa Gingold’s aerial forms began in the garden, pulling the deckle through the milky vat of pulp until producing a paper skin stretched across bamboo supports. The swallowtail-spirit of her work thrives on invasive wild Anise with its tiny silk sling holding the chrysalis to the branch. In Imogen Brent’s Rear Site (Nest), steel has found its form as a headband or intergalactic headphones anchored to an iron sight devoted to the precision aim of a weapon while tuning in to the celestial song of bowerbirds as they build their towering nests from shimmering plastic straws colored the same blues and oranges once found in flowers. Madelyn Kellum’s weathered fresco fragments reveals a dreamlike community intertwined with architectural spaces via muted earth tones, swathes of pink, and blue accents that might have been found in Loy’s palette. We enter these composites to find creatures, human and animal, beveling with lattices. Like Loy, Kenneth Winterschladen refuses to allow us to forget the materiality of the image even as we are absorbed in the fan form’s support of a lily, a mantle, a moon. Across the cartouche, red planets transmigrate over pearl skies. Layered opacities stutter open the eye as lilies breathe into the room


the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lust

          — — — Stellactric signs

                    —Mina Loy, “Lunar Baedecker”
‍

Imogen Brent (b. 1999 in Sydney, Australia; lives and works in New York) received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2021. Solo and two-person exhibitions: Parent Company, with Max Popov, New York (2025); Kaleidoscope Gallery, with Max Popov, Brooklyn (2024); Pratt Institute, Brooklyn (2021). Group exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); Mery Gates, curated by Collin Clarke, Brooklyn (2025); Pop Up Gallery, curated by Klara Vertes, Queens, NY (2024); Harsh Collective, curated by Etta Harshaw, Brooklyn (2024); Intima, curated by Brianna Griffin, Brooklyn (2023).

Vanesa Gingold (b. Ukiah, CA; lives and works in Oakland, CA) received her BA in Art and Psychology from UC Davis in 2007 and her MFA from UC Santa Barbara in 2016.  Selected solo & two-person exhibitions: /(room), San Francisco (2023); Painting & Sculpture Outpost, Marysville, CA (2019); Space 151, San Francisco (2017); Open Mind Art Space, Los Angeles (2017); Red Barn Project Space, Santa Barbara (2016); Glass Box Gallery, Santa Barbara (2015); Artists’s Television Access, San Francisco (2012); SFAC Art in Storefronts, San Francisco (2011). Selected group exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); Et. Al co-organized with Bibeau Krueger, San Francisco (2024); PØST, Los Angeles (2018); NOH/WAVE, Los Angeles (2017); The Atrium, Santa Barbara (2014); Raymond Gallery, Pasadena (2014); Alter Space, San Francisco (2013).

Bridget Hamel (b. 2000 in Richmond, Virginia; lives and works in Philadelphia) received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and was an Artist-in-Residence at Yale Norfolk School of Art in 2023. Selected solo & two-person exhibitions: Rumpus Room, St. Louis, MO (2024); Material Room, Richmond (2024); Light Harvesting Complex, Vantaa, Finland (2023); The Anderson Gallery, Richmond (2019). Selected group exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); Yale Norfolk School of Art, Norfolk, CT (2023); Dovetail, London (2022); The Garden, Chicago (2022).

Madelyn Kellum (b. 2002 in Florida; lives and works in New York) received her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, in 2024. Solo & two-person exhibitions: Hyacinth Gallery, New York (forthcoming, 2025); KB, with Danka Latorre, Brooklyn (2025). Selected group exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); Paul Kasmin, New York (2025); PYMK, Brooklyn (2025); Sitting Room, New York (2024); Preachers Valley, New York (2024); All Street, New York (2024); Kino Der Toten, Brooklyn (2024); Campus, New York (2024); Mountain View Mausoleum, Altadena (2024); Landmark Art Space, New York (2024); Quarters Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Queens Botanical Gardens, Queens (2023); Ideal Glass Studios, New York (2022).

Naoki Sutter-Shudo (b. 1990 in Paris; lives and works in Los Angeles) gained his arts education from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, in 2016 and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, from 2009-16. Selected solo exhibitions: Crèvecoeur, Paris (2025, 2021); Keijiban, Kanazawa, Japan (2024); Derosia, New York (2024, 2021, 2017); Gaga & Reena Spaulings, Los Angeles (2024); XYZ Collective, Tokyo (2022, 2019); Alienze, Vienna (2022); The Vanity, Los Angeles (2022); Crèvecoeur, Marseille (2019); Jessica Silverman, San Francisco (2016); Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Los Angeles (2016). Selected group exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); La Salle de bains, Lyon (2025); Musée Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Grasse (2025); Institut Français de Tokyo, Tokyo (2024); Gene’s Dispensary, Los Angeles (2024); Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles (2023); Derosia, New York (2022); Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2022); Alienze, Vienna (2022); Espace Arlaud, Lausanne (2021); Crèvecoeur, Paris (2020); Commercial Street, Provincetown (2020); From the Desk of Lucy Bull, Los Angeles (2020); von ammon co., Washington, D.C. (2019); Le Plateau, Frac Île-de-France, Paris (2019); Franz Kaka, Toronto (2019); Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles (2018). His work is included in the permanent collections of MAMCO Geneva and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Kenneth Winterschladen (b. 1993 in Washington, D.C.; lives and works in London) received his BA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, in 2015, and his MA in Painting from Royal College of Art, London, in 2020. Solo exhibitions: Pumice Raft, Toronto (2025); South Parade, London (2022). Selected group exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); The Artist Room, London (2025); Depa Archive, curated by Pieter-Jan de Paepe, Ghent (2024); The Shop at Sadie Coles, London (2022); 184 Frankln Street, curated by Daisy Sanchez, New York (2022); Recent Activity, Birmingham, UK (2022); ArtWorks Project Space, London (2019); Royal College of Art, London (2019); Spillway Collective, Philadelphia (2017); Icebox, Philadelphia (2017); Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia.

Image: Imogent Brent, Rear Sight (Nest), 2025 (detail). Steel, found iron sight, 23 1/2 x 21 x 4 in / 59.7 x 53.3 x 10.2 cm. Photo: Collin Clarke.

Islands in the Air

Cheremoya

Considering the portrait as shadow, as avatar, as likeness, the artists examine a range of approaches to a traditional subject matter, unpacking the construction of identity through allegory, distortions, doublings, emotions and atmospheres.

Featuring works by:

Hernan Bas
Alejandro Cardenas
Alannah Farrell
Ali Kazim
Jenny Morgan
Hannah Murray
Sarah Peters
Madeleine Pfull
Gideon Rubin
Cosmo Whyte


Head in the Clouds

Anat Ebgi | Mid-Wilshire

BLUM is pleased to present NAKED, an exhibition of new paintings by Tokyo-based artist Tomoo Gokita. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.  

Known for his uncanny approach to figuration, Gokita has long explored the tension between familiarity and distortion in his psychologically charged compositions. Working in both monochrome and vibrant colors, he has built a distinctive visual language that merges portraiture, abstraction, and cultural memory. Early works often originated from found imagery—vintage magazines and old newspapers—serving as visual springboards that he would intuitively warp and reimagine through his tactile process of painting. 

In recent years, however, Gokita has shifted his practice inward. No longer relying on pre-existing media, he channels his subjects from memory and subconscious invention. The resulting forms—part-human, part-fantastical—occupy a liminal space between reality and dream. His characters now take shape through layers of erasure and reinvention. This iterative approach allows each figure to exist as a collision of gestures, influences, and emotional states, invoking artists from Picasso to Guston while conjuring the spectral strangeness of sci-fi cinema and surrealist dreamscapes.  

With NAKED, Gokita turns his attention to the trope of the female nude, reframing a historically overdetermined subject with acidic irreverence and grotesque beauty. In these paintings, Surrealist bodies bristle with defiant physicality, eschewing objectification in favor of confrontational agency. Referencing the glamor of Playboy, the weirdness of B-movie aesthetics, and the compositional motifs of Impressionist painting, these nudes are saturated with intense, unsettling color. At once seductive and disquieting, titles such as PEEPING WOMAN (2025), THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB (2025), and THE BALCONY INCIDENT (2025) hint at uncanny and humorous narratives, infusing the work with irony, unease, and a self-assured rejection of conventional beauty.  

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BLUM is pleased to present Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Resisting a singular painting style—abstractions edging in on dreamy figuration—for his first exhibition at BLUM, Wilhelm Sasnal explores the iconography and visual lexicon of the roadways of Southern California. Painting from photographs and sketches, Sasnal captures imagery from a brief time spent living in Los Angeles as a cyclist—someone intimately familiar with the texture, palette, and imagery of the region's thoroughfares. The resulting body of work shares themes with film noir—examining the complexities of black as a lack of color; these vignettes are all at once dramatic, brooding, and exhilarating.

After studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Sasnal set out to create paintings that undid the restrictive methodology associated with formal painting. Making work that was more about drawing with paint than painting and preferring graphic novels or record covers as his guidance over the Old Masters, Sasnal built his career around this idea of flipping painting on its head. This included bringing subjects rendered in black to the forefront of his compositions, thus reversing the guiding principles of chiaroscuro, a painting fundamental that harks back to the Renaissance and Baroque periods. 

Presently, Sasnal is an avid pupil of the art historical canon—taking inspiration from and pushing back against a wide array of sources, such as Edgar Degas and Sigmar Polke—but his enthusiasm for this discourse is still laced with a persistent contrarian spirit. Retaining a fixation on black as a pause for the eye in traditional compositions, Sasnal asserts stripes of black paint—a compositional rest—atop the busyness of landscapes rendered in pale color. In All American (2025), for instance, the work’s titular words float amid the desert horizon as if roads were paved in midair. 

Asphalt takes a paramount position in this exhibition, both for its physical characteristics and conceptual implications. Sasnal immerses himself in the many facets of this substance, becoming absorbed in it in the intimate way that only a cyclist could. When he conveys his findings, it is with the sensibilities of an artist who is keenly attuned to semiotics, color theory, depth, and perspective. For its external implications, Sasnal notes that asphalt is made of petrol, which gestures at a wealth of global issues. Asphalt also contains a complex spectrum of black, which Sasnal expresses through a range of gestures from snaking abstract lines to solid-edged blocks of pigment. Roads are also notable for their traditional usage in perspective, requiring only two receding lines and a horizon point to express depth. 

Sasnal paints in a medium-specific manner, but his mode of culling subject matter is multidisciplinary. Archiving and reflecting culture’s nuances back upon itself, in this exhibition, Sasnal took photographs, kept a sketching practice, and borrowed typeface while collecting notable moments or ideas for future paintings. The works Palmdale 1 and Palmdale 2 (both 2025), for instance, are painted from photographs that the artist took streetside while cycling. Noticing the presence of several fighter jets parked just within the parameters of a military base near Palmdale, California, the artist recorded this unexpected and ominous encounter with his camera. Later, when creating his compositions for each work, these massive weapons become abstracted, shadowy figures to convey and isolate the unique feeling imparted upon the viewer when seeing the original. With his brush to canvas acting as the lens through which these found talismans of our society are given meaning, Sasnal is not merely a documentarian but also a philosopher of the overlooked.

Wilhelm Sasnal (b. 1972, Tarnów, Poland) studied architecture at the Kraków University of Technology (1992–1994) and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (1994–1999). Recognized as one of Europe’s leading contemporary painters, Sasnal employs photographic imagery—from film stills and art reproductions to personal snapshots—as foundations for his paintings, subjecting them to abstraction, simplification, and distortion. His practice thoughtfully addresses historical themes such as the Holocaust, iconic pop-cultural imagery, and intimate scenes from everyday life, creating a complex reflection of post-Communist Poland amid ongoing socio-political shifts. 

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BLUM is pleased to present Unending Spiral, Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Rosalena’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This presentation coincides with the unveiling of Rosalena’s major public artwork commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this June, and the artist’s participation in exhibitions at the Dallas Contemporary and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. She was recently featured in six exhibitions for the Getty’s PST ART: Art x Science Collide. 

Operating at the intersection of traditional craft and advancing technology, Rosalena’s work combines Wixárika weaving techniques, taught to her by her mother and grandmother, with technical processes such as ceramic 3D printing and digital weaving. Similar to computational language, weaving consists of a series of dualities—warp and weft, over and under—which behave similarly to the 0 and 1 binary of code. By giving form to this shared logic in her woven textiles and baskets, it is possible for Rosalena to physicalize and interrogate the technological scaffolding underneath.

Unending Spiral examines the structural and conceptual implications of the spiral as both a formal strategy and a conceptual framework, drawing parallels between galactic formations and terrestrial craft traditions in textiles, coiled ceramics, and basketry. By employing materials of the earth—hand-dyed pine needles, clay, and fiber—Rosalena grounds her work in tactile, site-responsive processes while simultaneously engaging digital technologies with her hand. The pine needles are naturally dyed in plants such as cochineal, walnut, and onion skin, producing a living palette. These material disruptions interrogate the hierarchies that have historically positioned Indigenous craft in opposition to digital methodologies, proposing instead a continuum in which traditional knowledge and emerging technologies co-generate one another, revealing the spiral as a structure of persistence, recursion, and self-perpetuation.

Using digital images of spirals in nature, such as spiral arms of galaxies—Rosalena translates these celestial bodies into handwoven patterns and coiled forms. Her 3D-printed ceramic vessels simulate the process of traditional coil building, yet they resist containment; partway through, the ceramic coils give way to handwoven pine needle basketry, a material intervention that disrupts technological precision with the irregularities of the organic. By positioning the spiral as a recursive, non-linear structure, Unending Spiral challenges dominant narratives of progress, which privilege forward motion and technological advancement over cyclical, regenerative knowledge systems, foregrounding craft as a site of critical resistance and epistemological expansion. Through these hybrid forms, Rosalena posits an alternative material cosmology—one that is iterative, interwoven, and perpetually in infinite motion.

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BLUM is pleased to present LACMA Seeds and Weeds, Los Angeles-based artist Adam Silverman’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Continuously finding new ways to address the idea of place through his mastery of the ceramic medium, Silverman has turned to the construction site of the forthcoming Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) building, designed by Peter Zumthor, for his latest source of inspiration. Collecting remnants such as tar, clay, and felled bamboo trees, the artist processes these tokens into the final constitution of each vessel. 

Receiving degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design in both Fine Arts and Architecture, the spatial and structural awareness of Silverman’s artistic output is palpable. As much about their own construction as their relationships to their surroundings, Silverman’s vessels are often presented as elements of a larger installation that also engages its environment—highly considered parts of a whole within a contingent context. After his studies, while doing a residency in ceramics in Mashiko, Japan—known for its rich ceramic tradition—Silverman observed and utilized the local clay that people from this region had been working with for centuries. Those familiar with the traditional vessels from Mashiko would recognize the distinctive style and finish that results, in part, from chemical reactions when firing the iron and silicic acid that naturally occurs in the ground there. It was in Japan that Silverman began examining the connections between pottery’s geological properties and place, but it wasn’t until later that he would begin exchanging geological indicators with cultural meaning in his process.

It was while working on a site-specific installation for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, that Silverman first utilized materials excavated from a cultural site to build his vessels. Intrigued by the convergence of two of his favorite architects, with Renzo Piano’s addition to Louis Kahn’s original museum building, Silverman wanted to create something that encapsulated the physical overlap between these two great cultural forces. Similarly, Silverman saw the construction site of Zumthor’s LACMA building abutting the historically rich La Brea Tar Pits within the heart of the city as a distinct moment of institutional, architectural, biological, and geological relevance that could be preserved through the ceramic medium.

LACMA Seeds and Weeds concretizes a transition for Los Angeles—wherein land that has acted as a gathering point, providing the city a glimpse into its prehistoric past, is peppered with unique properties as a new structure takes its place there. Utilizing materials from the construction zone as part of his medium to create the effect of his finished works, Silverman conceptually honors the many stages of the history of this place in his objects. Carefully searching the LACMA building’s dig site, Silverman found deposits of tar bubbling up from the ground alongside deposits of natural clay. Bringing these substances back to his studio, he processed them—using tools such as a mortar and pestle—into a specific mixture that he utilizes to create the finish of his “seed” and “weed” vessels presented here. 

As their name indicates, Silverman’s “seed” and “weed” vessels could almost have cropped up in their location, as that is what the ingredients of their makeup had done. It is Silverman whose expertise allows their specific existence—with a meticulous process that might include multiple firings, restricting airflow to the kiln, or blowing ash on vessels to achieve each work’s unique finish. It is through a combination of what the LACMA site provides and what Silverman alone can cultivate that each work comes into being.

For the work in LACMA Seeds and Weeds, Silverman’s glazes are all made from different combinations of the following ingredients collected from LACMA: wood ash (gallery floors, trees, construction lumber, and debris), concrete, travertine, ceramic tiles, glass, stones, red iron oxide (made from rusty metals found on the site), soda ash, clay, and tar.

Image: Tomoo Gokita

Tomoo Gokita: NAKED | Wilhelm Sasnal: AAAsphalt | Sarah Rosalena: Unending Spiral | Adam Silverman: LACMA Seeds and Weeds

BLUM

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Slow School: Ten Years of Moskowitz Bayse, an exhibition honoring the gallery’s ten-year anniversary. The show brings together a single work by each artist in the gallery’s program, a gesture that honors not only the individual strength of each practice, but the collective ethos that has shaped the gallery’s identity over the past decade.

Slow School: Ten Years of Moskowitz Bayse

Moskowitz Bayse

An exhibition of photographs documenting the Grateful Dead and Deadheads during the band's thirty-year history.


An American Beauty: Grateful Dead 1965–1995

David Kordansky Gallery

Curated by Maryam Taba

My Favorite Things brings together the work of fourteen Persian artists in a setting imagined like a home — thoughtful, layered, and full of quiet presence.

Rather than a white-cube display, this exhibition invites viewers into a space shaped by memory and feeling. It’s a room where each piece holds meaning — not for its rarity, but for its resonance. Objects, sculptures, and paintings are placed not only to be seen but to be lived with. This is an exhibition about what stays with us, what speaks softly, and what becomes part of our everyday gaze.

My Favorite Things continues our commitment to showcasing Persian voices in contemporary art, while shaping experiences that feel intimate, poetic, and real.

My Favorite Things

Maryam Taba Studios 

Featuring Deborah F. Blum, Natasha Rindt, and Leora Tofler

7811 Gallery is pleased to present Between the Lines, a group exhibition featuring new and recent works by Deborah F. Blum, Natasha Rindt, and Leora Tofler. Though each artist works in a distinct visual language—from delicate mark-making to bold symbolism and expressive abstraction—they converge through a shared commitment to intuitive, process-driven creation.

Deborah F. Blum’s tactile surfaces, often composed of printmaking, textile, or collage, explore the quiet power of fragility and repetition. Her work invites viewers to slow down and attend to the subtle shifts in texture, weight, and gesture, evoking a sense of inner stillness and contemplation.

Natasha Rindt engages symbolic and surrealist vocabularies, drawing upon strong visual contrasts to navigate themes of identity, transformation, and the subconscious. Her compositions unfold like visual riddles—charged with tension, balance, and mystery.

Leora Tofler brings a narrative sensitivity to gestural abstraction, using layered forms and expressive brushwork to construct emotive visual fields. Her work resonates with psychological depth, suggesting memory, movement, and unresolved storylines embedded in the surface.

“While each artist uses distinct mediums—from Blum’s tactile surfaces to Rindt’s symbolic forms and Tofler’s gestural abstraction—they share an intuitive, process-driven approach that foregrounds emotional resonance over realism,“ says 7811 Gallery.

Together, the works in Between the Lines offer viewers an immersive journey into the unseen—spaces where feeling precedes form, and meaning is shaped in the act of making. These are not artworks that shout, but ones that speak deeply and deliberately, inviting reflection and intimacy.

Between the Lines

7811 Gallery

Nüart Gallery proudly presents "Rincón Nuevo," an exhibition featuring works by acclaimed artist Emilio Lobato, on view from August 2 through August 30, 2025. In this captivating collection, Lobato present his profound exploration of solitude, cultural heritage, and abstraction, transforming personal narratives into evocative compositions that resonate universally.

Born in San Pablo, a village deeply influenced by Spanish Colonial traditions in the San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado, Lobato’s artistic language is deeply personal yet remarkably expansive. His work synthesizes painting and collage, deploying meticulous arrangements of shapes, textures, and restrained palettes to distill emotional and cultural experiences into compelling visual forms. His art engages viewers through its sophisticated simplicity, embodying themes of isolation, spirituality, and historical continuity.

In "Rincón Nuevo," Lobato present a dynamic multicolor assemblages that reflect his evolving approach to abstraction. These innovative compositions, characterized by their vibrant interplay of layered textures and carefully balanced geometry, exemplify his ability to push artistic boundaries while remaining deeply connected to his roots.

Lobato’s career includes significant exhibitions and widespread recognition, notably his mid-career retrospective "Mi Linda Soledad" at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in 2011. His works are featured in numerous public and private collections internationally, a testament to the resonance and universal appeal of his artistic vision.

Nüart Gallery Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA www.nuartgallery.com

For additional information, please contact the gallery at 424-900-3888.

Emilio Lobato: Rincón Nuevo

Nüart Gallery

Babst Gallery is pleased to present "Creatrix", a solo exhibition of oil paintings, works on paper, and ceramics by Nora Berman. Presented alongside these works are video sculptures informed by the artist’s livestreaming practice. Regularly since 2021, Berman broadcasts immersive, experimental livestreams from her studio, where she paints, performs, and co-exists with her viewers in a bizarre environment shaped by her own visual art.

Nora Berman: Creatrix 

Babst Gallery 

BEYOND THE STREETS presents Appointment Only, opening July 11, 2025, at their Los Angeles flagship. This exclusive in-gallery viewing room showcases never-before-seen works from six influential artists—Tim Conlon, Martha Cooper, Paul Insect, Felipe Pantone, LADY PINK, and POSE—highlighting their evolving practices within graffiti and street art. On view through August 23. Free admission.

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BEYOND THE STREETS presents VHS Dreams: The Art of Ghana’s Mobile Cinema—a vibrant exhibition of hand-painted Ghanaian movie posters curated by Deadly Prey Gallery. Showcasing one of the largest collections ever assembled, these one-of-a-kind artworks reimagine global cinema with bold color, wild imagination, and local flair. On view through August 23. Free admission.

'Appointment Only' | VHS Dreams: The Art of Ghana’s Mobile Cinema

Beyond The Streets

Lisson Gallery is pleased to present The Signs are Present, the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles by Li Ran. Comprising nine, recent, oil-on-canvas works—including some of the largest paintings the artist has made to date—this exhibition marks a discernable evolution in Li’s practice, wherein his focus has shifted toward the material and formal qualities of painting. Known for his cross-disciplinary approach, which spans video, performance, writing, and installation, Li often interrogates systems of ideology, cultural translation, and intellectual history. In this new body of work, he deliberately tempers the satirical and conceptual strategies that defined his earlier projects—where appropriation and narrative construction played central roles—in favor of a quieter, more ambiguous visual language. Here, narrative intent becomes more elusive, embedded subtly rather than explicitly articulated.

This body of work is also marked by a cohesive and contemplative painterly language—non-polemical, free of antagonism, and unburdened by historical hierarchies of authority or precedence. Li offers viewers a personal and introspective point of entry: his daily studio ritual of opening the Bible and engaging with spiritual reflection. However, he asserts that this practice is not intended to invoke mysticism. Instead, it underscores an enduring capacity to engage with personal experience, manipulates visual and rhetorical motifs, and draws upon cultural references, without being constrained by dominant historical interpretations.

Yet, despite this shift toward introspection and formal cohesion, narrative traces persist. Through symbolic elements, or ‘signs’ such as the scattered belongings of a deceased false teacher in The Empty Tomb (2024), or the ritualistic gestures surrounding cremation in They Swear, Dance, Alongside Miracle (2024), an underlying, unspoken storyline continues to course through Li Ran’s paintings, offering viewers interpretive depth beneath the surface of painterly abstraction.

Li’s inward shift is further echoed in These Four Walls, a new text written by the artist that corresponds loosely to the architecture of the exhibition, offering poetic insight into the mental and emotional terrain from which these works emerged.

1
Ripping his draft to shreds, Xu Min just couldn’t take it anymore. Hopeless days left him on edge. In the midst of devastation, he dreamed often, swallowing whole his own cigarette ends. Bitter as hell, what had he written anyway? Starting from the second paragraph on page ten—lungs charred, cream-made thyroid glands and dislocated vertebrae clinging to each other, silent gallstones beginning their monologue, not to mention the surging hermones... We once couldn’t stand such writing. But now? We’ve turned reactionary against ourselves. Door closed, pot on the stove, we’d be boiling up some formalist language, carefully sprinkling irony and adding poetry. They don’t really belong together, yet somehow, they got picked up in the same pair of chopsticks, gripping both reality and romance. Wanting it all! Exactly, today, we want it all — except conversation. The second we open our mouths, a spooky wind slits our throats. Could this be death? Probably not. Let’s just call it a dream.

2
12pm sharp.
I lower my head.
See that black, shapeless lump.

You know my name,
and everything.
Come cut me loose from my past,
and make it quick.

3
The attic on Huayuan Road still has its double-pane wooden windows, at least two sizes smaller than the ones they make nowadays. A few dusty potted plants often sat on the sill. Lao Gao used to say, “you can’t see outside with the lights on.” He insisted on turning them off, and as the room went dark, the faint blue of the sky crept back in. He’d put on sunglasses and rummage through the drawer until he found those little cards. On them were the pencil-written lines: “We will all die. We will all live. We will all meet in the room with the lights out.”

4
The day of demolition came—I couldn’t stay in this small place in the city any longer. But moving gives me headaches. Someone told me about this Japanese-style moving service, so I gave them a call. It sounded legit, and the price was acceptable. The house owner was supposed to get rid of all the unwanted things, so the movers could efficiently pack, transport, and restore the setup at the new place. It didn’t matter to me whether it’d end up restored…but the throwing away was a thorn to me. For two weeks straight, every conversation with her was like: “Do we still need this?” “Why are we keeping that?” “Just throw it out.” “Let’s buy a new one.” And suddenly, I thought of my parents’ old place. How could their generation throw anything away? Even the plastic bags had to be saved, folded up, tucked into drawers, filling a whole cabinet with garbage bags.

Li Ran: The Signs are Present

Lisson Gallery

"Weaving is not just an art form, it is an endurance test. It is a way of grappling with time and memory, pulling the threads together even when the past resists. - Anne Carson

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Circumstances Held Me To Threads, an exhibition featuring works by Terri Friedman, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Anina Major, Frances Trombly, and Michelle Yi Martin. On view from May 24th to July 26th, 2025.

Weaving, at its core, is a complex act, demanding not only physical dexterity but also a heightened awareness of the delicate interplay between thought, memory, and material. It is an embodied practice that transcends the mere manipulation of thread; it is a reflection of the artist’s engagement with time, space, and history. As Joan Didion aptly observed, “Weaving is not a simple thing. It’s not just the hand that moves the thread, but the mind that follows it.” Weaving requires a tension between the past and present, where every thread drawn through the loom forms an intricate connection between memory and material, between individual and collective histories.

In Circumstances Held Me To Threads, the artists delve into this profound act of connection, exploring the tactile beauty of fibers as they intertwine to form patterns that mirror the complexity of lived experience. These artists challenge and expand the traditional practice of weaving, drawing upon the metaphorical weight of the process itself. The act of weaving becomes an engagement with both personal and political realms, where materials become vessels of identity, culture, and memory.

Michelle Yi Martin and Frances Trombly push the boundaries of textile and fiber to examine the intricate relationships between the corporeal and the conceptual. Their work emphasizes the physicality of weaving, focusing on the act of binding, pulling, and stretching materials in ways that reveal the fragility and resilience inherent within the fibers themselves. Sabrina Gschwandtner interrogates the historical canon of craft, reframing archival media to explore how weaving and its associated forms have been shaped by gendered perspectives. Her work challenges traditional perceptions, questioning both the aesthetics and politics embedded in the act of making. Terri Friedman considers her fabric works paintings, blurring the line between mediums through vibrant compositions that fuse gesture and texture.

Anina Major’s and Gil Yefman’s works reimagine the act of weaving through the lens of personal and cultural memory, emphasizing hybridity and transformation. These artists draw on diasporic histories, where the very act of weaving becomes a means of negotiating new forms of identity and resilience. Their works underscore weaving as a force that binds not just threads but also histories and individuals, creating new connections between past and present.
In Circumstances Held Me To Threads, weaving is not merely a technical process; it becomes an act of endurance and reflection, of stretching the boundaries between past experiences and contemporary realities. Through this exhibition, the artists invite the viewer to witness how the act of weaving becomes a transformative process, one that is at once fragile and enduring, intimately tied to both the body and the world around us.

Circumstances Held Me To Threads

Shoshana Wayne Gallery

Night Gallery is pleased to announce Reflections, a presentation of new paintings by Esiri Erheriene-Essi. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Based in Amsterdam, Erheriene-Essi created these works across an ocean, their arrival in Los Angeles a resonant offering—bringing with them the quiet weight of distance traveled and stories carried.

Across this new body of work, Erheriene-Essi carries on with her time-honored tradition of breathing life into inspired and discarded photographs, using paint, color, and layered ephemera to investigate memory. The artist works through her paintings with the same skill and stewardship as a quilter, threading together histories through texture and tone. In this new series, she embraces the flatness of photographic source material while deepening the emotional and chromatic complexity of brown skin—bringing dimension, variation, and luminosity to the surface.

This evolution is on view in A Royal Flush, a work depicting what the artist imagines to be a group of men enjoying their last days together before deployment to Vietnam. Their faces are marked by a spectrum of hues, highlights, shadows, and undertones, encapsulating the use of color as a tool to depict emotion.

An archivist and collector first, Erheriene-Essi begins her process by mining through estates and online repositories for faces and vignettes that speak to her. This collection has amassed across continents and oceans, from North America to Europe to Africa, demonstrating the diversity of Black identity, while illuminating the moments that are universal across all our memories.

Erheriene-Essi is deeply moved by the connection between the diaspora, not only across geography, but across time. Throughout Reflections she continues her exploration of this relationship. Motifs such as the Black power fist, the face of Toni Morrison, a “Dismantle Apartheid” pin, all time travel accentuating the meaning of timelessness within the collective memory.

In her dissection of memory, Erheriene-Essi is a visual anthropologist, reading images for context clues and filling their gaps with gestures from her own lived experience. In A memory from your youth (London Trocadero), a fan poster for Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour noticeably sits on the shirt of a girl eating ice cream in the 1970s. The artist’s temporal twist, fusing together past and present, melds Black iconography with earnest symbols of nostalgia. As an artist, her mastery of collapsing time ensures the continuity of the culture.

These paintings were created over the course of two years, in rhythm with the demands of motherhood—a theme that quietly permeates the work through the lens of legacy and inheritance. Erheriene-Essi sees her practice as an active conversation, one that begins with her paintings but is completed by the viewer’s own activations of memory.

The exhibition is titled in honor of the song by Diana Ross & The Supremes, a comfort album that has accompanied the artist through many seasons of her life, including the making of this body of work. The most apropos of the lyrics being:

“Reflections of the way life used to be.

Reflections of the love you took from me.”

In faded hues and frayed edges, Erheriene-Essi develops an architecture of remembrance, for what has been lost, and for which should never be. Her paintings become mirrors, not of the past as it was, but as it is felt. Reflection as a sacred act of reclamation.

–Shaquille Heath


Esiri Erheriene-Essi: Reflections 

Night Gallery South

Night Gallery is pleased to announce Claire Colette’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Shoot Forth Thunder, a presentation of works on canvas and paper.

Furthering Colette’s distinct painterly grammar, the paintings uncover the potency within elemental forces, merging organic and inorganic materials toward each painting’s own agency. Beginning with a ritualistic slow build of the surface using a repeated vernacular of gridded lines, acrylic, ash, salt, resin, and dried flowers applied with non-traditional tools perhaps more akin to building—air brushes, rulers, masking tape—the materials activate the works as symbiotic, resolute bodies; alchemical conduits for material and supernatural energies. 

Colette’s systemic approach underpins the inherent structure of the paintings which yield personal and ideological landscapes. Their human-scaled verticality and muted palettes orient us in between familiar existential dichotomies: sky and earth, day and night, birth and death. Raised molding paste trails emerge from grids of airy blues and Los Angeles-dusk soft pinks, creating a mysterious and tangible topography that could be tree roots, buoy lines, umbilical cords, or desire paths—connective tissue mapping the visual plane. Colette’s repeated language of half moons and crosses appear as constellation-like directional guides, lifeboats for the journey. The works on paper function like crumbs on a path or notes in margins; highly viscous layers of paint are built up and carved out to reveal the elemental forces that comprise matter.  

Perhaps the only subject in the history of painting immune from the display of hierarchies or a politics, unpopulated landscapes rarely portray the trappings of human constructions—one can’t own the sky. Instead, they function as liminal spaces outside of linear time where moments of deeper knowing are possible: to rest, to grieve, to commune with natural forces, to calibrate a next move. In this pastoral reverie, thunderous insights have the space to strike. 

Shoot Forth Thunder references Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, in which the speaker yearns for the power embedded in thunder to enact justice in earthly matters. Metaphorically and mythologically, thunder is the catalyst for transformation and the deliverer of karma from which a subject’s path is irrevocably altered.

Within each of Colette’s paintings a visual disruption to the soothing symmetry appears: flashes of earthy, opaque micaceous iron oxide hover above and below, at times in thin gashes, at others spilling out in overwhelming chasms. These visual and metaphorical thunderbolts dislodge the stable system of the painting, pushing the viewer to make a navigational and philosophical decision. At the precipice of these voids we can choose to proceed through passageways where we face unknown futures. Much like the journey of grief, these portals also remind us of the infinite potential in beginnings: for new systems, for justice, for utopia. A centerpiece of the show pulls its title from the following:

I was sent from the power

And have come to those who contemplate me

And am found among those who seek me

….For I am the first and the last…

            The Thunder/Perfect Mind

Nag Hammadi Scriptures

-Megan Reed

Image: Claire Colette

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Night Gallery is proud to present Relic, Reliquary, Requiem, an exhibition of objects by Dan John Anderson. This is the artist’s debut solo show with the gallery.

An undertone of exchange runs through Anderson’s newest body of work; the pragmatism and skill of craft traditions finds dialogue with sculpture’s formalism. A reverence for natural materials (namely wood, and here, redwood and cedar) is reflected by the intense physicality of Anderson’s practice. His process is one of elimination, paring down layers of raw wood until something essential reveals itself, the ritualized intensity of the activity negotiating internal and external space. 

Relic, Reliquary, Requiem is born of a lifelong ethos of communion with nature. Growing up in rural Eastern Washington and now living in Yucca Valley, California, Anderson’s foundational language is experiential, shaped by days spent in sun-bleached expanses of trees, rocks, sand, grass. For Anderson, the sculptural potential of subtraction relates strongly to erosion: natural forces of movement have gradually shaped the desert washes and serrated shorelines of the West Coast that he knows intimately. This influence manifests as subtle patterns and textures that appear as innate as the range of a landscape.   

Anderson’s works seem to stand outside of time, anchored by a corporeal continuity between the two largest sculptures on view. An imposing set of hands, burned and black, reach skyward, either emerging from or sinking into the Earth. Warm-toned stained glass at the center allows traces of light to come through the dark palms. Elsewhere, a head is partially submerged in the ground, its eyes in cast bronze almost glowing with a blank stare. The interrelation between fragments of the body foregrounds an understanding of art as techne—or, as described by the artist, a “thinking with your hands” that melts the sharp distinctions between art and craft, and the activities of the conscious and subconscious mind. 

Among the recognizably figurative forms, gestures toward abstraction offer room for looser interpretation. Collar, 2025 stands tall, monument-like, its central feature holding the striking possibilities of Anderson’s method. A redwood pot evokes the timeless, archetypal quality of a vessel to act as a container for the discrete and disparate, while the encircling web motif suggests nonlinear time. These enigmatic works encourage curiosity in viewers, acknowledging an inevitability of the imagination to operate independently of an artist’s intention. The mind moves, rain indents soil, rocks slide into the ocean.

Erosion is contradictory, at once making and eliminating slow evidence of what’s happened. In Relic, Reliquary, Requiem, Anderson brings a more cosmic but deeply human consideration to this phenomenon—we amount to how we spend our time and where we place our efforts. Everything else falls away. 

-Jayne Pugh

Claire Colette: Shoot Forth Thunder | Dan John Anderson: Relic, Reliquary, Requiem

Night Gallery North

Sidecar Gallery is delighted to present From Common Ground, a group exhibition featuring work by Los Angeles area artists Sarah Awad, Marwa Abdul-Rahman, Mira Dancy, Kenturah Davis, Brad Eberhardt, Asher Hartman, Alice Könitz, Ruby Neri, Laura Howard Parker, Camilla Taylor, Patricia Valencia, Emmett Walsh, and Eric Zammitt. From Common Ground will be on view from July 12 - August 23, 2025 at Sidecar Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. There will be an opening reception from 6-8pm on July 12, including a performance by Marcos Lutyens.

The works by artists in From Common Ground engage with a robust variety of themes ranging from tensions between figuration and abstraction in painting, to land use and water rights in the American Southwest, and ideas about the collective and individual human experiences in the natural world.

This exhibition is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Fondation Valmont through its mission to promote contemporary art, foster intercultural dialogues, and support visual artists on a global scale.

From Common Ground is curated by Salim Moore, academic curator at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, and brings together a creative exchange of work by artists with roots in Altadena, California. The artists were assembled through a collaboration between the Fondation Valmont, Marcos Lutyens, and Night Gallery.

From Common Ground

Sidecar

In the midst of hot summer days, sultry evenings, the mysteries of the universe, and a waning moon, let’s pause and peer through the artists’ lens in Considering Summer 2025!

Considering Summer 2025 with Jonathan Bout, Demetri Broxton, Carrie Burckle, Julia Couzens, Molly Haynes, Wakana Kimura, Jeana Eve Klein, Suhn Lee, Corey Pemberton, Felandus Thames, Tristan Esmino, Jamie Vasta.

This ensemble exhibition is a continuing celebration of the rich language of material abstraction sprinkled with some phantasmic figuration. The artists in this show reframe memory, loss, ceremony, family, history, politics, culture, labor, and the here and now—through textiles, ceramics, paint, drawing, metal, beads, repurposed miscellany, and glass. We’re leaning into, not away from, what makes us unique—please join us!

Image: Jonathan Bout | in-progress detail of graphite drawing

Considering Summer 2025

Patricia Sweetow Gallery

Lucky Cat Gallery is proud to host the legendary roving group art show Cannibal Flower, curated by Leonard Croskey, AKA LC. Join us as we celebrate work from over 75 of LA’s best artists, featuring paintings, sculptures, installations, live painting and a live performance. Expect a powerful mix of genres, styles, and voices.

Artists: Emily Tsai, Nate Suebert, Preston Thomas, Snow Mack, Melany Meza Dierks, L. Croskey, Katie Middleton, Adam McCarthy, Marciano Ceballos, Little Ricky, Tewsr, Thea Saks, Bloomer, Thomas Garner, Taylor Blue, Rebecca Nabarette, Shanna Cox, Ernie Steiner, Lauren Mendelsohn Bass, Vakseen, Ken Flewellyn, Craig Cartwright, Palmer Earl, Steven Morrell, Min Kyong Kwon, Kevin Mack, Dan Litzinger, Francesca Quintano, Dany Paragouteva, Skyler Gonzales, Austin Call, Tanner Goldbeck, Lynette Henderson, Dakota Noot, Dion Macellari, Jesus Lopez, Alexander, Cerda, Lance Paullin, Brandon Hurley, John Fukuda, Josh Everhorn, Chromaven, Laura Leigh, Paul Garcia, Amy Meier Welch , Matthew Erhmann, Michael Camarra , Anthony Clarkson, Sawyer Hurwitz, Rei Manz, Cody Jimenez, Matthew Mallinger, Kaya Gillmore, Brenda Trujillo, KOLA DPW, Isabel Poon, Kyle William Harper, Paul Torres, Jason Ostro, Judy Ostro, Marie Njoku Obi, Darnell Waine, Michael Foulkrod, Roger Betka, RJ Quiralta, Matt Perez, Steve Jackson, Matthew Rae, Nathan Cartwright, Richard Stergulz, Linda Herzog, Isabella Morillo, Randi Matushevitz, Raymond Argumedo, Dead Gringos, Albert Reyes

Cannibal Flower Group Show

Lucky Cat Labs

Expanding on Posey’s debut presentation with our Highland Avenue gallery last spring, these fifteen landscape paintings offer an intimate glimpse into the artist's spacious realm.

Pam Posey: Field Trip [ONLINE]

Diane Rosenstein Gallery

AYA TAKANO
_
Perrotin Los Angeles is pleased to present an exhibition by internationally acclaimed Japanese artist, AYA TAKANO; the artist’s 11th solo exhibition with the gallery.

The exhibition brings together new paintings, drawings, and installations that explore memory, ancestral consciousness, and the timeless connection between all beings–human and non-human alike. Designed to awaken the five senses and reintroduce the body as a site of perception, it offers a reprieve from the disembodied logic of algorithm and data. TAKANO encourages audiences to engage not just intellectually, but physically and emotionally.



Jin Meyerson
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Seoul-based artist Jin Meyerson debuts his first solo show in Los Angeles with Perrotin.

Across ten canvases and a solitary windsock-esque soft sculpture, Meyerson lifts the visual language of landscape, ports it into metaverse, and returns it, somehow, to the analog world. Each a centrifugal force, the landscapes rotate free from the constraints of their genre, beyond memory and perspective. The result is what Meyerson calls a “meta-location,” something akin to the overview effect reported by astronauts. 


AYA TAKANO | Jin Meyerson 

Perrotin

This August, the Artists Gallery (TAG) spotlights figurative sculpture, painting, and mixed media. Featured solo exhibition artists are:

Dara Kay Barker, Robert Zent Chew, Lorna Herf, Emil Rutenberg, Bruce Sanders and Lana Shmulevich. 

TAG is proud to present art works that explore the overlooked materials of everyday life, the beauty of imperfection, the human spirit, memory, and fleeting moments:

NOT FADE AWAY .… the 5th sequel
This exhibition reflects Emil Rutenberg’s interpretation of the human spirit through the human form—whether in sculpture, sketching, or painting.

His work seeks to portray the condition and struggle of man, often in conflict with his environment—and at times, in fleeting moments, in harmony with it.

Rutenberg presents the human condition as one shaped by both circumstance and existential reality, yet almost always as something directly or indirectly self-imposed.

Born in South Africa, Emil Rutenberg relocated to Los Angeles in 1983, where he established a fashion label under his own name. Under his creative direction, the brand gained a strong international following. Over time, however, Emil’s creative passions evolved, drawing him increasingly toward the world of fine art.
He has since held seven successful solo exhibitions in the United States and Cape Town, South Africa, and maintains studios in both Inglewood, California, and Salt River, Cape Town. His work—across all three mediums—can be found in collections throughout the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, Israel, and Africa.

Dara Kay Barker In an age defined by speed and disconnection, Stitched + Interwoven is a quiet celebration of the handmade, the heartfelt, and the human.

This mother-and-son exhibition brings together two distinct visual languages: Dara Kay Barker’s layered, painterly “textiles” inspired by the fabrics on display, and Andrew Greyson Schwartz’s bold, graphic compositions rendered in tightly limited palettes. What unites their work is a shared desire to weave memory, emotion, and presence into something tactile—something that can be felt as much as seen.
 
Robert Zent Chew  "Blink of an Eye, Landscapes & Figures" memorializes fleeting moments in representation and deconstructed landscapes, still life, everyday street scenes and figurative compositions. 

So often there is a moment where there is a natural composition, a scene in a restaurant, a group of people standing on the corner, an old car passing, sunlight fading against trees or mountainside, and then it passes before us in a blink of an eye. We want to remember these moments. Better, we want to capture them, but they are fleeting. The work in this collection are those moments lost, and remembered, in a blink of any eye.

Lorna Herf In "Lost and Found," painter Lorna Herf explores themes of the passage of time, lost moments, and found presence, where each painting carries a deeper story behind the sweetness.
 
Working from a combination of photographs and memories, Lorna brings color and emotion through different periods of the past. Color palettes shift between realistic and monochromatic colors, with soft details to transport the viewer to a dreamy sense of nostalgia.

Bruce Sanders "After the Fires: A New Beginning” - is an evocative collection of first pieces produced since Sanders lost his home and body of work to the LA fires.  

In this solo show, are the first of my new paintings. When I started, I was worried that I would not have enough work to exhibit ... but I produced so much ... that I had to leave a lot of paintings out. This body of work is driven by my far-ranging emotions, feelings of loss, feelings of love for my family and friends, feelings of gratitude, and my renewal of faith.

Lana Shmulevich " Chasing the Light" captures the tension between nature and the urban environment - using pop elements and playful materials to reflect how nature, human activity, and light shape the spaces we inhabit.

I am drawn to the overlooked materials of everyday life—glitter from nail polish, discarded packaging, staples, and scraps that catch the light in unexpected ways. Using mixed media, I build layered collages and sculptural pieces that play with reflection, texture, and shadow, transforming the ordinary into moments of surprise.

Six Solo Shows | Art With Words

The Artists' Gallery (TAG)

Lewis Baltz, Heinrich Riebesehl, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Christina Fernandez, Ron Jude, Frank Gohlke, Mark Ruwedel, Simone Nieweg

"Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce Homeland Photography. The artists in this exhibition focus their lenses on the American and German landscape, revealing a fundamental part of our collective existence. They remind us of our bucolic agrarian roots, the human cost of these systems, and warn of potential catastrophe should we not pay enough attention.”

Image credit: Lewis Baltz, Prototype Works, Irvine Ranch (Fields), 1968/92

Homeland Photography

Gallery Luisotti

Cirrus Editions is moving forward with new print projects that honor the 55 year legacy set forward by master printer and art dealer Jean Milant. We welcome you to our gallery to see this selection of seminal prints, as well as our incredible print shop. The show features ambitious multi-panel prints by John Baldessari, transcendent stone lithographs by Vija Celmins, as well as the luscious, graphic surfaces of Ed Ruscha.

In 1968 Jean Milant was accepted into the Tamarind Master Printer Program in Hollywood. At the time, the program was responding to the students request to work with contemporary California artists. The neighborhood was ripe with creativity with Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode’s studios down the street. Milant printed Ed Ruscha’s iconic Standard Stations. He also collaborated with artists Ken Price and Billy Al Bengston among others.

In 1970 Milant completed the program and founded Cirrus Editions– “a new California atelier of prints”. Located on Manhattan Place in Hollywood, Cirrus became known as a workshop respected for its groundbreaking work with lithography and silkscreen, putting a spotlight on California based artists. In the 1970s, Jean was the first California publisher to attend Art Basel, bringing California artists to the world stage. Through the years Cirrus worked with now legendary artists such as John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Vija Celmins, Guy de Cointet, Ed Moses, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Judy Chicago, Mark Bradford, Mary Weatherford, and Jonas Wood.

In 1979 Cirrus moved to Alameda Street in downtown Los Angeles where it remained for 35 years. The gallery moved to its current location on South Santa Fe Avenue in 2015. Jean had an incredible eye for art that he continued to develop over his life. He once commented that when he began Cirrus there was not a market for contemporary art. Through his life he actively participated in the evolution of the industry. Jean Milant passed away peacefully at his home this winter at the age of 81. 

Image: Eddie Martinez "Untitled (white out)," 2024. Lithograph and Silkscreen. 24" x 34". Edition of 45

The Greatest Hits of Cirrus Editions - Remembering Jean Milant

Cirrus Gallery

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to present How We Go, an exhibition of new works by Gio Swaby, marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition will be on view from July 19th through August 30th, 2025.

Originally from The Bahamas and currently based in Toronto, Swaby is known for her intricate textile portraits of Black women and femmes in her community. Swaby begins by photographing the sitters and translates these images into textured and tactile expressions of identity. Swaby’s Bahamian upbringing inspires the title How We Go, and is an affirming, intuitive expression of identity and shared understanding. Taken from the colloquial phrase “you know how we go”, the phrase is a description of the essence of a person, it is that which is simply known without having to be explained.

Swaby states about this new body of work:

“This work is rooted in the exploration of duality — how identity is both held within and reflected outward. I am exploring the complexity of Black femme identity, the layered, shifting intersections of who we are, how we’re seen, and how we choose to present ourselves. I am investigating the construction of identity, not as a fixed truth, but as an evolving narrative shaped by our lived experiences, cultures, and community.

Personal style holds a central role in this exploration. I am interested in how we use adornment to build soft, protective places or use it to create space for presence and power and as a means of being deeply seen. Clothing becomes a language, serving as both resistance and affirmation. Style is a mirror and a map; It holds space for contradiction and cohesion, for both the bold and the tender.

This work is a celebration of each person represented, rooted in love, deep reverence, and gratitude. It honors the beauty in complexity alongside the intimate truth of the simple. My work seeks to hold these tensions in harmony, offering a visual vocabulary for coming into one’s own—fully, unapologetically, and in continuous unfolding.”

About the artist

Gio Swaby (born 1991) was born and raised in The Bahamas and is currently based in Toronto, Canada. Swaby was recently the subject of her first solo museum exhibition in 2023, Gio Swaby: Fresh Up, at the Art Institute of Chicago.  The exhibition, co-organized by Katherine Pill, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and Melinda Watt, Chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles, Art Institute of Chicago, it traveled to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. Swaby’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville, FL; Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN;  Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO; Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA; National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas; Kunsthaus Alte Mühle, Schmallenberg, Germany; among others. Swaby’s work is included in collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum; the Speed Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; among others.

_____

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce Be Your Own Cool, an exhibition of new works by Ghanaian artist Kwesi Botchway. On view from July 19 to September 13, this exhibition marks Botchway’s second solo presentation with the gallery.

This recent series of paintings was created during a focused residency in Los Angeles earlier this spring and represents a shift in both scale and mood. Botchway, known for his vivid portrayals of Black identity infused with psychological depth and vibrant colors, adopts an introspective approach in this body of work.

The paintings in Be Your Own Cool are contemplative offerings that nurture the individuality of each subject while evoking a sense of intimacy. Each figure is portrayed in moments of reflection and stillness, characterized by subtle brushstrokes and a sense of resonance. These portraits invite viewers to engage closely with the subjects, set against soft pastel backgrounds that inspire feelings of tranquility, sensitivity, and empowerment. Also included in the exhibition is a group of fifteen diminutive paintings entitled community of freedom fighters, which, for the artist, captures and acknowledges individuals whose actions and ideologies have helped shape a sense of community.

In Be Your Own Cool, Botchway continues to evolve his signature style, where realism and stylization intersect, while also deepening the emotional complexity of Black portraiture. His use of rich tones and nuanced expressions allows his subjects to stand out against tranquil backgrounds dramatically. Each figure is presented not just as a muse, but also as a symbol of quiet dignity. By juxtaposing contemporary styles with a classical sense of fashion, these paintings emphasize Black individuals and their unique choices in hairstyles, clothing, and personal flair. These details intentionally reflect cultural identity and celebrate the evolution and significance of contemporary Black life.

About the artist

Kwesi Botchway (b. 1994, Accra, Ghana) lives and works in Accra and Belgium. Botchway is the founder of Worldfaze Art Practice, a contemporary art studio and residency based in Accra that supports emerging Ghanaian artists and fosters experimental practices in art. He studied art at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra before enrolling at the Academy of Visual Arts in Frankfurt, Germany. Over the past decade, Botchway has exhibited his paintings internationally and held solo exhibitions in Denmark, Ghana, the UK, Belgium, and the United States. His work is included in such collections as the Arsenal Art Centre in Canada, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL,National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne,Vanhaerents Art Collection, Belgium, the Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, Israel,The Bunker Collection and Tia Collection.

Image: Gio Swaby

Gio Swaby: How We Go | Kwesi Botchway: Be Your Own Cool

As the trees grow denser and the foliage blocks out the sun, you had better keep your wits about you; the forest can be quite an unfamiliar place. In the thick darkness of a bramble’s shade, or the sweet moisture of a willow’s bell, strange happenings begin to occur. A wanderer may lose themselves in a disorienting maze, as the towering groves reveal their old secrets, only to find themselves recalling memories long forgotten.

Make Room is proud to present Into the Woods, A group show of works from artists, each exploring a unique notion of the woods. We bring these artists together to capture The Sublime that one finds when you leave the static of urban society. The feeling created by the power and vastness of natural greatness, a feeling of awe, wonder and terror. Rather than approaching this feeling from the tradition of classical romanticism, this show puts together The Sublime of the forest in fragments of abstraction. 

The forest has long held a cultural identity as a place of both mystery and homecoming. There is a nostalgic familiarity to the cathedral of trees. There is a warmth in the smells and the ground is soft under your feet, but even if it is our primordial home it is unknown to us now. This contradiction appears within these pieces, without words, or necessarily imagery of the forest itself. As a central figure of the show, Bai Yiyi’s paintings create a fluid abstraction of dappled light filtering across grasses and beads that are obscured by texture. These paintings evoke a calm feeling yet hold onto this sense of confusion and mystery; The feeling remains veiled. This feeling can be seen in the eyes of a Johanna Bath portrait, or one of Dylan Doe’s nearly-human figures.

Mother Nature takes the archetype of both the nurturing caretaker, as well as the nymphlike temptress. This feeling of the woods is presented in both the allure and the comfort of the feminine identity as it spans across generations. Much of this show pulls from this feminine heritage of craftsmanship and protection as well as delicate beauty. As with Malaika Temba’s piece Fragment 2; the art of textile making and weaving holds a long tradition of feminine care. A sturdy material made through the careful structuring of fragile thread. Like a grandmother teaching a child to weave, the forest imparts lessons of our natural world. The femininity of the forest can be seen across the body of work from the curves of nature in Camilla Engstrom’s paintings, to the bathing scenes in Tuan Vu radiant forest.  

Into the Woods is an exploration of the emotional identity of the woods separate from the figurative depiction of the trees themselves. The forest holds a spiritual identity that we all connect with in some way. Taking time in nature is transformative in many of the same ways that spending time with art can be. In a time when both the future of art institutions as well as the future of our natural spaces is unpredictable, we must make an effort to maintain them for future generations.


Into the Woods 

Attuned to phenomena like the flow of water, the behavior of wildlife, and the humming of roadways, Ian Wellman’s Between the Noise explores the local ecologies and infrastructures of the Arroyo Seco passage in LA County. In collaboration with Trevor Baker, whose accompanying videos give visual context to the sounds gathered from the landscape, Wellman documents the resonances between human and more-than-human worlds along the seasonally active stream. Composed to bring recognition to our local ecologies, Between the Noise fashions a narrative of the water course’s progress as a living—and life-giving—entity, from chaparral to concrete channel.

A master of field recording, Wellman used specialized techniques to capture extra-subtle sonic events. A parabolic dish amplified bird and mammal vocalizations, hydrophones listened under water, and geophones detected movements in the ground. For this iteration of Between the Noise, state-of-the-art surround sound methods place the viewer and listener in an immersive audiovisual experience.

To coincide with Fulcrum Arts’ exhibition Between the Noise, artist Ian Wellman will lead two field recording workshops in August. Participants will explore select areas along the Arroyo Seco, collect sounds, share recording techniques, and discuss the sonic properties unique to the watershed.
Click here for more information about the workshops.

About Ian Wellman
Ian Wellman is a sound artist and composer based in Pasadena, CA. Informed by study of bioacoustics, his work uses field sound and tape-loop compositions to create introspective narratives that emphasize vibrational overlaps between natural and built environments.

Wellman’s recordings have been published by Room40, Ash International, Dragon’s Eye Recordings, Luminous Drift, and Industrial Coast. Wellman’s work has been mentioned in Bandcamp Daily, The Wire, A Closer Listen, and Foxy Digitalis. He has performed at 2220 Arts and Archives, The Broad, Zebulon, Human Resources, The Chapel (Seattle), and High Water Mark (Portland, OR). He has contributed to recordings from Deru and Xiu Xiu, and he is currently a resident DJ on dublab.

About Trevor Baker
Trevor Baker works with video, still photography, and noise. Much of their work uses outdated technology pushed to saturation with feedback loops, interference, and distortion. The desert, mountains, and forests of California, where Trevor often explores, inspire their work.

Baker’s work has been published by Eyemyth Records and is self-published on YouTube. They have performed at The Lash, Little Joy, 2220 Arts and Archives, and The Stud (San Francisco).

Ian Wellman: Between the Noise is made possible with the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Image: Ian Wellman, Between the Noise, 2025. Sound and video installation. 46 min. Video by Trevor Baker. Photo by Hans Baumann. 


Ian Wellman: Between the Noise

Fulcrum Arts

Track 16 is pleased to present Praise The Dying Beauty With All Your Breath, a group exhibition featuring Bug Davidson, Rebecca Farr, Cheryl Hazelton, iris yirei hu, Kim Kei, Coe Lapossy, Rahn Marion, Alicia Piller, Molly Segal, Camilla Taylor and Lisa Diane Wedgeworth. Curated by Coe Lapossy and Molly Segal.

Praise the world - praise its fullness and its longing, its beauty and its grief
Praise stone and fire, lilac and river, and the solitary bird at the window.
Praise the moment when the whole bursts through pain and the moment when the whole bursts forth in joy.
Praise the dying beauty with all your breath, and praising, see the beauty of the world is your own. 
– Kaddish: Beauty of The World

The artists in Praise The Dying Beauty With All Your Breath explore artmaking and the persistence of beauty in the face of collapse of all kinds. Whether cobbling together a Utopia from the midst of rubble, examining loss and rage, or refusing to look away from injustice, each artist contributes a fragile yet incandescent vision of grief and resilience.

There is an inherent tension in looking directly at the most painful parts of our existence and still  deciding to make art. It speaks to stubborn, irrational optimism. A willingness to unflinchingly face what is while creating room for what could be.

Praise The Dying Beauty With All Your Breath

Track 16 | Downtown LA

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.

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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

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.}

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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

NOON Projects is honored to present "Fever Dream" by Finnish artist Hertta Kiiski. In her second exhibition with the gallery in Los Angeles, Kiiski presents a constellation of sculptural works, photographic assemblages, and the premiere of two new films. The installation evokes a gentle collapse—quiet, recursive, and strangely tender. It unfolds as a soft hallucination, tracing the slow erosion of form, the porous boundaries between species, and the unexpected warmth found at the end of things. "Fever Dream" moves like a lucid dream—nonlinear, looping, and without hierarchy—where softness replaces spectacle at the edge of collapse.

At the core of the exhibition, two new video works unfold Kiiski’s ongoing inquiry into ecological poetics, and the entangled mythologies of embodiment and environment. "Nox Rosae" is atmospheric and sensorially charged. Structured at 17 minutes—the average duration of a REM sleep cycle—the film resists conventional narrative, offering instead a drifting, affective experience that mimics the fluidity and disorientation of dreaming. Created collaboratively by Hertta Kiiski and visual artist Janne Punkari, the work builds on their shared interest in poetic form, symbolic objects, and spatial ambiguity. At its center is a rose, one of humanity’s most universal metaphors for love and natural beauty—yet also a symbol of human control: cultivated, hybridized, and rigorously manicured. In the film, a mummified tin rose becomes an unlikely protagonist, moving through textured spaces where material and meaning blur. The sound, composed by Anniina Saksa, acts as the film’s ambient nervous system—her audio-textures framing silence as much as sound, teasing memory, and heightening sensation.

In "Not not a metaphor," Kiiski doesn’t dramatize collapse but tunes into its frequencies. The film unfolds like a long exhale—soft, slow, and saturated with the minor chords of grief, wonder, absurdity, and care. Its narrator, a carrion crow—part oracle, part sidewalk prophet—riffs: “You want salvation, but also takeout. You want tenderness, but flinch at the bite. You want to save the dolphins, but you still fly. And yet. You love.”

What do we do with ourselves now that we are no longer at the center?

Filmed across zoos, aquariums, ancient ruins, and distribution centers, a monkey sits still—indifferent and alert. The artist’s daughters, long-time collaborators, appear as jesters without an audience, drifting through a glowing warehouse. Kiiski offers neither symbols nor solutions but casts out echoes suspended in a fluid, flickering ecosystem.

Surrounding the films, Kiiski’s sculptures are made from found, used, and inherited materials—ceramic dolphins, home decor, shoelaces, and wilted painted flowers—objects pre-charged with the residue of personal histories, consumer cycles, and cultural kitsch. Rather than purify or explain, Kiiski allows these materials to remain in their in-betweenness: awkward, sentimental, and animate. The works explore an aesthetic that sits at the crossroads of crumbling modern civilization and its detritus. Kiiski’s readymades become emblematic: Maslow's triangle, the mug as a vessel of comfort, the dolphin as a symbol of intelligence, play, and captivity. On the back wall are two photographic assemblages, presented in ultramarine blue frames. Created with a printed passe-partout, each contains four images arranged like holiday snapshots, hung on the wall like a family heirloom.

"Fever Dream" does not present any manifestos; instead, it creates a space—and a suggestion—to pay close attention to the contradictions we live inside. Kiiski presents a landscape shaped by entropy: the slow undoing of categories, systems, and species. Civilization doesn’t end with drama. It frays. It leaks. It dreams.


Hertta Kiiski (b. 1973, Turku, Finland) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work unfolds within a framework of love, embracing the magical, mythical, and esoteric. Working across photography, film, installation, textiles, and spatial interventions, Kiiski constructs environments that dissolve the boundaries between the natural and the constructed, the everyday and the imaginary. Her work is rooted in collaboration—over the past 13 years, with her daughters, as well as other artist partners, dogs, and more-than-human companions—foregrounding interspecies communication and feminist modes of world-building. Her practice draws on ecology, posthumanist theory, and the unruly textures of lived experience.

Her solo and group exhibitions have been presented at major institutions internationally, including the 14th Gwangju Biennale (Korea), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), the Finnish Museum of Photography, Photographic Centre Peri (Finland), Hafnarfjörður Museum (Iceland), the Icelandic Photo Festival, and NOON Projects (Los Angeles). Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Finnish National Gallery / Kiasma, the Finnish Museum of Photography, and the Turku Art Museum.

Kiiski has published three acclaimed photobooks—"Archive Play" (2014), "I Was an Apple and I Got Peeled" (2016), and "Otherworld" (Kehrer Verlag, 2023)—each further developing her interest in the intersection of photographic storytelling, dream logic, and spatial practice. In addition to her studio practice, she is an educator and is active in several artist-run initiatives. She lives and works in Turku, Finland.

Opening Reception:
Friday, August 1, 2025, 6–8 PM

August Gallery Hours:
Thursdays & Fridays: 7–10 PM
Saturdays: 12–5 PM

For further information, please contact info@noon-projects.com or +1 971 341 6648.

Hertta Kiiski: Fever Dream

NOON Projects

America (Soy Yo!) brings together artists from across the United States, Mexico, Central America, South America, and Canada who collectively interrogate ideas of forced migration, land ownership, and the man-made borders that separate us. The exhibition highlights the dissonance created when familial histories of land stewardship exist in conflict with bureaucratic divisions of property, questioning who and what constitute belonging, either to a nation or to the land itself.

America (Soy Yo!) - Curated by Ever Velasquez

Charlie James Gallery

"As art enters its nonhuman age, the artist is fortifying painting against datafication and easy prompting, preserving painting as a strict domain of the human."

DON’T LOOK Projects, in association with SLQS Gallery, is pleased to present Flotsam and Jetsam, Diana Taylor's first solo exhibition in the US. At a moment when all images are flowing into an AI algorithm, the canons of painting, photography, and film are converging into an undifferentiated field of digital “slop”. Diana Taylor’s practice makes legible the imminent threat of cultural blindness by splicing together different forms of visual grammar into a state of alluring aporia. Layering the graphical matrix of Gustave Doré’s woodblock prints for Dante’s Divine Comedy together with a surfeit of other patterns over a pixel grid, the artist’s works for Flotsam and Jetsam make legible the collapse of analog and digital organizing principles that AI obscures. 

This is painting as gerund: a process of ceaseless resolution and obfuscation that highlights the blind spots in a world of superabundant imagery. By deploying pattern as visual friction, Taylor slows the gaze over her chosen source materials—from astrological inquiries in medieval prints to the sample books of William Morris—juxtaposing different idioms in order to isolate the moments when meaning breaks down, and where history is rewritten.

Like a number of contemporary artists coming to terms with a state of postdigital experience, where all sense perception is preloaded with digital artifacts, Taylor’s hybrid approach confronts a reality where more images are produced by machines for machines than any other. As art enters its nonhuman age, the artist is fortifying painting against datafication and easy prompting, preserving painting as a strict domain of the human.

For Flotsam and Jetsam, Taylor used selected details of the choppy sea, rolling waves, and billowing mast from illustrations by Doré, for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, written in 1797-1798 and illustrated in 1875. The traditional woodblock, carved by hand in the late 19th century, was reproduced in the 1970s for Dover Publications before being scanned, cropped, resized, and repeatedly screen-printed onto canvas. Cut-outs from nature reference books intersect grids as well as the craftwork of crochet tablecloths, beadwork patterns, and other printed ephemera from the artist’s own archive. Themes of nature and culture, craft and technology, traditional and digital media, old and new are collapsed to highlight interconnections and uncouple apparent binaries. Decisions in the painting process are also reversed and “unpainted,” swinging between yes and no, fast and slow. The marine theme was significant to the time Taylor herself spent by the ocean during her residency at 18th St Arts Center, Santa Monica, where these works were produced.

Taylor is a recipient of the Andrew. W Mellon Fellowship at the Huntington, which she is undertaking in July and August 2025. Last year Taylor was an artist in residence at 18th St. Arts Centre, Santa Monica, from September to December 2024. She completed a practice-based PhD with the William Morris Gallery, London, through Sheffield Hallam University, 2023. Taylor graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London with an M.F.A in Painting, in 2010.

Recent solo shows include Borrowed Time, Bobinska Brownlee, London (2024); A Ghost for Today, William Morris Gallery, London (2022); Phantom Yarns, Artseen Contemporary, Nicosia, Cyprus (2021)  and Cyprus High Commission Gallery, London (2022); Can we Hold on?, CCA, Mallorca (2018-2019).

Recent, selected, group shows include A Landscape of Chance, SLQS Gallery, London (2024); Stable, Bobinska Brownlee New River (2023-2024); A Painting Show, Benjamin Parsons Gallery, Oxford; Montage, Fabrik, Baterswil, Switzerland.

Residencies include 18th St Arts Centre, L.A. (September-December 2024); CCA Andratx, Mallorca (April and September 2018); Factory floor residency, in response to ‘Love is Enough’, William Morris & Andy Warhol, curated by Jeremy Deller, Modern Art Oxford (2015); CCA Andratx, Mallorca (2012); East London Printmakers (2011); Abbey Scholarship in Painting, British School at Rome & Rosa Lee Travel Award (2011); Graduate Printmaking Prize Winner, Jealous Print Studios (2010).

Diana Taylor (b. UK, 1977) Lives and works in London.

- Alex Estorick with Diana Taylor

Diana Taylor: Flotsam and Jetsam

DON’T LOOK Projects

Curated by Joey Lico

Adrián S. Bará, Julian Charrière, Sofía Fernández Díaz, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Leslie Hewitt, Phaan Howng, Athena LaTocha, Dionne Lee, Harold Mendez, Nobuhito Nishigawara, Caleb Hahne Quintana, Jose de Jesus Rodriguez, Cauleen Smith, Rodrigo Valenzuela, and Maggie West

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles is delighted to present Ground Work, a group exhibition organized by Los Angeles-based curator and Executive Director of The Cultivist, Joey Lico. The exhibition brings together fifteen artists whose works respond to the material, psychic, and political dimensions of landscape. Anchored by Duchamp’s seminal photograph Dust Breeding, 1920, Ground Work considers the trace as a radical gesture, foregrounding atmosphere, residue, and the weight of absence over pictorial representation. As Lico states, the artists “gather materials touched by time—ashes, dust, silence, memory—and offer us not declarations, but traces. This is not a show about landscape. It is about what it means to inhabit one.” There will be an opening reception on Thursday, July 17, from 5 to 8pm. Curator Joey Lico and several of the featured artists will be present.

Ground Work unfolds through three thematic undercurrents: Traces of Passage, Spatial Resistance, and Temporal Compression. Taken on the surface of Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass, Dust Breeding captures the entropy of material, the residue, and accumulation as a slow representation of time. It offers a conceptual and historical aperture for the exhibition, introducing the idea that what we leave behind can speak louder than what we make. Through photography, sculpture, installation, and painting, the artists in Ground Work echo this ethos, turning away from direct depiction to instead engage with memory, pressure, and transformation.

Artists addressing the theme of Traces of Passage consider terrain as archive and absence as narrative. Harold Mendez’s works hold the imprint of migration, labor, and layered memory. Drawing from Latin American histories and cultural inheritance, his practice is a quiet excavation—tracing resilience across geography and time. Dionne Lee’s silver gelatin prints layer fragility and resistance, weaving diasporic placemaking into fractured geographies. Caleb Hahne Quintana paints atmospheric portraits suspended between memory and departure, while Athena LaTocha embeds earth, ash, and ink into her monumental abstractions, transforming the landscape into surface and scar. Cauleen Smith’s poetic photo-based works and sculptural interventions meditate on grief, resistance, and speculative care.

Several artists demonstrate Spatial Resistance as they negotiate constraint and collapse in their work. Adrián S. Bará and Sofía Fernández Díaz use industrial and ephemeral materials to sculpt tension between structure and fragility, form and failure. Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s installations transform the space through sculptural systems of sound and textiles, creating a conceptual architecture imbued with spatial perception. Phaan Howng’s saturated post-landscape sculptures are rooted in speculative survival and ecological resistance. Maggie West’s immersive underwater projection, lush with color and endangered marine life, offers a crescendo of visual rupture and sensory immersion.

Temporal Compression folds into form in the work of Rodrigo Valenzuela, whose staged photographs of collapse interrogate labor, construction, and failure. Leslie Hewitt’s conceptual rigor lends gravitas to stillness, with photo-sculptural works that compress personal and historical time. Jose de Jesus Rodriguez uses fragile materials—fresco, lime, wire—to evoke the vulnerability of built environments. Julian Charrière’s sculpture confronts the ruins of industrial progress and the sublime collapse of nature, holding spectacle and decay in uneasy balance. In Nobuhito Nishigawara’s ceramic sculptures, ancestral forms and contemporary abstraction collide, collapsing generations into gesture and glaze.

Together, these artists approach the landscape not as image but as site of erasure and endurance, collapse and continuity. They negotiate with the ground, registering its silences and tensions, refusing to resolve it into a view. Ground Work is an excavation of what lingers: the poetic residue of time, labor, and memory pressed into form.

For additional information on the exhibition, please visit seankellyla.com For media inquiries, please email Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com
For inquiries, please email Thomas Kelly at Thomas@seankellyla.com

Image: Jose de Jesus Rodriguez, Someone Marry my uncle; Nice guy, 2024, Oil, acrylic, airbrush, suspended pigment, sand, slated lime putty and chicken wire on panel, 60 x 48 inches © Jose de Jesus Rodriguez Courtesy: the artist, Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles and Joey Lico

Ground Work

Sean Kelly Los Angeles

Musichead Gallery proudly presents Stones in Exile: The Making and Tour of 'Exile on Main St.', examining the creativity, chaos, and peak era of The Rolling Stones in 1971–1972. Highlighting the importance of Mick Taylor and the Exile mythology, this photography exhibition will feature 20 photographs by 7 acclaimed photographers, reminding us that great art often emerges from turbulence and that creative freedom is always worth fighting for.

On display are photographs of the Rolling Stones at Villa Nellcôte in France, where the recording of Exile on Main St. began in the summer of 1971. Visitors will also see images from Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, where the band completed the album, along with the original studio photographs featured in the album’s first pressing. The exhibition also showcases photographs from the band’s legendary 1972 North American tour, a raucous and unapologetic stretch that captures the Stones at their most unfiltered, untouchable, and unforgettable.

Stones in Exile explores how the Rolling Stones, amidst isolation and pressure, created a groundbreaking record that redefined rock. The exhibition reflects on the power of reinvention, and the lasting impact of artists creating on their own terms.

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 26, 2025, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Free with RSVP | https://musichead.com/blogs/events/stones-in-exile-the-making-and-tour-of-exile-on-main-st

Stones in Exile: The Making and Tour of 'Exile on Main St.' will be on view July 25 – August 30, 2025. For more information, visit: Musichead.com

Metered parking is available on Sunset Boulevard. Ridesharing is encouraged due to limited space. The gallery entrance is wheelchair accessible. For accessibility accommodations, please contact Musichead Gallery in advance.

For additional information, please contact Musichead Gallery at (323) 876-0042 or email us at info@musichead.com.

Stones in Exile The Making and Tour of 'Exile on Main St.'

Musichead Gallery

Rhett Baruch Gallery is thrilled to announce our newest exhibition at the Melrose gallery, Wish You Were Here. This exhibition is about memory being reconstructed, reframed, and reimagined through fragments of culture and personal history through the lens of three painters. This summer show features Edward Givis, Satoshi Okano, and Kristopher Raos who work across different geographies and employ vastly different techniques. However, each artist is tethered to the same impulse: to revisit and reinterpret everyday moments and images that shape their lives today. Together their imagery evokes a kind of visual time capsule, one that shifts between the intimate and the universal, the discarded and the iconic, the past, present and future. Across found objects, screen references, signage, and pop culture artifacts, Wish You Were Here captures the sweet spot where memory meets media and nostalgia becomes a shared language.

We invite you to join us for the opening reception on Thursday, July 24 from 5-8pm at Rhett Baruch Gallery located at 6057 Melrose Ave
90038. Refreshments are provided and rideshare is highly encouraged.

Edward Givis, Satoshi Okano and Kristopher Raos: Wish You Were Here

Rhett Baruch Gallery 

LAUNCH Gallery is proud to present Natural Patterns, featuring three Los Angeles-based artists: Danielle Eubank, Zo Frampton, and Katie Elizabeth Stubblefield. Collectively, their elaborate and insightful creations reflect the beauty and power of the natural world, while acknowledging the profound changes it is undergoing. They celebrate nature’s resilience, even as they document the onslaught of human excess and ignorance that threatens our planet. Fascination and wonder inspire these three documentarians of our current natural condition, as they convey hope and beauty on the two-dimensional surface with aplomb.
 
Danielle Eubank explores the relationship between abstraction and realism through painting water.  She created One Artist Five Oceans, a 20-year project where she sailed and painted the waters of every ocean on Earth to raise climate awareness.  Some of her most enriching experiences include Expedition Artist for the Phoenicia Ship Expedition, that circumnavigated Africa and as Expedition Artist in the UNESCO approved Borobudur Ship Expedition that traveled from Indonesia to Ghana.  Danielle is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
"I have painted every ocean on Earth and over 200 bodies of water to forward the public conversation about how pollution threatens our seas and what we can do to support the environment. My art is international and collaborative. The goal of my work is to join art, culture and science to create a greater understanding of the changing planet. My work is about how water unifies us. Human history is intrinsically dependent on water and I want to invigorate people’s passion for it. If people observe and think about water, they will feel more passionate about protecting it. Aesthetically, I am looking for the tipping point between the conceptual and visible to create an emotive response. I consider forms created by ripples, oil slicks, or refuse a foundation for deconstruction. I create patterns within patterns, representing vertical stacks of rhythms in each painting."
 
Zo Frampton creates abstracted landscapes using black and white archival ink on either black or white hardboard surfaces, offering a striking visual meditation on shape and repetition. Her drawings build through accumulation, creating the illusion of three dimensions through layered depth and rhythmic mark-making. While each individual element is deceptively simple in form, the resulting compositions reflect a layered complexity—one that echoes the natural patterns she observes in the forest, ocean, and sky.
"My newest body of work explores edges and negative space. I’ve been thinking about the boundaries that we impose on the world and the cracks that form when nature is allowed into an urban environment. I’m thinking of the wildfire scars on the land and the footprints left behind and the edge of a planted field where the dirt is piled and wildflowers grow. I’m thinking of the horizon as it moves further and further away and the hidden paths we use to chase it."

Katie Elizabeth Stubblefield presents pieces from her recent body of work titled Collateral Damage. These works explore the current shape of California’s coastline with drawings on plexiglass that expose industry adulterating an otherwise bucolic landscape. These drawings, done on discarded plexiglass with Sharpie markers, are the result of a forensic study of past flood and fire zones, earthquake fault lines, global warming projections, and conspiracy theories. Mark-making from these maps intersect with imagery of local current, abandoned or reclaimed infrastructure.
"Initially, these works were inspired by the hair-raising twin tsunami test sirens I overheard while gallery-sitting at a gallery in Newport Beach, CA. My drive home along Pacific Coast Highway became a study in the collateral damage a tsunami would create along the low-lying highway. In these works, I am exploring this complex relationship: the stubborn refusal to quit trying to live here in the face of an all-powerful and capricious mother nature. Initially these works started simply as plein air studies, utilizing the scratched-up plexiglass as view finder and sighting tool. As I worked, I started overlaying with the landscaped and industrial imagery. Over time this imagery has evolved, building layers of drawing on both the front and back of the plexiglass, building density and shadow into the final works.”

Natural Patterns: Danielle Eubank, Zo Frampton, and Katie Elizabeth Stubblefield

LAUNCH LA

A group exhibition featuring Alex Gross / Rafael Silveira / Flavia Silveira & more...

Slice of Summer: Spheres of Influence Group Show

KP Projects

One hullabaloo of an art exhibition featuring both up and coming lowbrow artists and well established artists in the Los Angeles underground art scene. 

Everything But the Kitschen Sink - Annual Group Exhibition

La Luz De Jesus Gallery

Colectivo Cherani is a political and artistic initiative organized by an intergenerational group of artists: Betel Cucué, Giovanni Fabián Guerrero, Francisco Huaroco Rosas, Ariel Pañeda, and Alain Silva Guardian. Its name refers to the place where the collective was founded: Cherán, a town located in the state of Michoacán, Mexico. As part of a 2011 political uprising by the Purépecha community of Cherán, Colectivo Cherani has pioneered a cultural movement that seeks to recover and invigorate the plurality of cultural expressions of the Purépecha people. The collective’s output is characterized by the use of various artistic techniques, including painting, murals, graffiti, photography, installation, and hand-embellished objects, reflecting the customs and traditions of the community. Colectivo Cherani foregrounds the importance of communal justice, self-government, resistance, and the role of art and ancestral Indigenous traditions in transforming society.

Hammer Projects: Colectivo Cherani is organized by Pablo José Ramírez, curator, with Jessi DiTillio, curatorial assistant.

Hammer Projects: Colectivo Cherani

The first institutional survey of the late Noah Davis (1983–2015) charts the breadth and depth of the American artist’s relentless output. Assembling over 50 works made between 2007 and 2015, the exhibition is organized in a manner that reflects the diverse interests informing Davis’s practice including current affairs, everyday life, family histories, ancient Egyptian cosmologies, the racism of American media, art history, and architecture. Inspired by vernacular sources—from flea market photographs to personal archives—Davis’s fluid painting style questioned complex histories of representation and image-making. Although the body of paintings he produced over a brief creative life was largely figurative, Davis employed unorthodox techniques and rich color palettes to create scenes that feel simultaneously realistic and dreamlike, joyful and melancholic, capturing the contradictory sensations of lived experience.

Noah Davis

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gagosian is pleased to announce The Domes, an exhibition of paintings by Y.Z. Kami, opening on June 28. The presentation brings together two bodies of work by the artist: a survey of Dome paintings made from 2011 to the present, and a group of new Messenger paintings. The exhibition marks a meaningful return to the West Coast for Kami—he spent his early years in Northern California after moving to the United States from Tehran in 1973, and Southern California has played host to a number of his institutional presentations, including a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art nearly a decade ago.

The Dome paintings interpret architectural structures as painted form, their tessellated rectangles and squares arrayed in concentric rings of white, blue, black, or gold. In some works, Kami additionally creates radiant mosaiclike squares that converge at the compositions’ centers. Abstracting the experience of gazing up into luminous hemispheres, these paintings evoke the domes of temples, churches, and mosques—technical triumphs of construction that span enormous light-filled spaces to signify the heavens.

Eliminating spatial perspective, the Dome paintings function as mandalas, meditative designs that aspire to infinity. Additionally, their palettes correspond to the four stages of material and symbolic transmutation of elements in the tradition of alchemy. These works emerged from Kami’s consideration of sacred architecture in Untitled (Diptych) (1996), which was featured in the exhibition Architecture as Metaphor at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1997. This pair of large-scale photographic prints mounted on canvas juxtaposes two Persian domes to form a spatial vortex. Kami developed the motif of concentric circles further with Rumi, The Book of Shams E Tabrizi (In Memory of Mahin Tajadod) (2005), a sculpture of soapstone blocks imprinted with verses by the Persian poet Rumi, and with his series of Endless Prayer collages and paintings (initiated in 2005).

Accompanying the Dome works are three new paintings from the Messenger series, a body of work Kami first began in 2022, of which one entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2023. Inspired by a photograph he took while traveling in India, the series incorporates the motif of a single figure seen from behind. Painted in a soft-focus style related to the artist’s portraits, the anonymous individual is caught mid-stride seemingly at a crossroads. In the three works on view here, Kami positions the figures either before the lush greens of forest-covered hills or moving toward a metropolis with skyscrapers that rise like a mirage in the distance. These paintings present a contrast between humanity, nature, and architecture, and perhaps between timelessness and the materiality of the secular world.
Coinciding with the exhibition in Beverly Hills are two exhibitions in France that include Kami’s work: Dans le Flou (Out of Focus) at Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, on view through August 18, 2025, and Copistes (Copyists) at Centre Pompidou–Metz, organized in collaboration with the Musée du Louvre, on view from June 14, 2025, to February 2, 2026.


Y.Z. KAMI: The Domes

Gagosian

Anthony Miler: Tomorrow’s Not What It Used To Be | Pepe Mar: Doppelganger | Llyn Foulkes: Time's Witness

The Pit

“I pour myself a very little drink, watching, in the windowpane, my reflection, which steadily becomes more faint.  I seem to be fading away before my very eyes- this fancy amuses me, and I laugh to myself”

- James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

David Bush has a fascination with reflective surfaces.  When we distill and flatten our looking through a screen or a pane of glass, we see two spaces dissolve and merge into one another, joining while remaining quite distinct.  We simultaneously look out towards the fuzzy distance and look back towards ourselves, like Baldwin’s anonymous narrator in Giovanni’s Room.  Windows invite reverie, particularly looking out over a quiet country night.  That pane of glass becomes a looking glass.  Inside and outside crushed and merged and flattened together, looking becomes unfocused, malleable and dreamlike.  

Only In Bush’s photographs, stark white bellies, like constellations, are scattered across the darkness of the night. Bugs are caught here, tiny burning galaxies describing a naked flat plane, invisible to us. These tiny little creatures, riding the membrane between reflection and transparency, are all that let us know a barrier even exists. Much like an astronomer at a space telescope,  Bush adds to the depth and detail of his images through a similar layering of information. He seeks to amplify the effect of these tiny bodies, motes of dust, and scratches of spiders silk. Tracing deep space, shallow space, piling up tiny amounts of light and color, letting the image resolve itself through painstaking accumulation.  A universe in miniature.


David Bush: NIGHT COLLECTING

Persons Unknown

Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts’ center for contemporary arts in downtown Los Angeles, presents two solo exhibitions by LA-based artists Hande Sever and Abigail Raphael Collins. Both artists examine the role of visual media in shaping our memories and imagining of global conflict. Their work stands in conversation with each other, speaking to the acts of imperialism and militarization that expand into everyday culture. Hande Sever (Art MFA ‘18) explores cultural and political archives by excavating texts and images that shape historical narratives. Abigail Raphael Collins uses video installation and experimental nonfiction to listen to what is considered unspeakable. Both exhibitions open at REDCAT on May 22 and will remain on view through August 10.

Hande Sever: Take off your eyes
Hande Sever (Art MFA ‘18) explores cultural and political archives by excavating texts and images that shape historical narratives. Often drawing from her own family’s history of persecution, her work examines the intersection of personal and collective memory, particularly in the context of military violence, surveillance, and censorship. Take off your eyes presents two bodies of work rooted in Southern California collections. To Thread Air (2023) is based on research Sever conducted in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum, and examines the relationship between the former actor and US President and Kenan Evren, former Turkish President and right-wing leader of the 1980 Turkish coup d’etat. Stemming from an album held in the Ottoman Empire photography collection of the Getty Research Institute, In Search of ‘My Beloved Pauline’ (2025) follows the path of a German soldier who documented sites of colonization throughout and beyond the Ottoman Empire from 1917–1918.

Abigail Raphael Collins: BLACKOUT
Abigail Raphael Collins uses video installation and experimental nonfiction to listen to what is considered unspeakable. Her work begins from a queer, feminist perspective, exploring what is passed on through generations, outside of language: the gaps, silences, and stutters in intimate and historical dialogue. The culmination of seven years of researching, filming, and editing, BLACKOUT is an experimental documentary that unravels relationships between the film and television industry and the US military. Beginning with the artist’s father, a method actor with PTSD frequently cast in military roles, BLACKOUT threads together interviews of individuals working at the mediatized military junction: a combat videographer, a role player for military trainings, a script supervisor in the Army, and a writer for a TV show partially funded by the US military.

Both exhibitions are co-curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Programs and Talia Heiman, Assistant Curator.