Laurie DeVault’s work lives in the liminality of contemporary midcentury and abstract expressionism. Her mark-making employs dreamy biomorphic shapes in unabashed color.  The artist translates a sense of, movement, spontaneity, and energy through her non-representational forms and vibrant colors. More than occasionally, dancing lines intercede as if to encourage our continued exploration into her dreamy translations.

Laurie DeVault: Unbound

The LMF Gallery & Darkroom

Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to present NOT YOUR WOMAN, the third solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Heidi Hahn, opening April 25.  Comprised of eight large-scale paintings and fifteen smaller works, the exhibition unfolds in two distinct yet interconnected experiences—one driven by scale, the other by genre as a point of rupture. Hahn’s paintings hover between image and material, allowing the physicality of paint to dictate form, meaning, and perception. Rather than adhering to figuration, her work uses abstraction to reshape narrative, destabilizing conventional readings of the body. Paint itself becomes an active force, shifting the boundaries of representation and revealing a more elusive reality. 
 
Following the trajectory of her previous series—Soft Joy, Thoughts That Break the Soul, and Flex, Rot, and Spi(l)t—this new body of work introduces a renewed dialogue between scale and expression. The larger paintings remain open-ended and experimental, posing questions about presence, perception, and form. The smaller works, by contrast, engage with genre—landscape, the pastoral—subverting tradition to offer an alternative narrative. If the larger paintings pose the question, the smaller works attempt, or complicate, a response.
 
Hahn’s compositions—characterized by exaggerated forms, expansive color fields, and gestural layers—foreground the tension between surface and depth, material and meaning. Figures are fractured, displaced, and abstracted, not to erase them but to strip away expectations. “I think the paintings are protective of the body,” Hahn notes, “I always angle [subjects] to distort or turn out the meaning of a feminine body. These paintings are not interested in figuration, or representation, but in dealing with the nature of abstraction as a means to find a different narration.” This approach allows her work to exist in a space where meaning remains fluid, shifting between what is seen, what is felt, and what resists being fully known.

Heidi Hahn: Not Your Woman

Kohn Gallery

A bird tenderly hovers over a woman’s lips, its wings spread out in flight, resembling a speech bubble. The artist Seline Burn speaks through her paintings, the messages of which are at the heart of Kairos, her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Baert Gallery. Of the ten paintings in the show, five are evident as self-portraits. By bringing viewers into her world, Burn’s paintings offer intimacy; they are pure and confiding. These sentiments are accentuated through her tender depictions of birds, for example, in various contexts: nestled against human skin, cradled in arms, resting among trees or quietly taking flight. They are always portrayed peacefully, alluding to trust and surrender: the weight of a creature’s faith, the human willingness to let go.

Kairos is an ancient Greek meaning a critical opening in time, a crisis that is also an opportunity. As opposed to Chronos, which marks linear, measurable time, Kairos is time moving vertically. C. G. Jung associated it with synchronicity, a special moment when a person is particularly open to experiencing two random events as being connected. Because of their inner state, the person perceives a meaningfully link between these events. This seemingly random coincidence gains deeper significance for them. Burn is discovering that for her the essence of painting is an escape of Chronos, to being more open, not holding back, and working from the unconscious. While a painting may feel random when it’s first started, meaning often emerges in hindsight, like an epiphany.

In Burn’s exhibition Kairos, she has captured this moment of vertical time. Her paintings illustrate those instances when an individual wavers between collapse and flight, between holding on and letting go. Susan Sontag’s poignant confession resonates: “Strength is what I want. Strength not to endure—I have that, and it has made me weak—but strength to act.” Endurance alone, these paintings suggest, can become its own burden, but there comes a moment when one must act, choose, and transform.

Held by the Sun perfectly encapsulates this concept. Here, Burn contemplates her next move on a chessboard, populated with gargoyles inspired by those of Notre Dame, recalling her time living in Paris. The ambivalence between knowing and not knowing, as she uses her instincts and knowledge to guide her, is palpable. For Seline Burn, a Swiss artist from Basel, this exhibition marks a personal threshold. Recent upheavals and new beginnings in her life have left echoes across these works. Her search for balance—between inner turmoil and calm, past identities and new selves, here and elsewhere—unfolds in layers of paint. In Ariadne’s Thread, three women carefully step along a fallen tree suspended over water, guided by a delicate thread—they could be an allegory of Burn’s own self, of her past, future, and present (with a baseball cap as the time stamp).

Burn’s palette, dominated by soft yellows and deep blues—colors of dawn and twilight—enhances the mood of liminality. Yellow radiates hope in works like Intertwined or At the Edge of the Light, while shades of deep blue introduce undertones of uncertainty and contemplation. Each painting maintains a careful tension between tranquility and unrest, holding viewers in the quiet suspension of unresolved narratives.

In the end, Kairos offers a space that is poetic and profound—a pause in which fragility becomes strength, and in which every small bird, partially-eaten pretzel, or watchful gargoyle might carry the promise of a new beginning.

— Simmy Swinder Voellmy

Seline Burn: Kairos

Baert Gallery

In an enchanting showcase titled "ABSTRACT(ION)” two abstract artists, Michael Todd Serr and Gorman Bentley, come together to celebrate their shared emotional landscapes while embracing their unique stylistic choices. Despite their differences, both artists convey a profound connection to the human spirit, inviting viewers to explore the delicate balance between calm and chaos. This exhibition promises to be a captivating journey through the depths of emotion, leaving audiences inspired and contemplative.

Michael Todd Serr and Gorman Bentley: ABSTRACT(ION)

Baldwin Avenue Gallery

BEYOND THE STREETS proudly presents PINK CLOUD, the triumphant LA debut of graffiti icon GREY (Jonas Melvin). A trailblazer of San Francisco’s golden graffiti era, GREY revolutionized the art form with his bold, punchy style, influencing generations. After rising to fame in the late '90s, GREY disappeared into a world of addiction and turmoil, resurfacing years later with a renewed purpose.

Now sober, GREY reflects on his journey through vibrant installations, paintings, and sculptures that blend his struggles with a message of hope. The show also features works by Alexis Ross, Alicia McCarthy, Angel Castro, Barry McGee, Cheryl Dunn, Dan Murphy, Dave Schubert, Elberto Muller, GKAE, Mark Cross, MERCH, Stephen Powers, Timothy Curtis, Todd James, and more.

A portion of proceeds supports Feed The Streets LA, aiding communities in need.

Details: beyondthestreets.com


GREY (Jonas Melvin) & Friends: PINK CLOUD

Beyond The Streets

Simard Bilodeau Contemporary is thrilled to present Caribbean Stages, a solo exhibition of works by Alexandre Arrechea. At its core, Caribbean Stages explores cultural identity and its constantly shifting nature—reshaped by time, distance, and context. Painting these works speaks to the illusion of proximity—how memory, place, and identity can feel close, even intimate, yet remain just out of reach.

Alexandre Arrechea: Caribbean Stages

Simard Bilodeau Contemporary

Babst Gallery is pleased to present Leo Krikorian, an exhibition of hard-edge acrylic paintings by Leo Krikorian (1922-2005). Krikorian enrolled at ArtCenter School of Los Angeles where he studied photography under Ansel Adams. From 1946 to1948, he studied painting with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College alongside artists Ruth Asawa and Kenneth Noland, writer James Leo Herlihy, and filmmaker Arthur Penn.
 
In 1953, Krikorian and Knute Stiles opened The Place, a venue that functioned as a bar, jazz club, and exhibition space.  It was an important meeting place and venue for Beat Movement in San Francisco. It was at The Place that Allen Ginsberg practiced “Howl” and Jay DeFeo and Deborah Remington had their first exhibition sand where Krikorian put on shows of his own paintings. Kerouac anointed The Place as “the favorite bar of the hepcats around the Beach” where, as Knute Stiles recalled, “lesbians and queers and revolutionaries and so forth were interested in poetry, revolution, what have you—pacifism.”
 
During the 1950’s the San Francisco Police Department initiated the “Beatnik patrol” to aggressively police the artists and poets associated with the Movement. Krikorian closed The Place in 1958 because “the scene had changed. Everything in The Beach changed and I didn't dig the scene anymore.”
 
In 1976, Krikorian moved to Paris, where his studio was housed in a 15th century building on Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, around the corner from the Pompidou. In Paris, Krikorian exhibited widely, as well as in museums all over Europe, where he started experimenting with fluctuating space, enhancing it with vibrant colors and the use of reverse symmetry.  Krikorian once remarked about his process: “When you paint, you think of a scale. If the weight is in a corner, you need more and less active space, shapes surrounding it to get a balance.”
 
Knute Stiles, friend, fellow bar owner, and Artforum & Art in America  critic, wrote about Krikorian’s paintings in his 1984 essay, “Implied Space”: “The works are saturated with charged and juiced-up color that Krikorian encapsulates through shape and background, forcing the viewer’s eye in and out of the picture plane with reversals of positive and negative positions…the compositions echo the shape of the canvas support, and interplay of illusion and surface, hinging on the relation of the center to the edges.
 
“The center is generally present in Krikorian’s paintings, but it is approached obliquely, a light shift in the drawing displaces the symmetry that usually begins at the end of the canvas and sidesteps a direct relation to the composition at its center. The result is an open system in which the illusion of depth and completeness are interrupted. This ambiguity is compounded by Krikorian’s frequent inversion of the symmetry from left to right sides or top to bottom of the painting. Krikorian calls this ‘Implied Space.’’’
 
Leo Krikorian (1923-2005) was born in Fowler, California. Krikorian had solo museum exhibitions at Sears Art Museum, St. George, UT (2018-2019); Central Utah Art Center (2010); Black Mountain College Museum, Asheville, NC (2004); Institute of Modern Structural Art & Research Center, Kansas City, MO (1993); Fordham University at Lincoln Center, New York (1991); Musée Victor Duhamel, Mantes-la-Jolie, France (1990); Musée de Cholet, Cholet, France (1988), International Center, Hammsermith, London (1988), Giis Centre Wems, Paris (1987), Abbaye Royale du Moncel, Maxence, France (1987). 
 
Krikorian's work is in the permanent collections of the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center, Asheville, NC; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA; Musée de Cholet, Cholet, France; the Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA; Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC; Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Ligonier, PA; Brigham Young University Museum, Provo, UT; Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville, NC; Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY; Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, NC.
 

Leo Krikorian 

Babst Gallery 

An Installation by Giovanni Jance

FOYER-LA

Shadows cast
by dusk-led creatures
lose form in the
lineless light,
limb upon limb
live, uprooted
echolocating in their
protected playground.

Led away by heat,
that arrow of time, they arise -
bodies of light unbounded
from fragile bulbs of glass,
spill forth from the slipstream
in wax and paint
for us and for our salvation
unfurling onto canvas.

Umwelt, Juliana Keyser, April 2025


parrasch heijnen is pleased to present Rosy Keyser: ultraUMWELT, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with New York-based artist Rosy Keyser (b.1974, Baltimore, MD). 

The works of ultraUMWELT explore the synthesis of time and form as Keyser asks how we can propagate new beauty, new language, new structures, and new tools using the elastic language of painting. She negotiates the shifting relationships of creation and destruction simultaneous to the attendant sensuality and brutality that characterize nature.

Keyser engages Umwelt - the phenomenon in which the experience of reality is shaped by the differences in sensory and perceptual systems between organisms—within her material and conceptual process. As writer Mary Blair Taylor wrote about the work in this show, “Keyser imagined [and created] a machine that would act upon her works-in-progress, like an in-house contractor of sorts. Keyser designed [and developed in her studio] this contraption to sit on the floor like a giant printing cartridge or press, through which she could push the paintings. The machine both heats and applies pressure to the support surface, like a rotating doorway whose threshold imprints (or mono-prints) on everything that passes through. Despite inventing and building this mechanism herself, Keyser cannot control the manipulation, but over time she has come to understand certain likely operations.”

As Keyser describes, "In the context of [Italian physicist and writer] Carlo Rovelli, 'heat is the arrow of time'. I dreamt up the machine because I wanted to work into a ‘live surface.’ There is an ‘all-at-onceness’, an embrace of chance image-making, and a fostering of conditions that are unpredictably beautiful and impossible to fully control. The intentions that I bring to the process are very much embodied as there is no time to overdetermine. Additionally, the materials (oils, wax, resins) respond with their own wills. The canvas is rendered more transparent, more responsive, more synthesized and its edges or Umwelt more diffuse.”

Rosy Keyser earned her BFA at Cornell University in 1997 and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. Keyser has shown extensively throughout the United States and internationally, with the solo exhibitions: Arp 273, parrasch heijnen (Los Angeles, CA); I’ll Fly Away, Nunu Fine Art (Taipei, Taiwan); The OtherOther, Maccarone (New York and Los Angeles); Medusa Pie Country, Peter Blum Gallery (New York); and We Sing Sin, Contemporary Fine Arts (Berlin, Germany). Group exhibitions include: Rosy Keyser & Eleanor Mikus, Parts & Labor, Beacon, NY; Painter Painter at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, and Pink Caviar at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. Keyser’s work is held in the permanent collections of: the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK. Rosy Keyser was a Fall 2017 artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation (Marfa, TX) and a 2022 artist in residence at the Læsø AiR, Denmark. Rosy Keyser is represented by parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles; Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, Germany; Nunu Fine Art, Taipei, Taiwan; and Sevil Dolmaci, Dubai, UAE.

Rosy Keyser: ultraUMWELT will be on view at parrasch heijnen, 1326 S. Boyle Avenue, Los Angeles from April 26 - June 7, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 26, 4-7p.  The gallery has secure, private parking onsite. Gallery staff are available to guide you through our exhibitions virtually via Zoom upon request. For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 (323) 943-9373 or info@parraschheijnen.com.

Image: ROSY KEYSER, Pink Deer, 2024, oil, wax and spray paint on silk cotton with custom steel frame, 59-1/4 in x 41-1/4 in. 

Rosy Keyser: ultraUMWELT

parrasch heijnen

Come experience the colorful intricacies from the latest burst of creativity of legendary artist Ric Heitzman. Heitzman is known for his wild kinetic designs and ecstatic playfulness on Pee Wee's Playhouse. 

Heitzman brings the same playful intricacy and psychedelic charm to a series of over 40 vibrant new ballpoint pen drawings and paintings covering the walls of Face Guts. 

“Squiggly Dee” is a collaboration between WhiteBox.LA and Face Guts, and is accompanied by a full color catalog featuring writings by @gary.panter, Doug Harvey (@dghrvy), and Aaron Curry (@baddimension)  available as a collectible zine at the opening reception and throughout the run of the show and online at WhiteBox.LA

@whitebox.la
@face.guts
@HeitzmanRic 
@dghrvy
@gary.panter
@baddimension

www.WhiteBox.LA
www.faceguts.com
www.RicHeitzman.com

Ric Heitzman: Squiggly Dee

WhiteBox X Face Guts

A collection from the one and only artist, RETNA. This collection will feature 10 never-before-seen RETNA pieces that are gorgeous and truly a magnificent body of work. The opening is scheduled for May 16th, 4-8 pm, at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. 

The gallery is located in the blue building on the 3rd floor.

RETNA: Silence Decoded

Mash Gallery at PDC

The Artists Gallery (TAG) presents a vibrant array of contemporary art with solo exhibitions by Susan Dukow, David Lang, Sally Jacobs, Shelley Lazarus, Mel Smothers, and Judy Zimbert. These exhibitions showcase diverse styles, from history painting and botanical watercolors to abstract expressions and captured journeys.
TAG Artists proudly present "Shades of Gray," a group exhibition featuring photography and works in graphite or charcoal and paint that broadly interpret the theme.

Gallery Reception: Saturday, May 24, 5 – 8 pm

Exhibition Dates: Wednesday, May 21 – Friday, June 13, 2025

Eventbrite RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/afternoon-with-tag-artists-tickets-1370558660849

Google map: https://maps.app.goo.gl/x2eSPLSmYQYbbYGy5

https://taggallery.net 

TAG Gallery
5458 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, Calif. 90036

(323) 297-3061


Shelley Lazarus | Judy Zimbert | Sally Jacobs | Susan Dukow | David Lang | Mel Smothers

The Artists' Gallery (TAG)

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Sour Orange, Sam Michell’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, and her debut with the gallery. Based in Mérida, Mexico, Michell presents a series of horizontally oriented paintings on paper alongside a single, larger-scale canvas. This work is a deeply personal yet formally disciplined investigation into corporeal memory and emotional proximity. Rooted in the traditions of figurative painting yet persistently in dialogue with abstraction, Michell’s compositions emerge from an intimate engagement with the body—as form, as recollection, as a metaphor—creating space for reflection on gesture, presence, and the subtle tensions between inner experience and visual expression.

The exhibition unfolds through a nuanced chromatic arc, beginning with the sharp acidity of orange and gradually descending into the dense quietude of viridian green, with ochre recurring as a grounding emotional register. The horizontal orientation of the works on paper lend a cinematic rhythm, evoking suspended moments and fragmentary recollections. These paintings possess a raw immediacy that is both gestural and deliberate, hovering between meditation and unfinished narrative. Michell distills vulnerability and movement through fragmentation: a foot curled inward, an elbow extending outward, a pelvis hinted at more by its absence than its contour. The central canvas amplifies this language, presenting a reclining figure stretched across a couch-like form—part domestic furniture, part psychoanalytic symbol. The posture is uneasy yet intimate, a site of both exposure and quiet introspection.

Michell’s work is shaped not by linear narrative but by atmosphere—a sensorial and psychological space constructed through restrained mark-making and a finely attuned relationship to color, line, and space. Her engagement with the history of painting is felt as resonance rather than reference; tradition is not meant to be quoted nor imitated but carried forward as tension, weight, and embodied continuity. These works resist closure, embracing ambiguity and the elusive, tactile nature of memory. They suggest that remembrance is not solely an act of the mind, but one of the body—a process of retrieving what has been physically held, emotionally absorbed, and silently endured. 

Sam Michell (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Mérida, Mexico. Her practice constructs poetic visual languages that engage both spatial and emotional dimensions, navigating themes of memory, transformation, and perception. Through a range of media, Michell explores the fluid interplay between internal experience and external environments. She received her formal training at the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, and the Escuela Superior de Artes Visuales, Mérida, Mexico. Michell’s work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions across Mexico, the United States, and abroad including Maison Céleste, Mexico City, Mexico; Miguel Carrera, Mexico City, Mexico; Lux Perpetua Art Centre, Mérida, Mexico; The Collective at Highline Galleries, New York, NY; Museo de la Ciudad, Mérida, Mexico; Galería Shelf, Mexico City, Mexico; Centro Cultural La Cúpula, Mérida, Mexico; and the VI Bienal de Artes Visuales de Yucatán, Mérida, Mexico. Additionally, she has participated in residencies including Almost Perfect in Tokyo, Japan, and Universos Inexplorados in San Gimignano, Italy.

____

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Unspoken Pleasures of the New Frontier, the first solo exhibition by New Jersey-based, self-taught artist Marisa Regante (1980). In this suite of nine small-scale intricate oil paintings, Regante interlaces surrealism, personal symbolism, and retro Americana into rich, cinematic tableaux. Sourcing imagery from vintage magazines such as National Geographic, Playboy, and Arizona Highways, she reconfigures fragments of the past into dreamlike scenes that examine rituals of domesticity, desire, and escapism. Equal parts reverie and social mirror, these works traverse a world both intimate and uncanny.

Regante develops her compositions through analog collage—cutting and reassembling visual ephemera until a composition intuitively takes shape. From these paper fragments, she builds each oil painting layer by layer, rendering her subjects with a quiet precision that balances the surreal with the sincere. In Tupperwave Abode, a 1950s Tupperware party unfolds in a floral-drenched living room, overseen by a giant cuttlefish, transforming a scene of domestic ritual into something mythic and absurd. In Once Twice Three Times a Lady, Regante reimagines imagery from a 1970s porn film, creating a layered portrayal of pleasure, detachment, and repetition. A moment of sexual intimacy becomes fragmented—arms elongate, bodies echo, slipping into abstraction. Through her “fragmenting” technique, she evokes motion, time distortion, and the glitch-like duplicity of pornographic fantasy.

The title Unspoken Pleasures of the New Frontier suggests a psychological and symbolic terrain: a place where the past is not merely remembered but reimagined. Nature appears throughout the exhibition not as a passive backdrop but as a living, transformative presence. Mountain ranges, fields of flowers, and forest interiors hint at spaces of personal renewal, echoing the artist’s relationship to the natural world. Though Regante’s compositions are filled with depictions of the past, her treatment of them is neither ironic nor sentimental. Instead, she positions these elements within new, layered mythologies—ones that speak to longing and the strange beauty of reinvention.

What makes Regante’s work especially compelling is her ability to create resonance through contrast—between the meticulous and the intuitive, the fantastical and the mundane. With no formal training, she approaches painting as both a craft and a form of visual poetics, allowing instinct and emotion to lead. Her debut exhibition introduces a singular voice: one that transforms the residue of another era into a quietly radical, self-authored world.   

Sam Michell: Sour Orange | Marisa Regante: Unspoken Pleasures of the New Frontier

Lowell Ryan Projects 

Gallery Luisotti is delighted to announce Minding Time, artist CJ Heyliger’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is timed at ten years since his first at Gallery Luisotti and serves as an opportunity to observe how the artist has used photography to interpret the concept of time over the last decade. It is a survey of several series including Hell Mirage, 13 Vs, and most recently Horizon Studies, a set of small-scale works made using analog and digital methods.

Rather than depicting fixed moments, Heyliger’s photographs illustrate a more speculative view of time. Through a multitude of gestures–blurs, inversions, and even the physical manipulation of prints–the works in the show question the photograph as a means to describe time and space.

The earliest work in the exhibition is Goler Canyon (from Nothing Stands Still), which presents the viewer with vibrating geometries of a desert canyon and mountain ridge that are the result of multiple visits to the same site over time. During these trips the artist would try to reorient himself and see how closely he could make the same photograph on the same piece of film. The resulting image not only points to a layering of time which is present in the physical geologies of the sites but also undercuts the idea of a photograph representing a singular moment.

Works from 13 Vs present time through solarized photographs that have crossed a tipping point of exposure to the sun. Much like a quick sunburn on a bright summer day, the energy of the sun overwhelms the chemistry of the film and the familiar areas of light and dark as seen by the human eye are inverted. There is a haunting reversal in these black and white images which are simultaneously positive and negative. The soft reflections of sunlight, the ocean waves, and the readymade romance of the Pacific are subverted and presented as something to inspect with closer attention.

The first work in the exhibition, Westerly Wind, a suspension of a cloud of desert dust sifting through the artist’s hand, almost as if in a cinema still, is more “straightforward” work but still illusionistic and serves as a starting point for the explorations of time to follow. The latest works track time as sunlight fades from various locations. Finally, Heyliger introduces two singular transformations of the work by physically tearing prints and placing the halves side by side—their state permanently altered. The tear evades reproduction and is an action that cannot be performed the same way twice. Altering the print this way is an acknowledgement of the limitations of being human, and a way for the artist to attempt marking a fixed moment in time.

For more information please email us at info@galleryluisotti.com

CJ Heyliger: Minding Time

Gallery Luisotti

Tappan is pleased to present Forward, a group exhibition. Through gestures of ascent—soaring, reaching, and moving forward —this exhibition traces the energy of uplift. Whether through achievement, loss, encouragement, growth, or factors often out of our control, we are forced to deal with the shifts brought by change. Artists capture moments of transformation, where momentum meets possibility, and the weight of the past gives way to new horizons. A celebration of flight in all its forms, Forward invites us to rise.

Artists featured in the exhibition include: Aliya Abs, Katie Burdon, Ethan Caflisch, Catherine Lucky Chang, Michael DeSutter, Lola Erhart, Brittany Ferns, Marc Gabor, Anatole Heger, Cheryl Humphreys, Virginie Hucher, Loralee Jade, Jeff Kraus, Brianna Lance, Sara Marlowe Hall, Júlia Martins Miranda, Brian Merriam, Alice Neave, Firoozeh Neman, Bart O'Reilly, Emma Ortiz, Vince Palacios, Arran Rahimian, Petra Schott, Jessica Sellinger, Lauren Skunta, Stacy Solodkin, Philip Soucy, Chala Toprak and Astrid Verhoef.

Forward

TAPPAN

SANDY KUPFER // SHADOW BOXING is an exhibition of new paintings investigating the inner workings of society and the artist therein, but also instigates and challenges the core ethos of each. The works exude a sense of urgency, painted in a feverish manner – while also holding space for a delicacy of intent behind the marks made on canvas. Sandy utilizes portraiture to sharpen a focal point of meaning derived from topics spanning pop culture and personal narratives to mythological iconography and story telling. She utilizes both blissful expression and twisted intensity in these paintings which allow the viewer to congregate in a space where there are frequent shifts in reality. Kupfer exudes a charge in these paintings which results in an intensity of emotive feeling that surmounts any logical or preemptive belief system when engaged with willingly. She aims to bring the viewer into a realm with each painting acting as a portal into something intense that offers an immersive viewing experience. The cheerful color scheme allows one to digest this fierce way of painting in a fashion which acts as a helping hand to actually engage, not just to perceive. This series of works sees Sandy utilizing gestural iconography which walks the line of figurative and abstract, to shadow box with her own perspective’s on the nature of the psyche, spirit, and human bodily experience — in an attempt to transmute a belief and feeling into paintings which can unify and challenge instantaneously. 


SANDY KUPFER (B1999, EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN) lives and works in Los Angeles, CALIFORNIA AND is an artist with a focus in painting, drawing, and tattooing. She holds a BA from Occidental College with a major in painting. Sandy received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2025. Her work has been exhibited at BIRDHOUSE, Ceradon Gallery, Bolsky Gallery, Wienholt Projects, Devout Gallery, Neo LA Gallery, amongst others.

THE WORKS WILL BE ON VIEW EVERY SATURDAY AND SUNDAY FROM 1-6PM UNTIL JUNE 15TH & BY PRIVATE VIEWING APPOINTMENTs AT ALL OTHER TIMES

FOR INQUIRIES + PRESS + PRIVATE VIEWING APPOINTMENTS CONTACT SADE-LA@SADE-LA.COM

GALLERY SADE LOS ANGELES IS LOCATED AT 204 S AVENUE 19, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, 90031

@SADELOSANGELES  @SANDYKUPFERPAINTS

SANDY KUPFER: SHADOW BOXING

SADE

It's less about what we want to say and more about what we want to do. This is all we ever want to do, which is to play. This is our work. This is our joy. This is our purpose. Creating is a form of play and there's nothing as serious as playing with something formless and non-being that takes form through playing. This type of play requires no planning but only being present, from start to finish. No planning is necessary, because who plans how to play? At some point in our playing, we become mere instruments that translate the said formless into something seen, heard, even felt. This makes playing even more gratifying and more meaningful to us. It reminds us of what Oscar Wilde once said “Some things are too important to be taken seriously.” We invite the viewers to come into our world to witness, experience, and above all, try to enjoy the play.

Justin N. Kim and Soojung Park: Serious Play

Keystone Gallery

A two-person show of LA-based painter Rebecca Shippee and Seattle-based artist Carly Sheehan.

Carly Sheehan & Rebecca Shippee: Obsessed With Forgetting What It Is

North Loop West

Archipelago of Earthen Bones, which is part of Szlam's larger research project Towards a Counter-Cartography of Volcanic Time, traces cartographies of time rooted in the geologic formations of our planet. Examining volcanic lifespans to comprehend geology, the three-channel video and sound installation recognizes the divergent nature of the timescales around us. From split-second catastrophic ruptures to the slow-moving formation of mountains, Archipelago of Earthen Bones invites viewers to lean into time. 
 
Using the Earth’s tectonic plates as imaginary maps, Szlam filmed a constellation of geological phenomena, including the afterglow of the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai eruption, the eroded vestiges of volcanic activity in Australia’s Gondwana Rainforest, the topography of the central eastern mountain ranges in Australia, and lava fields where new flora shapes the surroundings of active volcanoes in the Chilean Andes. Szlam is joined by the Australian artist Lawrence English, whose accompanying soundscapes were composed using the Earth’s vibrations, murmurings, and signals. 

Towards a Counter-Cartography of Volcanic Time
 
In 2022 and 2023, Szlam undertook fieldwork in northeastern Australia to explore the Gondwana Rainforest and the continent’s ancient volcanoes sites, tracing a path along the central eastern ranges and coastline, from Mount Wollumbin (Mount Warning) in New South Wales to Mount Beerwah and the Bunya Mountains in Queensland. 

The eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai, in December 2021, released a sonic boom that encapsulated the planet and blasted an enormous plume of water vapor and ash into the upper atmosphere, creating intensely colored twilight “afterglows,” that were visible from Australia to Antarctica. These vibrant sunsets and sunrises lasted for several months and were captured by Szlam on 16 mm color reversal film stock during the making of Archipelago of Earthen Bones. 

Connecting antipodal cultures of tectonic plates in the Southern Hemisphere, Szlam also traveled to southern Chile to film new earth and forest formations at seemingly inert lava fields, thus linking geographical and geological extremes on the Ring of Fire. 

Lawrence English developed a soundscape using microphonic imagination, vibrations from the underground, and biophonic sounds of birds and insects recorded originally from these sites. Each video channel of the installation has a unique sound environment designed to interweave with the others. 

Curators, geoscientists, biologists, and knowledge keepers were the guiding force of this project including Gwynne Fulton, John Edmond, Clive Oppenheimer, Joali Paredes, Jorge Romero, Andrew Rozefelds, Francisca Vergara, BJ Murphy, Kyle Slabb, and Jarulah Slabb.

About the Artist

Malena Szlam is a Chilean artist and filmmaker based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Her films, installations, and photographs explore embodied perception and the material and affective dimensions of analogue film process. Szlam’s work gives form to lyrical approximations of the natural world. Attentive to the geopolitics of natural phenomena, her recent work focuses on geology, earth science, and volcanology.
 
Szlam’s work has been exhibited widely at festivals and museums, including Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA, New Directors/New Films, Media City Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, FICValdivia, Jeonju IFF, Cinéma du Réel, Edinburgh International Festival, and International Film Festival Rotterdam. 
 
Recent group exhibitions include Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific, PST ART: Art & Science Collide (Los Angeles), femmes volcans forêts torrents, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Expanded Plus: Utopian Phantom, Factory of Contemporary Arts Palbok (South Korea); The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark). Solo presentations include Inexistent Time presented by Los Angeles Filmforum and Infra— at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art. Szlam’s work is included in the MoMA’s permanent collection.


Malena Szlam: Archipelago of Earthen Bones

Fulcrum Arts

 Slipping Glimpser

 Munro Galloway
 Iva Gueorguieva
 Cameron Harvey
 Aaron Maier-Carretero
 Patrick McElnea


 “When I’m falling, I’m doing alright. And when I’m slipping, I say, ‘Hey, this is very

 interesting.’… That is a wonderful sensation … to slip into this glimpse.”

 –Willem de Kooning to David Sylvester, 1960

 Wönzimer is pleased to present Slipping Glimpser , an exhibition of five painters working in Los Angeles, connected through a shared commitment to process, improvisation, and dialogue. Through a series of informal studio visits over the past two years, these artists exchanged ideas, shared works in progress, and explored the slipperiness of looking, making, and understanding.

 It began when Iva texted Pat and Munro for a studio visit. They went to her studio on North Spring Street, near the LA River, where Cameron was already waiting. Aaron showed up a little later. Together they moved the giant paintings around, shifting them to see from different angles.They talked about habitats, craters, tornadoes, ghostly transparencies, and dotted lines. Iva gave everyone a drawing, and afterward they went to the bar.

 The next time they gathered was at Aaron’s studio. Dapples, his Great Dane, greeted them at thedoor before sprawling in the middle of the room. Aaron’s paintings of cats, birds, sardines, and sandwiches covered the walls. They sat on the floor leafing through drawings, and talked about grids, repetition, and containment.

 At Cameron’s studio her unstretched paintings were piled on the floor like rugs. The canvases were massive, spilling loosely from the walls onto the ground. In the middle of the space was a large cocoon-like mass of colorful plastic painting detritus. Cameron was trying to make it stand on its own. They talked about hides, moths, leaves, midlines, and dancing. 

In Pat’s studio, they looked at oil paintings on panels, made through blotting and wiping. The paintings evoked soot, fog, shadows and sidewalks, and the color of pollution. They talked about mixing color, and how certain combinations evoked a mood. Towards the end, Pat pulled out his collages, with titles, like Eye-eye-foam and Fidelity Futures .

 When they visited Munro’s studio, the walls were covered with hundreds of black ink drawings on newsprint, alongside large oil paintings. Small hand-painted wooden sculptures sat on shelves beneath the drawings. Aaron noticed one painting was upside down, so they turned it around. They looked at the paintings and saw masts, eyes, apertures, doorways and horizon lines. Then they went back to Munro’s house for soup.

 Slipping Glimpser

Wonzimer

David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery are pleased to announce Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, on view at David Zwirner’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Organized by both galleries, the exhibition debuted at David Zwirner New York in September 2022 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s momentous 1972 posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Cataclysm re-creates that iconic exhibition’s checklist of 113 photographs, underscoring the subversive poignancy of Arbus’s work even today while highlighting the popular and critical upheaval the original exhibition precipitated. This will be the first major survey of the artist’s work in Los Angeles since Diane Arbus: Revelations, which was presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art over twenty years ago.

Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited

David Zwirner | 606 N Western

LAUNCH Gallery and The National Tourism Board of Xicanoland proudly present new drawings by celebrated Mexican-American artist Abel Alejandre. In this new series, The Age of Heroes, Abel honors twelve pivotal figures whose brilliance forged modern Xicanoland.  Themes of masculinity, valor, patriarchy, and the capacity to look to the future with purpose and assurance are addressed through twelve ink portraits on paper, each capturing a statesperson, scientist, or cultural luminary whose vision reshaped Xicanoland.  

Inseparable from Xicanoland’s belief in cyclical life, every human portrait in The Age of Heroes is accompanied by a painting of a Xoloitzcuintle—the sacred dog that, by tradition, escorts the soul into the next realm. These twelve canine guardians transform the gallery into a spiritual corridor, guiding visitors through a meditation on legacy, mortality, and endurance.

Image: President Meztli “La Primera”, a ground-breaking champion of universal suffrage.


Abel Alejandre

LAUNCH LA

Rhett Baruch Gallery is pleased to announce Mysterious Bodies, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Samantha McCurdy (Los Angeles) and Bonnie Morano (New York). The exhibition opens with a public reception on Thursday, May 15th from 5:00–8:00 PM at Rhett Baruch Gallery, located at 6057 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038, and will be on view through June 21, 2025. Both artists will be present at the opening reception.

Through materially distinct yet thematically resonant practices, both artists interrogate the surface of the painting as a site of revelation, concealment, and transformation. Their works propose the body not merely as form, but as space—a vessel through which energy, symbolism, and spiritual resonance emerge.

Samantha McCurdy approaches the painted surface as both skin and container. Her sculptural paintings begin with expertly crafted wooden substrates, custom armatures constructed through over a decade of refined carpentry. These structures are tightly wrapped in stretchable fabric, which clings to the geometric and organic forms hidden beneath, subtly revealing the contours of an internal presence. Over this base, McCurdy applies multiple layers of paint, sanding each coat with precision. The result is an exceptionally smooth, plastic-like finish that both heightens the illusion of manufactured perfection and reinforces the tension between objecthood and intimacy. These taut, luminous surfaces evoke the aesthetics of industrial design while maintaining the quiet presence of the handmade. Her forms, restrained yet suggestive, animate the threshold between revelation and secrecy, exterior and interior.

Bonnie Morano, by contrast, navigates abstraction through a language of symmetry, repetition, and symbolic construction. Her compositions are built from a personal vocabulary of geometric and organic forms, elements she arranges with architectural precision and meditative intent. These formal strategies create visual rhythms that echo ritual, reflection, and the metaphysical. Morano’s color palette, drawn from the material culture of precious metals, gemstones, and textiles, imbues the work with a heightened sense of value and reverence. Her paintings are simultaneously structured and ecstatic, inviting viewers into symbolic worlds that pulse with hidden meaning. Beneath their hard edges and calculated balance lies a deep connection to the spiritual, a quiet assertion of painting as a space of order, mystery, and transformation.

Though their processes diverge, with McCurdy working through physical tension and concealment and Morano through visual codes and compositional structure, both artists treat the surface as a site of energetic resonance. They investigate the thresholds between body and spirit, visibility and opacity, control and emotion. Together in Mysterious Bodies, McCurdy and Morano establish a dynamic conversation. Their works insist that the body is not merely a form to be seen, but a field in which energy, devotion, and meaning are shaped, and where the material world meets something just beyond our grasp.

Photo by Ruben Diaz

Samantha McCurdy x Bonnie Morano: Mysterious Bodies

Rhett Baruch Gallery 

Immersed in screenglow chiaroscuro and off-hours hues, Vanessa Gully Santiago’s paintings reconnoiter the framework of labor and its psychosexual residue under the imperative of RTO: Return to Office. Against this renewed mandate, her works stage the entrapments of corporate life through a vespertine procession of postures, devices, and disarticulated limbs caught in loops of self-fashioning, submission, and self-surveillance.

Her subjects, women entangled with air purifiers, collapsed in boardrooms, wrapped around inert peripherals, borrow from Alex Bag’s passive-aggressive agency and Alina Szapocznikow’s procedural eroticism, but with the added dystopian veneer of deep digital fatigue; you can nearly feel the blue light pooling under their eyelids. If Edward Hopper radiates as an anticipatory reference, so too do the twilit hermeticism of Honoré Desmond Sharrer, the surrealist nocturnes of Miriam Tindall Smith, and the institutional reverie of Bernard Perlin’s hospital paintings. Gully Santiago locates her figures in a similarly heterotopic and suspended realm; dispersed across offices, bedrooms, and the continuous glow of graphics, they inhabit what might be labeled an eroticization of la perruque: a tactical, libidinal meandering through institutional constructs that perforate work and leisure.

Where Michel de Certeau once mapped the poetics of pedestrian errancy, Gully Santiago’s figures navigate corridors where one’s body is both asset and relic. As Laurent de Sutter theorizes, “in contemporary capitalism, the ideal citizen is no longer the obedient subject but the joyful accomplice.”[1] Gully Santiago takes this a step farther. In Overtime, supine in a corral of desk space, a woman liaises with a printer. It’s telling that here, as in Dyson Purifier Humidity + Cool PH03 and Dyson Purifier Cool Gen 1 TP10, the machine becomes the site of embrace—understandably preferred to the men who occasionally surface in her compositions as stand-ins for the system itself.
‍
While implicitly staged as feminist rejoinder to the relocalization of labor, the paintings complicate any easy parsing of libidinal displacement; blurring function and intimacy, they are equally ambiguous in their distinctions between a corporatized Stockholm syndrome and a wet opposition to the gutless connectivity of ‘smart’ objects shrouded in ergonomic plastics. Gully Santiago’s paintings suggest a critique of technologization that retains a tenderness toward its failures. Rather than resist their entanglement with these interfaces, some of her women linger inside it (and, vice versa); whatever they’re feeling, it’s irreducible to an exhibtion text.

In 5:10 am, a woman sits at her desk beneath an aquarium of documents and open tabs, surrounded by screens that, definitively, watch her back. Each velvety scene is a gloaming recursion of an ambient constant distributed across LinkedIn feeds, seated in the fiber of Herman Miller chairs as meshy as WiFi. The specific times in Gully Santiago’s titles—12:45 am, 3:22 pm, 6:07 am—index the always-on world of urban anomie, where pause does not promise rest so much as the fugue state of embodied buffering. For all this techno-eldritch disassociation and cubicle hauntology, for anyone who has worked long hours and wondered why the copier’s printing a novella of lorem ipsums, her images lie on the uncanny edge of familiarity.

Although these paintings arrive in the long shadow of the return-to-office mandate, they resist the didactic certitudes of social critique. One could parse that the works channel what Mark Alizart has named “an aesthetics of submission,”[2] subsuming appearances into the slow, sensorial coercions of affective labor under the disciplinary glow of a screen’s governing. Yet Daisy Lafarge would complicate this reading: “Desire...resides not in acquisition or climax but in ambient accumulation, in the careful reconstitution of attention after it has been spent.”[3] Seemingly registering this auto-oppositionality, several images—Efficiency, FaceTime, and Workplace Flexibility—feature women in states of literal disassembly, echoing the physically flattened and atomized figures of Dana Schutz, Ambera Wellmann, and Dorothea Tanning, as if riven by the phantom vibrations of their work phones.

There may be no outside to the corporate imaginary, but there are still sources of pleasure, not least in the delicacy of the painterly hand and depictions of task-untethered object intimacy. While the works register that “flexibility,” once marketed as the emancipatory promise of telecommuting, is just a gentler kind of handcuff, they do make space for implied sites of exception. In 12:45 am, a woman on a phone call gestures towards a third space, a possible exit from her Slack thread. A seam loosens; we have the hint of escape. Typing ...
‍‍
Vanessa Gully Santiago (b. 1984 in Boston, MA) lives and works in Queens, NY. The artist gained her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2006 and her MFA from The Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University in 2013. Solo and two-person exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); James Fuentes, New York (2022); James Fuentes, Online (2020); Jack Barrett Gallery, Brooklyn (2018); Thierry Goldberg, New York (2017); and American Medium, Brooklyn (2016). Selected group exhibitions: Turley Gallery, Hudson (2025); Andrea Festa, Rome (2024), Collaborations, Copenhagen (2023); Europa, New York (2023); The Green Gallery, Milwaukee (2021); Rachel Uffner, New York (2021); Mrs. Gallery, Queens (2021); In Lieu, Los Angeles (2020); Embajada, San Juan (2020); Assembly Room, New York (2019); Sibling, Toronto (2019); Helena Anrather, New York (2018); JTT, New York (2018); Marinaro, New York (2018); Charles Moffett, New York (2018); Foxy Production, New York (2017); Deli Gallery, Queens (2017); C. Grimaldis, Baltimore (2017); Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2017); 247365, New York (2016); Situation Room, Los Angeles (2015); and Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York (2014). Her work has been the subject of review in Artforum, ArtNews, Forbes, The Observer, The New Yorker, and Nylon, among other publications.
‍

[1] Laurent de Sutter, After Law (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), p. 47.
[2] Mark Alizart, The Climate Coup (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), p. 63.
[3] Daisy Lafarge, Life Without Air (London: Granta, 2020), p. 112.

Vanessa Gully Santiago: RTO

Cheremoya

la BEAST gallery is thrilled to exhibit sculptural works by artist Lorenzo Lorenzetti. Deeply rooted in the architectural motifs of Detroit, Lorenzetti’s sculptures invite contemplation on the enduring power of tradition amid the disconnection and impermanence of the digital age. 

Opening reception, Saturday May 17, 6-9p. 

Please email info@labeastgallery.com for more information about this artist. 
 

Lorenzo Lorenzetti: Silent Piazza

la BEAST Gallery

In Greg ‘CRAOLA’ Simkins' seventh solo exhibition with the gallery spanning 12 years, the artist opens the door to a world suspended between memory and invention. The Middle is a dream terrain where the surreal logic of childhood imagination meets the fragmented architecture of lived experience. This new collection of paintings and drawings continues to follow a cast of recurring characters and themes perched upon crumbling fragments of a world in motion.

Simkins’ creatures — many of whom have appeared in previous works as trickster guides or avatars of transformation, appear once again, embarking on new adventures. Pandas materialize as jokesters or soothsayers alongside cunning invertebrates, mischievous rodents, and porcelain deer. Fish float impossibly out of water and into space. Birds perch on slabs of broken concrete walls etched with faded tags or vintage cartoon characters. In Simkin’s world, animals become hybrid knights, flora grows from flesh, and narrative logic warps in favor of something more magical, more subconscious. This is not mere fantasy, it is mythology built from asphalt and imagination, from cartoons, comics, black book sketches and bedtime stories.

Greg 'CRAOLA' Simkins: The Middle

KP Projects

DEARLY DISCARTED: A Dark Resurrection of Forgotten Objects opens on June 5, 2024, curators/dynamic duo Carmen “Jane Dope” Acosta and Jessica Yost, under their creative moniker Howdy Artner, present their first collaborative art show in six years, titled Dearly Discarted. This exhibition, marking a significant chapter in their 15-year journey of curating art, invites viewers to delve into the unsettling yet vital theme of sustainability through a fun, unique lens.

Dearly Discarted creatively confronts the reality of waste and overconsumption in our society. Contributing artists were invited to choose an item within the curators’ collection of abandoned objects, sourced from local renovations, curbside rubbish, and community redistribution sites. They were then challenged to customize and resurrect their piece, transforming it from neglected clutter into an extraordinary work of art. Featuring an array of talented artists, including Sofia Enriquez, UPENDO, ZLA, Ian Robertson-Salt, BREK, TENSER, Darel Carey, The Obanoth, Mr. Toledo, and more, the exhibit showcases an innovative collection of artworks created from these discarded objects. Each piece serves as a stark reminder of what society often overlooks and throws away. Emphasizing the mantra of "reduce, reuse, reincarnate”, this show serves not only as a tribute to the discarded but also questions the deeper implications of our consumption habits. Through a somewhat whimsical yet haunting funeral theme, Dearly Discarted evokes a sense of mourning for the once-valued items that have been forsaken and celebrates the transformation into objects of beauty and meaning.

Dearly Discarted opens on Thursday, June 5, 2024, at Lucky Cat Labs: 620 S. Main Street from 6 PM - Close. Admission is free, and all are welcome to experience the haunting beauty of art born from the forgotten. For more information about the exhibit, please contact Howdy Artner at howdyartner@gmail.com or 424.702.7438.

About Howdy Artner:
Howdy Artner is a creative and curatorial partnership between Carmen Acosta and Jessica Yost, dedicated to creating compelling art experiences that challenge perceptions and engage communities. With over 15 years of collective expertise, they continue to explore and innovate within the art landscape.
@howdy_artner

DEARLY DISCARTED: A Dark Resurrection of Forgotten Objects

Lucky Cat Labs

Brand Library & Art Center is proud to present "Opulent Mobility: Re-Imagine Disability and Mobility," curated by founder A. Laura Brody and Anthony Tusler in collaboration with students from Glendale Unified School District (GUSD). Founded in 2015, Opulent Mobility has been hosting annual open calls for artworks which tell stories that humanize, uplift, and celebrate disabled artists and disability art. The events have built a community of artists and activists who place disability issues at the forefront of their endeavors. "Opulent Mobility" will feature artworks by Amabelle Aguiluz, Anahid Boghosian, A. Laura Brody, Vanessa Hernández Cruz, Diana Elizabeth Jordan, Patricia Fortlage, Kellie Gillespie, Francesca Hummler, Aragna Ker, Monica Marks, Larissa Nickel, Rebecca Niederlander, Tom and Linda Peters, Jaklin Romine, Katherine Sherwood, and Rachel Ungerer as well as Glendale Unified School District (GUSD) student artists representing Anderson W. Clark High School, Crescenta Valley High School, Daily High School and Glendale High School.

Artists from Opulent Mobility and Glendale Unified School District will be present at the opening reception on Saturday, April 26, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM accompanied by a live performance from artist and composer Tom Peters. ASL interpreters will be in attendance to assist hearing impaired and deaf attendees as well as detailed descriptions of artworks in large print and braille booklets online via QR codes for blind and low vision attendees.

The exhibition will be on view April 26 – June 21, 2025. For more information, visit: BrandLibrary.org/Gallery

---

Image: Larissa Nickel, "Human Limb Object /Architech Me," Still, 2014

---

Free, limited parking is available in Brand Park. The opening reception will be well attended, so please consider ridesharing. 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 additional information, please contact Brand Library & Art Center at (818) 548-2051 or send us an email at Gallery@BrandLibrary.org.

Opulent Mobility: Re-Imagine Disability and Mobility

Brand Library & Art Center

Make Room is proud to present “Shape of Life,” an exhibition that introduces Los Angeles-based artist Alex Anderson’s vision of geometry as both an aesthetic language and a metaphysical foundation. This is Anderson’s first solo exhibition with Make Room. For Anderson, geometry is not merely a formalist motif or a symbolic echo of natural recurrence—it serves as the structural armature of being. Spirals, hexagons, squares, and triangles reappear across botanical, mineral, celestial, and anatomical space: in floral blooms, crystalline lattices, star maps, and corporeal systems.

Make Room is proud to present "Spectral Arrangement," a new collection of paintings and drawings by Hammzat Tahabsim that calls on the powerful force of the unknown. They are the realization of ruptured narratives, woven from the torn threads of our larger societal tapestry and Hammzat Tahabsim’s own story. These are not depictions of events, but rather speculations of a temporal, psychological and spiritual world that is separate from our own. This place is not a fiction; These figures exist in a limbo between reality and fabrication. Not of our world, faintly familiar, remaining unrecognizable.

Alex Anderson & Hammzat Tahabsim

Make Room

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce Whitney Bedford’s solo exhibition, Sunsetting, opening May 17th through June 28th, 2025.

In Sunsetting, Bedford’s paintings continue her Veduta series–interpretations of historical landscape paintings–shifting her focus to turn-of-the-century sunset and moonlight paintings. Primarily referencing paintings by Edvard Munch and Félix Vallotton, Bedford’s works situate the historic landscape within an architectural stage-like space alongside contemporary flora and fauna, looking outward as if observing landscapes past. Approaching these scenes of nature through a temporal lens, Bedford’s works tap into the emotional potential of the sunset genre, drawing on the symbolism of endings, beginnings, rebirth, and renewal.

Painted in vivid and vibrant hues, each sunset offers a meditation on the passage of time and its cyclical nature. For Bedford, the sunsets are particularly poignant at this moment–politically and environmentally–as signifiers of the end of an era or harbingers of change. For Munch and Vallotton, the emotional charge of the sunsets symbolized the anxiety of their time and the drastic societal changes spurred by the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the century, leading up to the First World War. Bedford’s return to these themes draws comparisons a century later to our current moment, offering a visual allegory for the inevitability of change.

In several paintings, Bedford includes palm trees–quintessentially Californian trees–some of which were damaged by fire. These trees were drawn from images Bedford took of the devastation in her neighborhood in the Palisades after the recent wildfires. The wildfires, which took place midway through the production for her exhibition, dramatically underscore the symbolism of the sunsets. Her Veduta paintings, already expressing the despair of witnessing climate change, are now permeated by the trauma of the recent devastation.

Bedford’s works are both cautionary and hopeful. The transformative beauty of the sunsets is eclipsed by the anxiety of a new era approaching. With every end, there is a beginning, and with every beginning, there is grief for what once was. Bedford’s works occupy this space of in-betweenness and revel in the sublime power and ultimate hope of nature.

About the artist

Whitney Bedford received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. She won the 2001 UCLA Hammer Museum Drawing Biennale and received a Fulbright Graduate Fellowship from Hochschule der Kuenste, Berlin in 1999. Bedford recently had a solo exhibition last year at The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art titled “The Window,” curated by Emma Saperstein. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; the Jewish Museum, New York; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Bedford’s work is included in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA; the Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico; the De La Cruz Collection, Miami, Florida, USA; The Saatchi Collection, London, England; the Francois Pinault Collection, Paris, France; the Eric Decelle Collection, Brussels, Belgium; and the Collection Ginette Moulin/Guillaume Houze, Paris, France.

The gallery is located at 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, south of the 10 freeway. Parking is available on the south parking lot adjacent to the building. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm and by appointment. For further information and press inquiries, please contact Olivia Gauthier at Olivia@vielmetter.com.

Image: Whitney Bedford, “Veduta (Vallotton Yellow Green Sunset),” 2025, Ink and oil on nylinen on panel, 36" x 48" x 2" [HxWxD], Photo credit: Evan Bedford

____

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce Miami-based artist Jared McGriff’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, The Stakes Are Myself, on view from May 17th through June 28th, 2025.

The exhibition’s title alludes to the late Beat poet Diane di Prima’s poems from the “Revolutionary Letters” series. Written between 1968 and 1971, these letters were produced during a time of political and cultural upheaval in America, emphasizing the necessity of taking risks as a means of survival in an oppressive world. Honoring di Prima’s work and using it as a guide to respond to today’s political turmoil, McGriff draws inspiration from “Revolutionary Letter #1,” which opens with this powerful statement: “I have just realized that the stakes are myself, I have no other ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life.” 

Each of McGriff’s new paintings in the exhibition illustrates a scene of “risk-taking” in everyday life–gambling, horse racing, fishing–activities that are woven into our social fabric and serve as a potent metaphor for chance, probability, and luck throughout the show. For McGriff, these scenes represent a microcosm of the existential risks of existence, shedding light on how we navigate uncertainty in life and how we harness or mitigate it. In the painting The Inherent Risk of Surviving Infancy, in Trio (2025), three men engaged in a game of dice are captured mid-play. The moment is frozen in drama, creating a nearly Renaissance-like composition, though the actual dice remain just out of sight. By concentrating on the figures and their expressions and gestures, McGriff emphasizes the emotional and psychological dynamics of the players instead of the game's outcome. Consequently, the game itself transforms into a theatrical stage for catharsis and serves as a powerful metaphor for chance, probability, and luck.

In the paintings A Conduit of Trust (2025) and An Engine of Instinct and Intuition (2025), McGriff depicts dramatically cropped portraits of a croupier and a gambler against pitch-black backgrounds. The gambler, with eyes cast down and a cigarette in his mouth, coolly contemplates his next move, the darkness of the background enhancing the melodrama of the moment before he plays his next card. The croupier is caught mid-move, shifting the chips either toward or away from the unseen figure at the other end of the table – a card turned face down contrasts with her palm facing up, signaling the potential for action and opportunity.

About the artist

Jared McGriff (Los Angeles, 1977) received his BA in architecture from the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999 and his MBA from New York University in 2008.
   
Solo exhibitions include Alone, Together (2019) and Only Touching the Ground to Jump (2020) at Spinello Projects, and a solo exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, On Being a Wild Dream (2023). His work has been featured in solo booth presentations at NADA Miami (2020), Expo Chicago (2022), The Armory Show (2022), 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair - New York (2023, 2024). In 2021, McGriff had his debut museum solo exhibition, Where We Are You, at NSU Art Museum, curated by Bonnie Clearwater. He has been featured in museum group exhibitions at ICA Miami, Orlando Museum of Art, The Norton Museum of Art, and El Espacio 23.


Whitney Bedford: Sunsetting | Jared McGriff: The Stakes are Myself

Vielmetter Los Angeles

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Sayang, an exhibition by Singaporean artist Alvin Ong. This is Ong’s first solo presentation in the United States and with the gallery. On view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles from May 24 through June 28. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, May 24 from 5-7pm.

Ong is known for his paintings that capture rituals of queer diasporic identity and community in surreal, bodily imagery. His scenes of intimate domestic moments and introspective private rituals, created for this exhibition were completed during the past year in between his studios in London and Singapore—imbuing the works with a dreamy and transitory sensibility. The paintings stir the kind of existentialism and wistfulness one feels looking at the world from an airplane window—flashes of memory and hopes for the future.

Mining tropes of identity and cultural memory, Ong’s allegorical spaces of belonging subvert our expectations of reality, held together by a sense of fragility. Food references and objects function as charged markers of both memory and nostalgia, associated freely alongside references to sacred imagery, art history, and ordinary lived experience. The glow of a cellphone, steamy embrace in a bathhouse, or a stack of bowls are treated with equal symbolic importance.

Ong’s figures remain evasive, often camouflaged within their surroundings through painterly layers of light and transparency. Screens and reflections obscure or reveal their subjects in equal measure. Blurring the distinction between private and public spaces, viewers are implicated as voyeurs through glimpses of Ong’s subjects; his treatment of the delineations of space—figure/ground, inside/outside, psychological/physical—leans into a territory of ambivalence, opening the paintings up to multiple readings.

The compositions are dominated by recurrent soft, bulbous forms. Solid, yet yielding, suggesting flesh, cloud, stone, vessel, halo, hands, and feet. At times they coalesce against the edges of the canvas in Baroque ecstasy, supported or bound by the edge of the picture, erupting and dissolving inward. In a suite comprising five canvases, Quintet for a new Beginning, Ong layers narrative elements with explorations of a shifting landscape. Repeated across the canvases, the motif of a hand acts as a vessel, a frame, a catalyst of change.

This fluid sensibility in form and meaning lends itself to the title of the show, Sayang, a word of Malay origin commonly used in Singlish (or colloquial Singaporean English). The word translates to “love” or “darling,” and entwines together the threads of intimacy throughout the show. However in particular contexts, Sayang can also signify “pity” or “regret,” heightening Ong’s explorations of the insecurities that arise in the search for selfhood. Sayang is a filter, a lens capable of illuminating the inherent beauty and tension between desire, distance, and belonging.

Alvin Ong (b. 1988, Singapore) received his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (London) and BA from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo presentations with Ames Yavuz (Singapore, Sydney), Bank (Shanghai), Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels) and Various Small Fires (Seoul). His work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Peranakan Museum, ILHAM Gallery, X Museum, SunPride Foundation and UOB Art Collection. Recent press includes features in Tatler, Ocula and Juxtapoz. He lives and works between Singapore and London.

_____

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Agua de vida, an exhibition by Mexican artist Ileana García Magoda. This is Magoda’s first presentation in the United States and features new paintings and works on paper. On view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles from May 24 through June 28. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, May 24 from 5-7pm.

In this exhibition of new works, Magoda explores la mar (the sea) as the creative mother and primordial womb of existence. Her paintings on canvas and works on paper delve into ancient mythologies, where the ocean represents divine feminine power and the mysterious depths of consciousness. Magoda’s dynamic compositions, filled with undulating forms, mirror the perpetual motion of the sea, while red waters transform emotional turbulence by creative force. Dense and vibrant, the works in Agua de vida (Water of life) consider the ebb and flow of inner transformations, hinting at alternate pain-free realities.

In esoteric and mythological traditions, water represents human emotions. It is the elemental manifestation of the full goddess, consciousness, the absolute. Tides carry us back to these primordial origins, to eukaryotes and archaea, organelles and protists, floating forms. Magoda’s gestures bloom like divine apparitions, her imagery coalesces and dissolves in the eternal dance of creation. In this aqueous realm, memory and myth emanate as a dream, offering a glimpse into a time before time. 

As Magoda delves deeper into the metaphysical, she turns inward. Connecting her artistic practice to an embodied experience of life, she has begun experimenting with myofascial release, a hands-on massage technique that can be performed on one’s own body. Pressure is applied to various nerve points to hydrate the muscle-joint connection and consequently release pain, improve circulation and range of motion. This therapeutic practice grounds a daily awareness of her own bodily experience, which she channels into her paintings. Pain and relief appear as point and counterpoint. Through these works, the body becomes both subject and medium, an aqueous archive where sensation, memory, and creation converge.

Ileana García Magoda (b. 1985, Mexico City) studied Graphic Design at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City. Magoda has exhibited her work internationally at galleries including Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York; Bernheim Gallery, Zurich, CH; Whitewall Projects, Paris, FR; EDJI Gallery, Brussels, BE; and The Black Piglet, Mexico City, MX, among others. Magoda lives and works in Queretaro, Mexico.

Image: Alvin Ong "Friend," 2025

Alvin Ong: Sayang | Ileana García Magoda: Agua de vida

Anat Ebgi | Mid-Wilshire

<< I have made it a profession to look at the history of others, so it feels rather peculiar to finally be observing my own. I feel nonetheless- or even more so, a stranger to it.
Since Grandma’s passing in 2021, I came back to the house on Suan Phlu to find family photos and letters dug up, stacked in plastic bags or shoved into the many haphazard drawers around the house. I find myself fascinated by this time before my time. Having lived most of my life abroad, I’ve always felt estranged from this family history. 

Who are these people? 
How did they find each other? 
How do their stories inform mine? >>*

….

174 / Neung Jed Si - A Short History of Thailand

Neung Jed Si is a new research project that uses my family archive to create a mythic origin story for our chosen exile from Thailand. Initially conceived as a video essay, it now extends to an immersive installation and a print publication.

Neung Jed Si moves through a meditation on love and how the lover must journey to be reunited with their beloved.

Beginning with Pridi Banomyong, my ancestor who was forced into self-exile by a military coup in the 1940s, the narrative expands on our legacy of diaspora and inner alienation from our country of origin. Reflecting this origin-story along personal photographs and letters that surfaced in the process of returning to my Grandma’s house in Thailand, the timeframe of the work ranges from my parents’ long-distance relationship during my father’s studies, to the moment of their decision to remain abroad. Simultaneously, my family traces back to the historical capital of Ayutthaya and services to the king. Conflicted between these two tensions, sedentary and migrant, monarchist and revolutionary, shorelines and bodies of water become recurring motifs that represent this generational discomfort and desire for motion.

The installation takes the viewer through a landscape, composed of multimedia projections, image transfers and CNC-routed fragments of landmarks. Central to the space is the CNC sculpture of the facade of the Pomped Fortress in Ayutthaya, from which my ancestors inherited their last name. The facade is a portal around which we perceive other elements of the installation: an animation of boats rocking in my mother’s eyes projected on a translucent glass that I used as a table in my studio in Los Angeles; and, on the opposite wall, a two-channel video of my hand drawing the lines of the Chao Praya river. Further along, a collage of images transferred directly onto the wall shows my father sitting among Greek ruins and references to Aristophanes' myth of the Origin of Love (in Plato’s Symposium). Lastly, a slide projection plays photos of the family archive staged on furniture in my family home in Bangkok. Throughout, the installation carries my narrating voice accompanied by ambient sounds of rivers and a murmuring chorus composed by Louis Fontenot.

The narration, presented in the publication as a longer text, weaves stories from my family with my own memories and other mythical references around the concepts of history, love and diaspora. Photos from my family archive, online images and my own footage illustrate the publication.

_______________________
*Excerpt from print publication (coinciding with this exhibition): Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, 174 / Neung Jed Si – A Short History of Thailand (Los Angeles: Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, 2025).


__________________________________________________ 
|
Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai (b. Bangkok, Thailand) is a transdisciplinary artist, curator and art worker, currently based in St Paul, Minnesota. They received a Visual Arts Degree from the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Nantes Metropole and a License in Film Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. They hold a BFA from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and a MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

In 2024, their solo exhibition, Pridi in Paris opened at The Fulcrum Press, in Los Angeles. Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally, in exhibitions at the ONE Archives at USC Libraries and USC Pacific Asia Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Artists’ Television Access, San Francisco, CA; UTS Gallery, Sydney, Australia; esea contemporary, Manchester, UK; CAPC, Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux, France, among others. They participated in the Arizona Biennial 2015 at the Tucson Museum of Art. They held live and online performative lectures at Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA; Marathon Screenings, Los Angeles, CA; Summer University, Performing Arts Forum, Saint Erme-Outre-et-Ramecourt, France; BOOKSHOP LIBRARY, BANGKOK CITY CITY GALLERY, among others.

Their curatorial projects involve cross-cultural collaborations between artists working in different parts of the world. For MAHA Pavilion at the Bangkok Biennial 2020, Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai paired artists in the West with performance artists in Bangkok who enacted their score across various sites in the city. Tactics of Erasure and Rewriting Histories, at Craft Contemporary in 2022 and ReflectSpace Gallery in the Glendale Central Library in 2023, features artists with marginalized identities working with erasure methods to counter official narratives of history. The New Commons, for Prospect Art Curatorial Fellowship, is a series of online screenings, virtual live collaborations and discussions around the imaginaries of the homeland as they are shaped by digital communication technologies.

Their works have appeared in publications, such as Hyperallergic, Carla, Artillery Magazine and the Performance Art Journal and Thai online media, such as the101.world and [BOOKMARK MAGAZINE], an initiative of BANGKOK CITY CITY GALLERY. They received the SOMA Summer Award to attend the SOMA residency in Mexico City in 2016 and was awarded the California Arts Council 2023 Individual Artist Fellowship.

{Biographical information courtesy of the artist.}

__________________________________________
[Image: Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Mum, Aidos, 2025, still image from animation.{Courtesy of the artist.}]

Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai: 174 / Neung Jed Si - A Short History of Thailand

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary

When your identity and purpose are rooted in making objects, what happens when all of those objects are reduced to ash? What becomes of the artist when not just the studio, but the home, the archives, the tools, the detritus of life—everything—is gone?

My House Burned Down brings together artists who have experienced the destruction of their home by fire. The exhibition includes those affected by the recent Los Angeles fires of 2025, as well as others who have endured individual, isolated blazes. It asks: how does fire shape artmaking in the days that follow catastrophe? And how does it continue to burn years—or decades—later?

After the fire, many people tried to comfort me with the image of the phoenix rising from the ashes—rebirth, transformation, triumph. But I don’t feel reborn. I don’t feel triumphant. I feel exhausted. I feel the literal loss of everything I’ve ever owned, and it is, frankly, incredibly inconvenient.

This exhibition is not about inspiration or silver linings. It’s about the complex emotional, practical, and artistic aftermath of disaster. I eschewed any subtext in titling the show, and trusted the artists to find meaning in disaster rather than ascribing it to them. What’s left behind when everything burns?

My House Burned Down

Track 16 | Downtown LA

Musichead Gallery is proud to present Simply the Best: The Power and Perseverance of Tina Turner, a photography exhibition celebrating the undeniable spirit and legacy of the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Featuring 20 unforgettable images captured by 11 acclaimed photographers, this exhibition traces Tina Turner's extraordinary journey, from her explosive rise as the dynamic frontwoman of Ike & Tina Turner to her rebirth as a solo powerhouse. 

From her explosive beginnings with Ike & Tina Turner to her historic solo comeback, the exhibition showcases intimate portraits, electrifying live shots, and candid photographs that reflect her resilience and artistry. Featured photographers include Bob Gruen, Norman Seeff, Deborah Feingold, Baron Wolman, Brian Aris, and more.

Visitors will also get a look at original Rolling Stone magazine covers featuring Tina Turner, the magazine’s first Black artist and woman cover star.

Tina Turner’s story is more than music—it’s about reclaiming your voice and rising stronger than ever, says gallery founder and curator Sam Milgrom. This exhibition is both a celebration and a reflection, and we’re proud to honor her journey at Musichead Gallery.

Simply the Best: The Power and Perseverance of Tina Turner will be on view May 8 – June 28, 2025. For more information, visit: Musichead.com

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 10, 2025, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
 Free with RSVP | https://musichead.com/blogs/events/simply-the-best-the-power-and-perseverance-of-tina-turner

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.

Simply the Best: The Power and Perseverance of Tina Turner

Musichead Gallery

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce Why Are You Sitting In The Dark, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and a sculpture by Jason Fox. The exhibition will be on view in Los Angeles at 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., from May 16 through June 28, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Friday, May 16 from 6 to 8 PM.

Fox makes paintings that are, first and foremost, about painting but inevitably end up being about everything else. The style he has developed over four decades is responsive to many levels of cultural production, indulging in disparate interests such as modernism, minimalism, comic books, and popular music. No two paintings are alike, even or especially those produced as entries in an immediately recognizable series. Joni Mitchell, Alberto Giacometti, a bemused dragon, a melancholic dog, and various skeletons or other “frightening” figures are among the recurring cast of characters who lend their forms to Fox’s inventive, intuitively elaborated process. The artist continually eludes expectations and gently demands that viewers consider each iteration of his obsessions anew, not just because they are his, but because the avenues he takes to realize his images are the same avenues any of us take when we try to figure out what matters, what moves, and what amazes.

Why Are You Sitting In The Dark is all about the intimacy of this demand. Because it includes paintings of various sizes, the exhibition evokes the emotionally close environs of the salons in which the early modernists showed, debated about, and came to understand their work. Like the early paintings of these important predecessors, Fox’s avant-gardism is not reliant on the spectacle-based effects or serialized predictability that have come to infuse much contemporary art. It is, rather, focused on what it means to take chances, painting by painting and even brushstroke by brushstroke. By remaining off-kilter, the paintings leave open the possibility of some future-oriented, organically rendered harmony. These are pictures of the intersections between hope and despair. They arise out of a hard-won faith in formalism, as well as sanguine acceptance of the fact that formalism on its own is never enough.

To this end, Fox has made a kind of aesthetic science out of the convergence of forms, colors, gestures, and moods. In the eponymous painting that gives the show its title, images of Joni Mitchell, a Goya-inspired goat, and a disaffected gargoyle hover on, in, and through each other, occupying one another’s hearts and minds in visual as well as narrative terms. Any attempt to tease them apart results in awareness of their inseparability, just as the desire to untangle the closely linked denizens in the depths of our beings often leaves us pondering places where distinctions between creativity and destruction, for instance, fall away. The work’s background is a modulated field of darkly luminous tones that appears to breathe along with its more readily identifiable subjects. The artist’s longstanding interest in monochromatic color is a reminder that, on sculptural terms, there is never truly a “background” or “foreground.” In painting, the action always takes place on the surface.

In some cases, as in a saturated red painting of Bob Marley crossed with a dog, surface is synonymous with the bold graphic image inscribed on it. Each body part—eyes, hand, nose—stands out in discrete definition, until the realization sets in that the depiction is not as clear as it first seems. What is Marley’s and what is the dog’s become questions instead of facts. The blurring of features in The Golden Man (2025), meanwhile, is of the expressionistic variety, with Fox relishing in the moment-to-moment back-and forth that builds textural bridges between the busts of Tom Petty and Giacometti that are the work’s ostensible subjects. The two men become a pile of sensitive, curious, amber-hued attempts to find what unites them. They share a knowing gaze that itself speaks to the complexity of the states the artist conjures, as well as a frankness—of intention, of materiality—that is often obscured in the world at large.

While directness characterizes the entirety of Fox’s project, the sculpture and works on paper on view emphasize the lack of pretense in his approach to his materials as well as the range of his research and references. The sculpture Willie (2022) is a wood cross adorned with a bandana and two lengths of synthetic hair. Its resemblance to country music icon Willie Nelson feels both highly determined (it also matches the musician’s height) and completely accidental, as the visual and tactile qualities of its constituent parts quickly override the obvious associations they generate. Fox balances Dadaist humor against the weight and gravitas of totemic form. And in the works on paper that round out the exhibition, Fox makes plain how he moves from one idea to another, making complete statements even out of fragmented attempts to understand—and once again forget—the driving forces behind his work. The works on paper allow viewers to fully appreciate the role played by the unknown in Fox’s ongoing evolution and how breaking down what has come before is an essential phase in the process of making new things.

Jason Fox (b. 1964, Yonkers, New York) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery, New York (2023); CANADA, New York (2021); and Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels (2018). Recent group exhibitions include Blossom: The Tenth Anniversary of the Long Museum, Long Museum, Shanghai (2024); The Drawing Centre Show, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2022); Artists for New York, Hauser & Wirth, New York (2020); Samaritans, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York (2019); and Animal Farm, Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2017). His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; and Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont. Fox lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York.


Jason Fox: Why Are You Sitting In The Dark | Mary Weatherford: The Surrealist

David Kordansky Gallery

Carlye Packer is proud to present This Grass is Green, Los Angeles-based artist Samala Meza’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition takes place at Sidecar, opening Friday, May 23rd from 6 to 8 pm, This Grass is Green will be on view through Saturday, June 28th.

Meza’s new body of work presents color field paintings that approach femininity as a formal code— flattened, stylized, and distributed across the surface. Using softly-rendered shapes and carefully repeated visual motifs, Meza creates a language of erotic abstraction: diagrams that suggest exposure without revealing, that invite desire without naming.

Image: Samala Meza, Wall Doll (Shampoo), 2025

Samala Meza: This Grass is Green

Sidecar

Stroll Garden is pleased to present Comfort Zone, a solo exhibition of new ceramic works by Los Angeles-based artist Diana “Didi” Rojas. Known for her sculptural interpretations of cult-status sneakers and designer footwear, Rojas uses the familiar language of fashion and consumer objects to examine how we construct identity, belonging, and belief through what we wear. This marks the artist’s debut with Stroll Garden and inaugurates the gallery’s new hybrid home-gallery space in the Hollywood Hills.

With a deepened interest in repetition, ritual, and collective experience, Comfort Zone expands Rojas’s sculptural vocabulary beyond footwear to include clusters of symbolic forms—amulets, keychains, toys, trinkets, and the kinds of objects often dismissed as kitsch. These forms are not just playful, but potent: they reflect the attachments and meanings we project onto things in a culture of consumption. As Rojas puts it, “We’re constantly finding ourselves through what we choose to buy, wear, and believe in.”

Throughout the exhibition, Rojas’s ceramic forms evoke both ancient traditions and contemporary habits of devotion. References to fire and pre-Columbian circle of friends, to meme culture and mass-produced Crocs (“the people’s shoes”), converge to question how we gather and what we gather around. Rojas notes: “The light that a phone emits triggers the same part of the brain that gathering around a fire would… It creates a false sense of community.” This dissonance— between connection and illusion, intimacy and performance—asks what kind of belonging is possible in a hyper-mediated world.

Comfort Zone is a meditation on the objects we keep close, the brands and symbols we imbue with spiritual weight, and the search for comfort in a chaotic world. It suggests a blurred boundary between what is sacred and what is silly—between what connects us and what simply clutters.
With signature wit and exacting craft, Rojas reflects the weight of the world back to us through its lightest, most disposable forms.

Comfort Zone will be on view at Stroll Garden from June 7 to June 28, 2025. For more information, please visit stroll-garden.com. Contact philip@stroll-garden.com for the address.

Diana “Didi" Rojas: Comfort Zone 

Stroll Garden

7811 Gallery presents emerging Los Angeles artist, Mikio Nobumoto Metoyer. A solo exhibit of visceral new paintings rooted in memory, architecture, and nature.

Mikio Nobumoto Metoyer: I See Everyone, I Feel Everything

7811 Gallery

Perrotin Los Angeles is pleased to present Josh Sperling’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast. Known for his vibrant shaped canvases and interlocking forms, the American artist draws on influences from minimalist abstraction to Memphis design. This exhibition marks a significant evolution in his practice, featuring new paintings alongside his first foray into functional design in the United States, introducing modular benches and framed mirrors—extending his visual language beyond the canvas and into new contexts.

In Josh Sperling's Big Picture, the devil is in the details. The first solo exhibition of the Ithaca-based artist in Perrotin's Los Angeles space combines Sperling's quintessential sculptural paintings, demonstrating a decade-long commitment to the mastery of form and color, and his recent exciting venture into design, as function wiggles its way into the artist's core concerns. Sperling's whimsical lexicon of technicolor undulating shapes comes alive with fresh energy through an immersive environment where art, design, and craft overlap. The exhibition's cheeky title references LA's renown as the hub of the film industry and the gallery's transformation of the former Del Mar Theater into an exhibition space that features remnants of its past, including the marquee, ticket booth, and theater hall. Big Picture showcases a dynamic evolution in Sperling's practice, highlighting his desire to work beyond the confines of the wall. Not only have his paintings grown more three-dimensional, literally popping off the wall and looping onto themselves, but he has translated his painting language into full-bodied design objects that turn functionality into aesthetic experiences.
 
A series of "Composites," each a microcosm of juxtaposition, opens the show and sets the scene. Sperling mixes and matches sharp, flat planes with raised, curvilinear shapes in various textures and surface treatments, creating shifting linear perspectives and the illusion of motion, to animate the painted compositions. These paintings encompass an assortment of dualities that work in tandem rather than in opposition within Sperling’s overall practice: order and chaos, structure and looseness, and minimalism and maximalism. The “Composites,” elaborate power-clashing choreographies of form, color, and pattern, are an ideal introduction to the artist’s practice as they encapsulate many of his inspirations, like 1980s Memphis design, the road signs of LA, and minimalist paintings of the 1960s and 1970s. 

Modularity is at the core of Sperling's practice. So it is no surprise that he would extend this approach to furniture–a grown-up manifestation of his love for Legos as a child. Central to the first room is a collection of seven single and six two-person seats covered in vibrant Kvadrit wool. Sperling’s playful contemporary take on the clean lines of mid-century furniture builds upon the legacy of Pierre Paulin's iconic geometric furniture from the 1960s. This work is a rainbow arrangement of the artist’s signature "bullseye" and "double bubble" motifs, as bulbous stools that fit together to make up a three-dimensional version of his "Double Bubble" paintings. Like Paulin, Sperling does not compromise artistic integrity for functionality. The stools are user-friendly and easily come apart, but when brought back together, they are more than the sum of their parts, forming an inviting and bold pinwheel that is aesthetically pleasing and facilitates social interaction. In fact, the design of the stools provides a visual cue that establishes a sense of connection and harmony. 

As if comically large confetti had exploded from a cannon or someone had doodled with a box of giant crayons, one of Sperling's characteristic, lavish full-wall painting installations welcomes visitors into the second room. The show's title piece is the first conglomeration made up of only "Swoops." It is easy to get lost among the cursive gestures–the ups, the downs–like a visual rollercoaster. The energy is palpable as each piece curls, coils, and springs to life. The spirited "Swoops" are metaphorical giggles, the uncontrollable sounds of joy that escape in quick, short bursts, cutting through the silence. Each "Swoop" perfectly nestles among the others, undoubtedly the outcome of obsessive arrangement and rearrangement. However, they are reconfigured anew and still fit together when they come apart (into four distinct sections). 
Like the many "Squiggles" of Sperling's career, the "Swoops" are stretched canvas paintings in an unconventional format. While the saturated single-hued surfaces let the form shine, they also produce a deceiving mirage of flatness. The light-hearted, candy-coated loop-the-loops give an aura of simplicity and organic freedom. Yet, they result from a complicated and methodical process of ideation, building, configuration, and installation. 

While initially working with conventional painting formats, precisely because it did not require specialized equipment, Sperling, the son of an art teacher, woodworker, and ceramicist, could not deny that he cared most about the craft of building. He then intentionally complicated his process by incorporating machines to assist in constructing his armatures. The foundations of Sperling's shaped paintings are intricate plywood structures engineered to contort and stack before they are covered with stretched canvas and then painted. With form at the forefront, he often works with grayscale paper maquettes to puzzle his compositions before adding color from the massive paint chart displayed in pots that occupy his studio's floor. As it turns out, it takes a lot of planning and labor to make it look effortless.  

Across the wall of "Swoops" is the most unexpected addition to Big Picture–a large installation of amoeba-like mirrors. Unlike the rest of the objects, which are painted or tufted in punchy colors, Sperling remains true to the materials with these. The frames of the mirrors alternate between ash and walnut woods, recalling Noguchi's 1970 marble sculpture, The Opening, which demonstrated how to assemble a large sculpture using smaller components. This pattern also hints at the black-and-white lines of Memphis. The nearby serpentine bench worms its way like a path in Candyland through the room, echoing the segmentation of the mirrors. Like the furniture in the first room, this piece, featuring color-blocked components, underscores Sperling's continued pursuit of modularity while conveying connectivity. 

Like his father, Sperling is a wood-bender at heart. The mirrors more transparently reveal the structures hidden beneath the layers of paint in other works. This installation feels like a moment of reflection for the artist, literally and figuratively. While the natural wood mirrors mark a surprising shift, their installation celebrates the aesthetics that have defined Sperling for most of his career by amplifying the color eruption on the opposite wall when looking at the mirrors' surfaces. Through the lens of design, Sperling transforms his beloved archetypes while also marking a return to his childhood, surrounded by craft. Big Picture offers a generative feedback loop that makes Sperling’s already layered practice more intricate, propelling his practice into a new dimension.


Josh Sperling: Big Picture

Perrotin

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Moon, Turn the Flames…Gently Gently Away, Awol Erizku’s inaugural solo exhibition at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. Continuing his critical investigation of identity politics, resistance, and abstraction, Erizku offers a cosmology of visual language that disrupts conventional narratives of representation. The exhibition presents new photographs, neon installations, and sculptures that underscore Erizku’s distinctive approach to symbolism and cross-cultural dialogue. There will be an opening reception on Friday, May 16, from 5-7pm. The artist will be present.

Through a sophisticated interplay of diverse mediums, Awol Erizku’s unique lexicon recontextualizes historical narratives. A series of neon works further expand Erizku’s investigation of identity and symbolism. These new works reflect the artist’s exploration of beauty within everyday life. One neon reimagines the iconic Los Angeles Dodgers logo in vibrant, Pan-African colors, subverting expectations of branding and belonging. While another features the Olympic rings rendered in the five colors that Malcolm X identified as symbolic of the world's skin tones—red, black, brown, white, and yellow—offering a powerful meditation on unity, race, and representation. NO ICE is a striking neon addition to the artist’s enduring lexicon, introducing a multifaceted symbol ripe for interpretation within today’s volatile political climate. Within the broader constellation of works in this exhibition, NO ICE ignites a more urgent dialogue, illuminating the fraught landscape of race relations in America with unflinching intensity.

Erizku’s new photographic works reflect his continued resistance to the commodification of the Black body. Moving beyond direct figurative representation, they weave together Pan-African iconography, botanical symbolism, and profoundly personal narratives to explore themes of race, identity, and systemic injustice. In the Transfixion series recurring imagery from Erizku’s practice is projected onto delicate blooms such as orchids and Asiatic lilies. Drawing on French Martiniquais philosopher, Édouard Glissant’s concept of imagination as a dynamic force within the web of Relation, Erizku harnesses his creative process to envision new possibilities, forging visual narratives that resist oppressive frameworks and construct liberated futures rooted in Black identity and cultural multiplicity.

Another searing new photographic series confronts the enduring wounds of systemic injustice on Black communities. This deeply moving body of work serves as a requiem for individuals whose lives were tragically cut short by police violence, their stories etched into the artist’s consciousness. In these compositions, cowrie shells—potent symbols of African heritage, revered in spiritual rituals, and emblematic of diasporic resilience—replace bullet casings, while yellow evidence markers solemnly tally the gunshots. By transfiguring the cold aesthetics of forensic scenes into sacred spaces of remembrance and defiance, Erizku subverts the dehumanization of Black victims, carving out a visual sanctuary for mourning, reflection, and historical reckoning. This series not only amplifies his ongoing dialogue with Black identity and resistance but also reclaims the cowrie as a beacon of cultural continuity, echoing Malcolm X’s vision of a global Black consciousness.

Expanding on Erizku’s deep engagement with the intersection of music and visual art, the third-floor installation presents a suite of “The Most influential Hip-Hop Albums of all time” according to the artist, inkjet printed on stone. Erizku elevates his selection beyond their original commercial and digital contexts. Presenting them as “paintings” he situates them within art history. The weight and texture of the stone serve as a counterpoint to the ephemeral quality of contemporary music consumption, prompting reflection on how cultural memory is preserved and rewoven into a new tapestry. Creating an immersive experience, the exhibition is accompanied by a curated mixtape for visitors to listen to as they move through the space, serving as an auditory extension of Erizku’s artistic language.

Erizku’s work is currently the subject of, X, a solo exhibition at the California African American Museum on view through September 7, 2025. Bringing together recent and new works, this comprehensive exhibition centers on the impact of pioneering American Muslim human rights activist El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X). Curated by Daniel S. Palmer, X, first premiered at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, GA. His work is also featured in the group exhibition Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics, at LACMA on view through August 3, 2025.

Born in Ethiopia, in 1988, Erizku attended The Cooper Union before receiving his MFA from Yale University. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions including The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, AK; Public Art Fund, New York, and The FLAG Art Foundation, New York. His work has been exhibited at prominent institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; LACMA, LA; the Studio Museum Harlem, NY; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, amongst others. His work is included in the permanent collection of many institutions worldwide including, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; and The FLAG Art Foundation, NY. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Awol Erizku: Moon, Turn the Flames...Gently Gently Away

Sean Kelly Los Angeles

Keystone Arts Space Gallery presents "Patterns and Tones for A Paper Ballet", an interdisciplinary exhibition by artist Julie Green, bringing together photography, sculpture, elements of performance, and a light-based installation design into a singular, immersive environment. This hybrid body of work invites viewers into a visual choreography of shapes, materials, and shadow play, where movement is both suggested and suspended in time.

At the heart of "Patterns and Tones for A Paper Ballet" is a four-part photographic series referencing the structure of a four-act play. These images act as dimensional tableaux, with figures inhabiting constructed proscenium spaces, animated by handmade paper objects and enigmatic narrative symbols. The works are inspired in part by Oskar Schlemmer’s avant-garde "Triadic Ballet" (c.1920), whose explorations of costumed geometry and the mystical potential of modern aesthetics find new resonance here in Green’s compositions.

Presented in a dimly lit passage with a single, moving light source, the monochromatic, abstract “pattern relief” elements of the series become dynamic participants in the performance. As shadows slip across the surfaces, the works oscillate between stasis and movement, presence, and absence — creating a spatial rhythm that feels both intimate and theatrical, as though consciousness resides in geometry itself. Incorporating Constructivist ideas in the work to convey universal laws that the elements of lines, colors and shapes possess their own forces of expression, bound up with human emotion.

In dialogue with these pieces is "Silent Symphony", a sculptural installation of “tone reliefs” that engages the sensory imagination through implied sound. Constructed entirely from handmade paper pulp, wood, and molds, the classical instruments in this work appear poised mid- performance. In the absence of audible music, their material presence activates a surreal, cognitive echo — a silent score composed of gesture, tension, and expectation. Throughout the exhibition, Green’s meticulous use of handmade processes and geometric abstraction interrupts the traditional flatness of the photographic plane, expanding two- dimensional imagery into tactile, sculptural form. The works traverse themes of memory, movement, and perception, inviting audiences to experience a choreographed relationship between light, material, and implied narrative.

“I love to make something out of nothing,” says the artist. “Within my professional career and in the broader context of our hyper-saturated digital world, I have felt a deep desire to go back to using my hands, and this impulse has shaped the direction of my personal studio practice in the past five years.” In fact, sculpture and photography have a lot in common—both speak a language of light and shadow, positive and negative space, presence and absence, perspective and choice, truth and its interpretation. “My ultimate desire was to break out of the strict confines of photography’s inherent two- dimensionality,” she says, “to arrive at something more solid, tactile, animated, and even theatrical.”

"Patterns and Tones for A Paper Ballet" is less a static exhibition than a conversation between mediums — a series of visual performances suspended in time, waiting for the viewer to step in and complete the phenomenological gesture. Conceived and made before the artist nearly lost her home battling the encroaching flames of the Eaton Fire and its damaging aftermath, it’s hard not to imbue the works’ beguiling manner of magical thinking with an added layer of meaning, as it speaks to life’s fragility.
— Exhibition text by Shana Nys Dambrot

About the Artist
Born in Oakland, CA in 1969, Julie Green was surrounded in her youth by contemporary artists through extended family to Ruth Asawa by attending her children’s workshops, David Ireland by assisting him at his Capp Street Studio, and through her teenage friendship with Barry McGee. Having studied under Steve Harper at San Francisco Art Academy, Green earned her BFA in Fine Art Photography under Jack Welpott, Robin Lasser and Don Worth at San Francisco State University in 1991. Throughout the 90’s, Green worked as a rock and roll photographer as well as creating fine art photography and painted portraiture which were shown throughout the Bay Area. 
 
In 1999, Green moved to Los Angeles where she had the opportunity to dive into the established business through photo documentation in the music, theater and entertainment industry including portraiture. The idea of the stage became part of her landscape working with set, lighting and costume designers demonstrating the power of collaboration as a creative to execute your vision. Having maintained a photographic studio at the Warfield Building in San Francisco for many, her current studio is based at Keystone Art Space in LA’s Lincoln Heights. 


Julie Green: Patterns and Tones for A Paper Ballet

Sincich draws inspiration from the built landscape: signs, murals, and advertisements are transformed into idiosyncratic quilted compositions that emphasize the handmade quality of much of the urban landscape. The exhibition takes as its starting point the kinds of everyday shops that dot city neighborhoods: corner stores and tire shops, laundromats and bars. Sincich captures all of this in meticulously pieced and quilted works, stretched and finished with artist’s frames. 

Jeffrey Sincich: 99¢ Plus & More

Charlie James Gallery

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present NIGHT LIGHTS, an exhibition of large-format, analog
photographs by Los Angeles based artist Austin Irving. Captured across New York, Hong Kong, and Bangalore, India, these images document abstracted, transient spaces - hotel rooms, guest quarters, and temporary interiors - bathed in the glow of urban night.

Raised in New York City, Austin Irving has long been attuned to the glow of artificial city lights - the way they shape our internal rhythms, disrupt sleep, and redefine our sense of space. Printed on a large scale, NIGHT LIGHTS embraces the emotional impact of spaces that are not quite private, not quite public, but somewhere in between. Within these photographs, ambient illuminations become a kind of psychic residue, coloring the mind as much as the room. The psychological texture of the work - marked by jet lag, displacement, and a yearning for stillness - imbues each piece with a hushed intimacy.

Working in darkness, often over the course of several hours, Irving allows the camera to absorb what the eye cannot fully perceive. Each long exposure reveals strange distortions, shifts in color, and luminous textures that collapse the borders between artist, medium, and atmosphere. As though suspended in time, these spectral images capture intimate periods of solitude and transience, rendering them visible. Within One Hour, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, a neon storefront throbs like an apparition, projected onto the ceiling of Irving’s hotel room, emerging from a place between sleep and wakefulness, between stillness and drift.
Meticulously primed like a canvas, each photograph has been painted by the floating color story of the world outside, allowing for the intrusion of the unexpected. This commitment to process introduces an element of uncertainty and surrender, even from behind closed curtains - as is captured within the matte, dreamy pinks and reds of Four Hours, Tindlu Road, Bangalore, India. In this way, Irving’s photographs impart the beauty located within the technical imperfections of the medium, granting her film a voice of its own.

As a visual diary, NIGHT LIGHTS invites the viewer into the porous bleed between internal experience and the external world. Through fleeting apparitions and saturated shadows, Austin Irving's photographs offer unseen moments where reality slips and time is softened. It is a meditation on the flickering streetlights and passing cars that slip into our consciousness, the quiet places where anxious memory lingers, and the strange beauty that arises when we loosen our grip on control.

Austin Irving (b 1984, NYC) is an internationally award winning visual artist who works with large format analog photography. Irving graduated cum laude with a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s TISCH School Of The Arts in 2006. Her artwork has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and festivals, in Hong Kong, India, Germany, Lithuania, France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Indonesia, and across The United States. Irving has participated in exhibitions at institutions such as MOCA, Los Angeles CA; The Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine CA; The Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Tampa, FL; Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA; The International Photography Symposium, and The Katonah Museum of Art, Westchester County, NY. Her work as been the recipient of the Architecture Master Prize, Aesthetica Art Prize, Mono Awards, American Photography Competition, Budapest International Foto Awards, International Photography Awards, PX3 Paris Photography Prize, Tokyo International Foto Awards, Analog Sparks, and the International Photography Competition at The New York Center for Photographic Arts. Her images have been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Wired, Slate, Architectural Digest, Aesthetica Magazine, LA Weekly, PDN, Art Ltd., Artillery, Time Out NY, The Herald Tribune, Maize, The Huffington Post, Frontrunner, Artsy, Voyage LA, Yatzer, and Artweek LA. This is Irving's third solo exhibition at Wilding Cran Gallery.

Austin Irving: NIGHT LIGHTS

Wilding Cran Gallery

Five artist showcase work ranging from watercolors of baddies, esoteric monkeys, and interactive assemblage art.

Stephanie Brockway | Alea Bone | Craig LaRontonda | Wendy Gadzuk | Sea Monster

La Luz De Jesus Gallery

DON’T LOOK Projects is proud to announce “Freeway: Creative Growth Artists in LA”, a collaborative exhibition with Creative Growth Art Center, the pioneering Oakland-based nonprofit that has championed artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities for over 50 years. This exhibition spotlights the work of six Creative Growth artists: Juan Aguilera, Joseph Alef, Maureen Clay, Ying Ge Zhou, Cedric Johnson, and Peter Salsman. 

Opening Reception:
Friday, May 30th, 2025
5pm - 7pm

DON'T LOOK Projects
2680 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034

Freeway: Creative Growth Artists in L.A.

DON’T LOOK Projects

Simchowitz is pleased to present Charged Memory, Gene A’Hern’s first solo exhibition at Hill House in Pasadena. ]RSVP for address and parking information here.

In Charged Memory, Australian artist Gene A’Hern explores the profound interplay between personal identity, lived experience, and place. This new body of work draws deeply from his lifelong connection to the Blue Mountains of New South Wales—his birthplace, which serves as a wellspring of reflection, and a source
of enduring spiritual resonance.

A’Hern’s practice merges meditative reflection with instinctive, gestural mark-making, resulting in layered compositions that shift between contemplation and impulsiveness. Based in Katoomba, a town in the Blue Mountains region, he approaches art-making as a dialogue between internal experience and the surrounding environment. His visual language often incorporates organic symbolism first sketched in notebooks and evolves through varied materials—oil, pastel, wool, ink, and monk’s cloth—building layers of form and texture over time.

The exhibition spans a wide range of works—from the expansive, windswept energy of Sky Painting 42 (2023) to the dense, earthbound tactility of Canopy 6 (2025). In Flicker (2024), layers of distemper on linen evoke fleeting movement, while the twin works titled Cecil Road (2024) mirror one another as embodiments of landscape filtered through lived memory. Across the show, A’Hern articulates a personal mythology shaped by the cyclical nature of existence—“from dust and returning to dust.”
A central thread in A’Hern’s work is his intimate awareness of place. The Blue Mountains function not merely as a setting but as an active collaborator. Elements like shifting light, wind, and birdsong contribute to what he describes as the “ceremonial choreography” of painting. His practice of “skywatching” becomes a quiet ritual, captured in works such as Sky Drawing 64 (2025) and Sky Painting 57 (2024), where expansive gestures convey both scale and emotional resonance.

A’Hern’s work inhabits a liminal space—between past and present, interior and exterior. Rather than seeking critique or resolution, he leans into this threshold. His material choices—hessian, wool, distemper—speak to both raw immediacy and a connection to the elemental and handmade. The resulting pieces form an intuitive visual language of remembrance and transformation—offering traces of where the artist has been, and glimpses of where he is headed.

A’Hern holds a BFA from the National Art School in Sydney and has exhibited in Australia, Denmark, and the United States.

Gene A'Hern: Charged Memory

Simchowitz Hill House

Beryl Odette explores across a range of media her fascination with how we perceive each other. How do we learn to see -- and not to see? Her work probes the process of visual apprehension through techniques of layering and accumulation. Odette excavates and translates, pointing to that which is observed, but still unseen.  No matter the place, time or audience, beauty soothes that which enters the eye, the way a kind voice is skilled at delivering news we don’t want to hear. With formal beauty she invites your gaze to look past, offering up feelings we are less comfortable naming.

Beryl Odette: Seaing

Track 16 | East Hollywood

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

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 6pm

Oliver Clegg: always right, sometimes left.

The Journal Gallery

Nonaka-Hill Los Angeles is delighted to present paintings by Kaoru Ueda, a leading exponent of Japanese photorealism. Often termed a “superrealist,” Ueda is renown for his depictions of household objects and food suspended in space and time. Painted with exacting detail and concision, his works estrange the familiar through rigorous observation.

Ueda’s process is ostensibly a straightforward one in which he uses the visual information in his 35mm negatives as the basis for his hand-painted images; yet the results are paradoxical in that they are realistically unrealistic. Mirroring the “observer effect” in quantum mechanics, in which the act of observation alters the state of the object, Ueda intuitively changes what he termed the “raw and chaotic” aspects of his photographs into a new visual state based on painterly techniques of illusion. His images are therefore the result of subjective observation whose style is a cold—one might even say, surgical—act of seeing. This lends his works the feeling of sensuality colliding with clinicality, where the eros of illusion and the sobriety of reality blur.

Partly for this reason, there is a pop art sensibility subtly embedded within Ueda’s paintings. This is partly due to the estrangement of familiar objects through the marriage of photography and painting; but it’s also due to Ueda’s nod to Jasper Johns’ use of letterforms. In his paintings of soap bubbles and bottles, he renders his name in tromp l’oeil as an embossed label. Also akin to pop, Ueda tends to dispense with receding space, focusing instead on the object’s physical phenomena. As we enter its micro worlds of reflections and color shifts, Ueda gives it an iconic and spiritual dimension devoid of irony. Ueda is an artist more endeared to the power of subjective observation than to the politics of commodification.

Aspects of Ueda’s work can be surely traced to his biography: born in Tokyo in 1928, he initially sought a degree in medicine when he came of age but switched to pursuing painting at Tokyo University of the Arts. He eventually had his first solo exhibition in Tokyo in 1958, at which time he had been working as a graphic designer to support himself. In 1956, he had won the grand prize in an international poster competition funded by MGM studios. His graphic design studio consequently grew to a sizable staff and his painting practice became waylaid for a decade. When he restarted his painting practice in earnest, his use of photography took hold, imbibing aspects of mass culture absent from his early work.

As a consequence, Ueda’s paintings have an element of seduction that underwrites most popular advertising. But what his paintings are seducing us into is not the consumption of the object, but the physical wonderment of it. Ueda takes great pleasure in contrasting the densities, surface textures, and colors of his objects, as in his paintings of cutlery and Jell-O, sponges, or jam. We also find this in his soap bubbles and bottles, whose surfaces are stages for light and shadow through which we find another reality. Case in point: in Soapbubble M, 1982, we see the artist with his camera in the reflection, alluding to the handmade process of building an illusion, such as in The Arnolfini Marriage, 1434, by Jan Van Eyck. In it, we see the artist’s reflection in a convex mirror (a soap bubble!) behind the marital pair. In this sense, Ueda nods to a tradition that long preoccupied artists before modernism, in which the painter highlighted his subjective experience as the ur-subject of the painting. Ueda’s paintings, therefore, are documents of how an object can be changed by the artist’s observation, reminding us of how our perceptions make and remake the world with every moment of contact.

––
Kaoru Ueda was born in 1928 in Yoyogi, Tokyo. Selected solo and group exhibitions include Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (2024); Takamatsu City Museum of Art (2023); Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art (2023); Ibaraki Museum of Modern Art (2021); Yokosuka Museum of Art | Saitama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art (2020); Okazaki Children's Museum of Art (2020); Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Hayama (2017); Mito City Museum (2014); Sagamihara Civic Gallery (2003); Nerima Art Museum (2001); Rias Ark Museum of Art | Miyagi Prefecture (2001); Sakamoto Zenzo Museum of Art / Kumamoto (1999); Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (1998); Egyptian International Print Triennial, Cairo (1997); Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art (1997); Gwangju Museum of Art (1995); Museum of Modern Art, Shiga (1994); Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (1993); Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art (1990); Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (1989); Kasama Nichido Museum of Art/Ibaraki (1988); Saitama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art (1985); The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama (1983); Korea Arts and Culture Promotion Institute Art Hall, Seoul (1981); Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (1978); Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum/Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art (1976); Seibu Museum of Art (1975); Dusseldorf Art Museum (1974); Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (1974). Kaoru Ueda was a professor at Ibaraki University from 1985 to 1993.

Museum and public collections: National Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City, Mexico; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia

Image: Kaoru Ueda Spoon and Jam D, 1978, oil on canvas, 28 5/8 x 24 in

KAORU UEDA

Nonaka-Hill | Highland

Mother and Child: A Portal

Paintings, Drawings & Tapestries by Lucien Dante Lazar
Sculptural Works by Cybele Rowe, Patrick Nickel, Ann Weber, & Cheyann Washington

Opening Reception: 5-10pm Friday July 11th 2025
Exhibition Dates : July 11th - August 1st, 2025

Wonzimer Gallery, 341 S Avenue 17, Los Angeles 90031

 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 Nickel, 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

The paintings of Andreas Schulze (*1955) and Salvo (1947–2015) depict intriguing worlds unlike any other. Across vibrant landscapes and eccentric interiors, their unique conceptual approaches to painting evolved over decades of experimentation with color, light and form. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are proud to present an exhibition of new works by Schulze alongside paintings by Salvo, bringing into focus their parallel contributions to the discourse of contemporary painting and their deft manipulation of paint to depict shifting spatial and light effects. The exhibition’s presentation at the Los Angeles gallery brings into focus this particular concern with light and space – a feature so prevalent in the history of modern art in Southern California, from its impressionist, plein-air roots to the reflective plastics and resins of the 1960s onward.

Salvo, Andreas Schulze: About Painting

Sprüth Magers

The Abstract Future, curated by Alia Dahl,
documents a new generation of artists who are
redefining abstraction by merging sculpture,
painting, photography, and performance. Spanning
both our Los Angeles galleries, the exhibition
highlights over thirty artists who are simultaneously
exploring process and materiality while addressing
themes of identity, culture, and political beliefs to
reflect their unique personal narratives.
California has a rich history of abstraction, from
the Light and Space movement and Finish Fetish
to the development of geometric abstraction
and conceptual art. The Abstract Future builds
upon this legacy, presenting artists who infuse
abstraction with fresh perspectives–drawing inspiration from historical influences, current
events, environmental changes, astronomical exploration, and advancements in technology
and science.
The Abstract Future is an international exhibition, featuring artists from Europe, South
America, and Africa, alongside those based across the United States. This global perspective
underscores the universal relevance of abstraction as a method of creative production and
its capacity to offer insight into the human experience across cultures and contexts.
THE ABSTRACT FUTURE

WWW.DEITCH.COM
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, CONTACT ALIA DAHL AT ALIA@DEITCH.COM
The artists participating in The Abstract Future are:
Anthony Akinbola
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio
Loriel Beltrán
Elaine Cameron-Weir
Allana Clarke
sonia louise davis
Aria Dean
Guillaume Dénervaud
Tomm El-Saieh
Sam Falls
Alteronce Gumby
Madeline Hollander

Kahlil Robert Irving
Rindon Johnson
Lotus L. Kang
Bronwyn Katz
Antonia Kuo
Maia Ruth Lee
Hannah Levy
Manuel Mathieu
Jeffrey Meris
Kayode Ojo
Michael Andrew Page
Brian Rochefort

Tariku Shiferaw
Diego Singh
Shinique Smith
Diamond Stingily
Tadáskía
Chiffon Thomas
Uman
Raphaela Vogel
Kristin Walsh
Kennedy Yanko
Stella Zhong

The Abstract Future 

Jeffrey Deitch | Orange

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

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.  

____

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. 

____

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.

_____

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

Snisarenko Gallery opens new Beverly Hills exhibition space with First Light, Beverly Hills, a two-artist show featuring Ukrainian painters Liza Zhdanova and Eugene Lisniak. Longtime friends and classmates from the Ukrainian Academy of Arts, the artists reunite in California for their U.S. debut, presenting side-by-side abstract works rooted in emotion, nature, and personal transformation.

Inspired by the soft light and lush landscapes of Beverly Hills mornings—where rose gardens, jasmine, bougainvillea, and orchids bloom among palm trees and pines—the exhibition invites viewers into a visual dialogue between movement and stillness, color and memory.

Zhdanova’s Flowers series (2025) bursts with energy and symbolism, while Lisniak’s textured compositions, including his never-before-shown Self Portrait, offer quiet introspection. Together, their works speak to a shared journey of identity and renewal.

First Light, Beverly Hills is available by appointment only.
Visit www.snisarenko.com or inquire at info@snisarenko.com to schedule your visit.

First Light, Beverly Hills

Snisarenko 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

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: Judy Chicago "Mary, Queen of Scots," 1973. Lithograph, Silkscreen, ed. 40, 25 x 25 in.

The Greatest Hits of Cirrus Editions - Remembering Jean Milant

Cirrus Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

The Broad 

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

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

AR Open @ Venice Public Art Walls

KHACHIK ABRAHAMYAN SOLO EXHIBITION, SAHAK YAN Art Gallery organizing an exhibition in AzziArt Gallery LA, curated by Aziza Azizova. 

KHACHIK ABRAHAMYAN

Azzi Art Gallery LA

The Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles (KCCLA) & Korean Artists Association of Southern California (KAASC) proudly present the '56th Annual Exhibition of Korean Artists Association of Southern California', opening with a reception on Thursday, May 22, 2025, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at the KCCLA Art Gallery (5505 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036).

This year’s exhibition, held under the theme “Unity in Diversity,” celebrates the KAASC’s long-standing dedication to fostering artistic dialogue and cross-cultural connection. Seventy association artists will present a dynamic range of works-including painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, and mixed media-demonstrating the diversity of creative expression within the Korean American artistic community.

Founded in 1964, the Korean Artists Association of Southern California has played a vital role in promoting cultural exchange and harmony between Korea and other ethnic communities. Through initiatives such as juried student exhibitions and Korean-American collaborative shows, the association has actively encouraged the next generation of artists. Over the years, the inclusion of younger artists has brought renewed energy and innovation to the group, blending fresh perspectives with traditional forms.

The exhibition is free and open to the public and will remain on view through June 6, 2025.

Korean Artists Association of Southern California (total 70 Artists)
Kyongho Ko, Stephanie Ko, Joo Park-Kwon, Rebecca Kyungae Kim, Isabella Kim, Somoon Kim, Kathy Younsook Kim, Youn Hee Kim, Yongsik Kim, Wonsil Kim, Inchol Kim, Jongsung Kim, Jinsil Kim, Julia Kim, Chunae Kim, Taeok/Danni Kim, Phoebe Kim, Mona Na, Kyoung Namkung, Steve Moon, Miran Moon, Meekyong Park, Mi Yeun Park, Ben Park, Youngku Park, Lily Park, Jungun Park, Ellie Bae, Jungyeon Bae, Hairan Paik, Damian Jinho Seo, Julie Sim Edwards, Esther Shim, Minsook Vincent Yang, Sean Yang, Michelle Oh, Kija Yu, Keun Soon Lee, Nakyung Lee, Dongah Lee, Meejung Lee, Boonam Lee, Saberia Lee, Sam Sanghoon Lee, Robert Lee, Chungmee Lee, Jinhee Lee, Hyun Jin Lee, Hyesook Lee, In Kyung Chang, Jung Chang, Jane Chang, Yoon Seon Jeon, Min Cho, Boonyen Cho, Hyunsook Cho, Sunhee Joo, Young Ran Ji, Sungho Choe, Yun J. Choi, Helen Han, Sunny Kim, Susan Hwang, Yung Ah Hwang, Kyung Hee Kim, Young Mi Jeon, Yeun Kyung Suh, Paul Art Lee, Danny Lee, Soo Ji Lim Koo

The 56th Annual Exhibition of Korean Artists Association of Southern California 'Unity in Diversity'

Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles

Crusting evokes the moment when fluid meets air, when something begins to settle, rupture, or transform. It is a skin, a residue, a scar. In this two-person exhibition, artists Cara Rae Joven and Lauren Goldenberg Longoria explore the porous boundaries between surface and weight, body and land, beauty and abjection. Across sculpture, performance, video, and paper-based works, the artists investigate how histories are carried, how forms are shaped by time, and how matter remembers.

Cara Rae Joven’s practice traces the invisible threads that tether body and landscape. Working across sculpture, performance, and video, she engages with gravitational forces, both literal and historical, that act on materials and memory. In her How To/You Can: video series, she performs subtle, persistent gestures in landscapes marked by cultural trauma, offering tender interventions into spaces of past violence. Her Future Tools sculptures imagine speculative, non-dominant technologies: objects of connection and care, forged in anticipation of uncertain futures.

Lauren Goldenberg Longoria’s works emerge from an intimate ritual of transformation: sifting, soaking, and compressing discarded personal objects into densely layered paper forms. Her process echoes bodily rhythms—sweating, bleeding, slicing—and evokes the sensorial charge of memory lodged deep within material. These works are both architectural and intimate, saturated with pigment and pressure. They hold a delicate tension between the abject and the transcendent, revealing how grossness and beauty coexist within the material memory of the body.

Through a shared commitment to embodied inquiry, Joven and Goldenberg Longoria create forms shaped by tactile chemistries and bodily processes. Their surfaces blister, flake, and sag—echoing the earth’s crust, formed through collision and worn down over time. Refusing mastery over material, both artists embrace gravity, erosion, and entropy as collaborators. Together, the artists open up a space where survival, tenderness, and transformation coexist. Their exhibition Crusting asks viewers to consider: What remains when something breaks down? How does the past live on in the present—and what might be the essential tools for the worlds we are building now?

After hours gallery is a project rooted in shared intimacy, born from the collaboration and friendship between artists Kim Garcia and Amy MacKay. Founded in 2021, the gallery was originally located between their adjoining studios. Each after hours exhibition begins with an invited artist, who then selects a second artist to join them in a two-person show focused on material experimentation and dialogue. In its latest iteration, after hours has partnered with DMST Atelier in a shared goal of fostering connection within the LA art community. 

For more information and gallery appointments:
Instagram: @DMSTAtelier, @galleryafterhours | afterhoursgalleryla@gmail.com | https://www.dmstatelier.com/	

