"Valence," curated by Galia Linn featuring works by Azadeh Shladovsky and Daniel Wheeler that delves into the multifaceted nature of human existence through the lens of emotion and perception. Drawing inspiration from the psychological concept of "valence" – the inherent attractiveness or averseness of an experience – the exhibition presents a diverse collection of artworks that reflect the complexities of the human emotional experience.

Azadeh Shladovsky and Daniel Wheeler: Valence

Track 16 | Downtown LA

Stroll Garden is pleased to present Pattern Shift, a solo exhibition of new work by Lesley Kice Nishigawara. Featuring textiles and works on paper, the exhibition follows Nishigawara’s use of the grid as a generative structure—expanded and reimagined through weaving, drawing, and collage.

At the core of Nishigawara’s practice are handwoven works created on a loom, in which imagery emerges through layered weave structures, pigment applied during the weaving process, and the piecing together of woven segments. Each piece evolves through subtle deviations from pattern, reflecting the unpredictability and natural slippages inherent in daily life. As the artist notes, “Patterns create an infrastructure for my work to unfold… The balance between control and acceptance mirrors the unpredictability and fluidity inherent in daily life.”

For this exhibition, Nishigawara presents a body of new works that expand upon her long- standing interest in repetition and transformation. Large-scale woven grids are paired with smaller paper-based experiments—drawings that are woven, punched, folded, and stitched—forming a dialogue between materials and processes. Thread trimmed from the ends of a weaving is sewn over watercolor and gouache, while punched paper from one drawing becomes the basis for another. These works illuminate the cyclical nature of Nishigawara’s practice, in which every mark, thread, or gesture carries forward into something new.

Together, the works on view reveal Nishigawara’s sustained inquiry into the ways patterns evolve, fracture, and recombine, oﬀering a meditation on order, disruption, and the beauty of imperfection.

Lesley Kice Nishigawara: Pattern Shift will be on view at Stroll Garden’s Beverly Boulevard location (7380 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036) from October 11–November 15, 2025. For more information, please visit stroll-garden.com.

LESLEY KICE NISHIGAWARA is a textile artist based in Southern California. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the China National Silk Museum (Hangzhou, China); Cheongju-si, Sanding-gu (Republic of Korea); Tama Art University Museum (Tokyo, Japan); Espace Roi Baudouin au Sein du Palais des Académies (Brussels, Belgium); and Felissimo Design House (New York, NY). Her work has been featured in publications including Memory on Cloth: Shibori Now and Fiber Arts Design Book 7. Nishigawara holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from California State University–Long Beach.

General Inquiries: Philip Williams, philip@stroll-garden.com Press Inquiries: Alix Dana, alix@danamannix.com

Image: Lesley Kice Nishigawara, Woven Grid on Woven Grid, 2025. Cotton, pigment, thread, woven, unwoven and rewoven in two layers (66 inches x 66 inches).

Lesley Kice Nishigawara: Pattern Shift

Stroll Garden

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

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

Roberts Projects

Keystone Art Space Open Studios is a unique experience for art lovers and collectors of all levels to engage and connect with emerging and established artists in Los Angeles. Keystone artists welcome visitors into their workspaces to get a behind-the-scenes look into the creative process and purchase works directly from the artist. 

Always vibrant and fun, guests are encouraged to wander the halls, personally interact with artists in their studios, mingle with other art enthusiasts, and enjoy the works skillfully produced every day at this vibrant fine arts complex.

Keystone Art Space has over 50 artist studios featuring painting, illustration, printmaking, jewelry, photography, sculpture and more. Don't miss this opportunity to explore the studios and connect with our talented artists. Mark your calendars and celebrate the arts on November 8!

Keystone Art Space: Fall Open Studios

Keystone Gallery

This November, the Artists Gallery (TAG) solo artists capture the intrigue and essence of human form, nature's fleeting moments, history painting and narratives which promote peace.
 
Rhonda Burton contemplates nature's fleeting moments - bringing botanical forms into a delicate synthesis of printmaking, photography and painting processes; Liliana D'Ambrosio's abstract expressionist paintings are colorful tapestries rooted in narratives that advocate for peace; Mel Smothers paints current history, political narrative, and subjects inherited from our times; Susan Spector  evokes "the mood, the energy and the space the body occupies" in linoleum cuts relief printed on copper and brass; and Elyse Wyman explores the essence of figure through gesture and flowing colored inks. 

_____

"People people everywhere" features TAG Artists working in all mediums with diverse styles and depictions of portraits. 

Image: Mark Indig "Hollywood Boulevard"

PEOPLE PEOPLE EVERYWHERE | Five Solos

The Artists' Gallery (TAG)

In a world awash with unsettling headlines, digital noise, and emotional fatigue, "The Delight Within" offers a vibrant pause, a chance to reconnect with the simple, life-affirming beauty all around us. Opening at Mash Gallery on October 11, 7-10 pm, the exhibition gathers paintings, sculptures, and mixed media works that honor the fleeting, sacred moments of everyday joy. The exhibition ends November 22nd, normal gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday 11-5PM. 

“There’s a world of delight available to us in everyday life,” says Mashian. “When we remember to look for it—really look—it opens the door to something divine. I selected these works because each one moved me. They reminded me that joy, wonder, and play are still very much alive.”

The Delight Within brings together an extraordinary roster of contemporary artists—Justin Price, Marcello Petisci, Will Binder, Elizabeth Older, Tim Fowler, Philip Letsu, Maico Camilo and Haleh Mashian-in a vibrant exploration of joy, identity, history, and the human impulse to find beauty amid complexity.
At its heart, the exhibition asks: What does delight look like when filtered through different lenses of culture, memory, and imagination? The answer unfolds across a dynamic collection of paintings that span from mythology to modern fashion, from classical antiquity to pop culture, from botanical surrealism to everyday domesticity.

Multiplicity of Perspectives
Justin Price’s canvases radiate energy and playful complexity, blending geometric abstraction, fashion, and figuration. His works, whether layering a Rick Owens–clad figure into a whirlwind of color or patchworking faces and forms into fields of texture, balance chaos and control. They remind us that delight often arises from tension—from the push and pull of melancholy and joy, spontaneity and structure.

Marcello Petisci’s bold automotive-inspired paintings inject whimsy and nostalgia into icons of luxury and speed. Ferraris, Aston Martins, and vintage Porsches are reimagined through candy-colored stripes, coastal dreamscapes, and pop-art overlays. By translating power and precision into playful palettes, Marcello reveals delight in reinterpreting symbols of status as symbols of creativity.

Will Binder turns toward antiquity and intimacy, seamlessly blending the realism of Greek marble and bronze statues with contemporary imagination. Works like Aphrodite, Kore, and Theseus revive mythological figures with lifelike precision, while Washing the Dishes grounds his practice in the intimate heroism of everyday life. In pieces like Sleeping Eros and East Meets West, Binder meditates on love, transformation, and the meeting of cultures—finding delight in both timeless mythology and the fleeting tenderness of family moments.

Lisa Beth Older’s dreamlike abstractions open the field of interpretation, where blooms might also be coral reefs, and gardens might also be seascapes. Her compositions invite viewers to project their own experiences, finding delight in discovery and shifting perception.

Tim Fowler’s electrified botanicals (Green Tea, Prince’s Pine) collapse the boundaries between science, nature, and urban surrealism. His neon-saturated flora pulse with energy, suggesting a world where organic life is heightened, exaggerated, and alive with possibility. Delight here is futuristic, psychedelic, and brimming with reimagined vitality.

Philip Letsu and Haleh Mashian expand the dialogue further, each offering four works that root the exhibition in deeply personal and imaginative expression. Letsu’s pieces bring yet another dimension of perspective and narrative.
Haleh Mashian with her layered and whimsical tree series, celebrate nature, texture, and exuberance with sculptural depth and color.

Across these diverse practices, The Delight Within embraces abundance: of color, of texture, of meaning. The works oscillate between order and disorder, realism and abstraction, history and modernity. Yet together they share a common thread—the recognition that delight is not superficial but layered, complex, and resilient.

Mash Gallery presents The Delight Within as both an aesthetic celebration and a philosophical question: where, amid impermanence and complexity, do we find our delight?

FEATURING ARTISTS:
Justin Price 
Marcello Petisci 
Will Binder
Lisa Beth Older 
Tim Fowler 
Philip Letsu 
Maico Camilo
Haleh Mashian

Image: Philip Letsu "Brother's Keeper"

The Delight Within

Mash Gallery

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

Vanessa Conte: RIDE

Babst Gallery 

Creation begins in silence—
a thread pulled taut,
a breath held in the belly.

Love is written in the stars.
Once a year,
Altair meets Vega
on the bridge of magpies.

They make love.
They breathe life
into the womb
woven by constellations.

Somewhere in between,
life begins.

----------------------------

Weaving Wombspace invites audiences into a suspended realm—where longing, memory, and myth drift among the stars. Inspired by the ancient East Asian legend of Altair and Vega, celestial lovers separated by the Milky Way and reunited once a year by a bridge of magpies, this intimate exhibition honors love as ritual, and the maternal thread as a vessel of remembrance and regeneration.

In the vaulted studio space, sculptures hang like stars from the 11-foot ceiling—echoing constellations that once whispered stories of forbidden reunion and breath-held desire. Rooted in ecofeminist care, fiber arts, and diasporic myth, the show reimagines the womb as a cosmological site: a space where threads of body, sky, and spirit are woven together in remembrance.

Through suspended bodily forms, bleeding threads, and mythic breath—each becoming an offering,.. tender, aching, but alive. This is a site of collective yearning, a soft place where life is breathed into. A bridge not only between celestial lovers, but between generations, species, and lost motherlands.

-----------------------------

Featured artists, Kyong Boon Oh, Victoria May, and Snežana Saraswati Petrović.

Opening Offering: Sunday, September 28, 2025 | 4–9pm
a poco art archive, Culver City (RSVP for address): ann@apoco.art

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About the Curator

Ann Shi (she/her) is a Los Angeles–based curator, writer, and founder of a poco art collective—a nomadic curatorial platform rooted in ritual, feminist ecology, and Asian cosmological storytelling. Her practice reimagines the exhibition as a space of mythic care and spiritual repair. Her nomadic practice weaves together diasporic memory, ancient Asian philosophy, and speculative myth into site-responsive curatorial offerings.



Weaving Wombspace: Love Making in the Constellations

a poco art archive

Cheremoya is pleased to present A Broken Net Has Fewer Holes, Motoko Ishibashi’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery. Across six acrylic-on-canvas paintings, the acclaimed London-based Japanese artist metabolizes fanfiction-driven hentai through a pictorial circuitry attuned to systematic distortions within networked cultures. Throughout a richly integrative practice—spanning painting, performance, installation, video, photography, and print—she continually probes the conditions through which gendered self-determination and erotic autonomy are transculturally mediated. In this fluidly recoded field, Ishibashi positions painting as an apertural relay between analytic legibility, quasi-subjective traces of bodily presence, and the hallucinatory contingencies of dispersed authorships. 

Drawing on genealogies that traverse codified identifications of East and West, the exhibition places the erotic subcultural imagination of postwar Japan into dialogue with the mediated self-consciousness of Euro-American appropriation. Ishibashi’s lineage runs through the polymorphous excesses of Toshio Saeki and E’wao Kagoshima, in whose works desire embeds similarly transportive and trancelike architectures, inasmuch as it intersects with practices as varied as Sigmar Polke’s corrosively dialectical Rasterbild paintings, the viscous glamour of Evelyne Axell, Hannah Höch’s Dadaist photomontages, and the meta-reflexive image economies of the Pictures Generation. Perhaps her operating logic aligns most closely with the recursively critical syntax of Julia Wachtel and Michel Majerus, a connection underscored by Ishibashi’s recent performance in a program at Mudam Luxembourg devoted to the late artist. Nevertheless, where Wachtel often iterates a split-screen fracturing of mediated subjectivity and Majerus encapsuled high-velocity branding within painting as modularized spectacle, Ishibashi condenses these antecedents into vertiginously layered compositional and appropriative deliberations too multifactorial to reduce to any preexisting artistic impulses.

If Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s construal of “habitual new media,” as it pertains to technologies so intimate they resolve into habit, finds pictorial analogue in these works, so too does Hito Steyerl’s conception of the “mean image,” one that reproduces the way a thing should look in explicit concord with the prejudices of its day; indeed, while playful and coolly procedural, Ishibashi’s paintings exist within the median bandwidth of cultural expectation, rendering the mechanisms of manga and soft-core kitsch distinctly visible, proving the artist as attentive to her source iconography as to the social order that produces it. Insofar as the latter is seldom solid, she paints the Asian female body as it is seen through.

Shuttling from matte to gloss, molten to frosted, grounded to gossamer, the chromatized lattice within each new painting mimics an oceanic plane of surfable pixels as much as the optical regimes of myriad modernist scaffoldings. Within this matrix, Ishibashi subjects signals of speed-run culture to post-algorithmic sensuality, her figures’ edges gaussed and feathered like milk poured into tea; here, whole genres, whole girls, are ground into grids. In several, each limb and fold is digested into parodic replicas of food and beverage marketing. Just a regular “Wednesday,” per the painting's textual overlay. In the carmine and carnal commercial zone iv (asian, juicy), two young women beam through a field of saturated reds; with smiles lacquered to ahegao-adjacencies, hands gripping towering sandwiches, the image mosaics meat on meat, buns gleaming with the franchisable promise of exoticized fast-casual ecstasy, the painting nearly gagging on its own appeal. And it’s no accident that commercial zone i (chabo) draws its parenthetical title from a Japanese word meaning “bantam rooster," colloquialism for girly, or coquettish; dredging up an image of a handful of cock (in a Farocki-like inset at lower right), Ishibashi centers how appetites for pleasure and predation ferment in the same visual and lexical syntax.

Other works arrive as blurred, breathy, amorphously limbic vessels for seemingly incompatible strata of signification. Complementing what Mark B. N. Hansen registers as the “transductive surfaces” of the screen, the figure in commercial zone v appears as a dissolving gauze of flesh, petals, and pixels pollinating across the image; two tulips, channeling speculative manias known to adhere to painting in itself, obscure her widespread lips—nearly screenic and electric membranes through which erotic dispositions are dually distributed and deferred. A petulant refraction is also at center of commercial zone iii (song and yellow cherry), where the Katakana transliteration of the English words “Yellow Zone” mirrors a cultural double-coding of doujinshi looped through cosmopolitan painterly idioms; whether flagging caution or contagion, the dangers of ethnic segregation or quarantine zoning, this floating signifier is but a small part of a double portrait whose half-smirking subjects wait to be clicked, chosen, consumed. Likewise subject to obsessional superimposition, the seifuku-clad subject of commercial zone ii (wind, girl) reclines under an ornamental overlay of an acanthus-strewn rococo brocade, limned in creamy ochres and pale turquoise outlines, each plane slightly misaligned, anisochronous as its historical cues, as if collaged from multiple mercurial glitches.

In commercial zone vi, Ishibashi brings the series to a zenith of delirious self-awareness—one affectively and critically “beside itself,” to borrow a Kelseyism. Acknowledging the image as no longer sovereign so much as distributed across the infrastructures that condition its presence in this room, the composition literalizes its own stochastic dissemination. A girl in neon yellow and candy pink lunges through a warped grid, just as her image has breached the net of uncounted forgone containments. Above her, the words RCIAL ZONE hover in a sun-bleached gradient. Pocari Sweat in hand, Ishibashi’s world pivots on this note of buoyant dissonance.

Motoko Ishibashi (b. 1987, Nagasaki) lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions include: Cheremoya, Los Angeles; 4649, Tokyo; Deli Gallery, Mexico City; Robert’s, Glasgow; Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles; Ritsuki Fujisaki Gallery, Tokyo; Schwabinggrad, Munich; Quench Gallery, Margate; and V.O Curations, London. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art (Mudam), Luxembourg; Ginny on Frederick, London; General Information, London; Museum of Sex, New York; no gallery, New York; and South Parade, London. She has been the subject of extensive coverage in Purple Magazine, Flash Art, i-D, Dazed, and Yokogao Magazine, among numerous other publications.

Image: Motoko Ishibashi, commercial zone vi, 2025 (detail). Acrylic on canvas, 54 x 54 in / 137.2 x 137.2 cm


Motoko Ishibashi: A Broken Net Has Fewer Holes

Cheremoya

Vulture culture is the art of using found animal materials to create something new and beautiful. Honoring the lives of animals through artistic process is an ancient practice that artists today continue as an offshoot of assemblage art. This exhibition highlights some of the best of vulture culture with both local and national artists.

Memento Memoriam: Vulture Culture Group Exhibition

La Luz De Jesus Gallery

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

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

Hammer Museum

"Splendor" is a lush, illumination focused on the secret life of plants. In a semiotic dance of form and color, these works carefully consider the fragility of life while evoking the humid, earthy scent that questions the very nature of permanence.

Cynci Cutter: SPLENDOR : Fragility and Permanence, botanicals and still life

The LMF Gallery & Darkroom

Sustainers of Life, co-curated by Cecelia Caro and Laurie Steelink, features seven artists exploring intersectional themes through installation, sculpture, photography, illustration, and painting. The exhibition addresses colonialism’s impact, motherhood, and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis while also celebrating individual stories of resilience and survival.

Artists Weshoyot Alvitre, Emily Clarke, Katie Dorame, Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain, Cara Romero, Corey Stein, and Linda Vallejo create works that depict Native and Indigenous women as multidimensional beings. Honoring women as sustainers of cultural knowledge and community healing, this exhibition weaves together personal narratives within broader historical contexts. Through diverse media, the exhibition creates space for both mourning losses and celebrating the ongoing resilience of those who nurture and protect life.

Additional exhibition texts will be written by Dr. Kelly Leah Stewart, Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies.

Image: Katie Dorame, Our Land (detail), 2024. Inkjet print. Illustration from the book Toypurina: Japchavit Leader, Medicine Woman, Tongva Rebel

Support for the exhibitions program is provided by the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, the Perenchio Foundation, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, and the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks.

Accessibility
Please note that portions of Sustainers of Life are in areas of the gallery that are currently only accessible via stairs. A virtual walkthrough of the full exhibition will be available on a tablet at the front of the gallery.

Sustainers of Life

Angels Gate Cultural Center

Evangeline AdaLioryn
Gabriella Aguirre  
Augustine Ceramics 
Mindy Le Brock 
Karla Ekaterine Canseco  
Skye Chamberlain 
Josh Cloud  
Gabriela Forgo  
Anais Franco 
Cali Hetfield 
Jotham Hung  
Maddy Inez 
Christina Joseph 
Lauren Kim   
Jacqi Lee   
Jasmine Little   
Studio Mano 
Kyna Payawal  
Laura Rule 
Noon Tran 
Laura Stinger 
Christian Vargas
Amia Yokoyama  
Jamiee Zhuge 
+More!

3rd Annual Ceramic Pop-Up Shop with Clay CA 

Murmurs

Leo Frontini paints worlds within worlds, landscapes and interiors that dissolve and cohere in a kaleidoscopic logic. In Everlapsing Interlude, scenes murkily slip between endings and beginnings, and the familiar bends into the foreign. With this new body of work, Frontini mines the space between the folkloric, fairytale-esque “ever after” of a resolved story and the “everlasting” of something that refuses to conclude. Rather than a fixed answer or meaning, these works operate as liquid narratives, offering an interlude that interrupts the flow and lapsing
marks of both duration and decay. At a moment when the pace of the world compresses experience into instant outcomes, Frontini’s dream-like kingdoms slow time, foregrounding reflection and the processes that unfold in the unseen intervals between actions.

Born and raised in Cleveland, and earning his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2023, Frontini’s academic background draws on both traditional studio practice and a persistent interest in how space, perspective, and distortion can be reimagined. It is as if he has reverse-engineered his approach to painting, translating an internal logic of space into the tactile language of the canvas. While at Otis, Chris Warner’s drawing classes provided a fundamental grounding in anatomy and gesture, yet also fostered an openness to dismantle those systems. Frontini takes the rules and vocabulary of classical, academic training and reconfigures them into something distinctly his own. The body becomes a site of transmutation, whereby anatomical expectation gives way to new forms and logics, and figures transition between different states, acting as conduits for shifting narratives that unfold across seemingly unending portals.

Frontini draws on the buoyancy of Rococo, the dramatic thrust of Reubens and Breugel, and the liberation of color found in Monet, Vuillard, Bonnard, and the graphic clarity of Byzantine art. Linear perspective is deliberately compressed, pulling the eye toward a close vanishing point. Scale shifts constantly, as monumental bodies appear alongside diminutive figures, creating the
sensation of a spastic zooming in and out at once. It’s as if we’re peering into these paintings through the perspective of a lens articulating its focal lengths.

This contiguous zoom is present in Anamnesis, where a circular aperture divides two realms. In the foreground, two figures recline in bed, their forms softening into pools of water and folds of cloth. A door lies flat on the ground like a stand-in for a grave, leaves and small drifting figures hover at the edge of the scene, and the light is both cool and warm. Beyond this threshold rises a diving tower, its stark geometry and small human silhouettes interrupting the intimacy of the
interior. The effect is jittering and fleeting, the present overwhelmed by the past, the private folding into the public. For Frontini, draft-making is the stage where these narratives take shape.

He avoids starting from a static reference, preferring a generative process that combines automatic drawing, composite photographic fragments, and live modeling. Often using his own body as reference, he poses to find the weight, tilt, and reach that each scene demands. The process is an act of negotiation by which perspectives shift, proportions stretch or compress, and individual elements find their place like pieces of a puzzle. Some compositions resolve in the drawing stage, others resist and demand rethinking until they organically fall into place.

In The Horizon Lines Rise, this puzzle is made monumental, and in turn is emblematic of many of the show’s central themes. The painting reflects the processes and cycles of the day, the transfer from morning to day to night, and the body’s embedded role in these natural rhythms. At the center, a towering, statuesque figure threads a glowing string of orbs through her hands,
while another figure braces and pulls the line taut, as though hoisting the sun into the sky. Nearby, a boy in a jester’s costume rings bells above a reclining figure, who also holds a set of bells in hand. In the background, a small gathering appears to prepare for a ritual, their focus converging around a concentrated light source. Behind it all, a swirling green expanse hovers between ocean and sky, or perhaps some mythological substance binding the two. The scene is at once cosmic and domestic, a creation myth spoken in the language of the morning chore of rising from sleep.

Frontini’s expansive worlds often emerge from the meeting point between personal memory, lived experience, and fiction. Of Bountiful Folly springs from the artist’s childhood experience of raspberry picking in Ohio, yet the scene is infused with the visual flavor of Socialist Realism. Bodies bend, crouch, and nearly contort, baskets and bowls brimming, while a steeply tilted horizon and luminous sky push the scene toward the edge of stability. The balance of thematic
weight and formal precision is supported by Frontini’s technical considerations. His surfaces are primed with multiple layers of gesso, sanded until any trace of canvas texture disappears, a practice maintained from his early years of painting mainly on wood panels. He mixes his own mediums of stand oil, drying linseed oil, mineral spirits, and Venetian medium to control viscosity, luminosity, and drying time. Pigments are selected for their feel as much as their color, and each layer is considered in relation to the one before, unified through couching to keep thesurface alive.

Sculpture and glassworks act as connective tissue for the exhibition, bringing into three dimensions ideas that appear in the paintings. A marble figure, taken from a missing presence in one canvas, steps into the gallery space with a quiet power. Glass raspberries distill the cycles of growth, memory, and continuity that shape the work.

In Everlapsing Interlude, moments before and after action matter as much as the action itself. The works function as a record of the hesitation before a gesture, the breath before speech, or the pause that holds the weight of what comes next. Frontini treats these interludes as fractal spaces where the more one looks, the more there is to find. They are reminders that even in stillness, the world is turning, beginning, and ending all at once.

Simon Brewer


Leo Frontini: Everlapsing Interlude

Make Room

Lucky Cat Gallery is proud to present 'Worlds Collide', an exhibition featuring the collaborative works of 30 pairs of artists, each pair creating one large piece together alongside one smaller work from each individual. Co-curated by Leonard Croskey (LC) and Steven Morrell, this event explores the intersections of creativity and perspective, inviting attendees to engage with the dynamic interplay of artistic expression. 

Worlds Collide

Lucky Cat Labs

Charlie James Gallery is proud to present Elmer Guevara: Yesterday like today / Ayer cómo hoy, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In this new body of work, Guevara explores ideas of intergenerational memory and trauma, reflecting on his own family’s experience of civil war and unrest across time and space. The paintings meditate on the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising, which tore through South Central near where the Guevara family settled after fleeing violence in El Salvador. Time folds in on itself in these paintings, layering the civil war, which predated the artist’s birth, on top of the chaotic experiences of 1992, while also gesturing to the natural disasters and political unrest of the present moment. Despite his heavy subjects, Guevara never loses sight of the personal stories of regular people working to make a life in tumultuous times.

Image: Elmer Guevara, The Get Down, Oil and gel transfer on linen, 95 x 167 x 1.25 inches, 2025. Photo Credits: Yubo Dong

Elmer Guevara: Yesterday like today / Ayer cómo hoy

Charlie James Gallery

Why does anyone paint? Is it to continue the oldest tradition, the one our ancestors began when they marked the walls of caves to prove they were here, to translate experience into form? Maybe we paint to bear witness to the strangeness of being alive, to record this brief embodiment inside a vast and unknowable reality. Do we paint to inspire, or to caution? To translate what cannot be said? Sometimes it feels like an act of devotion, other times like survival. Abstraction and realism both reach toward the same horizon. Both attempt to touch what we cannot name.

Perhaps every story we tell is a gesture toward the undefinable truth of existence. Flesh & Stone lives in that paradox. Flesh dissolves, like liquid. Stone endures. Even when broken, stone remembers its shape, fractured pieces that can be put back together, though after rupture, they are never quite the same.
For Assata Mason, the search for meaning takes place within that paradox, between what dissolves and what endures. In Flesh & Stone, she strips away the outer skin of the self and renders what remains in dialogue with the myth of Medusa. Her paintings unfold like a lucid dream or a mirror seen through fog. Through Greek mythology, she finds a language for the unspeakable, crossing into another world to return with truth.

Medusa’s story, in Mason’s hands, becomes less a cautionary tale than a map of transformation. Once a mortal priestess punished and exiled for her vulnerability, Medusa is reborn here as a symbol of reclamation. Mason paints her not as a monster but as a mirror, a reflection of rage turned inward, a figure who has learned to look directly at what once petrified her. Each painting becomes a conversation between earlier versions of the self: the one who desired, the one who raged, the one who survived. When I spoke with Mason about the work, she described Medusa as a kind of shield. “She’s the version of me that’s lived through pain,” she said, “and now she helps me navigate the world.”

Rendered in oil and acrylic on canvas, these intimate works seem to burn softly from within. Flesh turns to light, and color becomes memory. The surface flickers with pinks that recall innocence, umbers that hint at disillusion, and gold that survives like embers beneath the skin. Mason’s palette is vast, her hand confident yet tender. She draws from the grotesque beauty of Ivan Albright, the chromatic richness of Kehinde Wiley and Arcmanoro Niles, and the sensuous forms of Sasha Gordon, yet her touch remains singular. Parts of the canvas are left bare, as though the body were still recalling what it’s made of, some changing measure of spirit, shadow, and stone, mixed differently each time it remembers.

To look at these paintings is to experience something close to what Carl Jung described when he wrote of facing one’s own image long enough to let the unconscious speak. In Flesh & Stone, mythology becomes that mirror. Each figure is both mythic and deeply personal, a fragment of the artist’s psyche reflected back to her until it begins to heal. Through color and form, she reassembles the broken image, not to return to what once was, but to understand it, to forgive it, and to hold it differently.

In the end, Flesh & Stone is not only about Medusa. It is about the human impulse to transform pain into pattern, to find meaning in the fragments. It reminds us that art, like myth, is a way of remembering who we have been, and who we still have the power to become.

Assata Mason (b. 2000, Chicago) is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has held solo exhibitions in New York and at EXPO Chicago. Flesh & Stone marks her first solo exhibition with Sabbatikal and her debut presentation in Los Angeles.

Flesh & Stone runs from November 9th to December 9th, 2025, at Sabbatikal, 1226 25th Street, Santa Monica, CA. The opening reception will take place on November 9th from 5 to 8 PM and is open to the public. Please RSVP as space is limited. Afterward, visits are available by appointment or during scheduled events. Sabbatikal hosts bi-weekly private gatherings that provide additional opportunities to engage with the exhibition.

We invite you to join us at Sabbatikal and experience this convergence of art, reflection, and community.
…
For inquiries on price and availability please connect with Sacha Cohen either in person or by way of one of the resources provided below:

Tel. +1 (508) 237-9457		              
E-mail. on@sabbatikal.com	                         
Website. www.sabbatikal.com


Assata Mason: Flesh & Stone

Sabbatikal

Drawings by Joshua AM Ross
Furniture Designs by Caleb Engstrom

Wönzimer is pleased to announce Ode to Sunflower, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Joshua AM Ross and Caleb Engstrom.

Ode to Sunflower explores themes of perception, the body, and material intimacy through drawings and furniture. The exhibition features 14 colored pencil drawings by Joshua AM Ross alongside 14 new furniture pieces by Caleb Engstrom.

Joshua AM Ross’s work draws a parallel between the life cycle of the sunflower and the human body. His series of drawings portrays figures in motion, capturing moments of interaction and connection. These works ask questions about seeing, being, and becoming, examining how bodies engage with one another through both touch and non-touch.

Caleb Engstrom presents the newest chapter of his DRY KISS series. The works include aluminum chairs and the debut of a dining table, as well as an upholstered lounge chair in wide-wale corduroy. Guided by the mantra “don’t repeat yourself, keep it simple, stupid,” Engstrom explores how we inhabit objects, and how touch transforms into memory.

Together, Ross and Engstrom’s investigations into the architecture of experience and the intimacy of materials find shared ground, creating a dialogue between their works.

Wonzimer Gallery / 341 S Avenue 17 Los Angeles CA 90031 /wonzimerinfo@gmail.com / www.wonzimer.com


Joshua AM Ross / Caleb Engstrom: Ode To Sunflower

Wonzimer

In wartime, beauty is not frivolous. Claude Monet, as bombs echoed near his garden at Giverny during World War I, continued to paint his water lilies — a radical act of continuity. 

The title of this group exhibition, curated by Shelley Holcomb, echoes “lacrimae rerum” (Latin: “the tears of things”) from Virgil’s Aeneid — a poignant expression of the sorrow embedded in the human experience.

Things Themselves Have Tears brings together works created during and in the aftermath of war: paintings, drawings, sculptures, and textiles — gestures arising from societal fracture. 

Daniel Adolfo’s abstractions translate memory and displacement into emotional landscapes. Salomón Huerta’s surfaces transform the ordinary into charged terrain. Samala Meza reimagines modernist abstraction through feminine experience. Christine Olowonira elevates the ant as a luminous metaphor for feminine strength. Pauline Shaw’s felted textiles weave ancestral patterns and scientific imagery into porous landscapes of remembrance. Lauren Fejarang’s sculptural compositions evoke the persistence of natural forms. 

Things Themselves Have Tears invites viewers to sit with this tension: to make art in wartime is not always an act of hope. Sometimes it is ritual. Sometimes it is refusal. Sometimes it is simply a way to live another day. The psyche craves evidence that not all is lost. Beauty reminds us of our humanity.

Image: Salomón Huerta "Gun with Tangerines," 2025


Things Themselves Have Tears

House of CoHit

Presenting the first solo exhibition by Orfeo Tagiuri in Los Angeles. Focusing on his drawing practice, an extension of the ongoing 'Little Passing Thoughts' series, this new body of large-scale pastel works on paper expands upon the intimate sketches that have cultivated a devoted following and led to a successful publication. The series has resonated with audiences around the world, with some individuals even choosing to tattoo particular thoughts that held personal significance. Originating from the artist’s daily reflections, these compositions of text and line capture moments of perception and introspection, from glimpses of the magical within the everyday to meditations on how connection is formed. Each work functions as a quiet pursuit of joy, charting the shifting terrain of fear and wonder.

“Each of these drawings is fished out from the river of little passing thoughts. I don’t know where they come from but sometimes I take the time to gently scoop them up and set them down. They are a great joy, relief and meditation to make. I hope you can feel that” - Orfeo Tagiuri

The series began on postcard-size papers, allowing the artist to rapidly capture thoughts as they surfaced. The artist shares the series on a dedicated instagram account @orfayo. A selection from the series was published in a book titled Little Passing Thoughts in 2023, and is currently on its third edition due to popular demand. 

Orfeo Tagiuri

Charlotte Call Gallery

Ballroom culture as imagined through 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite paintings is front and center in Jamie Vasta’s fifth exhibition with PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY. It’s with immense pleasure we present House of Roses, a celebration of the shimmering, diverse expressions of queer identity. The composite glitter portraits draw inspiration from the opulence, bearing, and metaphor found in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Rousing in lush outdoor environs and restaged with queer identities in full bloom, Vasta’s ficitve family are gorgeous, tattooed, costumed, commanding and heralded by community—they refuse the lassitudes of erasure and closeted thinking.

As a queer youth growing up in Rochester, New York, Vasta found hope and inspiration in Paris Is Burning—a film that elevates queerness as jubilant, communal, and fierce. Vasta’s imaginary family portraits in House of Roses pay homage to and expand in portraiture the legacy of Black and Latinx communities who built ballroom as a site of chosen family, safety, resilience, and performance, enshrining the courage and intention of their vision as well as the limitless diversity of queer experience.

Known for her contemporary figurative “paintings” made entirely of bombastic bits of glitter and a little glue, Vasta reimagines art history with a queer lens. In her first exhibition Mustn’t in 2007, Vasta reframed Angela Carter’s feminist fairy tales depicting a mystical landscape where women with supernatural powers cavort in deadly play. Vasta’s second exhibition reflects the trophy portrait in glitter, this time with internet composites of adolescent females posed with their kill.  Vasta then presented After Caravaggio – a contemporary reframing of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s historic paintings where she posed her coterie of friends and colleagues with contemporary props, turning gender and context on end. After the Hudson River School positioned Vasta’s glitter on wood landscapes in the traditions of 19th century landscape painting. Now Vasta turns to the sensorial visuals of the Pre-Raphaelites in House of Roses, a celebration of trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid as icons of beauty, sensuality and self-possession as much at home in the natural world as voguing in the ballroom. Flowing drapery in luminous glitter mirror Vasta’s operatic revelry and imposing gravity. A Vision of Fiammetta, after Rossetti, is almost ambrosial, a stately genderfluid portrait, obliquely referencing the original painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1898). Vasta’s Vision of Fiammetta strikes a direct, unyielding gaze, embraced by exquisite red roses in a deep verdant garden.

The melodrama of this series is a siren call to Vasta, whose imagination is fueled by the beguiling amplification glitter delivers. I recommend you don those rose-tinted glasses and plunge into Queer splendor with House of Roses!

"The subjects of my paintings are a diverse group of tattooed, genderfluid individuals who defy traditional notions of beauty and representation. By positioning these figures as the focal point of my reinterpretation of Pre-Raphaelite imagery, I challenge the historical tropes that have often sidelined those who fall outside normative definitions of gender and beauty. The lush floral motifs represent not just the natural world but also the flourishing of diverse identities and experiences. They serve as a reminder of the strength found in community and the importance of nurturing oneself and others".

– Jamie Vasta

Jamie Vasta received her MFA from the California College of Arts in 2007. Her work has been reviewed in Artillery, Art in America, Artforum, art LTD, Modern Art Obsession, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, SF Weekly, and The Bay Guardian. Vasta is included in prestigious public and private collections, including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Arizona State University, and the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento.

_____

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is thrilled to present Our Lady of the Bathhouse, beaded jacquard tapestries by John Paul Morabito. Morabito spent their early formative years in the Bronx, more specifically in the Bronx of the immigrant Italian-American community. This milieu provided an environment resplendent with cultural particularities, memories of religious icons dotting walls and tables, heavy perfumes, scents from candles and cooking wafting through the air, lavish brocade and fringed furniture encased in plastic (stand-ins for liturgical garments), plastic runners shielding rugs from human presence, heavy mahogany-stained wood tables, and, of course, on the personal side, big hair, leopard prints, oversized gold jewelry, painted nails, false eyelashes, cigars, polyester everything, and gesticulating robust conversations. Every ethnicity has its own Bronx, this landscape of experience has been the stuff of film, writing, and art for generations, continuing today. And thus it’s true of Morabito, the perfect petri dish birthed from the very icons that shaped the cultural imagination of their youth. This visual landscape is mirrored in their tapestries and, with a shimmer and a wink, exaggerated through campy drag decadence.

Presenting this extraordinary series offers more than a window into Morabito’s life and studio practice, it reveals an effective propaganda tool of early church and state: tapestries. Begun in 2018 and completed in 2020, Morabito unveils their series of religious tapestries with a subtle but explicit intervention, cloaking 15th- and 16th-century Renaissance paintings of Madonna and Child in flamboyant colors of drag—a Queer allegory turning sacred to Camp. Morabito remediates devotional paintings by artists such as DaVinci and Botticelli with accentuated day-glow colors and a stigmata presentation shimmering with gold beaded fringe. With this joyful celebration of sensorial imaginings, Morabito deftly reframes and reclaims the historic stigmatization and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church through queer transubstantiation. The best blasphemy is a slow burn.

Our Lady of the Bathhouse includes one tapestry from For Félix (love letter), a tribute to Felix Gonzales Torres, who succumbed to AIDS in the 90’s. This sweeping 7’ beaded tapestry will hang in the gallery’s entry alcove. Upon entry, you will metaphorically walk through a veil between sex, life, and death, an exquisite corollary to the homoerotic beaded curtains of González-Torres. For Felix is the outgrowth from the remediated Renaissance tapestries featured in our exhibition, Our Lady of the Bathhouse. While Morabito’s beaded tapestry offers a ravishing tribute to González-Torres and generations lost to AIDS, the work also raises a celebratory fist to subsequent Queer generations. Like González-Torres, Morabito’s tapestries act in defiance of religious, political and institutional policies as the guiding moral orthodoxy. Beading the long strands of thread central to For Felix is analogous to the beaded Rosary, only instead of contrition, Morabito’s act is erotic, lacing their tapestry with power, desire, intimacy, exaltation, and remembrance.

John Paul Morabito was awarded the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship in January 2024. Their current academic appointment is at a public research university where they are Assistant Professor and Area Head of Textiles. From 2013 to 2022 they were on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies. They hold a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent and upcoming press in 2025 include New Art Examiner (June 2025) by Michel Ségard, and in December – W Magazine by Jori Finkel.

In tandem with their studio, John Paul Morabito pursues a practice-led scholarship that positions weaving as a critical platform of cultural produc­tion. Their writing has been published in Art China, The Textile Reader 2 (China Academy of Art), The Journal of Textile Design Research and Prac­tice, Textile: Cloth and Culture. They are the editor of Weaving Beyond the Binary, a special issue of the international peer reviewed journal, Textile: Cloth and Culture. Their work has been included in museum exhibitions, including the Art in Embassies Program, Washington, DC; The Threads We Follow, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Sa­lem, NC; Queer Abstraction, curated by Jared Ledesma, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Over­land Park, KS; Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Arts, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou City, China. Their tapestries are included in public and private collections, with a recent placement at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.

_____

Event: Saturday, November 1 at 2:00 pm
In Conversation: The Weaving of an Icon – Recasting Art History with John Paul Morabito & Jamie Vasta

It’s a pleasure to present our upcoming solo exhibitions of John Paul Morabito—Our Lady of the Bathhouse and Jamie Vasta—House of Roses. The pairing of their one-person exhibitions provides the viewer an opportunity to delve into each artists’ remediation of art history through their respective media as they subvert treasured iconic paintings. Using nontraditional materials (Jamie Vasta, glitter and glue; John Paul Morabito, weaving and beads), they redress classical imagery with the aim of empowering those removed from the annals of art history.

Jamie Vista: House of Roses | John Paul Morabito: Our Lady of the Bathhouse

Patricia Sweetow Gallery

The Journal Gallery is pleased to present Blowing Robots, an exhibition of new sculptures by Marianne Vitale. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in nearly a decade, “Blowing Robots” will be on view from October 30 through December 13, 2025.

Blowing Robots reconstructs the remains of decommissioned locomotives into sculpture.

The project examines the material legacy of industrial production and its collapse. Engines, turbines, and outer steel plating are reconfigured into forms estranged from their original function. Obsolescence, failure, and transformation are foregrounded: once central to productivity and mobility, these machine remnants now sit in stasis, exposed as artifacts of ambition, exhaustion,
and decay.

"Cubes" are made from locomotive body skins — steel sheathing that once wrapped and shielded diesel engines over millions of rail miles. Cut into sections and reassembled, they form hollow blocks, stacked into modular piles, totems and walls, architectural in presence.

"Skull" is a locomotive cylinder head. Detached from its block, its ports and voids suggest a skeletal image — a mechanical part turned exposed cranium. Junk is a pneumatic regulator, once used to safeguard pistons by controlling airflow, now overtly phallic in profile. Both are industrial readymades — unchanged in form, estranged from use. Together, these works situate locomotive remains within two histories: the archive of American rail engineering and the sculptural traditions of raw material, Minimalism, and the readymade.

Gallery Hours  Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 6pm

Marianne Vitale: Blowing Robots 

The Journal Gallery

Saldamando’s intimate portraits distill figures from context, focusing on the body as the site of political struggle and communal joy. By spotlighting figures within her community who embody resistance to the prevailing currents of division and hate, Saldamando offers an alternative path of joyful, beautiful revolution. 

Shizu Saldamando: May the Ground Seethe

Charlie James Gallery (2nd location)

LAUNCH LA is proud to present Matriarchs, a group exhibition featuring six women artists whose practices reflect on the intertwined relationships between nature, culture, and regeneration. Bringing together works by Constanza Bejarano, Sophia Gasparian, Adrienne Kinsella, Rosalyn Myles, Amy Smith,and Melly Trochez, the exhibition explores the creative and philosophical power of the matriarchal lens as a means of renewal and resistance. This exhibition is curated by Steve Galindo.

Through a diverse range of materials—including painting, installation, street art, and assemblage—Matriarchs reimagines creation as an act of reclamation. Each artist engages with earthly elements and lived experience to question systems of commodification, displacement, and environmental imbalance, offering in their place visions of care, equality, and regeneration.


Matriarch's 

LAUNCH LA

Cheung Tsz Hin’s compositions explore the mixed emotions that arise from the artist’s memories and associations with people and events throughout his lifetime. Everyday objects, fleeting scenes and encounters provide spaces to observe the ever-changing landscape of the mind. Through painting, Cheung’s emotional starting points undergo transformations, reconstructions and even inversions until the layers of meaning abstract themselves both conceptually and visually. 

Beginning with the application of thin layers of paint, Cheung carves space in his process for reflection - a necessary element for interpreting his own feelings before transforming them. This strategy was born from the artist’s own personal experiences with life, death, and separation, and became a way to visually process emotion in a way that words alone could not. Through his paintings, these memories undergo a continuous transformation of recontextualization and fragmentation; those that grow unreachable manifest as voids. Visual elements become methods of dialogue between the artist and his psyche. 

Cheung’s intuitive color palettes strike a balance between soft and saturated, with the spectrum of color representing the intensity and certainty of an emotion. In "homes of the void," vibrant, neon yellow light pours like water from a pendant lamp, spilling into the corners of the composition and bursting through objects like overgrowth. Light, subconsciously, becomes a central object in his works. In his daydreams, the way it changes can drastically alter a scene or memory. Illumination becomes not only a device to create depth within the paintings, but a tool to make clearer a passage through the emotions he navigates. The exhibition’s title, "a sunbeam lent to us too briefly," is an ode to the ephemerality of this passage, particularly as it relates to the artist’s own relationships and memory. The line is drawn from "The God of Small Things", a novel which explores the significance of small actions. 

In "veil on juxtaposed scenes," blocks of color and light suggest a forest clearing just beyond the trees, which can only be reached by going “through the woods” - a common metaphor that alludes to the often difficult processing of emotion necessary to move forward. With the background fading to dark, layered greys, we see that this path is not purely linear. What lies on the other side of the light is complex, a void dotted with fragments of color in a horizon that is nuanced. 

When processing memories, we gain new tools and perspectives from which to view them. Similarly, Cheung’s multi-layering process pays homage to an ever-growing repertoire of resources with which to make sense of the world around us, particularly within the present moment. This visualization of memory is a deeply personal, tangible record of those that fade or transform with time. 
 
Cheung Tsz Hin (b.1987, Hong Kong) obtained his Bachelor of Integrated BBA (minor in Fine Arts) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2010, and a Master of Fine Arts in Taiwan in 2014. Cheung has taken part in an artist in residency programme held by Listhus SES in Iceland in 2018. His works have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Iceland, including Phantasmagoria, LBF Contemporary, London (2024); moments in layered motion, Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong (2024); shivering glow, I shiver and glow, Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong (2023); confluence of voice, Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre (2023); spinelessly planting, Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong (2022); the garden I still vaguely remember, Contemporary by Angela Li, Hong Kong (2021); Ólafsfjörður: Phase 2, Sansiao Gallery, Hong Kong (2019); Stundum, Listhus Artspace, Ólafsfjörður, Iceland (2018); No Neverland, Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre, Hong Kong (2017); Art as Social Interaction—Hong Kong/ Taiwan Exchange, The Pier-2 Art Center, B7 Warehouse, Taiwan (2015).

Cheung Tsz Hin: a sunbeam lent to us too briefly

Baert Gallery

mosie romney is an artist who primarily makes paintings. They occasionally work in puppetry, set design, installation, herbalism, and poetry. These methods trace fugitive paths of alterity through trinkets, animals, and ancestral presence. Drawing from both waking life and the subconscious, romney’s world is built by collecting, shuffling, and recomposing imagery from all corners of their experiences.

romney is a detached narrator, creating an evolving cast of characters to explore alternative animacy.

mosie romney: every Spiral has its law

Sebastian Gladstone

Simchowitz is pleased to present Stranger Things, a group exhibition curated by Lisa Pomares at Hill House in Pasadena. Please join us for an open house and reception on Saturday, October 25th, from 11am–4pm – RSVP for address and parking information here: info@simchowitz.com

Zachary Armstrong
Craig Boagey
Peter Burns
Brian Yihurn Byun
Matthew Chambers 
Penny Cortright 
Edward S. Curtis 
Stan Edmondson 
Mark Flood 
Nicolás Guagnini 
Marc Horowitz 
Elizabeth Ibarra
Jasmine Little 
Tyler Macko
Paul McLachlan 
Kevin McNamee-Tweed
Myriam Mechita
Nihura Montiel
Simphiwe Ndzube 
David Noonan 
Danii Pascoe
Diana Quandour
Jon Rafman
Ken Taylor Reynaga
Julio Rizhi
Sterling Ruby
Sky Salanje 
Tschabalala Self
Jeremy Shockley
Ueda Shoji
Aaron Wrinkle
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi


Stranger Things

Simchowitz Hill House

Mirror, Mirror, opening November 14th at Last Projects, is a multimedia exhibition made by L.A. Creeps: a collaboration between artists Liz Walsh and Kim Weller. The two have been working together (as L.A. Creeps) since 2016, and have exhibited at Last Projects, M.A.R.S. and Post.  The group’s initial projects involved installing site specific multimedia works in locations around Los Angeles such as Hollywood Forever Cemetery, parking garages, lawns, and under freeways.  Improvisation and sometimes danger shadowed these actions; the artists quickly set up their work and documented it to evade authority figures.  Random passerbys could experience art that entwined punk, humor, and pop with subtle social and political commentaries. 

Walsch and Weller met in San Francisco at the California College of the Arts, and then reconnected in Los Angeles.  The two enjoyed each other’s work and wanted to collaborate.  Walsch’s inspiration comes from plant life and living in Los Angeles.  She focuses on the relationships between technology, entropy, and the natural world.  Weller, on the other hand, mixes sparkly semi-precious materials with repulsive materials to explore celebrity tabloid culture, camp, and morbidity. 

Mirror, Mirror allows L.A. Creeps the opportunity to display their artwork in a more permanent setting, and it gives them more time to play with the work. It includes art that Weller and Walsh have been working on individually, which mirrors how their collaboration operates. Weller explains, in relation to the site specific work, “Another cool thing about CREEPS is that we never discuss what the other person is making beforehand.  When we arrive at the site, we pull everything out of the car and look at each other’s work and then we install. It’s really exhilarating and one of my favorite parts of this project. That is the surprise for me every time.”  

Mirror, Mirror runs until December 14th at Last Projects.  Please join us for the opening reception on November 14th from 7-11pm, and the closing reception on Sunday December 14th, 6-9pm. 



LA Creeps: Mirror Mirror: Liz Walsh & Kim Weller

LAST Projects Gallery

Xela Institute of Art is proud to present the debut solo museum exhibition by Dominican-American artist Nara Nicole Winston Betancourt. Rooted in ancestral memory, matrilineal craft, and the spiritual resonance of land, Morir Soñando – To Die Dreaming is an intimate exploration of honoring land and familial legacy.

Named after the beloved Dominican beverage, morir soñando translates to “to die dreaming.” Revealed in material poetics, the entrance of the exhibition presents two stained glass works inviting viewers into Winston’s Matriarcha: a lived and inherited matrilineage owing through craft, memory, and sacred indigenous stones. Winston draws directly from her mother’s stained glass artistic practice influencing the glass works on view. They serve not only as material artifacts of love and lineage, but as emotional conduits for Winston’s deeper inquiry into how culture is layered across history, memory, and enduring influence of family on the identity. 

“This project began as an exploration of land as a visual subject, but as I delved deeper, the land became a source or a living archive from which part of our family story emerges and plays out.”

Beyond the stained glass are a series of paintings of where Winston’s mother’s family is from–a rural countryside village called Sabana Larga, located on the outskirts of Baní in the Dominican Republic. In these, Winston animates the soil, stones, and stories of her grandfather’s homeland. But the paintings do not remain rooted there–they migrate to Baní, where her mother is from and was raised, and to the U.S., where her grandmother and much of the family settled beginning in the 1990s. Fragmentation and collage define her approach with visceral motifs expressed in raw flesh and meat–symbols of life and death. The paintings reside hidden, within an openable cupboard installation offering viewers a subversion of colonial traditions of the curiosity cabinet towards the subject of live, intimate inheritance. 

With reverence and resistance, Morir Soñando – To Die Dreaming weaves a fabric of land and heritage, the Caribbean diaspora, and the invisible threads that bind us.

For press inquiries, images, or to schedule a viewing, please contact info@xela.art.  

About the Artist

Nara Nicole Winston Betancourt is a Dominican-American multidisciplinary artist (1998) currently based in Los Angeles. As a child, she was raised in countries throughout Latin America and Asia until 2010, when she returned to her mother’s native country, the Dominican Republic. After graduating from the Chavon School of Design in the Dominican Republic (2018), she transferred to the Netherlands and finished her Bachelors in Fine Arts from The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.

About Xela Institute of Art
Xela Institute of Art is a nonprofit art exhibition space located in Wrigley Village, Long Beach/Los Angeles County, dedicated to supporting the careers of emerging, mid-career, and senior artists.

Our physical address is:
2176 Pacific Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90806

Please book a free public visit through our Calendly to schedule at least one-week in advance. We are open to the public by appointment only to accommodate staffing.

The Xela Institute of Art welcomes all education levels to explore and learn about the exhibitions on view.

Nara Nicole Winston Betancourt: Morir Soñando - To Die Dreaming

Xela Institute of Art

Perrotin Los Angeles is delighted to present a new solo exhibition by Mark Ryden titled 'Eye Am.' Composed of twelve paintings and a selection of drawings, 'Eye Am' debuts a succinct, eccentric series of mise-en-scènes that resist explanation. Ryden’s worlds, perhaps only a rabbit hole away from our own, run on a separate logic. A wide-eyed Bye-lo Baby, a Tibetan snow lion, an Abe Lincoln chaperon, and, more mirage than flesh, a thin Christ pouring wine for a circle of young girls from his own dripping veins. Sentient, wondrous, and nonsensical entities inhabit the works.

One tubular figure, a yam perhaps, lies in bed at night, keeping vigil; the sheets retain a quality of Philippe de Champaigne’s 'Ex-Voto' (1662), a painting of the artist's paralyzed daughter miraculously healed in a convent. With the ornate frame inseparable from the body of the canvas, Ryden’s figure stares with a single eye at the exhibition’s title written above, as if aware of its own summoning. 'Eye Am': the words emboss and disguise a yam in plain sight. In a later work, a yam floats upright over a dreamscape. The sedentary self and, later, the higher self. The yam is a curious medium, echoing the fetuses and internal organs that recur across Ryden’s work. The medium signals fertility, or perhaps commodity—“medium yams, 25 cents a pound”—or even a continued exploration of the partition between body and spirit. Much is formed in darkness, down in a certain country of dreams. In soil. In the womb. In sleep. In scripture, before there was light. Take the pineal gland. Detectable at three weeks, it is the first gland formed in the fetus; later, this tiny pinecone-shaped organ releases melatonin in darkness, telling the body to sleep. It is the only part of the brain without a pair. Descartes called it the “seat of the soul,” and in Yogic teachings it aligns with the Ajna chakra, “the third eye.”

The seat of the soul. The rice-sized force field they can’t breach.

In Ryden’s 177th painting, 'The Sentinel' (2024), a single eye looks out from a mysterious object onto a field now covered with wild flowers. A bee, curious by the hush of her tiny, febrile moan, looks back. The title itself trips. It trips, another small synchronicity: only after naming the work did Ryden learn that 'The Sentinel' (1951) by Arthur C. Clarke was the story that inspired the film '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) and much science fiction since. Where did this watchtower come from, before the lake fell still and the third eye opened on this strange world? Better not answer. Not that I know. Best not spoil the illusion.

—Paige Haran

Well, maybe one spoiler. The caterpillar is Timothy Leary. If you can find him, he’s ready to
ask the riddle of life: “Who are you?”

Doors to Eye Am open on October 30 at 5:00 p.m.

A book signing with Mark Ryden will be held on October 31, from 1:00-3:00 p.m.

Mark Ryden: Eye Am

Perrotin

Night Gallery is thrilled to present In Circles, Still Forward, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles based artist Kayla Witt. In Circles, Still Forward is Witt’s first solo exhibition with the gallery following her inclusion in Superbloom and our 2024 Frieze London presentation.

Witt’s work befriends the unknown and the varied ways in which we approach the mysteries that surround us. Spanning ancient archetypes and new age mysticism, Witt maps our yearning for connectivity, understanding and self actualization.

There is an earnest hunger in Witt’s latest body of work. A hunger for guidance, for belonging, for clarity and healing. Access to immaterial realms offered by posters and billboards highlight the ubiquity of ancient questions, commercialized in tchotchke form. Signage, symbols and talismans overlap and reinforce their common message by illustrating the persistence of invitations to step toward unchartered waters.

Like the snake that eats its tail, Witt employs the circle as a cyclical emblem, perpetually moving through beginnings and endings. The circle is contained and endless, centripetal and holistic, composed of continuous points to make a whole. Geometry carries sacred and utilitarian weight in Witt’s lexicon.

The paintings in the exhibition function as portraiture, depicting states of mind both singular and collective. As Witt reminds us, interiority is a physical and psychological space. In Searching for the Missing Piece, Witt selects items that act as surrogates for lived experience. Our belongings depict our longings, microcosms of desire fixed in objecthood. A model skeleton with arms extended reaches for a cosmic orb on a staircase that leads to nowhere. Facets of life vast enough to spark existential dread are rendered comprehendible in miniaturization. The immensity of the universe affixed in pacified neutrality when found repeated in wallpaper motifs, wind chimes and window appliqués. These shifts in scale enlarge our sense of self, enabling fleeting reprieve from panic stricken insignificance amongst planetary rhythms. An unassuming diptych, the work’s lost piece of the puzzle remains afloat, ever searching for home.

Signifiers of transformation appear throughout In Circles, Still Forward. Heralds of regeneration abound, a new leaf around every corner if you wish it. Tolled numbers offering salvation line each pathway, tempting us with a fresh start. Signs ask viewers to “Follow Signs”, river stones are engraved with reminders to “Adjust”, caterpillars climb blades of grass while chicks break out of their shells.

Psychic storefronts and other constructed vessels for transcendence are juxtaposed with awe inspiring sky scapes, infusing the work with temporality. Seemingly synchronistic encounters with the sublime draw upon Carl Jung’s notion of the numinous. The numinous is experiential, a spiritual presence in space that can free us from isolation, reconnecting us with the world at large.

With lighthearted sincerity In Circles, Still Forward pulls at the strings of what it means to live in both a spiritual and material world. As the Greek goddess Hecate adorns a roadside divorce attorney, the semiotics of landscape reflect our collective psyche.

-Mickey Mackenna Dill

Kayla Witt (b. 1994, Calgary, AB, Canada) has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles, CA; and the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Waterloo, ON. She has participated in group shows at Arsenal Contemporary, New York; albertz benda, Los Angeles, CA; Ketabi Bourdet, Paris, FR; WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong; Critical Distance Centre for Curators, Toronto, ON; among others. Witt has completed a number of residencies including Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA; and Struts Gallery, Sackville, NB. Her work has been featured in HypeArt, Booooooom, Harper’s Magazine, It’s Nice That, Surface Mag, among others. She received her BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto, ON and her MFA from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON. Witt lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Kayla Witt: In Circles, Still Forward

Night Gallery South

AMPHI Gallery is pleased to present "A Boat Made of Dreams", an exhibition curated by Robert Wilhite that brings together the work of three Los Angeles artists: Scott Grieger, Margaret Nielsen, and Axel Wilhite. Their works explore the terrain of the subconscious, that shifting border between dream and waking life. Each artist attempts to capture those fleeting, powerful moments when imagination and emotion overlap, when the familiar becomes strange and the unexpected presents itself on a mystical level.

During the mid-1980s, Scott Grieger, painter, educator, and longtime chairman of Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design, created a series of small, intimate, and mystical portraits of his East Melrose Avenue neighbors: punk musicians, drug addicts, and street people he befriended and gained the trust of. These faces, detached from their bodies and surrounded by fields of color, float like dream fragments. Grieger described them as “the masks that the individuals wore and hid behind,” allowing them to become who they imagined themselves to be. His paintings reveal both the confidence and the insecurity of his young subjects, at once real and unreal, awake and dreaming.

Margaret Nielsen, a Los Angeles painter born in Edmonton, Canada, and trained at the Chouinard Institute in the 1970s, has long blurred the boundaries between fantasy and reality. Exhibiting with the Asher Faure Gallery and later at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Nielsen’s work plays with transformation: waterfalls spill from one picture into another, canoes drift in midair, and a snake hovers above. As Thomas W. Rhoads, executive director of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, observed, “Nielsen employs a variety of iconographic and stylistic means to confound the relationship between image and object, fantasy and reality, nature and culture.” Her paintings, reminiscent of both René Magritte and Albert Bierstadt, open a private realm where elemental forces—fire, water, earth, and air—become sources of mystery, humor, and revelation.

The third artist in "A Boat Made of Dreams" is Axel Wilhite, whose imagery comes directly from his dreams. He wakes in the night to record them—notes, sketches, flashes of color, and shapes—and later transforms these fragments into visual reflections that capture both the story and the mood of the dream. Wilhite approaches his dreams with sincerity and insight, believing that these nocturnal visions hold truths about the psyche that waking logic cannot express. In addition to his studio work, Wilhite is the publisher of the online arts publication 7x7.LA and was curator and co-director of the now-defunct Space Ten Gallery in Hawthorne, California.

Together, Grieger, Nielsen, and Wilhite offer entry into parallel realms, spaces where the conscious and unconscious meet. "A Boat Made of Dreams" invites viewers to move through these interior landscapes, to encounter the masks, symbols, and sensations that live just beneath the surface of thought.

Image: Axel Wilhite, “Ayahuasca: The first night, nothing. The second night, I am ushered into some kind of procession, a parade...”, 2021, Graphite on watercolor paper.

A Boat Made of Dreams

AMPHI gallery

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present Being Home, an exhibition of new paintings by Robert Gunderman. 

With this exhibition, Gunderman explores the deep, often unseen mechanisms of the natural world through large - scale, vividly hued canvases that transform overlooked moments - an owl’s eye, a sprouting seed, a horizon line - into profound meditations on life, time, and transformation. Using rich, contrasting colors and recurring circular motifs, Gunderman dissolves traditional distinctions between landscape, symbol, and diagram, inviting viewers into an immersive visual language where boundaries are always in flux.

Gunderman’s approach to painting is one of close observation and poetic inquiry. Drawing from his encounters with the land—whether a bear crossing his property or the barely perceptible shift of a horizon - he avoids the grand or dramatic in favor of the nascent and emergent. In works like Seed (2025), the entire life cycle is compressed into a single form, capturing a moment of becoming that is both microscopic and immense. Each piece begins with a word, not as a title but as a generative root, unfolding into visual meditations on growth, perception, and the quiet complexity of ecological life. The color fields bleed into one another - yellows into blues and greys, purples into oranges, creams, and blacks - echoing the slow, organic spread of life across a landscape.

Hovering between abstraction and representation, Gunderman’s paintings evoke the tone of scientific diagrams or symbolic maps rather than literal depictions. Circular forms recur as stand-ins for planets, particles, and units of time. In Owl (2025), the bird's oversized yellow eye dominates the composition, its pupil, drawn from a background wash of midnight blue, reflects an uncanny convergence of inner vision and cosmic awareness. While in Sprout (2025), two overlapping circles swirl with jewel tones, partially framed by red lines that act as both horizon and threshold. The work evokes the origin point of life, with echoes of the same colors appearing both above and below the horizon - suggesting a mirrored continuity between earth and sky, inner and outer, seed and bloom. 

Within Being Home, Gunderman continues his long-standing engagement with land, labor, and the systems that bind them. The exhibition’s title speaks to this rootedness - not in a fixed sense of place, but in an ongoing dialogue between environment and imagination. Through rich color palettes and quietly transformative imagery, the works offer a meditation on how life begins, how it evolves, and how attention to the smallest details can reveal the most profound truths. In doing so, Gunderman extends an invitation: to see more deeply, to feel more fully, and to dwell - however briefly - in moments of wonder.

This is Robert Gunderman's second solo exhibition at Wilding Cran Gallery.

Robert Gunderman (USA, b. 1963) Recent solo exhibitions include Place Like You, Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Quiet Beliefs, Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; This End, AF Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Mollusk Half-Sisters, Rude Drawing, Los Angeles, CA, and Never Let Us Go, Desert Center, Los Angeles, CA. Group exhibitions include Surface Streets, curated by Russel Ferguson, Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Ripe, Harper’s, Los Angeles, 2 Person Show with Tracy Grayson, BravinLee Programs, New York, NY; LA ON FIRE curated by Michael Slenske, Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, and Between Worlds, Edward Cella, Los Angeles, CA. In 1992, he co-founded FOOD HOUSE, an alternative art space in Santa Monica, followed by ACME, an influential artist-run space that opened in 1994. Robert Gunderman lives and works near Fillmore, CA, in the Santa Clara River Valley just north of Los Angeles.



Robert Gunderman: Being Home

Wilding Cran Gallery

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present 'Who’s Laughing Now?', a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Michela Griffo. 

A prominent activist in the LGBT civil rights movement since the 1960s, Griffo has dedicated her life and artmaking to the cause of incisive protest and sociopolitical critique. In 'Who’s Laughing Now?', the artist presents a series of allegories that take the form of diptychs. Pairing vivid oil paintings of iconic Disney characters with delicately rendered graphite drawings of human experiences—then linking the two with comic strip-style commentary that destabilizes ideas of both—Griffo advocates for the reconsideration of pervasive cultural standards around gay rights, women’s rights, fair wages, and much more.

___

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present 'Friends, Acquaintances, and Idols', a solo exhibition by the late Los Angeles-based artist Kenneth Kendall.

Delectably camp, Kendall’s practice presciently embraced both post-modernism’s penchant for vernacular pastiche and pop art’s analysis of fame before either concept entered the mainstream. Employing the tradition of enamel portrait miniatures—popularized in 1630s Europe—to depict his many friends, acquaintances, and idols such as Vivian Zarvis and Mae West, Kendall’s work was unapologetically exuberant. During the 1950s and 60s, when the Ferus Gallery’s hypermasculinity dominated the Los Angeles art world, Kendall operated as an insider-outsider—a covertly queer artist that preferred a dazzling milieu of Hollywood starlets.

Excerpts of exhibition texts by Christie Hayden

Michela Griffo: Who's Laughing Now? | Kenneth Kendall: Friends, Acquaintances, and Idols

Moskowitz Bayse

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to present Stills, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Yunhee Min, on view from November 1st through December 20th, 2025.

Yunhee Min’s new suite of small-scale paintings reflects her ongoing interest in optical phenomena, transient light, and in capturing a sense of emergence. Each piece meditates on the passage of time, translating atmospheric impressions, sounds, memories, and observations into heavily saturated, tonal and near-translucent fields of color. Through Min’s deft grasp of the interactions between color, form, and opacity, the compositions seem to vibrate and flicker as layers of paint meander in and out of visibility. 

Min likens this work both to film stills and to still life painting. These two genres possess the seemingly contradictory qualities of being static while alluding to what may have preceded and what may come. She describes a process that involves “prolonged looking, quick glances…sounds near and distant, ambulating, floating, and remembering”, expressed through palimpsests of color and gesture that alternatingly emerge and disappear.

Min continues an exploration of the material possibilities of mark-making, employing a variety of different applications: wet and dry brush strokes, pours, drips, and rolls. The amalgamation of these approaches creates complex relationships between figure and ground, where solids dissolve into formlessness and shapes materialize out of pure expanses. 

On this new body of work Min writes: 

Like still images from a film, these paintings hold time with numerous segments and events on the surface of the canvas. When I think about still life painting, I imagine stillness in time, presence, and passing of light. 

Always present in everything visible, color is living and moving. 

Yunhee Min (b. Seoul, Korea) is a Los Angeles-based artist who holds a BFA from Art Center College of Design and an MA in Design Studies from Harvard University. Recent site-specific installations and architectural interventions include: Hammer Projects: Yunhee Min, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Yunhee Min & Peter Tolkin: Red Carpet in C, University of California, Riverside, Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts, Riverside, CA; Equitable Vitrines, Equitable Life Building, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles.

Min has had solo exhibitions at LAXART, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; ArtPace, San Antonio, TX; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and Exercise, Vancouver, BC. Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum at UCLA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). In 2022 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Upcoming projects include a permanent mosaic installation in the new Westwood/UCLA Los Angeles Metro station (scheduled to open 2028); as well as a site-specific installation for the opening of the new Memphis Art Museum (scheduled to open 2026). 

Min has shown with Vielmetter Los Angeles since 2003 and is also represented by Miles McEnery Gallery, New York.

The gallery is located at 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, south of the 10 freeway. Parking is available in the north and south parking lots 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: Yunhee Min, “Still (#18),” 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20" [HxW], Photo credit: Brica Wilcox

Yunhee Min: Stills

Vielmetter Los Angeles

KP PROJECTS is pleased to announce a new exhibition of charcoal drawings by Eric Nash.

West of Heaven, is a series of photorealistic charcoals that capture the subtle, surreal, and subliminal allure of California culture. Nash’s signature visual vocabulary references the atmosphere and minimalism of the Light and Space Movement (originating in Southern California in the 1960’s), crafting an enticing drama that is born from the contrast between light and dark, the divine and the material. 

“West of the wealth, the action, prestige and glamour are lonely places that are overlooked or ignored. No roads paved in gold here but rather pawn shops that buy gold. It’s quietly beautiful. Simple desires, yearning, lust, and dreams transcend harsh realities. Small moments of truth are documented. This is where I live and what I draw in charcoal, the most elemental, ancient and dramatic of mediums. Here is the contrast of life and light in the shadows West of Heaven.” – Eric Nash
Nash’s creative process is ritualistic, a sacramental quality where the act of observing is felt. Each image originates as a photograph shot by the artist, which is then meticulously drawn in charcoal on thick, smooth, 33 x 44 inch sheets 120lb Stonehenge paper. Here, the mundane is celebrated and imbued with reverence.

“At a very young age, learned to see beauty and soul in the mundane. Years later my journey drew me to the California desert where I now live - a vast expanse of desire and dreams. I feel at home. These drawings are visual poems to these feelings and places, the reason I am an artist.” – Eric Nash

West of Heaven will be on view from November 22nd – December 27, 2025. Gallery Hours are Tuesday - Saturday, 12pm - 6pm.

Eric Nash: West of Heaven

KP Projects

Join us for an artist talk with Libertad Alcántara, hosted by Shana Nys Dambrot, as they discuss her practice, inspiration, and her first US exhibition at DON'T LOOK Projects. The event will be followed by the Opening Reception of Ahí viene el Coco—an exhibition that invokes the metaphorical boogeyman, to critically examine the systemic violence of contemporary global polarization and the resulting monocultural, beige aesthetic of manufactured consensus. The exhibition asserts that the current retreat from inclusivity to apartheid is a psychological defense mechanism against the visible failure of prevailing economic models, which has led to the shattering of the meritocratic illusion.

Artist Talk: Libertad Alcántara with Shana Nys Dambrot

DON’T LOOK Projects

Opening Reception 5 pm - 7 pm

DON’T LOOK Projects is pleased to present Ahí viene el Coco—an exhibition that invokes the metaphorical boogeyman, to critically examine the systemic violence of contemporary global polarization and the resulting monocultural, beige aesthetic of manufactured consensus. The exhibition asserts that the current retreat from inclusivity to apartheid is a psychological defense mechanism against the visible failure of prevailing economic models, which has led to the shattering of the meritocratic illusion.

Libertad Alcántara: Ahí viene el Coco / Here Comes the Boogeyman

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

Venice Public Art Walls, Venice, CA
Free admission

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

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

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

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

Attendees must bring their own smartphone or tablet.

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

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

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


AR OPEN LA

AR Open @ Venice Public Art Walls

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

AR OPEN Augmented Reality Exhibition

de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Advertisements and Other Pictures, a solo exhibition by London-based Murray Clarke, his first with the gallery. The exhibition brings together eight oil on canvas paintings that, on surface level, appear to emulate the look, thinking, and lifestyle of prep schools and high society. A complex and self-reflexive act, the paintings interrogate the systems that produce aesthetics, capital, and identity and the ways in which taste, beauty, and class are constructed, circulated, and consumed.

The gestural simplicity of his portraits, taken as a whole, makes up quite a complex of civil manners. In works such as Evening Red (2024), and Beach (2024), the textures of wool, cotton, and synthetic blends are immediate expressions of hierarchy and a repetitive system of visibility about whose bodies and desires are made visible, commodified, and erased. This reorients the exhibition as a whole to visual persuasion while addressing fantasies of selfhood.
In this way, Clarke’s paintings echo and embrace the circulatory logic of the market itself: images made to move endlessly, stripped of origin yet loaded with beautiful history. Made in a medium that defies the digital, and rooted in painstaking observation and slow accumulation, stands as a paradox for the speed and disposability of visual culture. The result is a playful intermingling revealing how the visual economies of the twentieth century still reverberate into the uncertain futures of the twenty-first.

Murray Clarke (b. 1992, London) lives and works in London, England. Clarke graduated from Kingston School of Art in 2019 with an MA in Fine Art. His work explores the dichotomy of emotions surrounding the mass marketing and consumption of fabrics and garments. Through his work, Clarke dissects and questions our attitudes and feelings towards such luxury goods, creating paintings that are at once warm and welcoming yet deceptively cold and superficial. Clarke has had solo exhibitions at Nahmad Projects, London, UK; WOAW Gallery, Singapore; Arden + White, New Cannan, CT; Moosey Gallery, Norwich, UK. Group shows include those at de boer, Los Angeles; MXM Galeria, Madrid, Spain; and Volery Gallery, Dubai.

Murray Clarke: Advertisements and Other Pictures

De Boer Gallery

Zachary Benson Friedberg hits the walls of La Luz de Jesus Gallery again this winter for the newest showcase of paintings titled "Yesterday's Tomorrow". Friedberg acknowledges the nostalgia for the disappearing architecture of Googie style diners across Southern California by mixing them with sci-fiction.

Zachary Benson Friedberg: Yesterday's Tomorrow

7811 Gallery presents: This fall, acclaimed neo-expressionist painter Steven Terrell Cogle brings his dynamic solo exhibition Pop Culture Junkie: A Journey into Black Television, Cinema, and Experiences, 1974–1995 to Gallery 7811 in Los Angeles. This collection is a love letter to a cultural era that shaped Black identity, reinterpreted through the artist’s deeply personal lens and layered, expressive style.

Image: Steven Coogle Greased Lightning (Wendell’s Car), 2022, acrylic and oil stick on stretched canvas, 54” x 60 “ x 1.5. Courtesy of 7811 Gallery

Steven Terrell Cogle: POP CULTURE JUNKIE: A JOURNEY INTO BLACK TELEVISION, CINEMA, AND EXPERIENCES, 1975–1995

7811 Gallery

Michael Kohn Gallery is extremely proud to announce Dorian’s Gardens, an exhibition by New York-based artist Nir Hod. Dorian’s Gardens opens October 11, 2025, and will be on view through January 2026.

This new body of work expands upon Hod’s chrome and oil painting series, 100 Years is Not Enough, an ongoing study of various bodies of water rendered by Hod’s loose yet seductive impressionistic style and iconic chroming, mirror-like technique.

In addition to the new group of lustrous, pastoral landscapes, this exhibition will include intimate works on paper that appear as details of the much larger canvases, a rare realist portrait, a bronze figurative sculpture, and finally the artist’s self-portrait– a nod to both Édouard Manet and the mirror of the exhibition– Dorian Gray.
Most recently, Hod’s work debuted at the House of Dior’s newest flagship store on 57th St. in Manhattan, designed by architect Peter Marino.

In his nearly 30-year career, Hod has consistently delved into the duality of human nature as subject matter for his paintings. The dichotomous themes of beauty and death, flourish and decay, vanity, perfection, destruction, and the overall fragility of life permeate from his earliest bodies of work, such as the Genius and Mother portraits, to his most recent, reflective minimal canvases of the series 100 Years is Not Enough.

100 Years…, Hod’s recent chrome painting series, consists of gestural interpretations of flora floating over bodies of water, akin to a minimalist interpretation of Monet’s Waterlilies. These partially idealized works are not exact renditions of nature but impressions that hover between natural and representational beauty. Hod’s scattered mark-making is complemented by the illusion of shimmering water achieved by multiple applications of reflective metallic chrome. Each composition appears to create a singular ecosystem, a simulacrum of the natural world. Upon close inspection, the spectator finds their own likeness reflected in a painterly surface reminiscent of reality, a visual metaphor of vanity, illusion, and the human condition.

Appropriately titled after Oscar Wilde’s seminal novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Hod pays homage to the iconic character through the highly reflective chromed surface that allows the viewers to consider themselves within the background of Hod’s painting. The spectator is simultaneously a passive onlooker and an active participant in the physical space of the canvas. Nir Hod’s work is visually exquisite but, like Dorian Gray’s portrait, Hod’s painting ultimately betrays its true nature through rough gestures, ghostly traces of color, and a myriad of painterly “mistakes” that proudly reveal beauty and decay as one.

Equally present in Dorian’s Gardens is Hod’s affinity for art history. A palatial ambiance that recalls Old Masters is achieved through color palettes of deep turquoises, jewel- toned reds, and purples melded with black and brown tones. The relaxed brushwork of Life as a Memory, a portrait of a couple taking a stroll, recalls Claude Monet’s expressions. While Hod’s newest sculpture, Lonely girl with tiger, evocates allegoric bronzes from the Renaissance.
Dorian’s Gardens opens October 4, 2025, and will be on view through January 2026. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nir Hod (b. 1970, Tel Aviv, Israel) lives and works in New York. He earned his BFA at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and attended the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City in 1991. Hod has had several solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad with his first show in 1996 at Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. He has had solo exhibitions at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; The Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan, Israel; Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, NY; Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York, NY; Gavlak Gallery in Palm Beach, FL; and Michael Fuchs Gallery, Berlin, Germany, among others. His work has been in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally from New York to London, Berlin, Vienna, and Israel. These include the Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum, Berlin, Germany; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, NY; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Vienna Jewish Museum, Vienna, Austria; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Yerba Buena Center for the Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Modern Art, Oostende, Belgium; The Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY; Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY; among others.

ABOUT THE GALLERY
Since its establishment in 1985 by Michael Kohn, Kohn Gallery has presented historically significant exhibitions in Los Angeles alongside exciting contemporary artists, creating meaningful contexts to establish links to a greater art historical continuum. Kohn Gallery represents important West Coast artists with long careers and rich histories such as Joe Goode, Lita Albuquerque, and Sharon Ellis, as well as the Estates of Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, John Altoon and Martha Alf. Kohn Gallery boasts an expanding roster of emerging and mid-career artists including William Brickel, Alicia Adamerovich, Li Hei Di, Chiffon Thomas, Heidi Hahn, Jinbin Chen, Nir Hod, Siji Krishnan, Sophia Narrett, Shiwen Wang, Rosa Loy, and Mark Innerst. Visit kohngallery.com for the latest information on upcoming exhibitions.

Instagram: @KOHNGallery, @nirhod, #NirHod, #michaelkohngallery Press Contact: Elizabeth McNamara, emcnamara@fitzandco.com Gallery Contact: Karys Judd, karys@kohngallery.com

Image: Nir Hod, 100 Years is Not Enough, 2025, oil, chrome and patina on canvas, 72 x 90 inches

Nir Hod: Dorian’s Gardens

Kohn Gallery

Across I Know Her, Sarah Ann Weber locates apertures where the maternal, environmental, and imaginative converge, accumulating dualities that form an ecology of unruliness and resilience. The exhibition’s title gestures to multiple recognitions—the child, the mother, the landscape, the artist herself—each glimpsed, inhabiting a space of flux and perpetual renewal.

_____

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce After Each Night We Are Emptier, including works by: Eve Biddle, Veronica Fernandez, Simon Haas, Hayv Kahraman, Ragen Moss, Veronika Pausova, Mary Ann Unger. 

Sarah Ann Weber: I Know Her | Group Show: After Each Night We Are Emptier

Anat Ebgi | Mid-Wilshire

Musichead Gallery is proud to present Jersey Poets, a group exhibition of photographs celebrating Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith, two visionary artists who emerged from New Jersey to redefine the relationship between music, language, and image.

Featuring work by Adrian Boot, Allan Tannenbaum, Bob Gruen, Danny Clinch, David Gahr, David Rose, Frank Stefanko, Lynn Goldsmith, Neil Zlozower, Norman Seeff, Steve Rapport, and Terry O’Neill, the exhibition brings together portraits and performance photographs that explore how both artists transformed rock and roll into a form of storytelling, spiritual reflection, and personal expression.
While Springsteen and Smith share geographic and generational roots, their creative trajectories reveal distinct approaches to truth and transcendence. Springsteen’s narratives of working-class perseverance echo the rhythms of small-town America, while Smith’s poetic and avant-garde sensibility gave voice to the intellectual and emotional edges of punk. On view are photographs that trace their parallel journeys, capturing moments of performance, collaboration, and persona that illuminate the dynamic balance between realism and symbolism, individuality and community, sound and vision.

The exhibition coincides with the release of Bruce Springsteen’s biopic Deliver Us From Nowhere, the publication of Patti Smith’s memoir Bread of Angels, and her performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Both artists also mark the 50th anniversaries of their debut albums Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and Horses. Through these photographs, Jersey Poets invites viewers to reflect on how two singular voices continue to influence the cultural and visual language of modern music.

We invite you to experience Jersey Poets, where music and photography meet to tell the stories of Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith, their roots, their visions, and their enduring impact on culture.

Jersey Poets: Bruce Springsteen & Patti Smith
On View: November 14, 2024 to January 10, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, November 14, 2025 | 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Free with RSVP: https://opening-reception-jersey-poets.eventbrite.com

Metered parking is available on Sunset Boulevard. Ridesharing is encouraged due to limited space. The gallery entrance is wheelchair accessible. For accessibility accommodations, please contact Musichead Gallery in advance.

For additional information, please contact Musichead Gallery at (323) 876-0042 or info@musichead.com, or visit Musichead.com.

Jersey Poets: Bruce Springsteen & Patti Smith

Musichead Gallery

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Absinthe, Smoke, Sugar, Choice, an exhibition by Sabrina Gschwandtner. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from November 1, 2025 through January 10th, 2026, with an opening reception on November 1, from 4-6pm.

After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Gschwandtner looked back to the “pre-Roe” era, drawing on early film and familial memory to explore how women have taken control of their bodies and lives. Working with black-and-white 35mm film, etching ink on film, thread, and video, she presents twelve film quilts and a single-channel video that expand the concept of “filmic suture” into a three-dimensional, materially embodied cinematic form. Through her research-based and materially grounded practice, the artist stitches together a lineage of bodily autonomy and resistance.

Two early films directed by women anchor the exhibition. The first, Alice Guy-Blaché’s 1906 film Madame’s Cravings, portrays a pregnant protagonist who gleefully disrupts social norms — stealing absinthe, tobacco, and candy while her partner tends to their child. Her untamed desires and public act of childbirth, captured more than a century ago, subvert prescribed ideals of maternal propriety and bodily control. Gschwandtner heightens this subversion by hand-painting passages of the film — green for absinthe, and yellow, red, and blue for the lollipop — transforming the protagonist’s cravings into vivid, material expressions of desire and agency. The second film, a 1931 documentary by Marvin Breckinridge, chronicles the Frontier Nursing Service, which delivered maternal care by horseback in rural Appalachia and dramatically reduced maternal and infant mortality rates. Together, these films challenge the omission of reproductive life on screen. After the implementation of the 1934 Hays Code, depictions of pregnancy and childbirth disappeared from American cinema for decades. By revisiting works made before this period, Gschwandtner recovers a visual history that resists the cultural erasure of reproductive experience.

This exhibition also debuts a new “video quilt,” a hybrid form the artist has developed over the last eight years. Resembling a patchwork quilt, the work interlaces archival film, handwritten text, and a recorded interview with the artist’s mother, who recounts obtaining an illegal abortion in the years before Roe v. Wade. The video models forms of agency, showing women asserting control over their bodies and narratives, even under restrictive and oppressive conditions.

Gschwandtner has exhibited internationally, at the Victoria & Albert Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, among many others. Her 8-channel video Later in Life, commissioned by the Skirball Cultural Center, is currently on view at the museum. Her work is held in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the RISD Museum, and the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, among other public and private collections worldwide. She earned her BA from Brown University and her MFA from Bard College.

Sabrina Gschwandtner: Absinthe, Smoke, Sugar, Choice

Shoshana Wayne Gallery

In our gallery in East Hollywood, Track 16 presents a new body of work by Los Angeles-based artist Camilla Taylor. In the exhibition titled Unkindness, Taylor explores both the vacuum of loss and the emergence into a new world and new self – radically unlike the past. Multiple bronze works – representations of the body – suggest an emptiness, a blackout. Cast from hand-sculpted clay and wax, they function as preservations of something made then lost. Stray, a larger than life human mandible, uncannily imbues itself with uncertainty and, separated from its body, threatens like an omen. Stomach, a bronze lidded container, holds inside a scented wax that visitors may sample. Taylor designed the scent to mimic how people have described the smell of scientific clean rooms, where hallucinations are induced by the brain in response to the lack of olfactory stimulus. Adding a waterfall inside a bronze torso, a square bowl with the imprint of a breast, a glass ear, and a roped glass foot amplifies the richly enigmatic vocabulary of the body that has developed.

Taylor began 2025 with a residency at the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology in Oregon. Early morning, January 7, 2025, Taylor packed their car to return home. After more than a dozen hours on the road, their neighborhood came into sight along with a menacing glow behind it. Within moments of arriving home, Taylor, their partner, and four cats were fighting catastrophic winds to flee the approaching wildfire. This collection of bronze, copper, glass, and fabric sculptures was created in the aftermath of the Eaton Fire that destroyed Taylor’s home and studio in Altadena. Working out of borrowed studios, they salvaged, recreated, and conceived anew works for this exhibition, which had been planned since before the devastating fire. 

Recent residencies for Taylor had allowed deeper examination of the natural world. During a 2024 residency on Vashon Island in the Pacific Northwest, Taylor sculpted and cast bronze blackberry branches. Sanctuary – the only artwork in the current exhibition that survived and were blackened by the flames – are stacked into a triangular-shaped structure. In pagan witchcraft this is a symbol for fire or water, depending on the triangle’s orientation. Introduced to the Northwest in the 19th century, the thriving Himalayan blackberry is a bane and a bonus. The berries are everywhere to eat, but have effectively crowded out native plants and upset the balance of the ecosystem. That push-pull is reminiscent of fire in California, where, historically, it was a natural cycle for a healthy system. Contemporary suppression protects communities near the forests, but the build-up of fuel creates conditions for overwhelming destruction. 

While at the Sitka Artist Residency, they began a piece about the transformative consuming power of destructive rage, Harpy. A breastplate fashioned from etched copper feathers. Simultaneously to making this piece about rage, the deeply affecting experience of rescuing a wild bird, a Pacific loon, whose gentleness is evident in the delicate rendition of the feathers.

Describing themselves as having a “toxic Protestant work ethic,” Taylor spent the year in a string of donated studios forming this exhibition that addresses the emotions of loss, vulnerability, and the inevitability of change. What are we left with when our home, work, and surroundings are destroyed but soft human forms – which Taylor has made hard and frozen as objects. They lay bare the struggles of the human experience – using direct haunting language that questions mortality at the mercy of destructive forces, manmade and natural.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Camilla Taylor is recognized for their monochromatic and intensely introspective works on paper and sculpture, which utilize figurative and architectural forms. Taylor’s artworks reflect the viewer’s internal lives as well as collective issues we experience as a society.
An accomplished artist exhibiting in traditional gallery spaces, they also create installations in intimate and unusual locations, such as site-specific works in a swimming pool, desert garden, and other locations. They are represented by Track 16 in Los Angeles and Kanda & Oliveira in Tokyo.

Raised in Provo, Utah, Taylor attended the University of Utah and received a BFA in 2006, and an MFA from California State University at Long Beach in 2011. 

Taylor lives in Los Angeles, CA, with their partner and 4 cats, and teaches at Occidental College and UCLA.

Camilla Taylor: Unkindness

Track 16 | East Hollywood

BEYOND THE STREETS presents SHEPARD FAIREY: OUT OF PRINT, a landmark exhibition celebrating the rebellious, democratic force of ink and paper. Featuring over 400 screen prints and new hybrid works, the show traces Fairey’s evolution across three decades—from guerrilla interventions to globally recognized icons—spotlighting his lifelong dialogue with printmaking and the power of mass communication.

Through posters, album art, stencils, and layered editions, OUT OF PRINT highlights how Fairey harnesses the language of advertising and propaganda to provoke thought and inspire action. The exhibition captures the tactile immediacy of print in an increasingly digital world—affirming that “printing still matters.”

Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–6 PM
More Information: https://beyondthestreets.com/blogs/articles/beyond-the-streets-presents-shepard-fairey-out-of-print 


SHEPARD FAIREY: OUT OF PRINT

Beyond The Streets

Fulcrum Arts is pleased to present, Sam Shoemaker: Mushroom Boat, featuring works developed around the artist’s August 2025 crossing of the Catalina Channel in a kayak made of mushroom mycelium.  
 
Alongside the mushroom boat itself, the exhibition features large-scale projections, time-lapse videos, and soundscapes that immerse visitors in Shoemaker’s journey over 26 nautical miles of open ocean, where he passed through turbulent water, encountered wildlife, crossed a commercial shipping lane, and battled headwind.  
 
Visitors will also witness the artist’s process of constructing the mushroom boat.   
 
“Shoemaker’s work explores the potential of sustainable materials in unprecedented ways,” remarks Patrick J. Reed, curator at Fulcrum Arts. “His crossing of the Catalina Channel in a boat made of mushroom mycelium prompts us to recognize that innovative creative practices can guide our efforts toward ecologically responsible modes of inventing, exploring, and living our lives.”  
  
Additionally, Shoemaker is releasing an open-source compendium detailing his mycological research and methodologies. A hard copy will be exhibited and a digital version will be freely accessible. Shoemaker releases this document with the hope that others will carry his research forward, using fungi—an organic, versatile, and renewable resource—to pursue responsible technical and creative innovations.    
  
Mushroom Boat marks the first major exhibition held at Fulcrum Arts’ new headquarters in Pasadena, California.           

About the artist
Sam Shoemaker is a Los Angeles-based sculpture artist whose work is a collaboration between himself and species of mushrooms. Shoemaker’s work has been shown at Craft Contemporary, Armory Center for the Arts, Vielmetter, David Horvitz’s Garden, Make Room, Emma Gray HQ, and OCHI, among others. He was also included in World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project at the California African American Museum, an official exhibition of PST ART: Art & Science Collide presented by Getty. Shoemaker has been featured in many publications and news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, Galerie Magazine, W Magazine, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and Graphite. He lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by OCHI.

www.samkshoemaker.com

Sam Shoemaker: Mushroom Boat is made possible with the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Pasadena Art Alliance, the Perenchio Foundation, and the Pasadena Arts and Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division.

Sam Shoemaker: Mushroom Boat

Fulcrum Arts

Jeffrey Deitch is pleased to announce Still Life, a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Kohshin Finley. Marking his most ambitious presentation to date, the exhibition brings together monumental oil portraits integrated with ceramic vessels, seamlessly merging painting, poetry, sculpture, and design into an immersive installation rooted in memory, material, and personal mythology.

Finley, whose Black-Mexican identity and upbringing in Los Angeles anchor his practice, returns to Jeffrey Deitch after his celebrated inclusion in Shattered Glass (2021). With Still Life, he deepens his commitment to portraying his community through a lens of tenderness and truth, presenting a series of life sized portraits framed in handcrafted walnut vitrines, which also house vessels of his own making. This exhibition extends his formal language of transparency and layering, allowing the understructure of charcoal, gesso, and gestural poetry to surface as both visual and emotional code. 

“My paintings hold moments of intimacy and care,” Finley states. “There’s poetry embedded in the underpainting, not always legible but always present, like the stories we carry in our bodies. The ceramics extend that language, they’re ancestral, functional, symbolic.”

Influenced by time spent in Los Angeles, Japan, Italy, and Mexico, Finley’s ceramics reflect a dialogue between contemporary portraiture and the timelessness of the vessel. The work honors craft traditions while asserting a distinctly modern narrative: the ceramic becomes a witness, a container, and a collaborator in portraiture.

Kohshin Finley, a native Angeleno, has been steeped in creative expression since childhood, raised by artist and fashion designer parents who nurtured his early immersion in the arts. Recent solo exhibitions include Hummingbird at Barbati Gallery (Venice, IT) and Eight Artworks at Various Small Fires (Dallas, TX). Last year, a career-defining work by Finley was acquired by the Hammer Museum for its permanent collection.

Finley’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Jack Shainman Gallery, and CFHill in Stockholm. His paintings and sculptures are held in esteemed public collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Hammer Museum, Marciano Art Foundation and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He and his work have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Cultured, Essence, and The Cut, and was named one of Fine Art Connoisseur’s “Five to Watch." 

Kohshin Finley: Still Life

Jeffrey Deitch | Santa Monica

Jeffrey Deitch is pleased to present Walk on the Moon, an exhibition of new work by Alteronce Gumby, the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. Structured around four separate yet intertwined movements that incorporate each facet of Gumby’s ever-evolving practice—from painting, to sculpture, to installation and sound—Walk on the Moon presents the latest discoveries and innovations from his sustained research into and exploration of the material properties of color and how they shape human perception.

A pillar of Gumby’s work and primary vehicle for his experimentation with color has been a form of abstract painting entirely his own, one that incorporates mirrors and acrylics, colored glass and a vast array of gemstones, from agate to quartz, lapis to malachite. In a suite of six new square ‘tonal’ paintings, Gumby organizes his palette around a single color unique to each one, resulting in intensely concentrated expressions of a given hue or tonality. 

Placed throughout each composition are ‘organites’ that Gumby creates using gemstones, conductive metals and resin. Channeling the energetic properties of color into each organite, Gumby deploys them as magnifiers of that very energy. Though the shifting and shimmering surfaces of each painting change according to the available light in a given environment, several remain anchored by the presence of sacred geometry—the square, pyramid and circle—hovering within their compositions. Along with the inclusion of our mirrored reflection, these fundamental forms open up portals for the imagination.

Gumby’s expansive command of abstraction is further revealed by an eclectic group of paintings that accompany the tonal works. In three ‘Black-body’ paintings, Gumby manipulates and forms resin into strips of prismatic color that evoke the full spectrum of primary color that refracts through light. Four ‘falling rainbow’ paintings made of monochromatic resin with gemstones suspended within are affixed with naturally and synthetic dyed silks that flow down from the picture plane and pool onto the gallery floor, allowing Gumby to explore the transition of color from the material to the immaterial. 

In Color in Nature (2025) Gumby joins together five colored resin squares, with the palette and corresponding gemstone within each made to express both the idea and experience of the photographic image embedded within. Completing this movement is one of the largest shaped paintings Gumby has made yet, Dancing in the Milky Way (2025), that staggers two horizontal panels together, one atop the other—their radiant surfaces evoking the cosmos itself.

Continuing his investigation into the different ways color can be felt, seen or understood, Gumby has created new monolithic resin sculptures that reference the same color palette as the tonal paintings. Alternating between density and translucency, between opacity and luminosity, these hulking yet ethereal objects capture the way color is transfigured by passing through material. Each sculpture presents a concentrated expression of red, blue, green, yellow or violet and contains gemstones suspended within them.

The final movement of Walk on the Moon and one that synthesizes the preceding forays into color, material, experience and time, is an installation that harnesses the natural light that pours into the gallery via its skylights. Taking naturally and synthetic dyed silks and affixing them to the skylights to create what Gumby calls ‘light wells,’ these sculptural iterations of the ‘falling rainbow’ paintings reconsider the very materiality of color and its atmospheric or environmental quality. This room will also function as an experimental space where invited artists working with sound will stage one-day performances, offering their own vision of what color is and how it can be experienced. The fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the installation demonstrates the boundlessness of Gumby’s practice as he endeavors to understand color as both an earthly fact and abstract idea.

Alteronce Gumby was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and now resides in New York City. He received his BFA from Hunter College in 2013 and his MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2016. He was a resident artist at the Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva Island, Florida, in 2019. In 2017, he completed a residency as the Harriet Hale Woolley scholar at the Fondation des Etats-Unis in Paris. Solo exhibitions include Walk on the Moon, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2025); If Herr Street Could Talk, Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrison, PA (2025); Prince of the Far Rainbow, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2024); Dark Matter, Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA (2022); Cross Colours, Bode Projects, Berlin (2021); Alteronce Gumby: My Favorite Color is a Rainbow, Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles (2020) and Black(ness) is Beautiful, the Foundation des Etats-Unis, Paris (2017). Group exhibitions include The Abstract Future, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2025); Social Abstraction, Gagosian, Los Angeles (2024); Alteronce Gumby | Charles Ross, Parrasch Heijnen gallery, Los Angeles (2024); The 100 years, Gagosian x Deitch Exhibition, Miami (2022) and For Freedoms, Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus OH (2018). The artist’s work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Columbus Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Williams College Museum of Art, Allentown Art Museum, and Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Image: Love Saves the Day, 2025, Red jasper, quartz, copper, resin, glass, and acrylic on panel
72 x 72 inches 
Photos by Genevieve Hanson.
Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch.

Alteronce Gumby: Walk on the Moon

Jeffrey Deitch | Orange

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce, Your Tears Will Dry, a solo exhibition of new works by Kiriakos Tompolidis. The exhibition will be on view from November 15, 2025, through January 17, 2026 and marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

The paintings included in this exhibition are deeply influenced by Tompolidis’ recent move to Mexico City from Berlin, incorporating the color palette, visual sensibilities, and the endemic flora and fauna of his new environment into meticulous portrayals of memories and emotional states. Much of his practice grapples with his perception of being in between cultures and places, articulating both the parallels and fissures between his adopted home and his native country of Greece. The paintings depict subjects who seem to vacillate between feelings of displacement and familiarity, fragility and resolve, with a granular attention given to the patinas and patterns of their surroundings.

In the painting Under the Bougainvillea, a young version of Tompolidis stands in front of an ornately patterned doorway, a vivid fuchsia Bougainvillea cascading over the architecture while stray cats lounge nearby. Like in many of his paintings, photo transfers and other artifacts are seamlessly integrated into the composition – Bougainvillea leaves from Greece are delicately woven in among the petals, and the tactility of the floor tiles is enhanced with collaged elements. The diptych acts as a bridge between disparate times and locations, exposing the surprising similarities between the plants, animals, and vernacular architecture of the artist’s childhood memories of Greece with his more recent experiences in Mexico City and Los Angeles.

Tompolidis’ paintings occupy an ambiguous and atemporal space that draws from family histories, lived experience, and dreams, and that is made tangible through intricately rendered textures and surface treatments. Patterns in textiles, architecture, and nature function as signifiers of place, time, and cultural context. In the work Her Reflection Tompolidis depicts his grandmother as a young woman, capturing her pensive smile in the mirror of her vanity and the small cross necklace and family portrait sitting atop her dresser. The artist’s grandmother reappears in the titular work Your Tears Will Dry, a trompe l’oeil painting of the back of a canvas inscribed with the phrase she often repeated, and which was formative in his understanding of perseverance. Some of the paintings present an unvarnished realism while others teeter into the surreal, so that collectively they offer a richly detailed view of a space between reality and recollection.

About the artist

Kiriakos Tompolidis (b.1997, Essen, Germany) is a Berlin-based artist holding degrees from Freie Universität Berlin and University of Arts, Berlin, Germany.

He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Judin, Berlin, Germany; Labor, Mexico City, Mexico; Miettinen Collection, Berlin, Germany; The Cabin, Los Angeles, CA, and is currently included in the 14th Taipei Biennial Whispers on the Horizon, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan.

His work has been included in group shows at North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND; Green Family Foundation, Dallas, TX; Bode Gallery, Berlin, Germany, among others.

He is represented by Galerie Judin in Berlin and will have a solo exhibition next year at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany.

Kiriakos Tompolidis: Your Tears Will Dry

From my earliest days to my most recent pieces, I have always been inhabited by color, yet I am still looking for its mysterious soul. - Olga de Amaral

Lisson Gallery Los Angeles is honored to present a focused survey of works by renowned Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, marking her first solo exhibition in the city in almost a decade. Spanning from the early 1970s through 2018, the exhibition traces key developments in Amaral’s influential, six-decade career and her singular practice that dissolves the boundaries between weaving, painting, and sculpture. Through landmark works of varying scale and format, the show offers a rare opportunity to engage deeply with Amaral’s unique visual and material language, interlacing linen, wool, horsehair, Japanese paper, acrylic, and precious metals into luminous, sculptural forms that shimmer with historical, spiritual, and environmental resonance.

The works on view bear witness to the determined plurality of Amaral’s art since the 1970s. Materials including horsehair, Japanese paper, and gold and palladium leaf combine to produce a fluid, emotional and aesthetic register, one that fluctuates between the epic and the intimate, the material and the spiritual. In two distinct works, created nearly forty years apart, Amaral has suspended a woven structure from the ceiling. Eslabón familiar (1973) consists of a rope-like length of horsehair that loops with Baroque intricacy around a larger loop-shaped armature. By contrast with the internal dynamism of this early work, Nudo 19 (turquesa) (2014) takes the form of a slender column of turquoise-dyed linen threads, stiffened with gesso and tied in a single knot towards the top. The object appears both airborne and earthbound, magnifying a simple gesture at the core of all weaving to a grand scale.

Throughout the exhibition, twin elements of ornate complexity and disciplined simplicity can be seen to alternate and combine. A rare and monumental work from Amaral’s acclaimed Alquimia series, Alquimia 41 (díptico), will be featured prominently on the west wall of the gallery. Created in 1987, this diptych is one of the largest examples from Amaral’s most extensive body of work through which she has explored the transformative nature of alchemy. Infused with the luminosity of gold leaf, the work reflects both the sacred materiality of pre-Columbian traditions and the Japanese philosophy of kintsugi. Such ritualistic associations become more concrete in Memento 9 (2016), in which tightly-layered strips of linen form a grid, overlaid with gold leaf. Also on view is work from the Soles series, which relate closely to her Estelas (1996–2018), a larger body of gold leaf works. As the title Soles (Suns) suggests, Amaral’s use of gold emphasizes the luminosity of the material. Her deft manipulation of the surface, built up with many layers of gesso, lends a solid, sculptural weight to these works, which nonetheless maintain a sense of movement and ephemerality evocative of the natural world.

The grid structure reappears in two works from the Nébulas series (2014–19), where segments of Japanese paper, saturated in deep greens and blues, are overlaid with geometric or radial motifs. A related interplay of structure and light is evident in Agua azul (2018), where vertical strips of painted paper are folded over linen threads and suspended away from the wall, allowing light to pass through and produce a shimmer reminiscent of cascading water. This dualism between solidity and transparency, the earth and the sky, can also be traced back to early monumental works like Paisaje de calicanto (1983), in which light is integral to the woven form. However, unlike the artworks such as the Nébulas, which reference the cosmos in their palette and construction, Paisaje de calicanto’s rich colors are rooted in the artist’s native Colombian landscape.

Amaral’s studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in the mid-1950s proved to be a transformative experience for the artist, introducing her to weaving and thus providing a technical outlet for a fascination that had begun in childhood: “I learned about the loom, which I saw as another way of working and constructing things,” she has explained. “I became interested in fiber, in thread, because weaving allowed for invention.” Upon returning to Colombia, she began to make handwoven textiles, and from the late 1960s she increasingly aligned her creations with ‘fine art’ genres, initiating a dismantling of the boundary between craft and art that would come to define her output. The current exhibition follows upon institutional displays that have confirmed Amaral’s position within an expanded history of art. These include ‘Woven Histories’, which opened at LACMA in 2023 and subsequently travelled to three other venues, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and a large-scale retrospective that travelled from the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2024) to ICA Miami (2025).

Olga de Amaral

Lisson Gallery

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

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

Anj Smith: The Sequin-Strewn Night

Hauser & Wirth | WEHO

Taking inspiration from art historical genres, ranging from French rococo and Italian baroque to abstract expression, British artist Flora Yukhnovich’s paintings explore materiality and process through cascading forms that shift between representation and abstraction. For her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Yukhnovich will present her latest body of work, a series of canvases inspired by Bacchanalia. 

Addressing the excesses of consumerism and popular culture, her lush, swirling brushstrokes evoke the dynamism and intense corporeality of both ancient and contemporary hedonism. A catalogue featuring an extensive selection of illustrations by Yukhnovich, along with a text by curator Eleanor Nairne, will accompany the exhibition. 

‘Bacchanalia’ at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles will coincide with ‘Flora Yukhnovich's Four Seasons’ at The Frick Collection in New York (3 September 2025 – 9 March 2026), a site-specific mural in response to François Boucher’s Four Seasons series.

Image: Detail of Flora Yukhnovich

______

‘Lee Lozano. Hard Handshake’ brings together over 100 drawings by the artist, spanning the years 1959 to 1968. Lee Lozano made these provocative drawings at a remarkably fast pace, using a variety of artistic styles. Informed by the artist’s unsparing eye and wry humor, they dissect such societal norms as gender roles and property ownership while challenging the commodification of art and, ultimately, all conventional aspects of life.

Shown together, Lozano’s drawings embody her unbridled energy and social consciousness, radical for their time, and continue to provoke questions today. Although rarely exhibited during her lifetime, this body of work is instrumental to understanding the singular trajectory of Lozano's practice. In conjunction with the exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will release ‘In the Studio,’ a new book focused on Lozano’s life and work, written by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti.

Flora Yukhnovich: Bacchanalia | Lee Lozano: Hard Handshake

Hauser & Wirth DTLA

Mother Tongue asks: “What does it mean to speak the language of power?” In this moment, more than ever, words matter. Words seduce. Words distort. Words unite. Words intoxicate. Power knows this well, with language as its chosen lover.

Friday Gallery’s fall season brings together diaspora and indigenous artists exploring the language and symbols of power, from the literal to the metaphoric and mythic. Mother Tongue presents works by Caroline Monnet, Raymundo T. Reynoso, Cryptik, Salomón Huerta, and Behnaz Farahi. Weaving perspectives from Anishinaabe, Mexican, South Korean, and Iranian heritages, the pieces tell a larger story of how language and power have always danced together across time, culture, and community.

The show will be paired with a living library: 100 Books of Resistance chosen by 100 cultural thinkers and curated by linguist scholar Eva Barbarossa. The Mother Tongue library and popup bookstore will bring together diverse views on power and language: from the conversations of plants, to the secret lexicon of an extinct female-only language. It will span cultures, eras, and genres: from protest poetry to con artists, from political philosophy to comic books.

Your mother tongue is the first language you learned to speak. By understanding the language of power and making it our native tongue, we can hold it, bend it, and channel it as our own. Mother Tongue is a love letter to the thinkers, writers, and artists who’ve given us the language of courage when we needed it most.

___

With fashion by King Kennedy and Qasimi, silkscreen bandanas by Eduardo Raul Muñoz-Villafaña, sign-painted wooden matchboxes from Maachis, and hats from Ambos Project.

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FRIDAY GALLERY

For the Browns, the Queers, and the Witches. Friday exists to enable the discovery of rising creative voices from the Global South, curating art, objects, and editions from the Middle East, Latin America, South Asia, and beyond. Our space blends an art gallery with a design concept store to create a seasonal platform anchored in a rotating theme, with the art, fashion, and object curation bound together in a shared spirit. From Pakistani minimalism, to the surrealist visions of feminist Dubai photographers, to queer gothic brujas in Mexico, we peel back old divides to celebrate the cultural voices of tomorrow.



MOTHER TONGUE: On Power

Friday Gallery

Dario Argento, Antonin Artaud, Oliver Bak, Bruce Conner, Mati Diop & Fatima Al Qadiri, Cyprien Gaillard, Anne Imhof, Arthur Jafa, Asger Jorn, Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, Harmony Korine, Tetsumi Kudo, Mire Lee, Diego Marcon, Tyler Mitchell, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jill Mulleady, Precious Okoyomon, Sondra Perry, Carol Rama, Cindy Sherman, Pol Taburet, Henry Taylor, Paul Thek, Rosemarie Trockel, Andra Ursuta, Kara Walker and Jordan Wolfson

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Horror, a group exhibition organized by Jill Mulleady featuring an intergenerational group of artists. The exhibition presents horror as both symptom and strategy, illuminating seen and unseen forces that inscribe themselves on human experience. Rooted in the shadows of trauma, repression, and social unrest, horror channels our deepest anxieties and weaves fictions that probe the intersection of societal collapse and psychological unease. Whether evoking Cold War paranoia, civil rights conflicts, radiation fears, surveillance anxieties, or the existential dread and hyperreality of our times, the works in the exhibition quietly surface the intimate, often suppressed tensions embedded within collective and individual realities. Here, horror is neither simply spectacle nor genre, but rather a potent aesthetic and psychological resource—a visceral means of navigating the contradictions that define our era.

Horror

Sprüth Magers

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

Made in L.A. 2025

The Catalina Museum of Art & History is proud to present From Los Angeles to Catalina: The Art of Sonia Romero, an intimate and visually striking exhibition by celebrated Los Angeles-based artist Sonia Romero. On view until March 15, 2026, the exhibition features a curated selection of Romero’s iconic silkscreen prints, paintings and a brand-new site-specific work that captures the nostalgic charm and layered cultural history of Catalina Island.

Romero, widely recognized for her intricate paper-cutting, printmaking and mixed-media paintings, spent the summer of 2024 in Avalon researching and connecting with the local community. Her time on the island included leading museum-hosted workshops and exploring the museum’s vast archive of vintage Catalina ephemera—from postcards to brochures and ticket stubs—gathering visual references and historical insight for this new body of work.

“I’ve always been fascinated by vintage graphics and ephemera,” says Romero. “I spent two whole days poring over old postcards, brochures and ticket stubs. It’s a wonderful way to understand how the story of Catalina has been told over the years.”

Deeply rooted in Chicano culture and shaped by the diverse landscapes of California, Romero’s work explores themes of identity, community and the human connection to place. This exhibition marks the beginning of her ongoing exploration of Catalina Island,a journey sparked by her first visit to the island at age 14. With early sketches and plans for future works already underway, Romero intends to return to Avalon to continue expanding this evolving series.

“This is a deeply personal project for me,” she shares. “The island’s mix of glamour, grit and history resonates with the way I tell stories through my art. This is only the beginning.”

From Los Angeles to Catalina: The Art of Sonia Romero

Catalina Museum for Art & History

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

Robert Therrien: This is a Story

The Broad 

The Sextant, an immersive installation by Enrique Martínez Celaya, will open at The Wende Museum on November 8, 2025. This is the first solo exhibition in the museum’s history.

The Sextant is conceived as a visual poem, comprising the reconstructed childhood home and the sculptures and paintings within, all held together by a single material: sugar. The installation also includes larger paintings and working machinery that continually restore the sugar. The original house on which the work is based was built by the artist’s father in the sugarcane town of Nueva
Paz, Cuba, between 1957 and 1963, at the height of the Cold War.

This installation concludes the artist’s trilogy on Cuba, which began with Los muertos llaman al alba at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana and The Word-Shimmering Sea: Diego Velázquez / Enrique Martínez Celaya at The Hispanic Society in New York, both presented in 2024. The Sextant continues Martínez Celaya’s inquiry into memory and belonging, into how the self is refracted through the notion of home and the bond between witness and participant, placing the personal and the political in close proximity.

Supported by The Wende Museum’s commitment to preserving and interpreting Cold War history through its collections of art, artifacts, and archives, this final part of the trilogy draws resonance from the museum’s holdings and their alignment with the installation’s themes of memory, ideology, and reconstruction.


Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Sextant

The Wende Museum

The Blue Forest is an immersive installation by Marine Scientist and Artist Oriana Poindexter that transports visitors into the underwater world of Catalina Island’s iconic kelp forests without ever getting wet.

“Oriana’s work embodies our mission to celebrate the unique art, history and environment of Catalina,” said Sheila Bergman, Executive Director of Catalina Museum for Art & History. “The Blue Forest allows visitors to connect with the island’s natural world in a way that is as visually stunning as it is deeply meaningful.”

Created by hand using historic photographic processes, The Blue Forest features life-size cyanotype images of native marine flora,  collected by Poindexter while freediving just off Catalina’s shoreline and contact printed onto flowing silk panels. Visitors are invited to wander through a labyrinth of luminous, ocean-blue silk that depicts giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), elk kelp (Pelagophycus porra) and other local species.

Both meditative and educational, the exhibition bridges art, science and sensory experience. As light filters through the translucent panels, visitors are immersed in an environment that evokes the beauty and biodiversity of the island’s underwater ecosystems. For the first time in her work, Poindexter incorporates an underwater soundscape built from her own ocean recordings, deepening the sense of being submerged.

“I hope visitors will feel the sense of calm, curiosity and connection that I experience underwater,” said Oriana Poindexter. “Entering the forest of cyanotype silks is an invitation to slow down, breathe, and recognize yourself as a small part of something much larger. The exhibit is designed to act as a portal into Catalina’s underwater world, offering an encounter that is at once intimate, meditative, and educational.”

The Blue Forest: An Immersive Installation by Marine Scientist and Artist Oriana Poindexter

The 19th Korea Arts Foundation of America Award Recipient Exhibition: “A Motionless Movie” by Heehyun Choi Opens at KCCLA on October 23

October 23rd(Thursday) - November 14th(Friday), 2025 
Thursday, October 23rd, 2025 at 6:30pm-8:00pm

The Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles (KCCLA), in partnership with Korea Arts Foundation of America (KAFA), proudly present the The 19th Korea Arts Foundation of America Award Recipient Exhibition: A Motionless Movie. The exhibition will be on view from October 23 through November 14, 2025, at the KCCLA Art Gallery (5505 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036), with an opening reception on Thursday, October 23, from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.

KAFA is a non-profit public benefit organization based in Los Angeles dedicated to promoting creativity, research, and exhibitions in the arts. Funding and support for this exhibition are provided by KAFA and the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles. 

Heehyun Choi is a moving-image artist working between South Korea and the United States. Her practice spans cinema and exhibition spaces, where she creates experimental films using analog formats such as 16mm and Super 8mm. Through her exploration of film and video media, Choi examines the intricate relationships between camera, subject, and image. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Seoul, she holds a B.A. in Art & Technology from Sogang University and an M.F.A. in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

In her solo exhibition A Motionless Movie, Choi presents four new moving-image works alongside a series of embroidery pieces. The essay film A Motionless Movie, which shares its title with the exhibition, takes inspiration from a 1920s Korean newspaper article titled “Umjigiji-Anneun Yeonghwa (A Motionless Movie).” The work imagines the perspectives of Korean women readers of the newspaper’s “Home and Women’s” section, loosely following the trajectory of American actress Clara Bow featured in the article. The black-and-white silent film A Dark Room portrays a woman who may have encountered a camera obscura—a primal form of cinema that predates modern film language. The single-channel video Neolttwigi and the three-channel video The Wedding Chest blur the boundaries between the front and back of the camera, the inside and outside of the frame, and between those who create images and those who become them, presenting cameras that exist in shifting forms. The Chronophotography series fragments images—already fossilized in the history of photography and cinema—and reweaves them through traditional Korean embroidery and patchwork techniques.

The opening reception will take place on Thursday, October 23, at 6:30 p.m. at the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles. The exhibition is free and open to the public through Friday, November 14, 2025. 

A Motionless Movie – 19th KAFA Art Award Recipient Exhibition

Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles

One of the premier galleries of New Contemporary art, Los Angeles’ Corey Helford Gallery, is hosting the next major exhibition by world-renowned Nigerian hyper-realist artists Arinze Stanley and Oscar Ukonu, titled "The Weight of Us".

A duo exhibition featuring solo works from each artist alongside each other, The Weight of Us brings together the compelling visions of Nigerian contemporary artists Arinze Stanley and Oscar Ukonu in an intricate dialogue, exploring the depths of shared humanity, emotional interconnectedness, and the complex interplay of individual and collective narratives.

Stanley’s hyper-realistic mixed media charcoal drawings convey profound intimacy, vulnerability, and strength. His intricate portraits offer unflinching yet compassionate examinations of emotional bonds, gestures of care, protection, and the quiet dignity of introspection. The artist’s work has been profiled by CNN’s award-winning Great Big Story, BBC News, VICE, Forbes, Juxtapoz, and Colossal, among others.

Ukonu’s intricate ballpoint pen drawings (taking 200 to 400 hours to complete) command the viewer’s attention with striking monochromatic blue hues, emphasizing sociocultural dialogues around collective identity, information, and existential interconnectedness. The artist’s work intricately dissects how media narratives, historical context, and contemporary sociopolitical currents shape perceptions of the self and community. Ukonu's work has been exhibited internationally, and he’s completed commissions for institutions such as UNICEF and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, creating the official campaign art for the 2022 Oscars.

Arinze Stanley and Oscar Ukonu: The Weight of Us

Corey Helford Gallery 

"psychomanteum" The ancient Greeks consulted a ‘psychomanteum’ (oracle of the dead), such as that mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus, gazing into a pit filled with the blood of sacrificial sheep, is reassured by his deceased mother that her passing was not violent or painful. In the 1950s, an actual psychomanteum was excavated at Ephyra in the western Greek province of Epiros. Within the ruins of a subterranean complex, fragments of a giant bronze cauldron were found; possibly both its polished exterior and liquid it contained were used as reflective surfaces. 

Shamanic mirror-gazing traditions are found in Siberia, Madagascar, North America and parts of Africa. In the Christian era, mirror-gazing appeared sporadically and was discouraged by religious authorities. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the three witches conjure apparitions from the depth of a cauldron. The English queen Elizabeth I consulted with John Dee, a polymath scholar who set up a mirror-gazing room in his house and recorded in detail the visions experienced by his guests. Goethe’s Faust features frequent references to mirror-gazing techniques for invoking spirits of the dead and other purposes.

A large-scale ‘Census of Hallucinations’ published by the Society for Psychical Research in 1884 includes many accounts of apparitions spontaneously observed in mirrors and other reflective surfaces.  

–  The Psi Encyclopedia, The Society for Psychical Research, London. 

online: https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/psychomanteum-mirror-gazing 

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” –  William Faulkner

Scott Benzel is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. His work has been shown or performed at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum Of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, LA><ART, Los Angeles,  The MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, The Palm Springs Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, REDCAT, Los Angeles, the Mt. Wilson Observatory, Pasadena, and was featured in Made in L.A. 2012 and 2023 (as part of Los Angeles Contemporary Archive) at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Benzel has organized shows at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, The MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Schindler House and Mackey House), Los Angeles, and Welcome Inn, Eagle Rock, CA, as part of Pacific Standard Time organized by The Getty Museum. He is a member of the faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts.

Image: Hailey Strbry Glz Orgone Blaster (detail), 2o25, plastic, resin, resin coloring, metal shavings, copper, quartz crystal

Photo credit: Josh Schaedel

Scott Benzel: psychomanteum

PHASE gallery

Joshua Abelow
Jesse Benson
Bjorn Copeland
Michael Kennedy Costa
Juliana Halpert
Merideth Hillbrand
Sophia Le Fraga
David Muenzer
LeRoy Stevens

After having my gallery located on the edge of MacArthur Park — perhaps the most disregarded area in all of Los Angeles — for about a year and a half, I came to understand the depth and the breadth of the unrequited love that many Angelenos have with this city. I then came to realize that this is somewhat emblematic of the unrequited love that many Americans have with this country as a whole. What is happening within Los Angeles County is not the same as the nationalism or patriotism exhibited in other parts of the United States, of course, as the people I have been interacting with or walking past were not aggressive or exclusionary or xenophobic; nor are most of the people I interact with or walk past elsewhere. Most people I engage with simply want to know that they and the rest of us from West Covina to West Hollywood will be taken care of in the most basic of ways — housing, healthcare, food, etc. Why are city officials more focused on preparing for the Olympics and building new shopping centers than figuring out new solutions for traffic patterns and providing more widespread and better promoted harm reduction services?

That was both a snarky rhetorical question and a legitimately sincere question. I know why the local government does what it does — it is greedy and corrupt, like all forms of government. But also, why does it have to be that way? Why can’t people ever choose love and empathy over money and more money?

Community has always and always will be such a major focal point of Gene’s Dispensary and its expansive and varied programming. From day one, I have involved people and practices I have cared deeply about for many years. From day one, I have organized exhibitions and events elsewhere with people I greatly admire at places I greatly admire. From day one, I have been determined to stay rooted in my community, while also growing my community.

This exhibition is the first exhibition at the new Gene’s location in Chinatown: 422 Ord Street, 2B, Los Angeles, CA 90012. It’s above Leroy’s and next to The Fulcrum. These two spaces are operated by two of my best friends and favorite people, Ian James and Josh Schaedel. I am further integrating myself and my gallery into my community (like, I mean, officially).

This exhibition also includes nine of my favorite artists and people: Joshua Abelow, Jesse Benson, Bjorn Copeland, Michael Kennedy Costa, Juliana Halpert, Merideth Hillbrand, Sophia Le Fraga, David Muenzer, and LeRoy Stevens. I have previously worked with each of these artists in some capacity, some more extensively and/or intensely than others, but they are all now officially a part of the Gene’s extended family. 

Take a look around. Have a little bit of this, have a little bit of that. Chin-chin!!

⁃ Keith J. Varadi, October 2025

Grand Buffet

Gene's Dispensary

Eric Johnson: ex·cerpt
September 13 – November 15, 2025
Opening Reception: Sept. 13, 6 – 9pm

Artist Talk: November 1, 1-3 pm

Curated by Ron Linden

ex·cerpt

noun

/ˈekˌsərpt/

a short extract

 

 

Inspired by both art and science, sculptor Eric Johnson creates composite works of wood, resin and automotive lacquer. Elegantly conceived and meticulously crafted, the abstract forms are sheathed in resin skins, often revealing glimpses of skeletal armatures and hidden architectures. True to the definition of the word, ex·cerpt presents a selected extract from this artist’s expansive oeuvre.

Dating from the 1990s to the present, these sculptures run the gamut from polychrome to monochrome, and from voluptuous to menacing. Fabricating his own molds allows Johnson to also work in series, producing seductive color variations on a theme. Variations are most visible in the Madame X works – all based on the double-helix diagram of a typical DNA strand. This curve structure is a recurring metaphor in numerous iterations both large and small in a variety of materials. Much the same can be found in the serial Heart pieces, endlessly identical save for their variety of colors.

Whether wall-mounted, leaning or free standing, the work is in constant dialog with both SoCal’s Cool School and Finish Fetish movements, while invoking Johnson’s own fascination with California car culture. Mentored by the pioneers of the Light and Space Movement, the artist has gone on to develop his own distinctive style, capitalizing on his keen aesthetic and inventive engineering. The flawless results appear effortless; belying the exhaustive process developed over decades of experimentation.

A native Californian, Eric Johnson attended Los Angeles Valley College, California Institute of the Arts and received his Master of Fine Arts from University of California, Irvine. Johnson’s work is in many public and private collections, including: Oakland Museum; Laguna Art Museum; Museum of Art and History (MOAH), Lancaster; CBS Broadcasting, New York, NY; Digital Domain, Venice, CA; Mary Barnes; Leonardo DiCaprio and James Cameron. He currently lives and works in San Pedro, California.