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

Ancestral Futures: On Memory

Friday Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Murmurs

Medel captures the vibrancy of his eastside neighborhood in works that range from intimate snapshots to expansive street scenes, always with the aim of distilling and preserving the ephemeral feelings and fleeing moments that make up a thriving community. These works also celebrate a bustling street culture that has suffered a summer of ICE raids and unrest, which has stolen a sense of security that will be slow to return. Medel captures the resilience and ingenuity of this community, preserving its small joys and hidden beauties as a reservoir of hope for tomorrow. 

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Neighbors, a group exhibition curated by Erick Medel. The exhibition features painting and sculpture by artists who make up Medel’s own community of peers. The show includes works by Alex Becerra, Alan Chin, Daniel Gibson, Sean Hutton, Sarah Kim, Higinio Martinez, Alex McAdoo and Ohad Sarfaty

Erick Medel: El Mañana | Neighbors - Curated by Erick Medel 

Charlie James Gallery

UNIVERSE 25

On the top floor of the newly renovated Mortality Inhibiting Environment, the angels (aka the "beautiful ones”) pissed freely. Unlike the previous iterations of The Kingdom Heaven (of which there were only whispers), Universe 25 represented a revolution in post-mortal technology. A new air conditioning unit had been installed, along with a rooftop water fountain. The pearly gates looked pearlier than ever.

Our colony had it all. The grapes were peeled and abundant. The clouds, hypoallergenic. The sunlight fell evenly across the surface of the afterlife, flooding every shadow and crevice until the world gleamed with the merciless geometry of a lab-grown diamond, settling over the enrichment areas and pellet troughs with a methodological exactitude whose perfection spoke of God.

There were only a few angels to begin with. Gimlet eyes. Whip tail. She Whose Fur Shines Like Sunlight on Ripened Grain. Not that any of us had ever seen grain, ripened or otherwise. Our names were handed down by anonymous forefathers who had lived short and brutish lives in the mouldering cellars and abandoned barns of antiquity.

We were happy together in the Mortality Inhibiting Environment. Great vaulted windows contoured the sky. Chandeliers throbbed in their sockets, like hives teeming with glass stars.  Despite the abundance of available real estate, we built our nests close together, from spit and paper. Our destiny was manifest in every sense of the world. We thought little of our previous lives.

Sure, the incessant harp music got a little cloying from time to time, and despite the daily replenishment of sawdust, there was the ever-present fug of sour urine which never quite faded. But we soon forgot what it was like to go hungry, to feel cold. The abundance of nourishment and freedom from predation meant there was little to do but indulge in idle copulation. We begat one another, and soon began to multiply. The corridors of the Mortality Inhibiting Environment echoed with fresh data points jostling one another in their haste to ride The Great Wheel, and gleefully nipping at one another’s tails.

It wasn’t long until the Big Names began to arrive. We’d already had a few itinerant monks and repentant sinners. But everything changed when the philosophers began to establish themselves. First came Socrates, followed closely by Plato and Aristotle. Florence Nightingale arrived one day, with her puffy hat and overlarge candle. Soon, you couldn’t turn a corner without knocking over Newton, or stepping on Martin Luther’s frankly gargantuan tail. Bach had a nasty falling out with Princess Di, who bit him viciously, raising a welt on his tail, which turned septic and had to be amputated. Thomas Aquinas took a virulent dislike to Gandhi, and the two of them fought tooth and nail over Joan of Arc, who retreated deep into her nest and refused to emerge. A pack of troubadors banded together and began to roam the corridors in search of female companionship. Mother Theresa birthed a litter of seven, and ate all but one of them, who took to pacing the corridors, crying vain entreaties to God, asking why he had forsaken us. God took notes and entered the relevant data into his spreadsheet.

Eventually, our population began to dwindle. Fighting broke out in the upper stories. Shakespeare and his gang of thugs took control of the water fountain. Mothers abandoned their young, and the few who survived formed roving theological packs, squabbling incoherently over vague points of religious dogma. The remaining angels turned celibate and cloistered themselves in private quarters, growing thin on beauty and sunlight, while the floors below descended into chaos and squalor. We retreated to the ground floor, taking turns to guard the door. She Whose Fur Shines Like Sunlight on Ripened Grain grows wearier with every passing day, and Gimlet Eye has a permanent limp, from where Da Vinci bit him savagely on the ankle.

Our sawdust is replenished daily, and our water troughs are regularly sanitised. But despite our abundance of material wealth, God seems more remote than ever. Occasionally, he takes one of us away to weigh us and record our measurements. But he no longer intervenes, not even when Helen Keller’s head was crushed beneath The Great Wheel in a mechanical malfunction.

I do not know what is worse. To feel as if we have disappointed God, and he has turned his back on us in anger. Or that his experiment could be considered a success.

—Hera Lindsay Bird
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Ursula Bradley (b. 1997 in Auckland, Aotearoa) lives and works in London. She gained her BFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in 2021. Solo exhibitions: "High-Rise," Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); "Working," Envy, Wellington (2025); "Down and Out in Paris and London," Heart Galerie, Paris (2024); "Hoarders," Satchi & Satchi & Satchi, Auckland (2022). Group exhibitions: "The Dowse Art Museum," Lower Hutt, Wellington; "Three new artists," Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland; "Lindy walks to Countdown Mt Eden," Envy, Wellington (2022).

Image: Ursula Bradley, Outsider, 2025. Oil on canvas, 18 3/4 x 33 in / 47,6 x 83,8 cm

Ursula Bradley: High-Rise

Cheremoya

Danielle Orchard:
Perrotin is pleased to present Firstborn, Danielle Orchard’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in Los Angeles. In this latest body of work, her lush, velvety paintings revel in the primal chaos of early motherhood—from gestation to childbirth and childrearing—offering deeply symbolic compositions that mine the spiritual, psychological, and corporeal complexities inherent to the nurturance of life. As discrete acts of material creation, painting and mothering here go hand in hand: each function as an embodied experience that necessitates a well of stamina and intuition, invariably redrawing the somatic boundaries of the practitioner.

Roberto Benavidez:
Celebrated for his imaginative piñata sculptures that transform the humble art form into creations that provoke awe and wonder, Roberto Benavidez presents Bosch Beasts for his first exhibition with Perrotin. Inspired by the paintings of Early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch, Benavidez’s masterfully-crafted and labor-intensive piñatas are imbued with historical and personal meaning.

Danielle Orchard | Roberto Benavidez

Perrotin

Night Gallery is pleased to present Balance, a debut solo exhibition of works by artist and pro wrestler Lee Moriarty, opening September 27, 2025. The exhibition showcases eight new paintings that feature an intimate view of masked wrestlers—captured not in combat, but in moments of reprieve and solitude. The exhibition is curated by Adam Abdalla, founder of Orange Crush: The Journal of Art & Wrestling. 

Moriarty’s portraits reveal a different side of luchadors, known for their elaborate masks and larger-than-life personas typically seen in the ring. Here, they’re shown in quiet, everyday moments: one lounges in a beach chair beneath the sun; another builds a snowman on a quiet winter afternoon; a third peers through binoculars, birdwatching in a peaceful clearing. The paintings draw from Moriarty’s personal experience and are shaped by his background in lucha libre—he competed and trained in Mexico under luchadors including legendary wrestler Negro Navarro, learning the technical style known as llave. Through this lens, Moriarty’s work plays with the tropes of wrestling stereotypes, offering an insider’s take on the tension between spectacle and self. 

Moriarty’s paintings debuted at NADA Miami 2024 in a sold-out presentation that drew wide attention from collectors and critics. Following the fair, one of his works was acquired by the Pérez Art Museum Miami for its permanent collection—making Moriarty the first active professional wrestler to have an artwork acquired by a major museum. 

Lee Moriarty’s debut at Night Gallery aligns with the gallery’s commitment to showcasing artists who explore identity, performance, and narrative in unique and compelling ways. Balance marks the first major presentation of Moriarty’s evolving body of work, expanding traditional ideas of masculinity and identity. This exhibition also marks the first curatorial project for Adam Abdalla within a commercial gallery, who is known for his international work at the intersection of art and wrestling. 

Lee Moriarty: Balance

Night Gallery North

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

Pia Ortuño: Ceremonias

Make Room

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

Ramekon O’Arwisters: SCHISM

Patricia Sweetow Gallery

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

Ai Makita: Metabolizing Machine

Baert Gallery

Paintings by contemporary L.A. artist Janna Bock, focusing on the connection between people and place within transitory moments. 

Janna Bock: Ephemera

Keystone Gallery

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

Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency

The Wende Museum

On exhibition beginning Wed, Oct. 1: Lara Eve Kempke paints the animal kingdom as divine; Ernie Marjoram renders the landscapes of Sicily in watercolor; Eric Renard presents a photographic retrospective spanning two decades of evolving narratives and techniques; Gianna Vargas explores change, movement, and the rhythms of nature through abstraction. Emily Wallerstein paints the overlooked and ordinary—her work is a poetic dialogue between city and nature.

Eric M. Renard is a Los Angeles based fine art photographer and one of California’s leading contemporary artists. His passion for photography was ignited at Tufts University in Boston, where he studied photography under Siegfried Halus. After graduating, Eric returned to San Francisco and worked as an architectural real estate photographer before moving to Los Angeles.

In the upcoming exhibition titled Retrospective Hindsight: Two Decades of Photography Renard invites viewers to embark on a twenty five year journey through the evolution of his distinctive style. "This exhibition is not just a collection of photographs. It’s a narrative capturing the essence of transformation, introspection, and the pursuit of creativity."

Image: Eric Renard

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Ernie Marjoram is a well-known fine artist painter and art educator living and working in Los Angeles, who draws his primary inspiration from his frequent travels in Europe, Asia, and the US, favoring Southern California and Italy.

Postcards from Sicily "The Island of Sicily with its natural breathtaking landscapes, stunning beaches and dramatic coastlines combined with 3,000 years of history that blend Greek, Arab and Norman influences provided me with an overwhelming and endless source of inspiration. How could one resist the invitation to capture the crystal-clear transparency of the sea with its infinite hues of blues or the harsh, sun drenched, and blinding light of the archaeological parks where majestic Greek temples still stand as glorious testament to an ancient past?" 

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Lara Eve Kempke a Southern California native born in Long Beach, has spent much of her life in Orange County, where she raised her family and cultivated her creative voice. A multidisciplinary artist, she works as a visual artist, singer, and writer. Her work draws inspiration from the animal kingdom and has been exhibited in galleries throughout the West Coast.

Echoes from the Wild Divine "From birds to horses, octopuses to elephants, I enjoy showing the beauty of the animal kingdom through my unique perspective... in this time of turmoil I find I want to push into more spiritual and hopeful themes. Animals are still my chosen subjects, but now I’ve begin putting them in more surreal settings that suggest swirling ocean currents and the cosmos, reaching for some meaning beyond this messy reality. I have this stubborn notion that putting beauty into the world can make at least a tiny difference"

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Gianna Vargas is an artist and educator living in Venice, California. She divides her time between teaching and painting, balancing the classroom with the studio. Her work is informed by her background in science, often drawing on observation, inquiry, and experimentation to explore the natural world through abstraction
In Series "My paintings emerge in series, each inspired by the natural world. Through shifting perspectives of shorelines, atmospheres, and currents, I explore how memory and perception transform familiar places. This exhibition gathers multiple series into one conversation about change, movement, and the fluid rhythms of nature."
 
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Emily Wallerstein is a Los Angeles–based artist whose oil paintings capture fleeting moments of everyday life and the landscapes that shape them. With a background in fashion design and a degree from the University of Cincinnati, she brings a layered, expressive approach to painting that embraces imperfection and texture as part of the process.

Places in Time - Her work explores the interplay between city and nature, light and shadow, and memory and place. Whether documenting the quiet poetry of daily commutes or reflecting on more personal experiences, Wallerstein reveals beauty in the overlooked and ordinary, inviting viewers to pause and see the world in moments suspended in time.

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Interiors - A group art exhibition, featuring TAG Artists working in all mediums with diverse styles and interpretations of interior spaces.

Five Solo Exhibitions | "Interiors" by TAG Artists

The Artists' Gallery (TAG)

Curated by The Cannonball Betty Project in collaboration with 7811 Gallery

7811 Gallery and The Cannonball Betty Project is pleased to present Acts of Surface, a three-person exhibition bringing together the work of Edith Baumann, Chip Barrett and Vincent Enrique Hernandez. Across generations and mediums, each artist investigates the
layered dynamics of a surface—both literal and emotional—as a site of memory, transformation, and abstraction.

Edith Baumann, whose abstract paintings span four decades, offers a minimalist counterpoint marked by restraint and repetition. Based in Santa Monica, her geometric abstractions operate with meditative precision—radiating a visual rhythm that transcends gesture and moves into the realm of contemplation. Her work is part of the permanent collection at LACMA and is represented in numerous other public and private collections across the U.S. and Europe.
Chip Barrett,(b.1999 Baltimore, MD), is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. His work draws from rituals of comfort and endurance, constructing intimate, often tactile works that blur the boundary between private reflection and public offering. The work employs emotion and sensation through material experimentation in sculpture, drawing, performance, and photography, seeking to suspend both disbelief and time itself while leaning into sincerity. Having shown at Sade Gallery, he recently attended the Vermont Studio Center Residency and is a graduate of both the Mountain School of Arts and CalArts.

Vincent Enrique Hernandez (b. 1998, Los Angeles) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice explores history, monuments, localism, and community through the appropriation of regional narratives. His work is rooted in extensive research—ranging from deep internet dives and archival investigations to casual conversations, site visits, and media analysis. In 2023, Hernandez’s ongoing project Valley Tours was featured in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial. Following this, he received a Mohn LAND Grant, which supported the development of Field Permits, a site-specific public artwork. His work is currently on view in The Journey is the Destination: Recording Los Angeles at California State University.

Together in this exhibition, the artists work to animate the surface—whether the skin of a painting, the façade of a building, a photograph, or a body in motion. Their art becomes a vessel for effective resistance and renewal. Acts of Surface invites viewers to linger, absorb, and reorient themselves within works that are both deeply personal and powerfully communal.
7811 Gallery is a premier contemporary art gallery based in Los Angeles, dedicated to showcasing works from both emerging and established artists. Known for curating unique and thought-provoking exhibitions, the gallery serves as a platform for artistic dialogue and cultural exchange. 

The Cannonball Betty Project, a visionary arts project committed to amplifying the voices and practices of Los Angeles-based artists was born in 2023. More than just a project, it serves as a catalyst for dynamic cultural exchange, fostering site-specific curatorial projects that challenge conventional boundaries of artistic presentation and formats. Rooting creative expression in context, environment, and community collaboration, the project redefines how art engages with public space and collective memory. The Cannonball Betty Project not only supports artistic innovation—it cultivates a vital dialogue between artists and the world around them, generating transformative experiences that extend far beyond the traditional gallery setting.

For additional information please contact: 7811 Gallery.

Image: Edith Baumann Something Else No. 61, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inch. Courtesy of 7811 Gallery.

Acts of Surface: Edith Baumann, Chip Barrett & Vincent Enrique Hernandez 

7811 Gallery

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

Underlying Current

House of CoHit

Villa Aurora X O-Town House Exhibition

Surprise Music Performance 5pm

In January of 2025, the Palisades Fire came within feet of Villa Aurora. Miraculously, the house survived, allowing us to continue our work promoting intercultural exchange and fostering dialogue in arts and culture.

Located at the former home of Jewish-German writer Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta, Villa Aurora is dedicated to preserving the legacy of artists and intellectuals who found refuge from Nazi persecution in Los Angeles. For the past 30 years, Villa Aurora has been an artist residence, a place where exile and expression meet, where history and contemporary events converge. During the process of rebuilding, we are working with local partners to present our artists’ work within the city.

At O-Town House, Villa Aurora has found a temporary home away from home. A magical place located in the Granada Buildings, built in 1927 Spanish Revival Style echoing Villa Aurora’s architecture on the other side of Wilshire Boulevard. In addition to that we have found a kindred spirit and true inspiration in the founder and curator of O-Town House: Scott Cameron Weaver.

This group exhibition at O-Town House gallery is our kickoff anniversary show with works of artists spanning thirty years of our residency program. At the same time, it is the beginning of an annual exhibition series that will promote future fellows’ works in Los Angeles.

The exhibition Whispering Bells takes its name from the drought-tolerant flower species known as fire followers. The dry, bell-shaped flowers play a rustling song when caught in the wind. Its seeds are triggered by burnt material to start a new life cycle.

Whispering Bells offers a glimpse into the rich artistic legacy created by almost 500 resident artists since 1995 with works by Villa Aurora alumni Achim Mohné (2000), Klaus Pockrandt (2016), Sarah Szczesny (2021), Joram Schön (2024) and Fern Liberty Kallenbach Campbell (2024).

Together with O-Town House, this anniversary show celebrates old friends and new partners: international alliances showcasing our role as transatlantic bridge-builders and local connections anchoring our resident artists in Los Angeles.

Whispering Bells is curated by Friedel Schmoranzer and Scott Cameron Weaver. The exhibition is funded by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany, with generous support from our long-standing partner, Saxony-Anhalt Arts Foundation.

Join for upcoming artist talks: 

Artist talk during our kickoff anniversary show Whispering Bells with works of artists spanning the many years of our residency program.
https://www.vatmh.org/en/eventreader/artist-talk-villa-aurora-x-o-town-house-exhibition-whispering-bells.html

Artist Talk with Sarah Szczesny and Olivia Mole
Artist talk with Sarah Szczesny and Olivia Mole during our kickoff anniversary show Whispering Bells with works of artists spanning thirty years of our residency program.    

https://www.vatmh.org/en/eventreader/artist-talk-villa-aurora-x-o-town-house-exhibition-whispering-bells-sarah-szczesny.html

Image: "Hot Dog Trilogy'' of Fern Liberty Kallenbach Campbell


Whispering Bells

O-Town House 

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

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

Gallery Luisotti

Artist Conversation with Taylor Bythewood-Porter: Saturday, September 13, 3 – 4 pm

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 13, 4 – 6 pm

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce Corpus, Robert Pruitt’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from September 13th through October 25th, 2025. We invite guests to join us on September 13th from 3:00 – 4:00 pm for a conversation between Robert Pruitt and Taylor Bythewood-Porter prior to the opening reception.

Pruitt’s monumental portraits depict bodies draped with exquisite, often surreal adornments, their gaze frequently obscured by layers of carefully arranged textiles, sculptural objects, trailing vines, or gravity-defying swirls of ethereal substances. The works in Corpus consider the interplay between the corporeal substance of the body and the ephemeral concept of the spirit. By overlaying historical relics, elements of the natural world, and representations of the celestial realm onto the surface of the body, Pruitt teases out their material resemblances and skillfully intertwines the earthly with the intangible.

With their sumptuous use of conté, pastel, deep tones of charcoal and coffee wash, the portraits draw attention to surprising textural parallels – draped fabric, skin, earthenware, precious metals, soil, bones, and arteries. Pruitt’s practice weaves together religious iconography, science fiction imagery, and African American perspectives on theism, transcendence and mythology. Some of the figures in this new body of work are literally buried under the weight of their strange ornamentation, while others are stripped down to their bones or their circulatory system. Despite these drastic alterations to their bodies, the sitters impart a distinctive personal style and a bold sense of embodiment and ease.

The exhibition’s titular work, Corpus, depicts a body devoid of skin, muscles, organs, and bones, its sinuous red veins forming a kind of armature for a gold chain necklace with the head of a crucified Jesus. This baring of the body in attempt to pinpoint its essence is also seen in Strip Tease, in which a skeleton wearing a gold chain jauntily flashes his bones from beneath a silk-lined fur coat. In Woman in a gown constructed from a Land Acknowledgement, an upright female figure is fully submerged within a geological cross-section of soil laden with bags of money, prehistoric creatures, bones, and artifacts. Other works nod to the art historical trope of the Madonna and child, or to the religious iconography and symbols of transience used in vanitas still life paintings. Relics from recent history, objects from antiquity, and signs of the supernatural are imprinted upon and enmeshed with the bodies that wear them. These works question what defines the core of the self by examining the dichotomies of interior and exterior, the observable and the unseen, the mundane and the surreal.

About the artist

Robert Pruitt (b. 1975, Houston, TX) received his BA from Texas Southern University (2000) and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin (2003).

His work was recently included in the traveling exhibition A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration, which began at South at the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, and traveled to the North at the Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), and The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY. Solo exhibitions include To Control the Universe, Salon 94, New York (NY); Guest Minister at Oxbow, Seattle (WA); The Banner Project: Robert Pruitt, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA); Robert Pruitt: Devotion, at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles (CA), among many others.

Recent group exhibitions include Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (NY); FEMMES, Curated by Pharrell Williams, Perrotin, Paris,France; Between Distance and Desire: African Perspectives, The Soloviev Foundation Gallery, New York, (NY); Us, We, Them, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester (MA); Assembly, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (TX); Men of Steel, Women of Wonder, at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (AR); and Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, which traveled to the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (CA); the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston (SC); Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (MI); Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton (MA); Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City; and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (WA).

Pruitt’s work was also featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. His work is included in many public collections including the Dallas Museum of Art (TX); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (MA); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (NY); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX); the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham (NC); the Portland Museum of Art (OR); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (NY); the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (TX); and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (VA), among others.

Robert Pruitt: Corpus

Vielmetter Los Angeles

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present Blobs and Bod, an exhibition of recent sculptural works by renowned photographer and multimedia artist Polly Borland.

Known for her psychologically charged portraiture and documentary photography, Borland’s latest series marks a shift into sculptural form: one that continues her exploration of the human body as a site of discomfort, vulnerability, and transformation. The exhibition Blobs and Bod, pushes this inquiry further, presenting figures that are by turns playful, grotesque, and tender.

Through uncanny figurative distortion, Blobs and Bod investigates the relationship between identity and the body, pulling it apart to reveal a current of fluidity. Working with live models, Borland uses materials such as foam, nylon, and rubber bands—compressing and distorting the human form into unfamiliar configurations. These intuitive constructions are immediately 3D scanned and cast in situ, preserved within the moment of their creation. The resulting sculptures conjure a quite literal sense of cocooning, shielding the body as it rests in a raw, unmediated state.

At the heart of the exhibition stands BOD, a 7-foot aluminum creature, rendered mute, sightless, and devoid of clear agency. Balancing mass with vulnerability, BOD’s fleshy pink surface and puckered, swollen limbs, relay a sense of softness laid bare, inviting empathy amidst feelings of unease. Surrounding BOD’s monolithic form, we find a constellation of smaller, accompanying BLOB sculptures. Cast in translucent resin and ranging in scale, these beings flicker between the otherworldly and familiar. As light emanates from different angles, hints of anatomical details emerge and vanish—the shadow of an eye socket, a nose, a frozen gesture. Together suspended in a state of metamorphosis, Borland’s sculptures embrace tensions of ambiguity and objectification in an affectionate, yet wry take on the societal complexities of embodiment.

Within the sculptural series of Blobs and Bod, Polly Borland challenges the seriousness with which we traditionally view the body—as a vessel of meaning, gender, identity, and performance. To be rendered as a blob is a form of liberation, where identity dissolves and sensation emerges. When exhibited together, the works on view create a quiet fellowship, a reminder that within the lumps and folds of our bodies lies something fluid and primal, unremarkably tender, and deeply communal.


Polly Borland (b. 1959, Melbourne, AU) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Borland’s work has been exhibited internationally, with significant exhibitions in Australia, the UK, Europe, and throughout the United States. Notably, her major museum exhibition Polyverse was held at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, in 2018. Selected solo exhibitions include We Are Family, Sullivan+Strumpf, Melbourne, AU (2024); Blobs, Lyles & King, New York, NY (2023); Nudie, Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2021); The Babies, Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017); YOU, Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY (2013) and Smudge, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY (2011). Selected group exhibitions include Namedropping, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, AU (2024); Polly Borland & Penny Slinger: Playpen, Lyles & King, New York, NY (2023); Inaugural Exhibition, Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels, BE (2021); LA On Fire, Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2019) and Gossamer, curated by Zoe Bedeaux, Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, UK (2019). Internationally, Borland has exhibited at numerous institutions: the National Portrait Gallery, London, UK; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, AU; The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart, Tasmania, AU; Windsor Castle, Windsor, UK; and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Publications include MORPH, Polly Borland, Perimeter Editions (2018); Polly Borland SMUDGE, Actar (2011); Polly Borland: Bunny, Other Criteria (2008); The Babies, Polly Borland, essay by Susan Sontag, PowerHouse Books (2001); and Polly Borland: Australians, National Portrait Gallery, London (2000). Her work is in public and private collections, including The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Portrait Gallery, London; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Damien Hirst’s Murderme Collection.

This is Polly Borland’s first solo exhibition at Wilding Cran Gallery.

Polly Borland: Blobs and Bod

Wilding Cran Gallery

Nonaka Hill is delighted to present Innerspace, a solo exhibition of ceramics by Rando Aso. In his first presentation in the United States, Aso focuses on his signature unglazed earthenware (doki), otherwise known as yakishime and kokutou, depending on the firing method employed. Both “paint" his surfaces with black, lending his ceramics resemblances to charred wood or Oaxacan black clay. Looking to earthenware by the Jōmon, traditional pottery, and late 20th century minimalist sculpture, Aso mines a rich territory between them. In the process, he highlights the clay body’s relationship to fire, ritual, and metaphysics in a select range of forms that totter between functional and non-functional sculpture. 

At the heart of Aso’s exploration is space, which, for him, includes everything internal and external to human experience—even ideas and perceptions inaccessible to the mind. This has led him to the unknown as it is represented by negative space and darkness, physical worlds we cannot see. In his Intimate Space series, he created iterations of tamatebako, a refined box (tama = “jewel, ball, bullet, or soul;” tabako = “portable box”) designed to house intimate objects. Traditionally, tamatebako have been used as a metaphor for tampering with forbidden knowledge, akin to the myth of Pandora’s Box; but Ando has redescribed it as less a morally charged container than a metaphysical one that is complete in its closed state. Even as his boxes come in two parts, Aso has built them without internal voids, removing the literal and figurative symbolism of the vessel; instead, he invites the viewer to ‘enter’ them through feeling and contemplation.

Aso foregrounds spatial awareness more acutely in his Sphere and Space (tentative) series in which he pairs a discrete sphere with a much larger sculptural counterpart with a matching spherical indentation. Suggesting various levels of space, from the atomic to the microscopic to the celestial, and how their spatial relationships are inherently tentative, he paradoxically creates a constant state of visual and emotional tension. This carries into his Sphere of the Earth series, in which Aso has created iterations of an otherwise perfect sphere whose surface has been indented and marked. The internal space (air) becomes sculpted in tandem, resulting in external bulges or other subtle physical shifts that succinctly articulate Aso’s conceptualization of the human body meeting with clay. 

Similarly in his wall works, each entitled Vestige; Light in the Shade; and Trace, all 2024, Aso removes the human body out of the equation and highlights the interaction between fire, water, and soil. Each work contains a grid of tiles, each representing the unique traces left by fire as it had driven water out of the soil. In his Landscape and Stone series Aso reinserts his body into the interplay of nature's elements by imagining, through extra-sensory means, and then sculpted accordingly, how rocks from Lake Balaton in Hungary were “held” and created by the volcanic activity of the land’s past. 

Born in 1983 and raised in Nara Prefecture, Japan, Aso began his engagement with ceramics at the Kanzawa College of Art where he graduated in 2009. It was there he discovered open pit firing, which led him to apprehend his own feel forceramics, a form of synesthesia in which tactility can be sensed while looking, but not touching an object. Open firing was a method by which he could feel clay become pottery and make contact, through the sensations in his body, with the vast history of the medium and the geologic activity that gave rise to its materials. Currently living and working in Gifu, Japan, Aso continues to expand his repertoire of methods in working with earthenware, which in his view, best stimulates one's senses and imagination in her reconnection with nature, embodying the pursuit with elegance and economy.  

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

Rando Aso: Innerspace

Nonaka-Hill | Highland

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

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

Night Gallery South

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Coughing in the pipes, an exhibition of new paintings by Luke Rogers.  This presentation marks the artist’s first with the gallery, and will be on view September 13 - October 25, 2025.

“Water is important to people who do not have it,” Joan Didion wrote, “and the same is true of control.” She was talking about California, and the impressive machinery–“the aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains”–that has, since the early 20th Century, made American life as we know it to be plausible in the West. Those means of control are the subjects of Luke Rogers’ new paintings, a body of work that traverses the distance between dams in Oroville and Antelope Valley, the Jawbone siphon in the Sierras, the Los Angeles aqueduct, and the sink in his studio. Both plumbing and what Didion calls “plumbing on a grand scale”: the system of pipes, big and small, that deliver drinking water to his glass.

Excerpt of exhibition text by Henry Chapman

Luke Rogers: Coughing in the pipes

Moskowitz Bayse

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end” - Semisonic

Feia is proud to announce our not-quite-inaugural exhibition, Demolition Derby - a show about impermanence, trust, and the soft violence of starting over and building anew.

Set on the future site of Feia - currently a back garden and soon to be a brand new gallery space - and oriented around a soon-to-be-demolished shed, the show features works by a large and global group of artists working across media. The premise is simple and final: any artwork not collected by the time the demolition crew arrives will be placed in the shed and destroyed. There will be no storage, no after-the-fact extensions, and no carefully archived remains. The clock is ticking as this is an exhibition with a real and irreversible end point.

In that sense, Demolition Derby takes aim at the quiet assumption of permanence that underpins most exhibitions. This collection of work will not outlive this space, nor will it accumulate over time, or move from one context to the next. Instead, value is provisional, time is short, and the art is literally on the brink of destruction. On its surface, the show proposes a framework about risk that is both clear and loaded. But the risk present is not actually the kind that signals ambition or spectacle. It is instead quieter, stranger, and about showing something that may not last, while letting it live fully, then allowing it to disappear. A similar sense of precarity is thrust upon the audience, will you collect something now or witness it fall?

Some artists lean into that risk directly, while others ignore it completely. What binds the exhibition together is the condition of the works existence and the tension between making and unmaking, between presence and disappearance. The decision to participate is also a decision to surrender control over the work’s future.

Demolition Derby resists the instinct to preserve, to finalize, and to wrap things in bubble wrap for later. Instead, it invites immediacy and celebrates the brief, ecstatic window in which something exists and is seen fully, and maybe for the last time.

Demolition Derby is, at its core, a show about thresholds. About what gets carried forward and what gets left behind. About space as something active, volatile, and political. The demolition, of both the shed and the art, isn’t tragic - it’s necessary. The new building has already been imagined, but before it arrives, this show clears the ground and lays the foundation. After September 13th, the show will sit quietly and unceremoniously until the shed is taken down at a date yet to be determined and at the whims of contractors. And so we mark the end of summer, the end of the shed, the end of one phase of Feia, and the messy, exhilarating start of another.

Feia
Founded by husband-duo Thomas Martinez Pilnik and Jake Cavallo, Feia celebrates failure, brings people together, and curates beautiful spaces with unconventional features. Feia, meaning Ugly in Portuguese, is more than just an insult. It expresses curiosity, intrigue, excitement, novelty, beauty, disgust, and everything in between. Pilnik - raised in London by Brazilian parents - grew up hearing the phrase “Ai, Que Coisa Feia!”. It could describe a reaction his mum had while he bit his nails, a scraggle-toothed dog walking down the street, or even a stunning piece of art sitting at the Tate Modern. Cavallo is an Art Director for major films including Oppenheimer, Nope, and Beverly Hills Cop. He uses this extensive design experience to expand Feia into new territories. Feia is under construction, with a new 1200 square foot gallery set to open in Highland Park in 2026.

Image: Kayla Mattes "HALP!," 2022. Handwoven cotton and wool. 21 x 25 inches

Demolition Derby

Feia

Lucky Cat Labs is proud to present The Dark Show, an exhibition that dares to look where others turn away. Featuring leading and emerging voices in contemporary dark art, the show reveals works that navigate the spaces between beauty and dread, intimacy and unease. Alongside paintings and sculptures, the exhibition includes immersive, interactive installations that invite visitors to step directly into the atmosphere of the work—blurring the line between observer and participant. This is not darkness for spectacle’s sake, but an exploration of its resonance: how it shapes memory, desire, and the very nature of being.

The Dark Show

Lucky Cat Labs

Aaron Garber-Maikovska: Killing the Blues | Kiva Garber-Maikovska: Bottom C

The Journal Gallery

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

Ashwini Bhat: The Morning After The Fire Swept Through

Shoshana Wayne Gallery

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

Herman Cherry: A Different Kind of Abstraction

Sebastian Gladstone

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

Mire Lee: Faces

Sprüth Magers

"Beatrice Wood combines her colors like a painter, makes them vibrate like a musician… Water poured from one of her jars will taste like wine." - Anaïs Nin

A cross-generational exhibition placing Beatrice Wood’s ceramics and drawings in dialogue with contemporary artists exploring surface, spirit, and transformation.

Charlotte Call’s inaugural exhibition begins with a question: how can art help us find meaning? Fire and Life offers a belief that significant objects can lead us to both spiritual and intellectual insight, moving toward artworks as vessels of presence, transmission, and care. The title is drawn from a line by Anaïs Nin: “I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire.” Nin was a close friend of Beatrice Wood and spoke about her luster works with admiration: “Beatrice Wood combines her colors like a painter, makes them vibrate like a musician… Water poured from one of her jars will taste like wine.”

Beatrice Wood worked with heat to create her sculptures and lived her life with a comparable intensity. She lived to 105, and when asked about the secret to her longevity, she replied: “I owe it all to chocolates, art books, and young men.”

Anchored by a selection of luminous luster-glazed ceramics by Beatrice Wood, the exhibition places her work in dialogue with contemporary contributions by Durimel, Cecilia Granara, Amy Steel, and Yuwei Tu. Each artist engages transformation, vitality, and emotional presence through surface, gesture, and symbolic intensity. Their practices treat matter as a language for spirit, memory, and renewal.

Beatrice Wood (born 1893, San Francisco; died 1998, Ojai)
A foundational figure in American ceramics, Beatrice Wood developed a practice known for its mastery of luster glazes, sensual forms, and irreverent wit. She played a central role in the early twentieth-century avant-garde. In the 1910s, she was closely linked to Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché, and was part of the New York Dada circle with artists like Man Ray and Francis Picabia. She co-edited The Blind Man with Duchamp and helped organize the 1917 Blind Man’s Ball. Wood discovered ceramics at the age of forty, after moving to Los Angeles, and continued making work until the end of her life at 105. She later settled in Ojai, drawn by its natural beauty and its spiritual community, including Annie Besant and Jiddu Krishnamurti. Her remarkable life helped inspire the character of Rose in James Cameron’s Titanic. Today, her legacy is carried forward by the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts in Ojai. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Durimel (born 1993, Paris)
Jalan and Jibril Durimel are twin brothers working as an artist duo. Born to French-Caribbean parents in Paris, they spent two years on the island of Guadeloupe before moving to Miami at age four, and then to the island of St. Maarten at twelve. It was on Saint Maarten that they became inspired by cinema and set off to Los Angeles at the age of seventeen to study film. The twin brothers, now based in New York City, draw inspiration from their diverse upbringing and a passion for the evident beauties of the natural world. Through visual expression, their work aims to serve as a spectacle of cultural cross-pollination and an inquiry into the decadence of simplicity. Their work has appeared in i-D, Dazed, Vogue, and L’Uomo Vogue, and has been exhibited at Foam Museum in Amsterdam, Haus der Statistik in Berlin, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

Cecilia Granara (born 1991, Jeddah)
Cecilia Granara lives and works between Paris and Mexico City. She studied at Central Saint Martins, ENSBA Paris, Hunter College (MFA exchange), and received her MFA from Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2020. Granara’s paintings draw on mysticism, poetry, and personal history to explore longing, transformation, and spiritual renewal. She has presented solo and duo exhibitions at Cassina Projects in Milan, CAC Passerelle in Brittany, Exo Exo in Paris, and Sapling Gallery in London. Granara participated in institutional group shows at Musée D'Orsay (FR), Ford Foundation Gallery (U.S.A.) , FRAC Corsica (FR), Fondation Pernod Ricard (FR), Triennale Milano (IT), Château La Coste (FR), LAAC Musée de Dunkerque (FR), Centre D'Art Contemporain Passerelle (FR), Centre d'Art Parc Saint Léger (FR), Musée Cérès Franco (FR), Contemporary Art Center of Armenia, Zeyrek Cynili Hammam Museum (Turkey), MAXXI, Rome (IT) and ps120 Berlin (Germany). Granara was a finalist of the Antoine Marin Prize in 2019, the Cairo Prize (Italy) in 2021, the Club GAMEC Prize (Italy) in 2024, and the MAC Lissone Prize (Italy) in 2025. 

Amy Steel (born 1981, UK)
Amy Steel lives and works in London. She earned her MFA with distinction from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019 and her BA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Steel’s work spans painting and performance, drawing on archetype, transformation, and the charged inner life of women. Her work often creates dreamlike psychological landscapes that explore themes of embodiment and intuition. She has exhibited at Bim Bam Gallery in Paris, Tabula Rasa Gallery in Beijing, and Niru Ratnam Gallery in London, and received the Adrian Carruthers Award for 2019–2020. Her paintings are noted for their luminous colour, sensuality, and symbolic resonance.

Yuwei Tu (born 1995, Sichuan, China)
Yuwei Tu is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, and installation. Her practice centers on impermanence, emotional architecture, and quiet acts of composition. She is currently based in New Haven, completing her MFA at Yale School of Art. Tu’s work has been shown at Rusha & Co in Los Angeles, Palo Gallery in New York, and featured in New American Paintings. Her approach echoes Beatrice Wood’s sensitivity to embodied form and material intuition.

Fire and Life

Charlotte Call Gallery

It is injustice on a global scale that serves as the overarching theme within Elyse Pignolet's new body of work. The ceramics and paintings in the show are the result of processing this ever-changing environment, while pondering what it means to be an artist in the face of this destruction.

Elyse Pignolet: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Track 16 | East Hollywood

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

Annie Bielski: Trampoline

North Loop West

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

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

Calendar of Events:

Thursday, September 4, 10 AM–6 PM:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Cummins: Oasis Be Here Now

Musichead Gallery

Join us, Las Chicas Peligrosas (Jackie Hernandez), and community artists, partners, and friends on Thursday, September 18th, 2025 from 7-9:30 PM for the opening reception for the exhibition MI QUERIDO LOS ANGELES.

“Mi Querido Los Angeles” (My Dearest Los Angeles), a solo exhibition by Las Chicas Peligrosas (Jackie Hernandez), features a series of screen prints centered on the people and culture of various neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles - sharing the reality many Angelenos face, the fear that one day we could become displaced. Featured neighborhoods include MacArthur Park, Pico-Union, Koreatown, and more. The exhibition creates a community-centered space for resources on tenant rights, ways to resist and fight gentrification.  The Project seeks to actively engage with community members through a series of free printmaking workshops, offering participants the opportunity to share their stories and identify key places in their neighborhoods that have shaped their lives.

Jackie Hernandez (They/She) also known as Las Chicas Peligrosas is a first generation, queer latinx artist based in Los Angeles, California. They graduated with their B.A. in Studio Art from California State University, Long Beach. Inspired by their community, Las Chicas Peligrosas transforms stories into visually compelling illustrations to represent diverse cultures, neighborhoods, community members and more. She utilizes various art forms, including printmaking, murals, and digital illustration. Las Chicas Peligrosas has partnered with esteemed clients such as LA Kings, Altamed, Jordan, Shoe Palace, City of Los Angeles, Camp Flog Gnaw, and more.

During Office Hours: 
Tuesday–Thursdays: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
                    Fridays: 10:00 am – 3:00 pm 

The Goethe-Institut is closed to the public on Mondays

Secure, free Parking is available at Metro/Retail parking structure with rear entrance to the Goethe-Institut located at
674 S. Westlake Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90057

Public transport is possible with the red line to MacArthur Park/Westlake stop. Using carpool or ride-share options are appreciated.

MI QUERIDO LOS ANGELES is part of the Neighborhood Interpretive Center, a hyperlocal initiative of cultural programs that focus on and uplift the MacArthur Park/Westlake neighborhood and surrounding areas.



Las Chicas Peligrosas (Jackie Hernandez): MI QUERIDO LOS ANGELES

Goethe-Institut LA

Maryam Taba Studios is proud to present Carnival of Dreams, a solo exhibition of Iranian artist Adel Younesi, whose paintings conjure uncanny worlds where memory, myth, and spectacle collide.

With a palette at once austere and luminous, Younesi stages a surreal theatre: elephants wander through forgotten kingdoms, Farrah Diva and the Shah appear as spectral icons, and human figures drift among improbable beasts and banners of color. In his hands, history becomes a masquerade and imagination a stage set, where the boundaries between the real and the unreal dissolve into dreamlike procession.

Aboout the Exhibition:
Carnival of Dreams brings together new and recent works that transform the gallery into a space of shifting realities, part myth, part memory, part hallucination. Each painting offers an invitation into the uncanny: animals as symbols of endurance, icons as fragments of collective nostalgia, and figures as both witness and participant in a dream they cannot escape.

Curator's Statement:
“Adel’s work captures the moment when history feels like theatre, and memory takes on the logic of dreams. In Carnival of Dreams, we walk through a parade of symbols that are beautiful, unsettling, and unforgettable.”
— Maryam Taba, Curator and Founder of Maryam Taba Studios.

About Adel Younesi:
Born in Hamedan, Iran in 1985, Adel Younesi has exhibited internationally with shows in Tehran, Paris, and Berlin. His practice is known for merging archival memory with surreal invention, crafting works that hover between the mythic and the contemporary. Carnival of Dreams marks his first solo presentation with Maryam Taba Studios.

About Maryam Taba Studios:
Founded by interior designer and curator Maryam Taba, Maryam Taba Studios is a West Hollywood gallery that highlights Persian and Middle Eastern voices while welcoming a broader dialogue across cultures. Known for its intimate programming and poetic exhibitions, the studio cultivates connections between art, design, and cultural memory.

Press Inquiries and High-Resolution Images:
For press materials, interviews, or additional information, please contact: Jenna Brown | hello@maryamtaba.com | 858-461-8250

Adel Younesi: Carnival of Dreams

Maryam Taba Studios 

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

Hélio Oiticica

Lisson Gallery

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present new paintings by Los Angeles artist Joshua Petker. The exhibition, entitled Hyacinth Canyon, is the artists’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 13, 6-8 pm.

Hyacinth Canyon names both myth and place. Taking inspiration from the Greek story of beauty, rivalry, and metamorphosis, Petker pairs it with a fanciful California canyon where time folds on itself. The convergence of history and imagination unites Petker’s practice, which treats painting as a site of overlapping realities. Across large and medium scale canvases, layered and interlocking figures share a frame, yet retain a charged, separate relationship to each other. Ghostlike impressions, statuesque nudes, and wandering outlines of beasts and smiles seem at once animated and permanently fixed, arrested by a skin of paint. Here Petker treats the present tense as composite: histories, jokes, and devotions convene as a simultaneous multi-subjective reality.

Simultaneity registers as a metaphor for our times. Courtly decorum and comic interruption share the same picture plane. Identity and archetype behave like collage, as convergent stacks of roles that never settle into singularity. Desire and discipline move as mutually dependent currents through these avatars of contemporary ascension. Whether in a grand promenade portrait or a crowded tavern of layered subjects, the painted surface operates like a proscenium, where allegory, memory, and revision overlap rather than resolve.

Petker’s chromatically intense palette is a structuring device, setting the order of attention. Ice blue, burning orange, and punctuating cadmiums direct the eye rhythmically across the canvas. Suggesting a sort of anarchic freedom, limbs and costumes splice, silhouettes echo and contradict, outlines double back, tracing a choreography of alternate poses and time scales. Varying expressions of line, color, and rendering sit together; revisions, rubbings, and drips remain legible throughout. Petker’s subjects command this bizarre, yet curiously credible and fertile world of the imagination and subconscious. 

Forming a lush, theatrical world where anachronism and allegory collide, Petker mines a visual vocabulary of 18th- and 19th-century European painting. Courtly attire, powdered wigs, pastoral landscapes, and studio tableaux, are filtered through a Petker’s psychedelic lens producing figures who are at once historical, haunted, and disassembled. Goblets, masks, laurels, tambourines, dogs, and dragons alike, circulate as props in a repertory theater. Their recurrence turns iconography into a grammar of morphability. Process and development, rehearsal and performance, period styles and studio cartoons, water nymph and flower child, share the stage to complete a vision of reality. Petker reanimates art history as a medium of fantasy, introspection, and archetype, reimagining historical motifs and genre toward an emotional truth. 

Joshua Petker (b. 1979, Los Angeles, CA) completed his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Santa Clarita, CA and his BFA at Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA. He has exhibited his work in solo exhibitions at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Rachel Uffner, New York, NY; ASHES/ASHES, Los Angeles, CA; and Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles, CA; as well as group exhibitions at National Arts Club, New York, NY; albertz benda, New York, NY; Althuis Holland, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Spurs Gallery, Beijing, China; Carl Kostyál Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden; La Loma Projects, Pasadena, CA; and ACME, Los Angeles, CA. A forthcoming solo exhibition, Hyacinth Canyon, will open at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA in September 2025. His works are in the permanent collection of the K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong, China and X Museum, Beijing, China. Petker lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Image: Joshua Petker The Gentleman, 2025 (Detail)

_____

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present new paintings by German artist Fabian Treiber. The exhibition, entitled I Take The Whole Damn Place With Me, is the artists’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. On view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles from September 13 to November 1. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 13, 6-8 pm.

Spontaneity of gesture and response to material drive the engine of Fabian Treiber’s paintings. Swaths of thinned paint, crisp masked edges, and abrupt textural shifts signal a process attuned the examination of artifice and pictorial mechanics. Flattened perspective, compressed space, and abrupt visual breaks push up to the bounds of representation. The starting point for these paintings lies in fragments taken from the empty backgrounds of early Hollywood animations: interiors, landscapes, transitional zones originally designated as passive scenery. The resulting pictorial spaces resist fixed interpretation, hovering between found image and painterly invention. 

Memory becomes a central operative force, not as nostalgia or as recollection of what was, but as an unstable state to linger in. His paintings adhere to the logic of déjà vu: recognition without origin, the disquieting feeling of the familiar as it slips into strangeness. Treiber treats the built environment like an exquisite corpse of sorts—part home, part, set part studio—these rooms open onto diorama-like vistas; landscape slips indoors as decor. The result is a lucid, slightly uncanny vocabulary of props, portals, and stages. Windows that frame pastoral fragments, and sinks and pipes that connect literal lines bisecting the picture plane. Curtains, carpets, bits of fabric perform acts of revealing and concealing.

A recurring cast of props, plants, and personal effects unite these environments. Emblematic trees reappear at different scales; circular moons rhyme with faucet handles, basins, and glass rims; abandoned shoes mark the stage like floors. Treiber uses these motifs as pictorial devices, as anchoring points around his varied paint languages. Airbrushed haze, scumbled passages, cartoon-outline notations, and paste-ups share the same field. Treiber indulges the pleasure of atmosphere and color while skirting the seamlessness of illusion. 

Day, dusk, and night cohabitate. Rags, pipes, patched walls share the surface of pastoral longing. These modest elements do double duty: a flame is mark and illumination, a shred of cloth is decor and gesture, a thread is a line that remembers a hand. These works remind us that a view is a construction where the scenic and the architectural are painterly problems. Larger canvases expand painting into rooms that borrow from the cinematic, assemblages fold the picture plane into the scale of a keepsake.

Functioning as a discreet suite, Treiber’s new framed “painting-assemblages” compress these questions to an intimate scale, sharpening the stakes. Each small panel builds a tiny proscenium from found materials. Pleated cloth, linen valances, brass tacks, bottle caps, scraps of paper, and matchbooks are set against stained or oversprayed grounds. Curtains promise access, yet question what is revealed is often a charged field of color or a tonal xeroxed photographic ghosts, conjuring, carrying, concealing.

I Take The Whole Damn Place With Me asks how images remember, how they linger as afterimage, echo, palimpsest. Insisting on both construction and atmosphere, the exhibition hinges the romance of light and color against the gritty process of painterly assembly. Landscape is treated as portable, something open, psychologically and poetically charged. These paintings remind us that a view is never given, but built: sites where seeing becomes an act of making.

Fabian Treiber (b. 1986, Ludwigsburg Germany) studied Fine Art at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, Stuttgart, Germany. He was awarded the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship for his work up to 2018 and was granted by the Kunsthalle Nürnberg with the Marianne Defet Painting Scholarship the same year. In 2021 he was a finalist for the Große-Hans-Purrmann Prize. His works have been shown in solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Nürnberg; Kunstverein Ludwigsburg; Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen; Ruttkowski;68 Gallery, Cologne and Paris; KANT Gallery, Copenhagen, Haverkampf Leistenschneider Gallery, Berlin; Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich; and Public Gallery of Ostfildern, Stuttgart. His 2022 solo exhibition Sunrise Doesn’t Last All Morning at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA was the artist’s debut in the United States. Further his work has been included in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Villa Merkel Galerien der Stadt Esslingen a.N.; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Kunstverein Speyer, Arts Projects Australia, Melbourne; CFHILL Art Space, Stockholm; König Gallery, Berlin; Kunstverein Lüneburg; 69 Art Campus, Beijing; Kunstmuseum Singen; X-Museum, Beijing; and PACE Gallery, Hong Kong in 2024. Treiber lives and works in Stuttgart, Germany.

Solo show featuring works by Fabian Treiber 


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

Anat Ebgi | Mid-Wilshire

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles is delighted to announce The Poetic Dimension, a two-person exhibition featuring photographs by James Casebere and new sculptures by Jose Dávila. Marking the first time these two artists have been paired together, the exhibition centers around their shared dialogue on the work of Mexican modernist architect Luis Barragán. Through their respective practices, Casebere and Dávila explore the expressive potential of form, space, and color, inviting a deeper meditation on architecture’s emotional resonance. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, September 13 from 5 to 7pm.

James Casebere’s photographs in The Poetic Dimension respond directly to Luis Barragán’s architectural masterpieces, including the Gilardi House, the Galvez House, and the architect’s home and studio in Mexico City. A seminal figure in the Pictures Generation, Casebere is known for constructing meticulously crafted models that he photographs, reimagining built environments through a conceptual lens. In these works, he engages with Barragán’s spaces not simply as formal subjects, but as sites of emotion and psychological depth. By subtly modifying architectural elements, adding apertures, altering proportions, and shifting light, Casebere imbues his images with an affective charge, deepening their contemplative quality. As he notes, Barragán’s architecture is “contemplative and solitary and beautiful, without the associations of confinement.” This poetic sensibility resonates strongly with Casebere’s practice, which has long sought to explore how architecture can reflect social structures, elicit emotional states, and inspire transformation.

Barragán’s architectural language has been a foundational influence for Jose Dávila, who trained as an architect before turning to sculpture. His materially rich works incorporate industrial elements, including ratchet straps and concrete juxtaposed with natural materials such as volcanic stone, balancing tension and gravity with a distinctive elegance. In these new sculptures, Dávila continues his investigation into structural equilibrium and formal restraint, using vibrant color and precarious construction to create works with both conceptual clarity and playful irreverence. Dávila’s engagement with Barragán’s legacy is most evident in his chromatic palette featuring bright hues of red, blue, and yellow which directly reference the architect’s structures and draw from the vernacular architecture of Mexico. Like Barragán, Dávila elevates raw, utilitarian materials into expressions of volume, color, and balance.
As Luis Barragán wrote, “Architecture is an art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well- being.” In the spirit of this philosophy, The Poetic Dimension foregrounds how both Casebere and Dávila translate architecture’s fundamental elements, light, form, color, material, into transcendent aesthetic experiences. Engaging in a deeply personal dialogue with Barragán’s legacy, they reveal how the built environment can become a vehicle for reflection.

For additional information on the exhibition, please visit skny.com

For all inquiries, please email Thomas Kelly at Thomas@skny.com

For media inquiries, please email Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com

James Casebere and Jose Dávila: The Poetic Dimension

Sean Kelly Los Angeles

Tappan is pleased to present TRACE, a group exhibition. TRACE brings together works that capture the quiet layering of perception—marks laid over time, palettes tempered or emboldened, forms that seem to have shed earlier versions to reveal something truer, rarer, and more essential. A single mark can hold the weight of a season, or vanish almost as soon as it appears. In their layering, these works grapple with phenomena that can’t be measured but are nonetheless known: the pauses and accelerations, the strange reversals, the private clocks we each carry. They speak to the subtle transformations that unfold over years: the softening of certain edges, the sharpening of others, the gradual reordering of what we attend to and what we release.

Each contour, surface, and shift in tone reads as a register of change—how experience redefines our appetite for uncertainty, reshapes our inner landscapes, and refines our sense of what endures. TRACE speaks to evolution—whether to realized truths, altered perspectives, or the slow, almost imperceptible accrual of understanding. Together, they form a record of continual becoming, each piece bearing the subtle evidence of where it has been and what it has absorbed along the way.

Artists featured in the exhibition include: Luke Chiswell, Michael DeSutter, Sarana Haeata, Michael Harnish, Anatole Heger, Cortney Herron, Johanna Togada Hoffbeck, Virginie Hucher, Viktor Kobylianski, Bart O'Reilly, Arran Rahimian, Colt Seager, Irinka Talakhadze, and Orrin Whalen.

Tappan will be hosting an opening event on Thursday, September 18th from 6:00PM - 9:00PM at the Tappan Gallery, 8200 Melrose Ave,, Los Angeles 90046. 

For additional information, please contact Liglin Lopez, Advisor, at liglin@thetappancollective.com

For press inquiries and additional information, please contact Heather Bardocz, Director of Marketing & Communications at heather@thetappancollective.com

TAPPAN
8200 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90046 tappancollective.com

Image: Rest Your Wings by Cortney Herron

TRACE

TAPPAN

Samayoa works in several different modes, most prominently with airbrush on canvas, and across media achieves a hauntingly expressive greyscale palette. His works speak to his own Guatemalan and Mexican heritage, his Oakland community, and his Islamic faith; Samayoa taps into the visual power of muralism and the narrative potency of dreams, yet retains the intimacy of memory or whispered prayer. His compositions are layered with meaning, all held within a kind of dreamspace that emphasizes the beauty and power of community. The title of the exhibition comes from the chorus of a 1998 DMX song, which warns the listener that one has to be willing to give everything to the hustle.

Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa: Hug the sky for it 

Charlie James Gallery (2nd location)

Overduin & Co. is pleased to present the exhibition, “Sans Soleil,” by Poppy Jones.

The exhibition takes its title from the 1983 experimental film by French writer and director Chris Marker. The film is described as a meditation on the nature of human memory, while Marker himself has declared the film nothing more than “a home movie.” At its start the film’s narrator recounts, “I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me."

Throughout her work, Jones’ imagery captures an intensity in life’s ordinary moments. Images are rendered in oil and watercolor on suede and silk. These pictures document the pathos of everyday objects, recording fleeting moments of domestic life: flowers collected from the garden, sunlight dappled across the walls of a room, shadows falling on the pages of a book, a lone balloon caught at the ceiling. One work in the exhibition titled “Clock” depicts a dandelion clipped and lying flat like a specimen in a lab. The bloom signals the start of a regenerative cycle.
Intimate in scale, each piece layers the hand-painted with lithography and photography on found textiles, including swatches from the artists own clothing. One of the first pieces in this body of work captures an image of buttons running along the front of Jones’ suede jacket. The picture is rendered on a stretched segment of the jacket itself, collapsing the image and its support. The fingerprints caught in the photographic image and actual prints embedded in the suede are indistinguishable.

While much of Jones’ imagery is taken from within her family’s home and garden, some photographs are taken during visits to historical spaces such as Sir John Soane’s Museum in London and Charleston House in Lewes, where gatherings of the Bloomsbury Group took place only a few miles from the artist’s home and studio.

Jones’ work draws on modernist literature and cinema, particularly Gertrude Stein and Alain Robbe-Grillet's writings on objects and the material world, creating their own reality without time or plot. One work in the exhibition depicts a bottle and a vase in muted sepia tones on a suede surface. The Morandi-like mise-en-scène focuses on the illuminated glassy surfaces of the vessels. The piece is titled, “Transparent Things,” a reference to one of Nabokov’s final novels, also a reflection on memory.

Depictions of pages from books and journals figure heavily in Jones’ lexicon, another structure for the collection of images. A group of works in the show present illustrations of stone sculptures from the pages of the 1943 tome, Sculpture Today in Great Britain. In Jones’ renderings from the book, the black and white pages are awash in bright blue ink.

Jones’ recurring images often recall film stills, with some pictures tracing the arc of a flower’s form over time. While most works are more or less monochromatic, some pieces break with this structure, layering color into the image. “Still Life” depicts a glass of water set on a table, all in cool blue tones aside from two bright red cherry tomatoes lying on a white tablecloth. This overlay of color in areas within these monochromatic images brings to mind early film colorization in cinema, an attempt to make black and white footage appear more “real.”

As we move through Marker’s film, “Sans Soleil’s” narrator relays, “I’m writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility… A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector.”

Jones was born in 1985 in London and currently lives and works in Bexhill-on-Sea in the UK. Jones received an MA from the Royal College of Art in London and a BA from Falmouth College of Art in the UK. Solo exhibitions of Jones’ work have been organized by Herald St in London, Mai 36 in Zurich, South Parade in London, and The Artist Room in London. Jones’ work has been included in recent group shows including “The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain” at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester in the UK. Jones’s first monograph was published last year by Zolo Press in Brussels.

For more information and images, please contact the gallery at office@overduinandco.com. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 5pm and by appointment.


Poppy Jones: Sans Soleil

Overduin & Co.

Kurt, half conscious, performs a song on platform stage. His movements are puppeted by two gimps in denim suits*

Kert is nekid belaw staich

Kert is pul tup antu sait af platform bai kimbz

Kert is chrezd pei kimbz

Kert is pul tang tu cher ang staich

Kert is hangtut kitar

Uh kikered is plezd intu Kerts mauth

Kimbz lait kikered for Kert

Kert achutz th’ nops ang th’ amp wedh helb vrum kimbz

Wung kimbz asizd Kert ang sitring up ing cher wedh kitar

Thi uthor kimb wogz tu thi smol rum ang plux ing kitar bedl

Bag ang th’ staich, Kert bikingz streging sinkl kordz ang th’ kitar

Ing smol rum, kimb bresis ang tibresis kitar bedl

Kert bikings sinking intu meikrofon

This tre akshungs meik up th’ performungs

This kontinuus vor a waid


(*“I’ll start this off without any words.”)


__________________________________________________ 

Work by Matthew McGaughey has been included in recent group exhibitions and performances such as Haunting House (Departure Lounge, Los Angeles, 2024), Erotic Codex (Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, 2024), Collapse All Windows and Exit (1258 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles, 2024), Untitled Affairs (Miller ICA, Pittsburgh, 2022), In the Company of Men (Platform Gallery, Pittsburgh, 2020), 18-Wheeler Platform Shoes (Melwood Gallery, Pittsburgh, 2019), and Gloria! (Melwood Gallery, Pittsburgh, 2019).

Matthew’s commercial work as a composer includes Criminal Confessions (Oxygen, 2016–2019), American Horror Story (FX, 2014), The Last Ship (TNT, 2014–2015), Cold Case Files (Oxygen, 2014–2019), Project Runway (Bravo, 2004–2019), Top Chef (Bravo, 2004–2019), and The Real Housewives franchise (Bravo, 2004–2020).

Since 2020, Matthew has been awarded the William S. Dietrich II Presidential Fellowship (2021), ASCAP Screen Music Awards (2021–2023), a Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture nomination (2021), a GuSH Research Grant from Carnegie Mellon University (2021), the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier (2021). Matthew received a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, a PhD in Composition with a focus on extended performance practice and music technology from the University of York in 2004.

Image courtesy of the artist.

Matthew McGaughey: Staged

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary

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

Vanessa Conte: RIDE

Babst Gallery 

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

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

De Boer Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LET THERE BE GWAR

Beyond The Streets

The never-ending development of the hi-desert, that surrounds Dianne Bennett’s home, into suburbia creates a slow encroachment on the survival of indigenous species. It goes unnoticed day by day, but the stark difference in bird populations on a decade by decade comparison is horrendous. Bennett recognizes how the anthro-centric development resists any narrative of destruction of habitat and pushes back through her continued series of flora and fauna on hi-viz signage. The title of the show OMG life is suffering is a dry and satirizing play on the Buddhism mistranslation of dukkha, an ancient Pali word that has no direct translation into English, but is often misdirected to a narrative that implies suffering as a symptom of impermanence is a natural inherited state. When in fact, many Buddhist monks argue this acceptance is directed towards benign moments of dissatisfaction and not intended to be tolerant of systemic injustices.

The medium of hi-viz signage comes with its set of difficulties that Dianne Bennett takes head on utilizing high-contrast colors while allowing much of the sign to peep through the psychedelic imagery. Without any priming under-painting, she uses sgraffito techniques to create patterns and textures best seen in-person.

_____

Amidst times when faith and hope in democracy are at an all-time low, and communities, once united, are further broken down into their isolates, a solo exhibition of work by Dan Barry could not be any more timely. Barry is known for making open-ended narratives about the self as much as he is known for his political statements. However, the story that develops with this show is one intentionally reflecting the culmination of failures society has dredged upon us.

The never-ending development of the hi-desert, that surrounds Dianne Bennett’s home, into suburbia creates a slow encroachment on the survival of indigenous species. It goes unnoticed day by day, but the stark difference in bird populations on a decade by decade comparison is horrendous. Bennett recognizes how the anthro-centric development resists any narrative of destruction of habitat and pushes back through her continued series of flora and fauna on hi-viz signage. The title of the show OMG life is suffering is a dry and satirizing play on the Buddhism mistranslation of dukkha, an ancient Pali word that has no direct translation into English, but is often misdirected to a narrative that implies suffering as a symptom of impermanence is a natural inherited state. When in fact, many Buddhist monks argue this acceptance is directed towards benign moments of dissatisfaction and not intended to be tolerant of systemic injustices.


Dianne Bennett: OMG life is suffering | Dan Barry: There are Dangers

La Luz De Jesus Gallery

Drawing from Imperfectionism 
Curated by Alaïa Parhizi
Wonzimer Gallery, 341 S Avenue 17, Los Angeles 90031
Opening Reception: October 17th 5-10pm
Exhibition Dates: October 17th - November 7th 2025

Wonzimer Gallery is proud to present "Drawing from Imperfectionism," a group exhibition that stands as a philosophical counterpoint to our contemporary search for perfection. Curated by artist Alaïa Parhizi, this show is an ode to the beauty found in flaws, accidents, and the unique, irreplaceable nature of human creation.
The exhibition features a diverse collection of drawings, each a final work of art that embraces the principles of Imperfectionism. This movement, founded by Parhizi in 2014, challenges the anthropocentric belief that we can control our world and destiny. Instead, it finds grace in the humility of flawed forms—a philosophy that has deep roots in traditions from Japanese Wabi-Sabi to deliberate "mistakes" in Islamic art and the subconscious-driven accidents of Dada and Surrealism.
In an age where artificial intelligence and robotics can produce flawless outcomes and precise duplications, this exhibition reasserts the value of the human touch. The works on display are not a pursuit of a planned outcome but are a direct reflection where raw and expressive impulses guide the creative process. The artists free themselves from the old paradigms of suffering and traditional limitations, allowing for a creative process that is focused, liberated, and deeply personal.
The artworks in "Drawing from Imperfectionism" are a testament to the unique circumstances of each artist and serve as a "capsule of human consciousness" where premeditation is set aside. This is art that acknowledges the vulnerability of being human and finds the perfect vessel for our wayward and contradictory nature in the imperfect form.


Exhibiting Artists:
John Greer
James Caruso
Alaïa Parhizi
Cheyann Washington
Nick Taggart
Constantin Werner
Lucien Dante Lazar
Shilla Shakoori
Christine Weir
Joshua AM Ross
Nadege Monchera Baer
Brian Randolph
linn meyers
Serafina Harris
Iva Gueorguieva
Bryant Eugene Vazquez (BEV)
Ann Weber
Tim Hawkinson
David S. Rubin
Hiromi Nakatsugawa
Marta Thoma Hall
Retro 1999
Tom Dunn
Elías Hernández
Jorge Mujica
Kim Farbota
Ian Douglass
Lisa Lesniak
Ruby Vartan
Lino Bernabe Fernandez
Justin N. Kim
The Contaminator
Nena Amsler
Sebastian Loo
Scott Meskill
Tae Lee
Kelsey Overstreet
Caleb St Julian
Julia Nejman
Brittany Kiertzner (Arisawe)
Carole Silverstein
Vasco Del Rey
Theodore Svenningsen


Drawing From Imperfectionism

Wonzimer

LAUNCH Gallery is proud to present Temporary and Corporeal Aviaries featuring Los Angeles-based artists Eve Wood and Andre Yi and their fascination with birds. Andre Yi is a serious observer, meticulous recorder and true friend to many different bird species he has depicted in this new series of paintings and drawings. Eve Wood’s new series of paintings and drawings are focused on the antics of the raven while also presenting keen observations from its point of view.

In this newest body of work, Eve Wood presents us yet again with her titular raven, part prankster, part sage, but always one to comment on the current state of affairs. Wood uses the image of the raven as both a vehicle to reflect the artist’s own life narratives, conflicts and concerns while also speaking to a broader narrative of political unrest.  

"We are living in a very difficult socio-political moment in our history and it is true that the world may be ending, but you can be sure the raven will be present at every turn, providing, if not comfort, then sardonic commentary. There is a palpable tension in these drawings, a push/pull between humor and a darker more sinister impulse. These are echoes of a scream, residue from dreams, transformative and ever rupturing. While Wood’s opportunistic raven engage in mischief making, the humans in Wood’s work struggle for intimacy and connection, albeit at a high price. The raven, ever loquacious, ever shape-shifting, speaks both for and against us, revealing the absurdity of our all too humans wants and desires, fears and falsely constructed histories.” - E.W.

These new paintings and drawings by Andre Yi are born from thoughtful observations, fulfilling an artist’s responsibility to reflect and record our times. In the spring of 2023, following a long COVID winter, a unique sanctuary emerged from a swarm of American bushtits that had descended upon a manzanita bush outside his window.  

"For a few weeks, these tiny birds turned the home office into a temporary aviary, completely oblivious to the human eyes watching them from mere inches away. This unexpected, intimate encounter became the catalyst for a series of artworks that capture a complex and poignant reflection on our world.

The American bushtits in this exhibition are pensive, angry, and alert. The Manzanitas that surround them are covered in detritus from found materials in my studio. Perhaps these bushtits are what we see in America today. All of us, inhabiting an environment that is ever changing, buried, ruined by climate; maybe we understand the damage, our complicity, or maybe we deny our involvement, angry at those who would burden us with the responsibilities. This collection of work challenges us to see ourselves in the midst of this cluttered world and confront our relationship with it. 

Additionally, there are selected drawings from my sketchbook, a quiet celebration of beautiful, mysterious, and often endangered creatures. These drawings are a powerful reminder that we are not the sole inhabitants of this planet; we share it with countless other remarkable beings. They serve as a gentle yet profound plea to remember our shared existence and our responsibility to protect the fragile beauty around us." - A.Y.


About the Artists	
	
Eve Wood is both a distinguished critic and artist. She was represented for six years by Western Project and before that at Susanne Vielmetter; Los Angeles Projects. She is currently represented by Track 16. She has exhibited her work at numerous galleries and museums including The Riverside Museum of Art, Track 16, Angles Gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid in New York, The Huntington Beach Museum of Art, The Vincent Price Museum, The Western Carolina University Museum and The Weatherspoon Museum of Art, etc. Her work has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, Art & Cake, Artweek, Art Issues, The LA Weekly, Modern Painters, The OC Weekly, Art/US, THE Magazine and Art Press. Her art criticism has appeared in many 
magazines including Riot Material, Flash Art, Artnet.com, Art & Cake, Tema Celeste, Flavorpill, White Hot Magazine, Artillery, Art ltd. New York Arts, Angelino Magazine, Art Papers, Bridge, ArtUS, Artweek, Latin Arts.com, Art Review. She is also the author of five books of poetry published by university presses. In 2023 MOCA hosted the book launch for her Remarks on Color book published by Doppelhouse Press. A compilation of 4 of her poetry collections will also be published by Doppelhouse Press in the spring of 2026. A documentary entitled Unfurled about her life and work premiered at MOCA as well. 

Andre Yi was born in California and raised in Texas. After receiving his BFA from the University of Texas at Austin and his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, he returned to Los Angeles, California. Yi has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Berkeley, 
Miami, Dallas, St. Louis, Berlin, Amsterdam and Seoul. His work is included in the collection of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. He has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Weekly, Die Welt as well as numerous other publications.

LAUNCH LA believes exposure to the arts enhances quality of life and strengthens community for all through the shared appreciation of creative expression in all its forms and hybrids. LAUNCH LA is passionate about providing all artists regardless of background, race, color, creed or sexual orientation with quality opportunities to present themselves and their creations that reflect our times to curious and enthusiastic audiences at our Gallery and at important happenings throughout Los Angeles County.

Eve Wood & Andre Yi: Temporary and Corporeal Aviaries

LAUNCH LA

KP Projects is honored to present a new body of work by Jeff Soto, titled Shadow, marking a pivotal moment in the artist’s evolving practice. Known for his vivid palette, surreal iconography, and evocative narratives, Soto continues to merge elements of personal mythology, street culture, and natural symbolism. 

The exhibition introduces works that span large-scale multi-panel paintings to intimate studies on wood. Through his use of layered acrylics and oils, Soto creates dreamlike worlds that speak to cycles of decay and renewal, the passage of time, and the coexistence of beauty and fragility. 

With Shadow, the artist explores the tradition of still painting to reflect on our turbulent present and the lingering weight of the past.

"Following my 2023 exhibition Sadlands, which explored technology and the future through landscape, Shadow moves indoors and looks inward with still lifes, one of painting’s oldest genres. Everyday objects, taxidermy, cacti and houseplants, along with artifacts from analog culture, books, records, and polaroid pictures, are reimagined as vessels of memory and meaning. Some items are based on reality, others imagined entirely. Each painting is a kind of time capsule, balancing presence and loss.

Unlike the symbols of wealth often found in historical still life paintings (goblets, jewels, exotic fruits), these works embrace the ordinary and the ghostly. They call back to the things that shaped my generation, the media that imprinted on us, the objects we live with daily, and the shadows of experiences and people long past.

Still life painting has always fascinated me; I teach painting, and I’ve spent years setting up still lifes for students. I enjoy the play of light and shadow, texture and color. These are objects that tell my narrative while hopefully leaving space for viewers to find their own. The works ask viewers to slow down, sit with details, and find their own stories contained in each object.

The title Shadow carries multiple meanings. Shadows are obscure, but they also give form through light. They speak to absence as well as presence. In the paintings, shadow becomes metaphor for the uncertainty of our times, for memory itself, and for the way history lives in the objects we keep.”

- Jeff Soto

Jeff Soto: Shadow

KP Projects

Sidecar, in collaboration with Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York, presents Drawing Room—a two-person exhibition featuring new work by Josh Callaghan and Elizabeth Schwaiger. This marks Callaghan’s fourth exhibition with the gallery and Schwaiger’s first.

Elizabeth Schwaiger’s emphatic paintings and Josh Callaghan’s frenetic sculptures transform the gallery into a drawn room. The voluminous gestures of Schwaiger’s studio portraits create an illusory depth that extends beyond the frame. At the same time, Callaghan’s steel tubes delineate the negative space, lending them the appearance of three-dimensional doodles. Tracing marks and impressions left by forces come and gone, their works give form to the absence of presence.

Painting from archival images of artist studios belonging to artists such as Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, Schwaiger paints rooms poised between creativity and entropy. Her thick, energetic brushstrokes, scrawling gestures, and hueful smears animate the unoccupied interior spaces. Material objects—like canvases, easels, books, stools, and desks—are infused with the intensity and vitality of living entities. Layers of incandescent colors, harmonized in perfect tonal balance, produce a sense of depth and complexity.

In Verdigris 2025, lush, leafy houseplants overtake the manmade environment, visualizing a generative force tipping toward chaos and destruction. Expressive lines loose from representation render the scene abstract and uncanny. This distinction becomes even more pronounced when contrasted with the more figurative portrait of Pablo Picasso’s crowded studio in There Is Nowhere To Remain 2025. Through studios as subject, Schwaiger paints narrative—a sort of alternative portrait of each artist. 

While the pictorial content suggests the existence of the studio’s stewards, the physical quality of the mark-making captures the movements and machinations of the artist herself. Inexhaustible, Schwaiger's paintings appear to continue developing as you look, illuminating the ongoing mystery of the creative process.

A similar dynamism animates Callaghan’s sculptures, crafted from deftly manipulated steel with which the artist seems to dance. It’s easy to imagine one of Schwaiger's quivering painted lines escaping the two-dimensional plane and refashioning itself as one of his twisting metallic forms. Using a vice and a hand bender, Callaghan torques tubing before plating it in brass, chrome, or black nickel. The physicality of the process is preserved in the kinks, twists, and acute angles. These sculptures not only delineate shapes in space but trace the artist’s formal application of force and finesse. Elements such as direction, contour, velocity, and stress afford the industrial material a seemingly organic lifeforce.

By adding chair glides or flag pole finials to the ends of the tubes, Callaghan introduces an additional layer of cultural context and offers the viewer an entry point. The sprawling legs in Cursive Spider Chair 2025 recall daydreaming during homeroom, while Executive Display Structure poses questions about the forces conspiring to distort or deform our nation. In works like Cursive Faun Chair 2025, the functional objects are subsumed by lilting, lyrical gestures that appear on the verge of escaping the constraints of materiality and representation—invoking experiences more akin to music or sudden surges of emotion. 

Both Callaghan and Schwaiger imbue their work with what the philosopher Jacques Derrida might refer to as ‘trace’ or the presence of absence; in this context, that truth which transcends the visible, be it paint or plated steel. 

-Tara Anne Dalbow

Elizabeth Schwaiger (b. 1985, Texas) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received an MFA from Glasgow School of Art and a BA from the University of North Texas. She was a 2019 artist in residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. Schwaiger’s painting practice is occupied by a deep fascination with the internal versus the external, and the way in which these boundaries blur within the body, space and time. The interior is often a starting point for Schwaiger. An abandoned household, quiet museum aisle or overflowing artist studio, the spaces she depicts invoke both the material and the ethereal. Energy is a central theme in her practice, which continually explores questions of womanhood, ecology, and the creative and destructive powers of Mother Nature. Expressive brushstrokes of watercolor, acrylic, ink and oil converge on the canvas to create rich compositions. Monochromatic palettes counterbalance this effervescence, completing Schwaiger’s atmospheric worlds in harmonious hues. Solo exhibitions include Now & Now & Now, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2024); Pressing Shadows, Gana Art, Seoul (2023); From the Dark Sea, Jane Lombard, New York (2021) and Darkening Warmth, Co-Lab Projects, Austin, Texas (2020). Group exhibitions include The Selves, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2024); Uncanny Interiors, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Unheimlich, Anthem Gallery, San Antonio, TX (2018) and Mystery Portrait Gala, The National Portrait Gallery, London (2017).

Josh Callaghan (b. 1969, Doylestown, PA) holds an MFA in New Genres from the University of California, Los Angeles and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of North Carolina Asheville and is a Fulbright Scholar (Nepal). He has exhibited widely, and produced numerous public projects internationally. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Image: Elizabeth Schwaiger, Linger On, 2025, oil, acrylic, and ink on linen, 54 x 54 in (137.2 x 137.2 cm)

Josh Callaghan and Elizabeth Schwaiger: Drawing Room

Sidecar

a BEAST gallery is pleased to present ‘the mud — the sky, and the 395’, a two-person collaborative exhibition featuring new works by Wyatt Mills and Zak Christensen. The show draws on a long familiarity with California’s Eastern Sierra, where memory and landscape fold into one adjoining concept. Along Highway 395, the sky is imposing, pressing against the long expanse of shifting granite, revealing a territory that is richly verdant yet deeply primeval. Reminiscent of creation itself, this elemental terrain becomes both origin and echo, a place where mud grants humanity the power to build while quietly reminding us it will always return to itself.

‘the mud – the sky, and the 395’ opens with a reception on Saturday, October 4, from 6–9 PM at la BEAST gallery in Cypress Park. The exhibition will remain on view through November 8.

Please email info@labeastgallery.com for more information

the mud – the sky, and the 395

la BEAST Gallery

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

Tess Jenkins: Thank You Universe, May I Delight You

DON’T LOOK Projects

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

In Conversation TBA: Please join Patricia Sweetow & Jamie Vasta for an insightful conversation into the development of  House of Roses!

_____

Event: Saturday, November 1 at 2:00 pm
In Conversation: The Weaving of an Icon, John Paul Morabito and Patricia Sweetow

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.

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

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

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

 Eric Nash

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

Venice Public Art Walls, Venice, CA
Free admission

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

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

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

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

Attendees must bring their own smartphone or tablet.

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

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

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


AR OPEN LA

AR Open @ Venice Public Art Walls

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

AR OPEN Augmented Reality Exhibition

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

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

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

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.