The Artists Gallery celebrates photography during the Black & White Captures of the World exhibition, running from January 8-24, 2025. Please join us at the opening reception on January 11th from 5-8 pm. 

The curators, Eric Renard and Gigi Chung, both fine art photographers, examined hundreds of images from all genres of photography for this exclusive exhibition.  “We showcase some of today’s best photographers from across the globe” said Renard about the exhibition “and it gives a real sense of where fine art photography is today from all parts of the world”. Photographs were submitted from Argentine, Belgium, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the UK and across the United States. Approximately 40 photographs were selected for the exhibition.

Black and white photography is an aesthetic that simplifies, enhances, describes truth at its essence. The Captures of the World photography exhibition shows the diversity of place, and yet by the commonality of medium and human existence,  reveals similarities across diversities. We are eternally fascinated by who we are, how and where others live, how we are different and how we are the same.

Black & White Captures of the World

The Artists' Gallery (TAG)

Nonaka-Hill opens Jiro Nagase’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles on Saturday, November 23 from 6 to 8pm. Jiro Nagase continues his in depth material exploration of aluminum. Chairs, lamps, vessels, architectural elements, analog musical instruments all realized in matte polished aluminum create a catalog of living sculpture, equally ready for functional deployment or aesthetic pleasure. For years Nagase has studied Siberian folk music and the mechanism of musical instruments leading to his production of sound machines RM-2024 and EG-01. Performances will be held by the artist on opening night and on Saturday, December 7th


Jiro Nagase

Nonaka-Hill | Highland

After the amazing unveiling of Dinosaur at the High Line in New York, Iván Argote is continuing his reflection about public space and the use of monuments. His seventh show with Perrotin, Impermanent showcases the artist’s humorous yet incisive interventions in which public fixtures such as statues and obelisks, rather than functioning as enduring symbols of power and conquest, are alternately displaced, deconstructed, rendered invisible, or recontextualized.

Opening Talk:
Iván Argote & Leslie Hewitt in conversation with Hamza Walker
Saturday, November 16, 4pm
5040 West Pico Blvd

____

Perrotin Los Angeles is pleased to present artist Leslie Hewitt’s solo presentation New Waves. For her fifth show with Perrotin, and her first exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery, Hewitt brings together a selection of her acclaimed still life photographs, and places them in conversation with two other powerful works: a floor sculpture that pays homage to the lost outlines of everyday spaces and ancestral sites submerged by systematic oppression, eminent domain, and other forces often collapsing within anti-blackness; and a collaboration with artist Jamal Cyrus that functions as an open-ended event score. Taken together, these distinct bodies of work speak to the intersection of ordinary objects, lived spaces, and material associations as they exist within the larger context of social and political histories.

Iván Argote: Impermanent | Leslie Hewitt: New Waves

Perrotin

On Saturday, January 18th at 6 PM, Assemblage artist Tom Tomlinson presents twenty-nine works at The LMF Gallery.  He reminds us that lives, institutions, and societies are supple constructions that can be understood and valued in the service of a difference in self, a new aesthetic, and a novel social re-ordering.

CURATED BY : Xrstine Franco

Tom Tomlinson: Gather up the fragments

The LMF Gallery & Darkroom

Gana Art LA is pleased to present the group exhibition How The Trees See The Stars. This gathering of artists illuminates visionary ways of seeing the world. The artists in this show explore our connection to nature, human- animal symbiosis, otherworldly landscapes, cosmic curiosity, and enigmatic mystical forms. Hypnotic, enchanted visual experiences are alive in works that evoke an animistic sense of life force that permeates all things.

Caris Reid (b. 1983) captures the ethereal in a pair of peacocks, adorned with intricate details in a lush landscape brimming with flowers beneath a star-studded sky. The majestic birds serve as intermediaries between the terrestrial and the celestial, becoming vessels to mine the spiritual and contemplative potential of painting.

Sarah Alice Moran’s (b. 1982) paintings offer a poetic, allegorical investigation of animal symbolism and feminine power. Her Red Knight is an atmospheric dream of a sword-wielding rider on a zebra, and her Star Gazer explores the tigress archetype in a star-dazzled nocturnal scene.

Ben Sanders’s (b. 1989) luminous canvases with meticulous paint handling suggest a hybridization of the botanical and the cosmic. His enigmatic forms evoke a familiar connection to nature, yet with a sci-fi or psychedelic otherworldliness, emitting an enchanted glow.

Andrew Schoultz (b. 1975) employs meditative, repetitive linework in vibrational optical paintings that pulse with energy. His depictions of owls, snakes, trees, and landscapes, informed by esoteric knowledge, provide a distinct and thrilling visual experience.

Hiejin Yoo’s (b. 1987) transforms personal records of daily life into paintings. Mundane events and experiences, selected according to the artist’s intention, unfold into semi-figurative paintings. Layers of starry sky, grass, and foliage merge in an interplay of shadow and light as the hands seem to weave an alternate reality.

Ross Simonini (b. 1981) presents joyous, hallucinatory scenes, incorporating sigils and eccentric techniques— such as painting with his foot rather than his hand —to propose art as a spiritual and mystical practice. Through an alchemy of life-source materials, egg tempera, and casein milk paint, his works breathe with an animistic energy.

Ceramicist Jude Pauli (b. 1971) stacks geometric forms into towering totemic sculptures, combining stoneware and steel. Like otherworldly figures, her sculptures also evoke an ancient enigmatic language like petroglyphs. The alchemy of earthy materials in her works suggest a living consciousness embedded within earth, stone, and clay.

Aaron Johnson (b. 1975) uses a color field stain technique, embracing paint’s fluid and unpredictable nature. This action-reaction process treats paint like a force of nature, revealing encounters with ethereal nature spirits, glowing from within with orbs of color and light.

This exhibition was curated by Aaron Johnson, in collaboration with Gana Art. Exhibition opens November 23rd and runs through January 5th.


How The Trees See The Stars

Gana Art Los Angeles

Unveil Gallery presents A Clover and One Bee, a group exhibition opening on January 11th, 2025, featuring an eclectic collection of contemporary works by five innovative artists: Lauren Goldenberg Longoria, Greg Eberhardt, Alex Paik, Mimi, Jiang Xiaohan and Sebastian Loo. The exhibition draws inspiration from the interconnectedness of all things, where the subtle moments between disparate forms, materials, and emotions converge into something greater than the sum of their parts.

The title A Clover and One Bee references the delicate balance between the finite and the infinite, the ephemeral and the enduring. It speaks to the magical interplay between chance encounters, fleeting beauty, and the weight of personal transformation. Each participating artist explores this theme through distinct mediums and methodologies, creating an exhibition that invites reflection on memory, identity, and the flow of time.

The exhibition draws its inspiration from Emily Dickinson’s poetic phrase “a clover and one bee”, a metaphor that captures the symbiosis of simplicity and imagination. In this context, the show explores the deeply personal relationship between artists and their creative practices, emphasizing the ways in which art becomes a source of sustenance, emotional release, and introspection.

Image: Alex Paik. Image courtesy of the artist. 

A Clover and One Bee

Unveil Gallery

David Zwirner is pleased to present The Last Dyes, an exhibition of new dye-transfer prints by William Eggleston opening at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Eggleston pioneered the use of dye-transfer printing for art photography in the 1970s, and—as the title suggests—these photographs will be the final prints ever made of Eggleston’s images using this analog process. The presentation itself constitutes the last major group of photographs ever to be produced using this printing method, making it a unique opportunity to see a number of works by Eggleston in the format in which he originally presented them. The works on view are from Eggleston’s celebrated Outlands and Chromes series, as well as several images that were first shown in the artist’s groundbreaking exhibition of color photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976, and the concurrent publication William Eggleston’s Guide. William Eggleston: The Last Dyes is presented as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a landmark regional event exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty.

Image: William Eggleston, Untitled, 1970 (detail)


William Eggleston: The Last Dyes 

David Zwirner | Los Angeles

The Crossroads Project (Part 1)

Featuring:
Aviante
Dallin L. Moe
Jacquelin Nagel

Curated by Julia Smith and Linda Jo Russell of Range Projects Gallery

January 11 th – February 1, 2025

Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 11 th , 5 – 8pm

LAUNCH Gallery
170 S. La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Launch LA and Range Projects are proud to present six new artists in a cultural collaboration. The Crossroads Project brings together artists and galleries from diverse neighborhoods to explore shared artistic themes and vision. This originative event aims to foster collaboration, open new dialogs and introduce fresh ideas from unique perspectives.

Launch Gallery will present the works of three emerging artists; Jacqueline Nagel, Dallin L. Moe and Aviante curated by Julia Smith and Linda Jo Russell of Range Projects Gallery located on Slauson Avenue in the Park Mesa Heights/Crenshaw District neighborhood of Los Angeles. 

Jacquelin Nagel's artistic painting style derives mostly from intuition and is deeply intertwined with her background in floristry and the practice of Ikebana, the traditional art of flower arranging. This influence is largely reflected in her use of form, balance and strong negative space. For Nagel, the symbolic meaning of flowers represents both life and death, but more generally, the concept of growth. She finds growth to be a beautiful process but acknowledges it often brings about disturbing and disquieting emotions. She is interested in how these inner thoughts infringe on reality. Floral elements in her work, accompanied by human body fragments, reach for light, grasping for enlightenment as they swirl and flow over the canvas in a sea of darkness.

Dallin Moe's recent paintings on wood panel embody ideas of growth and transformation. They capture the essence of those awkward, liminal phases in a life where the familiar past is left behind and the future remains uncertain. Each painting is a visual memoir of what it means to persist through the unknown. Moe describes this stage of creation as trudging "on a field of thorns and faith" In style and content, each piece reflects an emotion, a snapshot, of Moe's own "wanderings and experimentations." They reveal vulnerability but celebrate the discomfort and the joys of self-discovery and growth.

Aviante’s new paintings are inspired by the brilliance of black culture as he explores themes of identity, resilience, transformation and, essentially, the light within us all. Informed by his own nature to balance quiet reflection and vibrant social interaction, he explores both the "mundane and the monumental moments of life." Aviante symbolizes inner strength and radiance as he carefully selects a palette that evokes light along with colors that ignite powerful and meaningful emotions.

About the artists:
Aviante’s story is one of resilience, transformation, and the relentless pursuit of self-betterment. Born in Wisconsin in 1995 and raised in a single-parent household, he grew up with an intimate understanding of adversity. From an early age, art became his sanctuary—a way to navigate life’s complexities and give voice to emotions words could not capture. His journey has been shaped by a tireless commitment to self-development, often rising above moments of self-doubt by channeling his struggles into creativity. A pivotal chapter began when Aviante relocated to Los Angeles, CA, where he embraced the unknown and unearthed his artistic identity. Balancing his ambivert nature, he thrives in the fluid space between quiet reflection and vibrant social connection, allowing both to inform his work.

My name is Dallin L. Moe and I am an artist based in Southern California. I received my BFA from Otis College of Art and Design. I create artwork to connect and inspire. Art has a unique position in our society to pierce deeper into our hearts, minds, and souls than we typically allow. I exalt this aspect of art because it is more often below the surface level where we find connection and insight. The artwork I create is often to help me connect with myself or to process thoughts and emotions, but I have found that occasionally others have a similar experience in engaging with my work and this, to me, is invaluable. To emphasize this phenomena I do my best to work from a place of vulnerability, encouraging those who engage with my work to do the same. I use a variety of media but I gravitate to painting because the emphasis on color, over form or texture, is most associated with emotion. Art has brought so much depth, personal development, and richness to my life I really just want others to experience that as well.

Jacquelin Nagel received her BA from Loyola Marymount University and her MFA from Laguna College of Art and Design. She has been drawing and painting since childhood. She takes advantage of the relationship between drawing, painting, and photography to explore a surreal world of photo- based figurative works. She often uses a collage like approach to help piece together her own world. She utilizes a glazing technique used by the Old Masters to give her paintings a high level of luminosity and saturation. Her work uses the figure to convey metaphors that help her to be at peace with who she is and what she has experienced.

About Range Projects - Founded with a vision by seasoned educator and artist Linda Jo Russell, and guided by the passionate activism of Executive Director Julia Smith, Range Gallery emerges as a beacon of artistic exploration in the heart of South Los Angeles. Range Gallery celebrates the convergence of the avant-garde and boundless creativity. Linda Jo, with over three decades of art education experience, has crafted a space that resonates with the diverse voices of underrepresented, emerging, and mid-career artists from various backgrounds. The gallery stands as a testament to the profound impact of contemporary art on our cultural landscape. Executive Director Julia Smith, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and a dedicated advocate for social change, channels her activism into curating a space where art transcends boundaries. The gallery, situated in the Park Mesa Heights Community and Crenshaw District, becomes a vibrant canvas for artists to express their narratives, making a lasting impact on the community.

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.

The Crossroads Project (Part 1)

LAUNCH LA

One day during my meditation practice, a nature-spirit came to me, laughing like the wind and completely ephemeral in shape and color. Her image keeps morphing in front of my eyes, and I cannot see her clearly. I ask her “show me your face” and she shows me two eyes, and then, two thousand. She showed me systems in which everything flowed into each other. It was the most beautiful and terrifying thing I have ever seen.

- Yukine Yanagi, 2024

 
parrasch heijnen is pleased to present Yukine Yanagi: Silent Sonata, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Yukine Yanagi (b. 1998, Tokyo, Japan) is a painter of psychological and spiritual landscapes. Drawn to the depiction of the existential and deeply personal meanings of life observed in and via nature, Yanagi reflects on themes of hope within the coexisting and contradicting forces of absence and presence, wonder and terror, and yearning and detachment.

Influenced by Eastern philosophy and spirituality, as well as the conceptual lineage of the German Romantic movement, Yanagi’s abstract language of organic mark-making alludes to the figurative while conveying symbolic representations of emotions suspended in time. As she explores bodily awareness and nature’s elemental constructions, she plays with scale to seek an understanding of our human connection with the souls of the natural world and the responsibilities that come with this innate coexistence.

In this new body of work, the self is completely dissolved into abstracted landscapes, each containing primal forces of unique personalities and desires. Interested in painting’s alchemical properties of optics, color, and tactility, the artist often uses her hands to sculpt out or to erase the paint until the presence of the image is achieved and life is given to the subject. In A Persistence of Growth, 2024, the landscape is a harmonious ecosystem of layered colors depicting organic systems, natural phenomena, and busy networks suspended in a convergence of ground and sky; Yanagi’s constant search for, and excavation of, hope is represented in paint through the action of reaching into the unknown, as seen in Face to Face, 2024.

“It is that energy and that life force that I search for within the work, a visceral kind of confrontation. It is energy contained, spewed out, an emblem of hope, of searching within a process of anxiety and uncertainty, and arriving at something beautiful, passed from me to the viewer,” Yanagi explains.

Yukine Yanagi, a Chinese-Japanese artist, has continued to live and work in Rhode Island after receiving her BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) in 2020. In 2023, Yanagi presented her first solo exhibition, The Ultraviolet Principle, at G/ART/EN Gallery in Como, Italy. Group exhibitions include: Analog Diary, Beacon, NY (2024); Latitude Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Apt13 Gallery, Providence, RI (2023); and SPY Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2023), among others. She teaches at Rhode Island School of Design.

Yukine Yanagi: Silent Sonata will be on view at parrasch heijnen, 1326 S. Boyle Avenue, Los Angeles, from January 11 - February 1, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 11 from 6-8p. Gallery staff are available to guide you through our exhibitions virtually via Zoom upon request. For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 (323) 943-9373 or info@parraschheijnen.com.

Yukine Yanagi: Silent Sonata

parrasch heijnen

David Zwirner is pleased to present Pearl Lines, the gallery’s first exhibition with Brooklyn-based artist Walter Price since the announcement of his representation earlier this year. Marking Price’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Pearl Lines will include paintings from a new body of work that feature recurring motifs from his characteristic visual domain.

Price is known for his richly vibrant paintings and drawings, which bypass strict allegiances to representational or abstract modes. In his work, the artist sensitively employs an idiom of motifs that traverse the real world and the dream world, memory and collective history. Price’s paintings and works on paper not only experiment freely with color, line, and space but also reveal emphatic shifts in perspective, suggesting scenes and imagery that the artist ultimately leaves for viewers to absorb and contemplate on their own. He has given the title Pearl Lines to the majority of his solo presentations, suggesting that each exhibition expands beyond the confines of its own time and place, becoming part of a larger body of work.

In this Los Angeles presentation, Price pays homage to car culture, with its particular relationship to the city and its environs. Across his canvases, sleek automobiles are stamped into rows of busy traffic or delineated by the artist’s hand, their forms splintered and spectral. Trodden footsteps on surfaces bring to mind a foot on the gas pedal. Alternatively, they register a leisurely stroll or a labored gait. The vehicles are at times shrouded in billowing clouds of scumbled paint, other opalescent penumbrae, and showers of dancing stars. The shapes evoke further poetic links with Los Angeles’s other famous exports: Hollywood, its cast of personalities, and its production of artifice.

In Pearl Lines, Price merges points of view while playing with spatial depth. Overstuffed armchairs, contoured by the artist’s signature staccato lines, appear as ghosts from another world. The silhouettes of faces in profile conjure up headshots of enigmatic figures in the shadows. Scarlet flames lick nothing in particular, perhaps suggesting the aftermath of a car accident. A splash of red-orange paint overwhelms a canvas, recalling sunsets on the Pacific Ocean as seen from the freeway. 

These warm reds contrast sharply with the prominent blue palette featured in many of these works. Price mines the color’s multitude of timeless and timely associations, invoking such quixotic historical connections in Western art as early cyanotypes, International Klein Blue, artists’ blue periods, and the Virgin Mary’s mantle. The color summons a range of emotional responses like sadness and gloom, peace and calm, while also encompassing its applications in society and its appearance in nature. The obscenities and profanities of blue language. The potent hue of indigo dye. The azure of skies and the aquamarine of seas. The navy blue of the military. The blue-versus-red of conflicting political factions.

Price stretches and expands the bounds of blue as he layers, speckles, and scrapes the color onto his canvases in unorthodox applications, merging and abstracting its symbolism as well as its use in language. The artist quotes an observation from On Being Blue (1976) by the novelist and critic William H. Gass, who writes of the color:

"So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that. A single word, a single thought, a single thing, as Plato taught. We cover our concepts, like fish, with clouds of net. Cops and bobbies wear blue. We catch them and connect. Imagined origins reduce the sounds of clash and contradiction, as when one cries out blue murder in the street."

1  William H. Gass, On Being Blue (1976; repr., New York: New York Review of Books, 2014), p. 7.

Image: Walter Price, Both addicted and trapped, 2024. © Walter Price. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Walter Price: Pearl Lines

Eight person exhibition at La Luz de Jesus. 

Douglas Cason: Visible Damage | Annette Hassell | Myah London-Harwell | Dion Macellari | Heath Quiel | Juri Umagami:The Beginning of the End

La Luz De Jesus Gallery


NOON Projects is honored to present "Slow Opening" by Jay Stern, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This new body of work unveils a series of expressive, layered oil paintings that explore the intricate relationship between memory, time, and transformation. "Slow Opening" invites viewers into a space that feels both familiar and distant, capturing ephemeral moments of transition and quiet introspection. Much like memory, Stern assembles his compositions from fragmented elements into expansive forms, employing directional light to subtly evoke the emotion arising from the fleeting nature of information over time. The exhibition title reflects Stern’s fascination with the hidden layers of activity within what is considered 'still,' and the slow, unfolding blooms that emerge from looking.

Through rapid brushwork and built layering, Stern’s paintings balance domestic intimacy with the rawness of nature. He seeks to capture these instants just before the relentless tide of life carries them from the present into the past. Stern’s work meditates on the generosity of time, a concept symbolized through imagery of flowers and landscapes, and echoed in the words of curator Hilton Als: “Time can be very cruel, but it can also be very generous to artists who are paying attention.” The works urge viewers to appreciate the quiet beauty and respect the active nuances of daily life often overlooked, while emphasizing the majesty and conflict of each passing moment and encouraging reflection on how our identities are shaped by both presence and absence. 

Since moving to Maine in 2021, Stern has been inspired by the region’s landscapes and rich artistic history, while maintaining a conscious distance from idealized reverence or sentimental representation. Interested in presenting nature in a pure way, works like Roofline Sunset, Kezar Lake and Desire Destination find Stern making a deeper connection between man-made objects that often inform nature’s fluid sensibilities. This evolving queer perspective fosters a unique form of voyeurism that goes beyond the ordinary, shedding light on and celebrating the aspects of his surroundings that Stern finds most captivating. "Slow Opening" reflects Stern’s belief that memory, much like his paintings, is not a fixed point but a living, evolving entity—always in the process of becoming, reshaped by time, perception, and the quiet moments of transformation.

"Slow Opening" will be on view at NOON Projects from December 13, 2024, to January 25, 2025, with an opening reception on December 13, 2024, from 6–9 PM.

For more information email info@noon-projects.com or call +1-971-341-6648

Jay Stern: Slow Opening

NOON Projects

Why do we love things that bear a glow of grime? Why are some so intensely somatic in their effect on us? As Jun'ichiro Tanizaki describes in his 1933 essay, In Praise of Shadows, we love that which is marked with "soot and weather, things that bespeak a sheen of antiquity that call to mind the past that made them." 1‍

Attuned to the thingness of things, Kati Kirsch envisions a vital materiality through which the experience of loss is conjured through surreal fragmentation—where cinders become unsettled, flickering with a suspicious nostalgia. Kirsch's paintings and ceramics often begin as meditations on found and familiar objects. A tender, playful sense of care is garnered in Kirsch's interest in didactic ephemera, embedded in the seemingly frivolous, ornate details and whimsical designs of found paper goods such as a bridge tally card, a children's how-to book, illustrated calendar cards, rose-contoured bookmarks.

These are objects that wear their purpose on their sleeves, organizational tools and emblems of "progress," instructing with a particular logic, which Kirsch relentlessly warps, teases, unravels. Her practice is alive with the residue of this process. A tattered towel, a pencil pouch, a weekly calendar: these are not afterthoughts but anchors, markers of a method that privileges the ordinary and insists on an inner vitality. In the compositions that emerge in this space, this process, a keepsake becomes a question, an object for meditation, an immanent thing that speaks, its “decorative” details bridging the timeless and urgent.

Hinting at multiple realms of interiority in the painting School zone Company Alphabet flashcards - the letter q (2024), a head peaks out of a checkered quilt, its translucent geometry revealing a strange infrastructure beneath, an intestinal jumble, warm and pulsating, illuminated by a rosy glow. Gridded motifs function as permeable, structural topographies bridging the seen and unseen, an interplay unfolding further in Days of the week (2024) in which an uncanny index of temporality is recorded on found flashcards and craft paper, resulting in a compartmentalized imagining of temporality.

Informed by a keen sense of materiality, Kirsch gathers both found and self-fabricated media into assemblages that feel both broken and reborn—shattered, unstitched, and veiled by molten patinas. Her work recalls the layered intricacy of a paper accordion doll—terrains of infinite depth emerge, inhabited by overlapping figures yearning to unfurl. These teeming, immanent forms resist the pull toward tidy resolution, offering compositions that remain, instead, elaborately intractable.

– Lauren Guilford


Kati Kirsch (b. 1999, Washington, D.C.) lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, in 2022. Solo and two-person exhibitions: “Paper Goods,” Cheremoya, Los Angeles, 2024; “The Secret Life of Doubters” (two-person), Kaleidoscope, Brooklyn, 2024; “Wish Fulfillment Chart,” Bahnhof Gallery, New York (2023); “How Could it Be Once Wa”s (two-person), Pratt Institute, Brooklyn (2022). Selected group exhibitions: “Internet Personality Quiz,” Popgun, Brooklyn (2024); “Angel Tech,” Gern en Regalia, New York (2024); “Growing Down,” Known Studio, Los Angeles (2024); “Museum of I Love You So Much,” Quarters Gallery, Los Angeles (2023). Exhibitions as curator: “Ice Cream House,” The Alcove, Brooklyn (2024); “Cold Email”, Osseous Matter (online) (2023); “Selective Attention Test,” Private location, Brooklyn (2022). She has been a Teaching Artist in Residence at The Oxbow School, Napa, CA (2024) and a guest lecturer in Professional Practices at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn (2024). Paper Goods is the artist’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast and her debut with Cheremoya.


1 Tanizaki, Jun'ichiro, In Praise of Shadows (1977): 11.

Kati Kirsch: Paper Goods

Cheremoya

A solo exhibition of collages, photographs, and paintings by Sarah Schumann (GER, 1933-2019), a Surrealist feminist artist who was based in Berlin until her death in 2019.

This presentation of significant works from 1959-1998 is Sarah Schumann’s inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles.

A figurative painter and collagist, Schumann drew on her personal life as a queer artist to create heroic depictions of women in post-war Europe. 

_____

An exhibition of selected photographs and works on paper created between 1972 - 1977 by iconic conceptual artist Eleanor Antin, depicting the artist in performance as her personae The Nurse, The Ballerina, and The King of Solana Beach.

Sarah Schumann: Shock and Beauty | Eleanor Antin: Persona

Diane Rosenstein Gallery

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Aristotle is a skeleton., an exhibition with one work by each of the gallery’s artists. The exhibition takes a series of adages by the American poet Wallace Stevens as a point of departure, of which the title is one.

Aristotle is a skeleton.

Moskowitz Bayse

Paul McCarthy is known for his wide-ranging and often provocative works, which encompass performance, photography, film, multimedia installations, sculpture, drawing and painting.

Whether absent or present, the human figure has been a constant in his work, either through the artist’s performances or the array of characters he creates to mix high and low culture and provoke an analysis of our fundamental beliefs. These playfully oversized characters and objects critique the worlds from which they are drawn: Hollywood, politics, philosophy, science, art, literature and television. McCarthy’s work, thus, locates the traumas lurking behind the stage set of the American Dream and identifies their counterparts in the art historical canon.

Tomato Head (1994), one of Paul McCarthy’s most important works from the 1990s, creates a life- size, cartoon-like figure that explores the relationship between modern culture, consumerism and innocence.

In this work, McCarthy plays out the allegories of a beloved and immediately recognizable cast of characters ranging from Santa Claus and Pinocchio to Mr. Potato Head and Popeye. Tomato Head (Green) (1994) is both a nomenclative and visual play on the children’s toy “Mr. Potato Head.” Developed in 1949, the original “Mr. Potato Head” was the first toy ever to be advertised on television and has remained popular even today. This post-war symbol of children’s entertainment symbolizes the beginning of a new consumer-driven era in America.

Much like “Mr. Potato Head,” Tomato Head (Green) has holes in place of eyes, nose, mouth and ears, where various pegs affixed with these human parts could be inserted randomly to give the figure different appendages or expressions. Unlike the toy, however, there are holes in its groin and anus where pegs could also be inserted. The work suggests an ability to construct gender identity: making these changes and substitutions allows the figure to play with potential self-iterations and explore all the possible identities available to it. However, even though the figure has several items at its disposal with which to auto-configure, these are a prefabricated, predetermined set. This limitation speaks to the restricted number of identities and lifestyle choices available to individuals in normative contemporary culture. Raw, visceral, and deeply disturbing, McCarthy’s work unmasks the vile, dysfunctional truth behind the American Dream. Through these twisted perversions of American cultural icons, McCarthy undermines a central theme of the American myth of equal opportunity–– the notion that one can realize oneself to the fullest degree regardless of origins and social status, is here invalidated through the message that society mandates one’s options of choice. Thus, the idea of freedom of choice is turned on its head.

Paul McCarthy: Tomato Head is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Post Human, and it is accompanied by drawings and sketches that allow audiences to discover the thought process behind one of McCarthy’s most significant artworks. The exhibition will also presentbehind present Wolf-Pig (2024), an AI-generated video work that shows McCarthy’s latest interest and experimentation with new technologies.

Paul McCarthy: Tomato Head

Jeffrey Deitch | Santa Monica

Sidecar is pleased to present An Artificial Place, a presentation of new and recent works by 2024 Guggenheim Fellow Won Ju Lim, organized in collaboration with Parapet, St. Louis. The artist’s career retrospective, curated by Rory Padeken, will open at the Denver Art Museum in 2026. At Sidecar, collaborative work with artist Matthew Brannon will also be on view.

The title of this exhibition sets the scene for the audience in a seemingly straightforward manner. Galleries, it reminds us, are unnatural places, reserved for artifice. But there is more to those words, which in fact derive from literature, specifically the writings of Marcel Proust. They are resumed inside via a series of “magic lanterns” that Won Ju Lim has produced over the past three years, and which form the bulk of this show. When their titles are read in sequence, the textual fragment is rounded out:  

That sense of the complexity of the Bois de Boulogne which made it an artificial place and, in the zoological or mythological sense of the word, a Garden, I captured again, this year, as I crossed it on my way to Trianon, on one of those mornings, early in November, when in Paris, if we stay indoors, being so near and yet prevented from witnessing the transformation scene of autumn, which is drawing so rapidly to a close without our assistance, we feel a regret for the fallen leaves that becomes a fever, and may even keep us awake at night.

This meandering sentence comes from the novel Swann’s Way (1913), the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. A monumental feat of remembrance, it looms large over the proceedings, plunging every work on view in the febrile uncertainty of the past tense. Arranged on gently rotating platforms are items of various sorts—handmade architectural models, hobby kit renditions of environmental details, and a wide assortment of domestic bric-a-brac gleaned from thrift-stores, swap meets, and estate sales—all pertaining to episodes from Proust’s grand adventure in introspection. Accordingly, one could say that these are things summoned from another time, infused with a mental atmosphere, perhaps mere figments of reverie. And yet, unlike the words that 

appear on the author’s pages and are so readily translatable into thought, these things constitute a phenomenal reality, available to our eyes here and now. Moreover, raked by the light of the small desk lamps at their side, they gain an uncanny sense of agency, projecting past their given form as shadows and reflections—images.

Also included is a new series of wall-hung works collectively titled Regained (2024) after the seventh and final volume of Lost Time, which are based on documentation of these objects in action. Every distinction between causal agents and their effects is here erased as the spatial depth of the source photographs compresses into delicately overlapping arrangements of colored shapes, screen-printed onto mirrored Plexiglas. At every step in this translation process, the Proustian point of origin grows more distant. That which initially took shape in perception, then memory, and then imagination was written down, was read, and was again memorized, reimagined. Words were congealed into objective sculptural forms, these subsequently captured by camera, and then reproduced as pictures beset by a whole host of remediations. What we see upon their surfaces is something from far away brought close, because the room we are in is there too, as are we, seeing ourselves seeing.  

In Casting II (2023), a 39-minute single-channel video also featured in the show, a voice-over narrator once again takes us to the novelistic scene of a garden. This work could be slotted into the “making of” category. In it, we observe Lim working on one of her shadow-play lightboxes, a genre she began exploring in 2003. An example hangs on the opposite wall, dominated by Man Ray’s famous portrait of Proust on his deathbed. One might wonder if he is still dreaming of his childhood; the video suggests as much. Throughout, the lights flicker on and off. At the extreme, a white screen suddenly turns black, but which is more full or empty from the perspective of memory? Hands move small objects across a tabletop stage where, caught up in a play of brightness and obscurity, they occasionally lock into virtual tableaux, only to again decompose into the stuff they actually are. In the drawn-out finale, which amounts to a kind of credit sequence, each “takes a bow.” These diverse things, already so steeped in memory and storytelling, double down on their illusionistic aspect, effectively representing “themselves” as imaginary entities, the flora and fauna of an artificial place.

—Jan Tumlir      

Won Ju Lim: An Artificial Place

Sidecar

Sebastian Gladstone is thrilled to present the first US solo exhibition of the Berlin-based artist Leon Eisermann at our Los Angeles gallery. The exhibition will open Saturday, January 4th with a reception from 6PM to 8PM, and be on view through February 8th, 2025.

Leon Eisermann: Bothered by the past, burdened by the future.

Sebastian Gladstone

The gallery at Keystone Art Space presents Creature(s &) Comforts, a group show curated by Kim Marra.

Featuring a diverse group of artists, this exhibition invites the viewer to reflect on the ways in which all living beings interact with the natural world in search for sanctuary, survival and companionship.

Through a variety of media including painting, sculpture and photography, Creature(s &) Comforts reflects on the different ways we all seek comfort - through the furnishings of our homes, time spent in nature or through our own imaginations. 

Considering the harmony between humans and the creatures that inspire us, from the earthly to the surreal, this exhibition will feature pieces that explore the contrast between the comforts of modern life and the beauty of the untamed.  

Creature(s &) Comforts celebrates the depth of human need alongside creatures of all kinds. It’s cozy, it’s colorful, it’s dark, it’s alien. It’s alive. 

Opens: February 1st, 2025, 5-9pm
Runs: February 1st - February 9th, 2025


Featuring:
Katie Berka
Gary Brewer
Zander Fieschko
Kim Marra
Samuelle Richardson
Mayra Villegas

Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 12pm - 5pm
For more information contact Kim Marra at kmarra03@gmail.com

*50% of artwork sales will be donated to Grief and Hope, raising money for artists who have been impacted by the Los Angeles wildfires. 


Creature(s &) Comforts

Keystone Gallery

"Robert Standish: "New Terrains, a solo exhibition by Robert Standish. 

Join us at MASH Gallery on February 1st to ring in the new year with an immersive experience like no other. Explore innovative art, connect with fellow creatives, and expand your horizons. This in-person event is your chance to discover new perspectives and be inspired by groundbreaking work. Don’t miss out on this exciting opportunity to delve into uncharted territories of creativity. See you there!"

Robert Standish: New Terrains

Mash Gallery

 Transience to the Infinite: A Scientific Exploration of Time and Space Curated by Cynthia Penna
Opening: 5 pm-10 pm, Friday January 17th 2025
Dates of Show: January 17th - February 14th 2025
Wonzimer Gallery
341-B S Avenue 17 Los Angeles 90031 / wonzimerinfo@gmail.com
Featuring: Bonita Helmer, Laddie John Dill, Ann Weber, Alaïa Parhizi, Max Coppeta, Todd Williamson, Khang Nguyen, Amedeo Sanzone, Nurit Avesar, Lisa Bartleson
Transience to the Infinite brings together a diverse group of ten artists whose works offer unique perspectives on the ephemeral nature of existence and the boundless possibilities of the universe.
In “God, Science, Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution”, Olivier Bonnassies, alongside Michel-Yves Bolloré, posits that contemporary scientific research inexorably points to the existence of a Creator God—an assertion that may seem provocative in the realm of empirical inquiry. The authors intertwine cosmology, physics, history, and theology in an ambitious attempt to bridge the oft- assumed divide between faith and reason. The premise is bold: "With the discovery of thermodynamics," they argue, "we learn that the universe is wearing down, heading toward thermal death. If the universe had a beginning... then there must be a God."
This concept hinges on three core scientific principles: first, the recognition that the universe is inextricably composed of time, space, and matter; second, the certainty that it had an absolute beginning; and third, that its fine-tuned laws seem almost tailored to allow for the emergence of complex life. With such findings, the authors claim that science itself defines what ancient philosophies and religions have long identified as God—a transcendent, external force that crafted the universe, ultimately allowing for human existence.
Yet, despite these weighty claims, the exhibition tied to this discourse does not seek to validate or refute the existence of such a divine entity. Rather, it aims to explore the nuanced intersection between human experience, daily struggles, and spiritual transcendence—where art becomes a means of navigating the liminal spaces between the physical and metaphysical.
The transcendental, often viewed as timeless and spaceless, resonates deeply with the core of artistic creation. Far from the strict boundaries of scientific inquiry, art ventures into those vast unknowns where metaphysics and human consciousness collide. This exhibition invites viewers to contemplate moments of "divine" revelation, not in the religious sense, but as profound instances in which the mind perceives beyond the material world, tapping into a realm that surpasses time and space.

 In art, humanity seeks such revelations—a desire to transcend the mundane and ascend to a higher, perhaps mystical, plane. This echoes across cultural and religious contexts, in which the ultimate goal is to connect with what is often referred to as GOD. The role of art in this quest for spirituality is fundamental. As a visual medium, art provides the vehicle for meditative introspection, offering viewers a window into higher truths.
Saint Paul’s assertion in his Sermon at the Areopagus of Athens that “God created man so that he might seek Him” resonates here, as art becomes the catalyst for such a search—an intimate and often silent dialogue between the viewer and the ineffable.
But what of mysticism in the contemporary era? Is there still space for such contemplation in our material-obsessed world? Wassily Kandinsky provides a prophetic answer. He once remarked on the "tragic collision between matter and spirit" in his era, foreseeing the rupture of a purely materialistic worldview. Kandinsky's words, spoken over a century ago, describe a cultural crisis that feels remarkably familiar today—a time marked by uncertainty, disorientation, and spiritual yearning.
His own artistic journey shifted from representing the objective world to delving into the inner Klang (the “inner sound” or “inner need”), striving for a spirituality and transcendence that go beyond the mere physical representation of reality.In this sense, Kandinsky’s message is uncannily relevant to our current moment. As we grapple with a world increasingly dominated by superficial material concerns, the existential questions of theearly 20th century resurface. His call for spiritual awakening, through art, suggests that refuge in the spiritual or even in art itself is insufficient on its own. Rather, what is required is a fundamental transformation of our way of being, rooted in introspection and a relentless pursuit of justice—both personal and collective.
This transformation begins with an acknowledgment of our own smallness within the vast, intricate mechanism of the universe. If we could pause to truly grasp the magnitude of what lies “OUT THERE” beyond our limited world, perhaps only then would we see art and introspective thought as the fragile but powerful tools they are: means of reconnecting with a broader, more profound sense of existence.
The exhibition thus calls on us to reflect on this urgency for change. It urges a recalibration of our behaviors, anchored in the realization of our finitude and insignificance in the grand cosmic design. And yet, it also reminds us that, within this immense scope, we have the capacity for profound insight, expression, and—through art—a connection to the infinite.
by Cynthia Penna


Transience to the Infinite

Wonzimer

Marcus Leslie Singleton: Winter Atlantic Summer

The Journal Gallery

An exhibition of new watercolor paintings and the artist’s first at the gallery. Edelstein mines her own family history in works that transform vintage photographs into compositions that acutely capture the color and texture of a particular moment in time. 

Lisa Edelstein: DANCE ME TO THE END OF THE WORLD

Charlie James Gallery

Julia Elise Hong: Today 

de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Today, a solo exhibition by Korean-born Los Angeles-based artist Julia Elise Hong. The exhibition debuts a series of new oil paintings on canvas. The title, Today, reflects the core theme of the paintings representing the present moment and an ongoing, continuous sense of existence.

Hong begins each picture by building the canvases to the exact dimensions of a historical painting, setting the stage for a deep exploration of both past, present and future. Without reference to photography, she builds the compositions with expressive brushstrokes, seeking to unearth figures from within the paint itself.

For Hong, her paintings serve as an intimate dialogue, akin to a conversation between two people. “Yet, for the flatness and opacity of the image, neither can fully access the other.” she explains. In these moments of separation, Hong strives to grasp something elusive, a fleeting understanding that can only be described as miraculous. Roland Barthes’ concept of Punctum—that which touches us deeply in a photograph—mirrors Hong’s exploration of this sensation, which she identifies as a moment of realization: the feeling of knowing someone or something fully, if only for an instant.  

In Young Man Seated Beside the Sea (after Flandrin’s Young Male Nude Seated Beside the Sea, 1837), 2024, Hong reinterprets the dimensions of the 19th-century masterpiece by French artist Hippolyte Flandrin, leaving the compositional elements intentionally ambiguous. The result is a work that challenges viewers to question the essence of the scene, inviting them to consider not only the fleeting moment of realization, but also the moments surrounding it—the anticipation, the aftermath, and the space in between. For Hong, the pursuit of a painting is not simply about capturing a singular moment, but rather exploring the journey toward it, the ever-shifting sense of time and perception.

ABOUT JULIA ELISE HONG
Julia Elise Hong (b. 1985 in South Korea) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Hong received an MA from Columbia University in 2010, an MFA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2014, and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2023. Recent exhibitions include Tide Pools, Nous-ance at TRYST by the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; GLAMFA, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA; Play It As It Lays, de boer, Los Angeles, CA; Daydream Jelly, la BEAST gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Vague Domains, Alt Projects, Arcadia, CA; At Home, IKEA residency at Surely Work Studios, Los Angeles, CA. Alongside a dynamic studio process Hong curates and writes with notable accomplishments in each arena. Today (2025) will be Hong’s first solo exhibition with de boer.

-----------------------------------
Aaron Maier-Carretero: New Works

de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present a new solo exhibition featuring the work of Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Maier-Carretero. The exhibition will include paintings and sculptures rooted in Maier-Carretero’s dynamic drawing practice. 

Maier-Carretero’s process begins with intuitive mark-making, where repetitive movements and spontaneous gestures form the building blocks of his work. In this exhibition, Maier-Carretero returns to recurring motifs—ranging from playful figures like "scaredy cats" and "sardines," to the familiar comfort of flowers and still lifes—imbuing them with a tension between humor and melancholy. The result is a body of work that is light and introspective.
"Drawing is where everything begins," says Maier-Carretero. "It’s about finding rhythm in my lines and pushing the boundaries of what feels comfortable." This tension between freedom and constraint is central to his process, whether working in monochrome or through collaborations with his younger self—“little Aaron”—who provides a fresh, unfiltered perspective that disrupts the artist’s usual instincts.

ABOUT AARON MAIER-CARRETERO
Aaron Maier-Carretero is a Latinx artist born in 1987. He obtained his BFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Maier-Carretero has exhibited at the Queens Museum, NY; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Sculpture Center, NY; The National Arts Club, New York City; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; The University of Maryland Art Gallery; the Washington Project for the Arts; NADA New York, EXPO Chicago, and UNTITLED Miami. His work is held in the collections of the Phillips Collection, Washington; The Ned Nomad Collection, Washington, D.C., The University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, MD; the Art Bank Collection and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities in Washington, DC; The Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; The Bunker: The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Palm Beach, FL, and numerous private collections. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.


Julia Elise Hong: Today | Aaron Maier-Carretero: New Works

De Boer Gallery

Night Gallery is delighted to announce Morning Star, an exhibition of new paintings by Cathleen Clarke. This is Clarke’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles and with the gallery, following her inclusion in The Wrong Sea, Night Gallery x Dunes, Portland, ME (2024).

In the titular work, a yellow sun adorns a bright red barn. A starry mark on a horse’s teal snout offers a visual rhyme, another reflection of the cosmos here on earth. A blue figure holds reins that appear to blur into a forest, further connecting the worlds of the natural and the manmade. This hazy, borderless quality permeates all the work in Morning Star. Suns have faces, while bodily contours dissolve into air.

Clarke takes inspiration from family photographs and her recollections of the rural Illinois farm where she grew up. Her mother painted a sunrise mural across the family’s red barn, an incident the artist calls the beginning of her creative life. To this day, she continues to explore representations of nature and domesticity. Her paintings suggest the potency of memory and a sublime integration of human and environment.

Clarke’s process, too, evokes the presence and absence integral to any act of remembrance: Each time we think of the past, and what’s been lost, our memories shift. The artist continuously loosens her paint as her compositions progress. She wipes her surfaces, blurring her images until she reaches an ideal tension between recognition and distortion.

Clarke also notes a disparity between day and night on the farm, between sunlit pastures and the moonlit activities of coyotes, who preyed on more vulnerable animals in the middle of the night. Her palette similarly negotiates between shadow and light.

As the artist hovers between past and present, reality and dream, thresholds become a natural metaphor. Windows, stairs, doors, and ladders appear throughout her paintings. In The Porch of Shadows, figures young and old dapple a porch, which is divided into three sections by two long, brown bars. Many of the figures wait behind blue guardrails, which themselves seem to ripple with anticipation. In the middle section, a man in a white shirt places one foot on a step, one foot on the porch, poised between the residence and what lies beyond. “This is a painting of these people from my past,” the artist says. “They’re welcoming the viewer back home.”

Cathleen Clarke (b. 1988, Illinois) has presented solo exhibitions at Margot Samel Gallery, New York, NY and Fou Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. She has participated in group exhibitions at White Columns, New York, NY; Margot Samel Gallery, New York, NY + Pangée, Montréal, QC; Workplace Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Dunes, Portland, ME; Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY; and Ames Yavuz Gallery, Sydney, Australia, among other galleries. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Cathleen Clarke: Morning Star

Night Gallery North

“The dream hints, “This spirit should manifest . . . here are the stones in which it lives.” Bones, bricks, shells, ash, pine sap, and beeswax become paint, each painting a revivification of the Earth. The dreams are symbolic yet rooted in the patterns of physical sensations: breathe in-out-in, wake-sleep-wake, become-cease-become, daily tides, yearly seasons, and heart beating. We are the waves taking shape.” - Ellen Picken

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Waves Take Shape, Ellen Picken’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Consisting of a series of paintings and a mural encompassing the upper level of the gallery space, Picken utilizes materials from the land surrounding her home in Spokane, Washington, and items that contain a personal connection through a friend or neighbor to create handmade paints. These works explore the liminal space between the physical and spiritual realms while synchronizing with the cyclical nature of earth’s rhythms and their impact on our own lifecycle’s perpetual transformation. Waves Take Shape takes the form of a guide, opening the consciousness to investigate transitions—pathways and boundaries, secret places to protect, danger to avoid, and reactions to keep in check.

Picken’s process begins by gathering her materials—bricks found in the Spokane river, fallen off a crumbling building; yellow ocher collected from the site of the last home her great aunt and great grandmother lived in; eggshells from a neighbor’s hens; beeswax from a local beekeeper; bone from a deer found in a friend’s backyard; pine resin from the forests around her home; and salt from the Great Salt Lake and the Pacific Ocean are just some of items that become pigments for her paintings. Charged with meaning and sentiment these materials become the basis for her process. Shape and form begin to emerge on the clayboard panels while the subject matter is abstracted from dreams.

Symbolism plays an imperative role in these works. The snake is a protector of secrets and part of the consciousness that warns of the overwhelming power of the unconscious, fish imply nutrition both physically and spiritually, fire is a source of life and destruction, and a starburst is a release of condensed energy and indicator of new beginnings—these are a few of the readily visible images that appear. In the lower level of the gallery, the red glow of the ocher in the works is a reference to the Lammergeier vulture, alluding to the interconnectedness of life and death with its practice of covering itself in iron ocher and feeding off the bones of other animals. Picken utilizes the gallery’s layout to envision another level of symbolism. The gallery's upper level, painted throughout with undulating geometric patterns, suggests that one is entering a dream space within a dream. A reminder that the physical world is both incomprehensible yet unavoidable. A molecule of water is hardly observable, but an ocean is too large to see in its entirety. Between those extremes where matter appears solid and God becomes an icon, we can grasp meaning.

Ellen Picken (b. 1980) explores complex themes of existence, ritual, and nature, reflecting her deep engagement with the materials and landscapes that shape her practice. Best known for her monumental public artworks, Picken has created large-scale murals across the United States for prominent organizations like Adobe, Google, and NYC Department of Transportation. She has exhibited regionally and internationally at venues including Samsøn (New York, NY); Gage Academy (Seattle, WA); GlogauAIR (Berlin, GER); Gallery One (Ellensburg, WA); and Entropy Gallery (Spokane, WA). She is a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship recipient, and is most significantly influenced by her time living with the Benedictine Monks of St. Gertrude's Monastery in rural Idaho. Picken holds a BFA in Printmaking and a BA in Visual Communication Design from Eastern Washington University. She resides in Spokane, Washington.



Ellen Picken: Waves Take Shape

Lowell Ryan Projects 

“… then today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of  cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions  seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state  of things but of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we  are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way… to  blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things  seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.” - Slavoij Žižek  

Make Room is delighted to present Astra Huimeng Wang’s second solo exhibition “Polite Infidelity”, in Los Angeles. The exhibition title Polite Infidelity perhaps allures to our mentalities as members of a “post-ideological” society. It may seem unbecoming, even offensive, to commit fully and unironically to a single ideology or belief system. Instead, society unironically commits to the delusion that we are not witnessing the slow collapse of western empires—once powerful but now faltering. So is this what Wang is signaling towards, with the works in “Polite Infidelity”?

The plush vibrancy of the raw-liver-red flocked curtains in Mildly Entertaining, Keenly Felt, the gilded-age attire of the audience attending the spectacle central to the painting, the conspicuously jaunty attire of the processioners in In Time’s Ruins, and the joyful romp that concludes the funeral parade—These elements seem to offer satire on a silver platter, inviting us to reflect on our disillusionment. However, all of her works, in particular In Time’s Ruins, belie something more sincere and lacking in real “ironical distance.”

In Time’s Ruins is on one hand, a public execution of the piano in its role as a symbol of western cultural supremacy, and on the other hand, an earnest religious sacrament, a ritual sacrifice, an appeal to some unconscious fantasy for deliverance from suffering. The piano is carried, like Christ bearing the cross, into the desert for execution. Then a funeral procession, spectral and incongruous with its surroundings, journeys out from the desert through a ghost town and into the jewelry district of downtown Los Angeles, before it returns to the studio and the gallery as Damage Control, an altarpiece, painted on the lid of the original shot piano. The desert, often seen as a place of testing and revelation in Abrahamic religions, holds great symbolic significance. Neither can the fact that the funeral procession, once it reaches Los Angeles, first arrives outside an evangelical church with a sign reading “Pare de sufrir”, or “end suffering”. Whether the members of this cult-like procession are true believers or are merely indulging in collective fantasy, they seem to have found their deliverance, whether spiritual, ideological, or emotional, in the end.

The tension between ironic distance and true belief mirrors a similar tension between reality and unreality present in both the paintings and the film. For example, in Mildly Entertaining, Keenly Felt, there is a clear division between the audience loosely outlined in white, and the spectacle at center stage flocked chromatic. From across the room, the figure on the horse seems to vibrate off the painting’s surface, appearing more real than its surroundings. However, as the viewer approaches, the spell is broken, and the figure on the horse dissolves like a weathered relief on an old stone wall. At arm’s distance, only the audience members remain truthful about the fidelity with which they were rendered. In this way, Wang separates the painting into two spaces, encouraging viewers to navigate the boundary between reality and fantasy.

Wang achieves a similar contrast in In Time’s Ruins through the inclusion of her lonely acolyte, the piano mover. The film is bookended by sequences showing the piano mover hoisting the piano onto a trailer. If the piano is a ghost on its palanquin, then in its trailer it’s a corpse. The contrast between the measured, stoic walk of the pall-bearers and the conspicuous effort with which the piano mover works, again underscores a division between the real and the fantasy.

Only The Night is like a Strange Day resolves this division between realms. Unlike the other paintings, this work was meticulously hand-carved into the lacquer of the piano lid. Without the obvious presence of society, humanity, and its ruins as in Thank You for Coming Home, or the dissonant coincidence of fantasy, this work is suspended in a third supercritical state. Reality becomes slippery, untethered from the unconscious fantasies that structure it. Starry leaves and quicksilver seas, the Picardy third at the end of the overture to the decomposition of fantasies—all in all Mildly Entertaining, Keenly Felt.

Astra Huimeng Wang: Polite Infidelity

Make Room

Abstract artist Sharon Cannon’s "The Painting Knows" reveals a world where art takes on a life of its own. With each brushstroke, her work transcends mere visual representation, becoming an emotive force that speaks directly to the individual observer. The exhibition explores spontaneity and intuition.  Each piece is guided by an innate process where both artist and canvas engage in a profound and poignant dialogue. This interactive process ensures that the final work is not pre-determined but rather evolves organically, with each subsequent element guiding the next, inviting the viewers to interpret the emotions presented in their own personal way.

Sharon Cannon: The Painting Knows

NOON Projects is honored to present “Between Cheeks”, a solo exhibition by Finnish artist Artor Jesus Inkerö, opening on Saturday, January 18 from 6–8 PM. Known for their multidisciplinary practice, which incorporates poetry, painting, performance, filmmaking, and research, Inkerö investigates the fluid intersections of contemporary culture through language, drawing on themes of oral history, domesticity, queerness, the body, and relationships.

At the core of Between Cheeks is an exploration of poetry and language’s power to critique, shape, and forge society and history. Inkerö’s series of autobiographical poetry paintings merges text and materials, using narrow horizontal canvases as a site for experimentation. Furniture and house paints—chosen for their connection to bodily fluids and domesticity—are scraped, layered, and painted over, evoking the cyclical nature of lived spaces, like apartment walls being repainted after a breakup. The poems, dripped and smeared onto the canvases in a process reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s action painting, create a visceral interplay of text and texture.

Works such as “Can we talk tonight?” and “In the park And by fire we found a mutual Sense of us…” evoke inner dialogue or conversations between new lovers, while “Before this we just licked them” and “On this flat earth we lay” reflect the fragmented ways we encounter language in modern life—through text messages, tweets, stranger-than-fiction news headlines, safety signage, and gossip. Inkerö’s works also engage with the historical canon of queer art, referencing Derek Jarman’s autobiographical paintings on HIV/AIDS and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ text-based installations that span entire galleries.

The exhibition further investigates metaphors of gaps, orifices, and holes, extending these ideas to themes of loss, ambiguity, and openings. These concepts resonate in Inkerö’s film A Taste of Every Dish You’ve Ever Eaten, commissioned by Somerset House in London. Created in collaboration with Juulia Haverinen and Sam Taskinen, the film combines poetry, operatic soundscapes, and a fragmented narrative. Described by Inkerö as a “poetic meditation” on memory, identity, and sensory experience, the film’s lyrics and dialogue reverberate throughout the gallery, reinforcing the exhibition’s focus on ambivalence and fluidity.

Artor Jesus Inkerö is a Finnish visual artist whose work has been exhibited internationally, including at the New Museum (New York), Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (Aachen), and Helsinki Contemporary (Helsinki). They have participated in prestigious artist residencies, such as Somerset House (London), the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam), and currently at the MAK Center Residency for Artists and Architects (at the Schindler House), Los Angeles. Inkerö’s practice centers on themes of queer identity and belonging, expressed through exhibitions, performances, poetry, research, public art, and multidisciplinary projects


Artor Jesus Inkerö: “Between Cheeks”
Opening Saturday, October 18, 2025 
6 – 8 PM
508 Chung King Road, Los Angeles

On view through February 22, 2025

For more information contact info@noon-projects.com

Artor Jesus Inkerö: Between Cheeks

NOON Projects (2nd Location)

your voice is in every shell reconsiders the odyssey as a mapped search between contiguous impressions rather than a physical return. The interdisciplinary exhibition includes video, painting, sculpture, writing, and ephemera. It spans huang’s long-term perseverance of the horse as a shifting but consistent emblem in their work, from the horse, centaur, and unicorn, to the pegasus. 

stephanie mei huang is a Shanghai/Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist. A core examination of their work is bearing witness to the aftereffects of globalization through inhabiting new embodied and synthetic configurations––parafictional avatars: extended myths both woven together and ruptured by autobiography. They completed their MFA in Art at the California Institute of the Arts (2020) and were a participant at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022). Select exhibitions include the Autry Museum of the American West (Los Angeles), Sargent’s Daughters (Los Angeles), Jeffrey Deitch (Los Angeles), Pulpo Gallery (Munich/Murnau), Artists Space (New York), the Hauser and Wirth Book Lab (Los Angeles), Contemporary Calgary (Calgary), the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles), the New Wight Biennial at the University of California Los Angeles (Los Angeles), and the Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe). huang’s work has been featured in the New York Times, South China Morning Post, CNN, Tokyo Shimbun, PBS Artbound, ABC7 Eyewitness News, and Artsy.

Join at 7:30pm during the opening reception for Precipice portal––a collaborative performance with stephanie mei huang & Red Rae

stephanie mei huang: your voice is in every shell

Murmurs

The exhibition explores the interrelation between nature and technology, prompting us to consider both their effects on our society, humanity and its horizon, and our own positionality in earth’s future. Like a call to adventure beckoning us to explore these connections, the exhibition challenges our understanding of these two seemingly opposing forces.

Nature has long been a source of inspiration for artists over the last 40,000 years, the natural world being depicted in prehistoric cave paintings found across the globe. Despite human attempts to control it, nature will reclaim its space after our technological innovations fade, a thought best illustrated in the image of wildflowers that bloom in derelict factories in many provincial locations globally. This exchange reminds us that while modern technologies enhance our lives and agricultural advances feed vast populations, it is nature’s virility that forms the foundation of our existence. 

Nature also finds ways to endure despite humanity's insatiable appetite for expansion and subjugation. Gillian Brett's work (France) reflects upon the decline of traditional farming methods and the increasing reliance on precision agriculture technologies. Brett invites viewers to consider the delicate balance between human intervention and the natural world. 

Similarly, Beverley Duckworth’s (UK) research into global landfills materializes in sculpture and installation that takes a regenerative approach to the infinite mountains of discarded garments and electronic waste by implanting them with seeds and utilizing them as foundations for roots of new life to emerge. 

Helena Sekot (Austria) attends to the formal symbolism of the natural world, leaning into the grace and grit of flora and fauna. Sekot’s series of digital prints of rhubarb skins wrapped around body parts contain a sensuality and eroticism that references both digital cultures and art history. 

Ewelina Skrowronska’s (Poland) paintings use natural dyes, departing from a human-centric framing of the world to reveal a deeply interconnected biophilic reading of Earth. The works offer us a potential dreamscape of a future where humankind and the natural world work in symbiosis.

Permission to Bloom

DON’T LOOK Projects

Murmurs is pleased to present Resurrectura, a solo exhibition of multimodal, kinetic sculptures by Sasha Fishman opening November 9, 2024 from 6-9pm. The works on view––composed largely of moving image, biomaterials, and running water––exemplify Fishman’s sustained engagement with an aesthetics of transcorporeality. Disgust, pleasure, identification, and desire commingle within the interstices of both Fishman’s material structures and the interspecies encounters they speak of.

Sasha Fishman is a NY based sculptor and researcher. She is particularly interested in marine biomaterials, toxicology and energy harvesting as points for critical analysis and mechanisms for sculpting. She is a recent MFA Sculpture graduate from Columbia University where she collaborated with labs on salmon, fountains, and carbon capture materials. Sasha is a 2024 Puffins Grant recipient and a current Artist in Residence at Smack Mellon.  

Fishman has exhibited her work at Below Grand (New York), Resort (Maryland), Hesse Flatow (New York), Bozomag (Los Angeles), ILY2 (Portland), The Jewish Museum (New York), and The Indian Ceramics Triennale (New Delhi, India). She has participated in residencies at Smack Mellon (New York), Art Ichol (India), Acre (Wisconsin), NAHR (Italy) and the High Desert Observatory (California). Fishman has presented her work and run workshops at Printed Matter (New York), Genspace (New York), Navel (Los Angeles), UCLA (Los Angeles), UDenver (Colorado), UColorado Boulder (Colorado), Kenyon College (Ohio), MICA (Maryland), Caltech (California), and CSULB (California). 

Sasha Fishman: Resurrectura

Rhett Baruch Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures by artist Richard Shapiro. He is an internationally recognized creative in the worlds of design and art. Over the last forty years his greatest love has been Arte Povera, the Italian movement of the mid 20th century. Its hallmarks and references have almost always found their way into his work. Unconventional materials and fabrication methods are broadly employed in his ongoing search for what he calls a “new language”. This is the inaugural exhibition for the gallery at its new location as well as the first solo exhibition with Shapiro

The opening reception is on Saturday, January 25, 2025 from 5-8pm at 357 N La Brea Ave

Richard Shapiro: Incursions 

Rhett Baruch Gallery 

“WANDERLUST TRAILS” Solo Painting Exhibit
Curator Dena D'Angelo is proud to present the Los Angeles premiere solo show of Carlos Buitrago, a distinguished artist born in Colombia and raised in California. In "Wanderlust Trails” Carlos invites viewers to drift through landscapes imbued with a sense of adventure and introspection. Each composition portrays the challenges, dreams, and vibrant settings encountered along life’s road.

The paintings reflect the exhilarating and unpredictable nature of journey, drawing parallels between the physical trails one traverses and inner paths of self-discovery. Canvases are saturated with vivid intricacies of color, geometric patterns, and organic forms that transform the human condition into a multi-faceted visual dialogue.

Buitrago’s work stirs the emotions, fills the viewer with wonder, and brilliantly blends abstraction, expressionism, and a modern nod to Cubism. The tender stories that accompany the work are on their own worthy of contemplation.



Carlos Buitrago: WANDERLUST TRAILS

CadFab Creative Gallery

Take Me to Heaven, Sylvester (1984, excerpt)

All I wanna know
Do you wanna rock me
The lights are low
And you know where to go
So baby, let’s hit the floor

Won’t you take me to Heaven
Take me to Heaven
Oh, take me to Heaven

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is thrilled to present the dazzling woven, beaded tapestries of John Paul Morabito in their first one-person exhibition with the gallery. The title of the exhibition, Take Me To Heaven, references the famed Black, Queer, disco icon of the 70’s and 80’s, Sylvester! Sylvester’s music, lyrics, and gender fluid persona gave voice to the cultural and political shifts in America when sexual energy pulsed in clubs throughout urban centers, where seduction, drag, sparkle, protest, coming out, demands for equal rights and decriminalization began ripping through the hetero-normative walls of the United States. Morabito’s luminous tapestries tower as a metaphoric rallying cry, “This is a retracing of the queer resistance born in urban discos of a prior generation. As social and political forces once again seek to eradicate queer people, I, like those who came before me, reach for the promise of queer futurity.”

Improvisation guides Morabito’s woven abstractions; bold intersecting geometry with electrifying gold and hot neon colors are the intuitive gestures of “the body pulsing to the rhythm of the beat.” Morabito’s work delivers “a spark of divinity,” reaching back in time to the cultural zenith that celebrated queer spaces. However, citing health as the orthodoxy of reason, AIDS provided political heft for the erasure and censure of queer public centers in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Morabito’s unabashed emphasis on metaphor, beauty, and sensuality fuels the recovery of queer identity, community, and place—“where glamour, glitter, sweat, and low light open embodied pathways to find something greater than yourself.” Glass beads, hand-dyed wool, and cotton in the hands of Morabito become the sacrament of possibility, defying voices that would choose to turn back the clock of time.

In our first group exhibition with Morabito, (A Chorus of Twisted Threads, 2023) the gallery presented selections from For Félix (love letter), an homage to Félix González-Torres, who succumbed to AIDS in the ’90s. This series was a corollary to the exquisite homoerotic beaded curtains of González-Torres, a powerful metaphoric veil between sex, life, and death. Morabito’s beaded tapestries offered a ravishing tribute to González-Torres but also delivered a celebratory fist to subsequent Queer generations. Like González-Torres’, Morabito’s art is a protest against religious and institutional policies as the guiding moral orthodoxy. Their subtle but powerful interventions in For Félix (love letter) reinterpret sanctity with a seductive queer protest. Beading the long strands of thread is analogous to the beaded rosary; only instead of contrition, Morabito’s act is erotic, lacing their tapestry with desire, intimacy, exaltation, and remembrance.

John Paul Morabito was awarded the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship in January 2024. They are Assistant Professor and Head of Textiles at Kent State University in Ohio. 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.

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.

Image: John Paul Morabito | Untitled (fever) | 2024 | linen, wool, gold leaf thread, glass beads | 47 x 92 inches

_____

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is excited and honored to feature Los Angeles-based artist Ferne Jacobs in her First Los Angeles gallery exhibition! The gallery’s focus on artists who engage in conceptual material practices aligns with Jacobs’ pioneering career.

Ferne Jacobs’ sculptures have been included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Art and Design, the MFA Boston, the MFA Houston, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the De Young Museum, and many more over several decades. Recently, Jacobs was a finalist for the prestigious 2024 Loewe Craft Prize. Currently her work is on public view at the MFA Boston and the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation.

At 82 years old, Jacobs is a ground-breaking pioneer in the International Fiber Art Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She continues her daily studio practice today, intuitively coiling and twining compelling abstract forms that infer historical provenance beyond their making.

On view will be coiled and twined free-standing sculpture and wall work, including new as well as work spanning over her 50-year career.

Jacobs is recognized for her technical mastery of material and process. Reinventing and advancing traditional techniques used for basketry and inventing countless other methods along the way, Jacobs has generated an entirely fresh format for sculptural art. Her acute sense of color melded with her poetic and intuitive approach are characteristic traits. Each piece begins with an idea, a dream, a story, or a picture in Jacobs’ mind, but it grows and takes on its own form over the months in which she shapes the artwork.

Jacobs plays with duality in terms of textures, contrast of color, interior and exterior, solids and voids. In terms of concept, she investigates the significance of masculinity and femininity, spirituality and religion, and the destruction of the natural world… Her pieces are meditations on the fiber of society and the nature of humanity in the modern world.
– Emily Zaiden, Essay: Connected Cells, Breathing Forms, Craft in America Exhibition, 2022

When I begin a piece, I create a line by wrapping thread around a cord with a color that has been in my mind. From then on I live in a mystery, creating each cell (wrap) and connection, of what I hope is a living form. The cells make up a body, and I have no idea about what it will become until it is finished. There is no direct intention, only a hope that it has life and through that, is moving in some way.
– Ferne Jacobs, from Connected Cells, Breathing Forms, Craft in America Exhibition, 2022

John Paul Morabito: Take Me To Heaven | Ferne Jacobs: A Poetry of Thread

Patricia Sweetow Gallery

 Fuji interweaves Japanese myth and folklore with contemporary iconography to explore ideas of identity and space, history and heritage. The title of the exhibition refers to the particular feeling of a certain place, and the works negotiate the constant push and pull of living between two continents and two cultures. Fuji populates remembered Japanese interiors with ancestors, playful deities and spirits, imagining them all coexisting in the modern day. The work celebrates traditional Japanese craftsmanship and spiritual tradition while simultaneously embracing a playful, modern sensibility.   

Maya Fuji: Igokochi・居心地 

Charlie James Gallery (2nd location)

La Luz de Jesus Gallery is excited to announce the upcoming exhibition of Complicated Characters, a collaborative exhibition with Jon Langford as Father Drogo and Jim Sherraden as Bishop Biscuit and Sugar and Spice, a solo exhibition with Don Fritz. The exhibitions open February 7th and close March 2nd. The free to the public reception is Friday February 7th from 7pm to 11pm.

Master Printer Emeritus Jim Sherraden and prolific musician and visual artist Jon Langford have been collaborating since 2016. This exhibit, Complicated Characters, will be their fourth such show, featuring a blend of Sherraden’s woodcut artwork and Langford’s extraordinary drawing skills. The show’s title is a nod to the alter egos the artists took on during their collaborative process.

Don Fritz busts out two series of drawings that at first glance may seem congruent but only in Fritz’s iconic stylistic approach to composition. Often his drawings involve layers and layers of discombobulated iconography, figures and text, all hinting towards a larger story filled with many complexities and layers.

The first series is Sugar and Spice, based around a 50’s childhood juxtaposed against the background of a brewing Cold War sentiment, emerging neo-liberal ideals, and attempts at holding up fundamentalist traditions. Many of his children emulating the perky and innocence of a Precious Moments figurine than actual children, furthering this satirical difference.

The other series is Demon and Dolls, taking a dirtier turn as Don Fritz satirizes Mexican pulp fiction and comics. These comics, not unlike the lowbrow pulp of other countries, are beyond exaggerated, both in character design and plot.



Jon Langford & Jim Sherraden: Complicated Characters | Don Fritz: Sugar and Spice

Scientia Sexualis is an ambitious group survey of contemporary artists whose work confronts, dissolves, and reimagines sex and gender within the scientific apparatus. Organized by Jennifer Doyle (Professor of English, University of California, Riverside) and Jeanne Vaccaro (Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies, University of Kansas), the exhibition will take place in fall 2024 as part of the ambitious collaboration across arts institutions throughout Southern California led by the Getty known as Pacific Standard Time, and will be accompanied by a major scholarly publication produced by ICA LA.

Scientia Sexualis centers research-driven interventions into raced and gendered assumptions that structure scientific disciplines governing our sense of the sexual body. The artists in this exhibition bring attention to the material, conceptual, and psychic forms of the lab and the clinic as aesthetics that operate across scientific and artistic discourses. The exhibition catalogue will feature new writing by leading interdisciplinary scholars who will map key concepts (sex, race, Indigeneity), materials (instruments, specimens, biomatter), and disciplines (psychiatry, anthropology, reproductive medicine) that the artists engage through their work. Together with the catalogue and related programming, Scientia Sexualis aims to examine and reconfigure the relationship between art and science and, in turn, to create an alternative access point to the history of science where sex, gender, and pleasure are concerned.

Scientia Sexualis takes its title from Michel Foucault’s landmark text, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976), in which Foucault describes the nineteenth-century development of a “scientia sexualis”—the clinical pursuit of a “uniform truth of sex” as evidenced by an endless scanning of the body and a relentless cataloging of sexual types and deviations. In contrast, over the past 35 years, feminist and queer artists have approached sex and gender as sources of experimentation, knowledge production, medical management, and biotechnical information, resulting in a wide range of works that address difficult subjects such as the origins of modern gynecology and its ties to the torture of enslaved women; the pathologizing of the sexual body; the entanglement of colonization with sexual violence; and the nonconsensual gendering of trans and intersex people. The artists featured in Scientia Sexualis not only explore these painful histories through their artistic output, but they also work from its wake, reclaiming and redeploying scientific discourses to produce speculative technologies of transformation, map embodied forms of knowledge, and radicalize practices of healing and care.

While several major museum exhibitions have addressed issues of gender, sexuality, and representation, Scientia Sexualis is distinct for the coalitional possibilities it generates between Black, feminist, trans and decolonial approaches to these subjects. The project is intentionally heterogenous, situating Black feminist work that confronts the abuse of Black women’s bodies alongside decolonial interrogations of a settler colonial anthropology, trans reclamation of medical practices, and intersectional feminist interventions in reproductive medicine. As a whole, the exhibition addresses the aftermath of our encounters with scientific discourses and institutions as the featured artists surface the contradictory energies that circulate through the lab and the clinic, the library and the archive, exploring and re-constructing frameworks that tell us not only what sex and gender are, but what a body is and can be.

Featured artists include: Panteha Abareshi, Dotty Attie, Louise Bourgeois, Nao Bustamante, Andrea Carlson, Demian DinéYazhi’, Nicole Eisenman, El Palomar, dean erdmann, Jes Fan, Nicki Green, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger, Xandra Ibarra, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Joseph Liatela, Candice Lin, Carlos Motta, Wangechi Mutu, Young Joon Kwak & Gala Porras-Kim, Cauleen Smith, P. Staff, Joey Terrill, Chris E. Vargas, Millie Wilson, and Geo Wyex.

Image: Jes Fan

Scientia Sexualis

ICA LA

Gallery Luisotti is delighted to announce our fourth solo exhibition with New York-based artist Shirley Irons celebrating the release of her first comprehensive publication, Composition, and the gallery’s parallel presentation of paintings showcasing four-decade of work mixing her industrial landscapes and anonymous highways with her most recent focus, the flower.

Irons subtle oil paintings made between 1988 and 2019 of landscape fragments and urban interiors based on photographs taken as she drives through exurban landscapes, blends realistic details with abstract applications of paint to explore how much information is necessary to render an image legible. These fleeting landscape scenes often capturing the perspective of someone on the move, gives meditative attention to side-glances and everyday objects. Influences include late Manet, Morris Graves, Janice Biala and particularly Vija Celmins in the way she extracts moments in the landscape and creates a simple, nuanced rendition of a lamp or a tiny section of the ocean or sky, fleeting moments of infinity.

The flower paintings represent a paradigmatic shift as Irons transitioned to painting directly from observation, rather than using photographs as references. As such, these new paintings consider a different way of seeing, reinforced by a salon-style hang where the movement of one’s eye across the canvases parallels the motion of the artist’s hand across the canvas. Moments of heartfelt consideration, visual pleasure, or poignant passages echo in Irons paint handling—the tenuous strokes of pale green that portray a fragile stem, the bristly pointillism of the flower’s luminescent fronds, and the subtly monochromatic shading of the flowers themselves—meditating on the passage of time and the joys of close looking.

By highlighting these in-between moments and spaces the artist expands how we think about the world around us, eloquently capturing the fragmentation of modern life and the ephemeral nature of our existence with elegant pulses of painterly movement through time and space.

Please join us on Saturday, February 1, 5 – 7pm to celebrate the artists new exhibition and book launch. Composition is published by MACK Books, UK.

Image: Shirley Irons, 2nd Black Highway, 2003

Shirley Irons: Composition: Landscsapes, Highways and Flowers

Gallery Luisotti

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles is delighted to announce Keep Your Wonder Moving, the West Coast debut of Chicago-based artist Lindsay Adams and her inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. Titled after a note written by poet Patricia Spears Jones to philosopher Audre Lorde, the exhibition, presented on the third floor, consists of eleven abstract paintings. Keep Your Wonder Moving emphasizes the artist’s longstanding interest in world-building – Adams’ exploration of abstraction as a conduit for expanding the imagination while embedding deeply personal narratives. The exhibition opens on Saturday, January 18 from 5 - 7 PM. The artist will be present.

Adams’ work interrogates the boundaries of abstraction and representation, seamlessly weaving together the materiality of paint with the intangibility of memory and cultural identity. Her layered approach—where pigments are built up, washed away, or otherwise manipulated—imbues each canvas with a sense of flux, reflecting her assertion that painting is as much alchemical as it is artistic. Her process leaves behind not only a complex surface, but also an ambiguity that invites sustained contemplation.

Keep Your Wonder Moving pivots from her earlier figurative depictions of nature and Black subjects to a complex abstract vernacular. As Adams describes, this transition emerged as “an inevitable shift toward expressing a conceptual story, allowing myself latitude in my storytelling and cultural reflection.” The works on view highlight her interest in constructing imagined ecologies, spaces in which rhythmic gestures and dynamic hues engage in a continuous dialogue. For instance, in Rhythm With Blues, electric yellow and lavender forms bloom against an inky blue background, evoking a field of abstracted flowers that resist traditional representational constraints. Adams challenges the viewer to question the delineations of form to embrace the unknown.

Thematically, Adams situates her practice at the intersection of resilience, freedom, and the quotidian realities of Black womanhood. Her work transforms the canvas into an aspirational site—one that allows for intimate encounters with self-discovery and resistance against societal constraints. This ethos resonates with her political and cultural identity, as her paintings assert their presence within a broader discourse of artistic and social transformation. The exhibition thus positions painting as both a reflective and generative act, with Adams’ compositions acting as sites where meaning is not prescribed but rather discovered.

Lindsay Adams is currently finalizing her MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a BA in both International Studies and Spanish from The University of Richmond. She has already garnered critical recognition, including the prestigious Helen Frankenthaler Award in 2024 and the New Artist Society Merit Award in 2023. Her work has been exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, D.C., and is included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and Northwestern Law School.

____

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles is delighted to present Fading Origin, Wu Chi-Tsung’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Known for his experimental approach to photography, Chi-Tsung’s work bridges traditional Chinese art techniques and contemporary media, integrating Eastern and Western aesthetics. The exhibition features new works in Chi-Tsung’s signature Cyano-Collage series and marks innovative new developments in his Wrinkled Texture works. There will be a reception from 5 to 7 pm. The artist will be present.

Wu Chi-Tsung was initially drawn to the cyanotype – an early form of photography requiring only basic chemicals and sunlight – in response to the rise of digital photography. For Chi-Tsung, what digital photography loses, and what his cyanotypes capture, is the medium’s openness to chance and its connection to the material world, qualities that make each cyanotype unique. Chi-Tsung’s renowned Cyano-Collage series synthesize his dual interests in Chinese landscape painting and experimental photography. This process begins by washing sheets of Xuan rice paper in photo-sensitive materials, which, when dried, Chi-Tsung creases by hand and exposes to sunlight. The subsequent abstract elements are collaged together on aluminum panels. The resulting images are open to interpretation perhaps evoking sublime mountainous landscapes or tumultuous seascapes. With their stunning formal cohesion and classical grandeur, the Cyano-Collages belie the inventive process of their creation. While Chi-Tsung conjures his panoramas through experimental photography, his use of the cyanotype process retains a connection to both the artist’s hand and the natural world. In this way, Chi-Tsung captures the spiritual depth of Eastern painting traditions dating back over a thousand years, while renewing it with a contemporary aesthetic.

In the new Wrinkled Texture Fading Origin series the diptych and quadriptych works begin with a single, full sheet of exposed cyanotype paper. This print then becomes the basis for recursive cyanotypes within the same work, with each image becoming the negative for the adjacent sheet. The result is a mesmerizing shift between blue and white tones, where the original image gradually dissipates into a field of color. This process captures the ephemeral and transient qualities of the natural world whilst also emphasizing the slight, irreproducible differences unique to analog processes. By double-exposing the paper and exploring the faded origin of the image, the Wrinkled Texture Fading Origin series reflect Chi-Tsung’s commitment to advancing the medium while preserving the poetic, tactile qualities of analog photography.

Wu Chi-Tsung believes his generation is the last to transition from analog to digital photography, a shift that profoundly informs his practice. Unlike digital images, where copies retain perfect fidelity, analog processes embrace subtle variations that reflect their individuality. In his Cyano-Collage series, breathtaking images emerge from the meticulous accumulation of numerous cyanotype prints, while his Wrinkled Texture works explore cycles of emergence and disappearance through innovative multiple exposures. Together, these works emphasize the conceptual depth, material innovation, and aesthetic sensitivity that define Chi-Tsung’s body of work.

Wu Chi-Tsung’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Katonah Museum of Art, New York and TAO Art, Taiwan. His work has been included in international exhibitions at institutions such as the Mori Art Museum, Japan; the National Museum Cardiff, United Kingdom; the Long Beach Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art Contemporain, Luxembourg; the Museo Del Palacio De Bellas Artes, Mexico; the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; the Shanghai Art Museum and the Minsheng 21st Century Museum, Shanghai, China; the Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea; the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan amongst others. Wu Chi-Tsung was the recipient of the Liu Kuo Sung Ink Art Award, Hong Kong in 2019, the WRO Media Art Biennial award in 2013 and the Taipei Arts Award in 2003. His work is included in renowned collections such as the Xie Zilong Photography Museum, the Post Vidai Collection, M+ Hong Kong, The Vero Beach Museum of Art, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection.



Lindsay Adams Keep Your Wonder Moving | Wu Chi-Tsung: Fading Origin

Sean Kelly Los Angeles

Yoshitomo Nara
My Imperfect Self
Curated by Yeewan Koon

BLUM Los Angeles
January 18–March 8, 2025
Opening reception is postponed to late February

BLUM is pleased to present My Imperfect Self, Yoshitomo Nara’s tenth exhibition with the gallery, commemorating thirty years since the artist’s first US show, entitled Pacific Babies, at Blum & Poe in 1995. 

A standout piece from that first exhibition, titled There is No Place Like Home (1995), employs dark humor to explore the complexities of belonging for a young Japanese artist living in Germany on the cusp of international acclaim. Today, that restless uncertainty has given way to a deep-seated sense of connectedness, including attunement to remote places that remind him of growing up in Northern Japan. It was in Sapporo, Hokkaido, when Nara first started using remnants of unused clay to deconstruct his iconic image of the child into misshaped forms that bear traces of his hands, reestablishing his connection to the material and his sense of place. This process culminated in a new series of bronze sculptures, eleven of which are presented for the first time in this latest exhibition. Seen together, these works highlight how far Nara has transformed the kawaii aesthetic into an alternate realm of beguiling misfits. 

My Imperfect Self: Yoshitomo Nara

This exhibition highlights Nara’s evolving sculptural practice, featuring eleven mid-size heads exuding a quirky strangeness and dark charm that defines the artist’s work. These heads, presented for the first time, are integral to Nara’s exploration in clay, intertwining ideas and techniques developed since 2011, but also express a poignant return to his roots. The exhibition also includes paintings and drawings that resonate with the sculptures, inviting deeper reflection on his ongoing experimentation throughout a career that gained international acclaim with his seminal work, The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand (1991).

This collection of heads is full of contradictions that lean toward the peculiar and anomalous. Although cast in bronze, they were first made in clay as palm size pieces, and then enlarged and cast in bronze. In their transformed state, the malleable nature of the clay’s original form remains evident, enticing viewers to retrace Nara’s touch across its pillowy surface. Many feature a flattened face on which Nara cleaves lines, pokes holes, and scratches indentations on their matte white planar surfaces, wrapped within marshmallow globs of hair. However, these markings are not aggressive inflictions but rather embedded scarifications that lend the figures a raw, carefree quality of oddity. The overall effect is of a child, but one who we have never seen before in Nara's oeuvre. Gone are the rounded cheeks that we expect from his stylized depiction of the child motif, instead Title to be confirmed bears a shy smile with gouged eyes, and retreats into deep folds of imperfect hair; while Long Tall Peace Sister, the largest of the sculptures in the show, has flowers in her hair formed by using traditional tile molds. She smiles with delight, even with the five skeletal lines that form each eye. 

The awkwardness of these heads embraces the possibilities of mischance and imperfections. They form their own gang of misfits. For Nara, this reflects a renewed engagement with the praxis of making—the dynamic interplay between hand and body, craft and object—which directs his curiosity toward possibilities of incompleteness.

The artist’s turn toward this more embodied practice is shaped by three significant sources. The first comes from his response to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, which left an indelible mark on Nara, whose natal home was close to this site. Struggling to paint, he took a large block of clay and threw his entire body against the solid mass of grayness, attacking it as if he were a sumo wrestler. It was a method of freeing himself to paint again, while also rekindling his interest in clay. The intensity of his bodily approach left imprints that, when cast in bronze, became permanent traces on his figurative heads—a contrast to the impermanence of life so clearly brought home by Fukushima’s fate. 

A second source, from around 2016, is drawn from Nara’s time spent in Northern Japan, including Tobiu, a remote village with Ainu roots in Sapporo. It was there that he began making his palm-size heads, initially as something playful where he would mindlessly give in to the material. These small, more spontaneous, heads speak to his wandering spirit, where forested landscapes and remote settings deepen his sense of being in the world. By working at a small scale, he sculpts with a gentler touch, shifting his bodily energy to reconnect with nature, rather than fighting with the clay as he had done in 2011. Scaling up, however, affords the artist a chance to experiment even more with the paring down of the figurative into quirkier forms of existential inelegance.

A third, less direct source, is a return to Nara's earliest paintings and drawings, especially of works that may have received less attention, such as figures with elongated almond-shaped bodies or squashed circular heads. It demonstrates a practice of Nara’s where he retrieves older works that may have once been considered imperfect, finding the open potential yet to come from that which is flawed. 

There is a strong connectivity across Nara’s works—evident when considering the paintings and drawings as a spectrum from the meditative to the spontaneous, exploring the potential of the unformed and of returns. The iconic figure in his large painting Blurry Mind draws viewers in to see the many layers of radiant colors that dance and glimmer across the canvas. This painting is a testament to Nara’s deep interest in the painterly effects of color, and its ability to hold viewers’ attention. This work is, however, also an iconic image of the “Nara-child,” one which the artist is seeking to deconstruct with these eleven sculptures, to find a new form that can push him into different directions. His process of taking apart his own pictorial language or returning to earlier, perhaps forgotten, drawings and paintings as inspiration also underscores the theme of this show. 

In the past decade, while continuing to exhibit in major museums worldwide, Nara has embraced a slower, more reflective approach to his work. He enjoys the tactile nature of his materials and the connective charge between hand and mind—elements that are evident in his latest paintings and sculptures. Notably, Nara aligns these methods with his own way of being in the world—where attentiveness to small, seemingly imperfect acts can yield a deep sense of freedom. 

– Yeewan Koon

Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959, Hirosaki, Japan) graduated with an MFA from the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, Nagakute, Japan, in 1987, he completed his studies at the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, Germany from 1988 to 1993. Nara began his career during the decade he spent in Cologne, and from the mid-1990s, he exhibited widely in Europe, the United States, Japan, and all over Asia. His return to Japan in 2000 coincided with a surge of global interest in Japanese pop culture, particularly in the United States. While he is primarily a painter, his practice encompasses drawing; sculptures made of wood, FRP, ceramic, and bronze; installations that incorporate scrap materials; and photographs that document everyday landscapes and the encounters he has during his travels. Influenced by music, literature, and his own life, Nara's works transcend cultural and linguistic barriers, touching people globally.

Nara’s numerous solo exhibitions include Yoshitomo Nara, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; traveling to Frieder Burda Museum, Baden-Baden, Germany; Hayward Gallery-Southbank Centre, London, UK (2024–25); Yoshitomo Nara: The Beginning Place, Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan (2023); Yoshitomo Nara: All My Little Words, Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria (2023); Yoshitomo Nara, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; traveled to Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands (2021–23); Yoshitomo Nara for better or worse, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi, Japan (2017); Life is Only One: Yoshitomo Nara, Asia Society Hong Kong Center, Hong Kong, China (2015); NARA Yoshitomo: a bit like you and me…, Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan; traveled to Aomori Museum of Art, Japan; Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan (2012–13); Yoshitomo Nara: The Little Little House in The Blue Wood, Towada Art Center, Aomori, Japan (2012); Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, Asia Society Museum, New York, NY (2010); Yoshitomo Nara + graf, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK (2008); Yoshitomo Nara + graf: A to Z, Yoshii Brick Brew House, Aomori, Japan (2006); Yoshitomo Nara: Moonlight Serenade, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan (2006); Yoshitomo Nara— From the Depth of My Drawer, Hara Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan; traveled to Kanaz Forest of Creation, Fukui, Japan; Yonago City Museum of Art, Tottori, Japan; Yoshii Brick Brewhouse, Hirosaki, Aomori, Japan; Rodin Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2004–05); Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH; traveled to Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, PA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MI; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI (2003–05); I DON’T MIND, IF YOU FORGET ME, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama Japan; traveled to Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan; Ashiya City Museum of Art and History, Ashiya, Japan; Asahikawa Prefectural Museum of Art, Hokkaido, Japan; Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan; Hirosaki Yoshii Brick Brewhouse, Hirosaki, Japan (2001–02); Walk On: Works by Yoshitomo Nara, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2000); and Yoshitomo Nara: Lullaby Supermarket, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA (2000), among many more.

_____

BLUM is pleased to present New York-based artist Hadi Falapishi’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Edge of the World.

Exhibiting Falapishi’s new body of shrewdly deskilled panels alongside photorealistic paintings and bold ceramic sculptures, Edge of the World demonstrates the remarkable range inherent to the artist’s practice as he examines the widely varying possibilities for visual representation. Falapishi’s works cannibalize a vast quantity of reference material—from the Surrealists to Spaghetti Western films—to create a carefully selected composite of signs and signifiers. Deconstructing the vulnerabilities within both the act of viewing and of being viewed, Edge of the World is insightfully humorous, art historically allusive, and stylistically multifaceted. 

Growing up in Tehran as the son of two photographers and later studying photography at Bard College, Falapishi’s now interdisciplinary practice has a unique and expansive approach to the mechanism as medium. For Falapishi, the mechanism that he now activates to make work is the art and cultural historical canon. Deploying imagery from this pool of reference material, the artist situates his and other bodies therein. In his photorealistic paintings in Edge of the World, such as Professional Painter in a Tree on the Sixteenth of September (2024) or Professional Painter in a False Mirror (2024), for instance, Falapishi inserts his likeness into famous compositions by René Magritte while facetiously giving himself the title of “Professional Painter” as both a rebuke and an assessment of the painting style.

Stemming from the photorealistic paintings, Falapishi’s ceramic sculptures and panels with cardboard allow the artist to playfully explore the psychological state that drives his practice. Rendered in a loose style—with flat colors, crude shapes, and blocky horizon lines—these works borrow from the ethos of the CoBrA art movement in their hue and sentiments prioritizing spontaneity and experimentation. Simultaneously, in a gesture reminiscent of Mike Kelley, Falapishi grants new intellectual and emotional depth to that which might otherwise appear childlike, embedding art historical references in his faux-naïf scenes for those that know to look. Still Life with Cat and Mouse (2024), for example, adds a cartoonish cat and mouse to a still life with a bottle that clearly alludes to the oeuvre of Giorgio Morandi.

Falapishi leverages the humor that is intrinsic to an unlikely pairing to great effect. Transposing his face onto the bosom of a Roman statue in Professional Painter in a Roman Statue (2024) or inserting a lamppost referencing artists’ artist Martin Kippenberger into a work with simple depth and imprecise lines, Falapishi asserts a truth that has echoed through time with other great storytellers such as William Faulkner. Complex thoughts on the grand nature of existence can sometimes come from the most uncomplicated or unexpected places.

Hadi Falapishi (b. 1987, Tehran, Iran) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including SEARCHERS in Three Acts, ART&NEWPORT, Newport, RI;  Almost There, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2023); As Free As Birds, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, UK (2022); Young and Clueless, The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2022); and In Practice: Total Disbelief, SculptureCenter, New York, NY (2020) ), among others. His work is found in public collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

About BLUM

BLUM represents more than sixty artists and estates from seventeen countries worldwide, nurturing a diverse roster of artists at all stages of their practices with a range of global perspectives. Originally opened as Blum & Poe in Santa Monica in 1994, the gallery has been a pioneer in its early commitment to Los Angeles as an international arts capital. 

The gallery has been acclaimed for its groundbreaking work in championing international artists of postwar and contemporary movements, such as CoBrA, Dansaekhwa, Mono-ha, and Superflat, and for organizing museum-caliber solo presentations and historical survey exhibitions across its spaces in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York. Often partnering with celebrated curators and scholars such as Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Sofia Gotti, Joan Kee, and Mika Yoshitake, the gallery has produced large-scale exhibitions focusing on the Japanese Mono-ha school (2012); the Korean Dansaekhwa monochrome painters (2014); the European postwar movement CoBrA (2015); Japanese art of the 1980s and 1990s (2019); a rereading of Brazilian Modernism (2019); a revisionist take on the 1959 MoMA exhibition, New Images of Man (2020); and a survey of portraiture through a democratic and humanist lens (2023); among others. 

BLUM’s wide-reaching program includes exhibitions, lectures, performance series, screenings, video series, and an annual art book fair at its base in Los Angeles. BLUM Books, the gallery’s publishing division, democratically circulates its program through original scholarship and accessible media ranging from academic monographs, audio series, magazines, to artists’ books.  

Across the three global locations, BLUM prioritizes environmental and community stewardship in all operations. In 2015, it was certified as an Arts:Earth Partnership (AEP) green art gallery in Los Angeles and consequently became one of the first green certified galleries in the United States. The gallery is also a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, which works to facilitate a more sustainable commercial art world and reduce the industry’s collective carbon footprint. BLUM is committed to fostering inclusive and equitable communities both in its physical and online spaces and believes that everybody should have equal access to creating and engaging with contemporary art.

Press Inquiries

Nicoletta Beyer
Communications and Editorial Director, New York
nicoletta@blum-gallery.com

Christie Hayden
Communications and Social Media Editor, Los Angeles
christie@blum-gallery.com



Yoshitomo Nara: My Imperfect Self | Hadi Falapshi: Edge of the World

BLUM

Roberts Projects is pleased to present Schwarzweiß, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Lenz Geerk, marking the artist’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery. Using the German word for “black-and-white,” the monochromatic works in Schwarzweiß straddle the line between drawing and painting, allowing the artist to probe the emotional and psychological spaces of anxiety, uncertainty and disconnection.

Geerk’s oeuvre is renowned for its use of a figurative language that hearkens back to early Modernism as a means for exploring the strangeness and alienation of contemporary life while also attending to moments of hope and possibility. His paintings regularly depict solitary figures absorbed in contemplation, or groups of people where the possibility of connection has been replaced by the certainty of isolation. His figures are archetypal rather than specific; he sets them within spaces both descriptively vague and poetically alive. The compositional restraint of the scenes Geerk constructs and the placid, dreamlike manner in which he paints is often at odds with the inner turmoil his figures seem to be experiencing. By eschewing obvious references within the works to a specific historical period, Geerk allows them to assume a timeless and universal quality, one that prompts viewers to reflect on details in their own lives without being imaginatively confined by them.

Though the existential and thematic focus in Schwarzweiß is consistent with previous bodies of work, the form of expression is decidedly new, as these works are rendered entirely in black and white. For Geerk, the simplification of his palette into a range of monochromatic values is a way of expressing the increasing polarization of society and the absence of nuance, complexity and uncertainty as a result. His figures continue to express these states and qualities, as do the scenes of landscapes, still-lifes and interiors where figures are conspicuously absent. Even when the emphasis is on the inanimate or non-human, Geerk still places viewers in a precarious situation where, though certainty of meaning may be unattainable, the experiences of levity and joy are not.

Geerk’s investigation of the vast space between seemingly rigid positions takes place not only on a metaphoric level, but on a formal one as well. Although the spectrum of color has been narrowed in these works, they nonetheless contain a wide range of tonal variation and pictorial subtlety which belie any notion that they are truly—and only—black and white. Working in this evasive space where drawing meets painting is just another example of Geerk’s brilliance in using his materials and creative process to express a state of flux and indeterminacy. In Schwarzweiß, works that might have previously been understood as studies or preparations are embraced as both provisional and complete. 

_____

Roberts Projects is pleased to present Finding Figures, an exhibition of new works on paper by Daniel Crews-Chubb, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Building on his previous exploration of the figure's formal and philosophical possibilities, Crews-Chubb’s new works take an increasingly abstract direction, aiming to uncover the timeless and universal rather than the contemporary and specific.

For nearly ten years Crews-Chubb has centered the figure in his work, using it as a flexible motif that blends ancient references to Aztec deities and Hindu gods with more recent art historical influences, including Cubism, Abstract Expressionism and the CoBrA movement. His figures, whether solitary or in groups, are intentionally devoid of defining features that might tie them to specific races, genders or cultural identities. By allowing them to be read as archetypes rather than embodiments of specific historical periods, Crews-Chubb invites viewers to consider the body in a more fundamental and primary sense—as a vessel of energy rather than a container for subjectivity.

Though Finding Figures marks the first time that Crews-Chubb will solely exhibit works on paper, he has retained the materially dense, compositionally frenetic and formally complex qualities that are typical of his works on canvas and which are due in large part to the manner in which he paints, a process he likens to sculpture. Beginning with his substrates on the floor, Crews-Chubb then covers them with a wide array of materials, including acrylics, oil pastels, charcoal, sand and inks, while seldom using brushes for the application or refinement of his compositions. Once the rough outline of a silhouette or compositional structure has emerged he moves each work onto the wall and continues to both add and remove material as he searches for the right balance of figure and ground, shape and atmosphere. Like his choice of materials, Crews-Chubb’s palettes are varied and expansive and they express his interest in pairing colors and materials evoking the organic and natural with those that seem artificial, industrial and irrefutably new.

The drive towards greater degrees of abstraction in these works is reflective of Crews-Chubb’s ongoing interest in pareidolia, the psychological and perceptual phenomenon whereby humans perceive order, patterns or structure in otherwise random and diffuse stimuli, as when a face or object is seen amidst fleeting cloud formations. This deeply human and universal drive to convert the abstract into the concrete takes on a formal dimension in Crews-Chubb’s works, in which figures are somewhat discernible and seemingly on the cusp of dissolving into the larger world of their compositions. The internal split between order and its absence is never resolved in these works. Instead, both possibilities exist simultaneously and in productive tension with one another.

The exhibitions will open to the public on January 25, 2025. However, due to current circumstances, there will not be an opening reception.

Lenz Geerk: Schwarzweiß | Daniel Crews-Chubb: Finding Figures

Roberts Projects

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to present Moonbliss Riverdream, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles painter Kim DeJesus on view from January 25 to March 8, 2025. This exhibition marks DeJesus’s first solo show with the gallery and features a selection of her recent abstract paintings, created using acrylic, oil, and mixed media on canvas.

Kim DeJesus employs skilled techniques such as staining, pouring, and blurring, resulting in voluminous, vibrant canvases that resonate with the complexities of nature, perception, and the human psyche. Drawing from historical movements like Color Field and Action Painting, DeJesus’s work contributes to the rich tradition of American abstraction. These historical connections are enriched by an intuitively driven feminist perspective and a spiritually ritualistic approach to process.

DeJesus’s bold explorations of form, light, and depth evoke the ethereal and emotional. Each painting reflects on and builds upon the next. This creative progression allows DeJesus’s picture planes to develop through both surrender and intention, chance and control. She choreographs energetic and vivid compositions that pulse with life and offer space for transformation—equally for the artist herself and for the viewer—by creating a harmonious balance of introspection and expansion, form and formlessness.

Her approach to color field painting offers insights into the fleeting nature of memory, perception, and the depths of consciousness, highlighting abstraction’s potential as a poetic language. The works in Moonbliss Riverdream evoke the vastness of outer space, suggesting an analogy to the enormity of the spiritual realms we each hold within ourselves. This shift from outer to inner space encourages viewers to tap into their own perception of space and consciousness to access nuanced levels of awareness.

Kim DeJesus: Moonbliss Riverdream

Vielmetter Los Angeles

YOU AND ME AND EGO
Artist statement written by Steven Dayvid McKellar

It’s 4am 
Winter is on it’s way 
And it’s dark and cold outside 
The comings of a bacteria rain in the distance 
From the upstairs of the FH, 
I can see over the small houses 
The neighborhood is dead quiet
And will remain so most of the day 
Not a lot of life in these streets
An area of a small Kentucky river town where drugs are rampant 
and children (if seen or heard)
speak with foul language 
and inherited distrust 

I feel like a maiden in a tower 
transmitting some lonely frequency 
Beep beep beep 
Silently 
It is very quiet here 
And the stairs leading down to the bottom floor 
create a moaning song arrangement 
as i descend 
But at the bottom lies all this paint 
and canvas 
and power tools 
and old bicycles parts 
and piled scaffolding 
and tall planks of wood leaned against the red brick walls
tarps 
and wood ships on the concrete floor 
Along with dirt 
and hay 
And seeing all this 
My heart is singed with excitement 
and i put my headphones in
I’m barely awake 
But i feel like I’m the only person alive
And three hours could be three seconds 
And all of this could burn 
and be whittled down to 
a small pile of ash 
And in imagining this 
I could think of no greater manifestation 

bitches brew 
In a silent way 
On the streets 
The sound of it 
within a soft-dream mind 
is an avalanche in the head 
circular 
Perpetual 
Relentless 
Like pushing through a violent wind
no destination
in the thick of it 
where nature puts me 
Unmerciful toward circumstance 
and emotion 
Unceasing 
to our rules of comfort and conduct 
And Miles rages 
And i tumble and rage with him 
along with my guides 
who have ventured with me 
through all of it
And the break
when it comes 
and I step away 
is like life itself 
I have no idea what to think of it all
Cause that, was never the purpose 
It was to exist in it 
Of it 
Eat it 
Drink it 
Puke and shit 
Collapse 
Get up 

Drop the mic
Or the brush 
Or the trumpet 

And bow out 

And then, years later 
I was reunited with these works 
My mental and emotional state 
entirely different 
Seeing them again 
Spread out on the floor 
of my parents flat in Nashville 
It was like seeing old friends again 
Ones that are pretty new and unknown to you 
but your bond is that of brotherhood/sisterhood
bonded over the fire of life’s intensity 
Like tour mates 
If you allow it, you will find yourself
forever connected to the people you journeyed with 

One thing that isolation of that kind did to me 
It opened my subconscious more 
My conscious mind slowly realized 
that it wasn’t gonna be disturbed 
Phone off, no one i knew coming round 
And my subconscious followed suite 
eventually letting it sink
that it was not gonna be interrupted 
if I sat and staired at a wall for three hours 

Truth is 
I was ..really confused at the time 
About relationships, identity and purpose 
And I had to walk through it

It was a necessary wrestle


About the Artist
Steven Dayvid McKellar is a musician, painter, and poet from Cape Town, South Africa. After a 20-year music career, touring globally with his band, Civil Twilight, Steven began releasing his first solo records and returned to his roots in painting. As a child, he was trained in realism by his aunt and renowned South African artist Donna McKellar before finding community and creative outlets through music and poetry.

In September 2022, Steven released ‘Nama,’ a textural and rhythmic exploration of his South African roots and identity. ‘Nama’ is a follow-up to two earlier musical releases, ‘Ethio’ and ‘Belleville Demos’—soon to be reissued.

After a debut solo show of his early paintings in Nashville, TN, and a solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Nooit Ge Dacht, Steven has continued his exploration of both the mundane and the esoteric, stripping away layers of identity with You and Me and Ego.



Steven Dayvid McKellar: YOU AND ME AND EGO

El Nido 

Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature will prominently highlight the artist’s “multiples.” Arranged thematically throughout the first-floor galleries, the multiples are editioned objects made to be sold or given away, more accessible than singular, large-scale pieces. Iconic works such as Sled (1969) and Felt Suit (1970) join lesser-known multiples such as Rhine Water Polluted (1981), a bottle of river water that exemplifies the artist’s approach to artmaking, using humble materials to draw attention to social conditions and environmental issues, such as the contamination of the Rhine River. This expansive array of historical works will show how Beuys transformed the medium of sculpture, with his political concerns at the forefront. 

This fall, in a multifaceted effort, The Broad will present a free collection exhibition, offsite public reforestation project, and series of programs connected with the legacy of Joseph Beuys’s art and environmental advocacy. The exhibition Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature is organized by The Broad’s curator Sarah Loyer with Beuys scholar Andrea Gyorody, director of the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University. It will coincide with a major reforestation initiative, Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar, as part of Getty’s landmark arts event PST ART: Art & Science Collide. These dual projects present Beuys’s work and practice as more urgent than ever before, as the planet’s climate continues to warm. 

The exhibition will present over 400 artworks that illuminate Beuys’s practice as a model for direct environmental action, drawing from the Broad’s extensive holdings of the artist’s work. The corresponding Social Forest initiative will echo the appeals for change seen within the exhibition, with an emphasis on the unique social and environmental context of current day Los Angeles. Undertaken in partnership with North East Trees and Tongva (Gabrielino) archaeologist Desireé Reneé Martinez and artist Lazaro Arvizu Jr., the project encompasses the planting of 100 native trees, primarily coast live oaks, in Elysian Park in Los Angeles and additional plantings at Kuruvungna Village Springs in West L.A. 


Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature

The Broad 

Black in Place is a holding space for invocation, re-memory, and unbridled Black expression. Remedying erasure that historically fueled what esteemed African-American collectors Bernard and Shirley Kinsey refer to as the “myth of absence,” artworks in this exhibition dispel the notion that what is unseen does not exist. The paradox of existing while being rendered invisible is an ongoing reality for the Black Diaspora, particularly in the West. This exhibition interrogates the living contradictions of existing while Black, invocates ancestral and indigenous wisdom, and explores how Black artists cultivate dreaming through making.

The artists presented are Leslie Adkins, Adeola Davies-Aiyeloja, Denise ‘deLaSNP’ Coke, Dea Jenkins, Steven A. Johnson II, Kandy G. Lopez, Rosalyn Myles, Cheyann Washington, and Fallon Williams. Their art practices reflect journeys of cultural enunciation and recontextualization of Black expression, particularly in white-dominated spaces. Through audio, portraiture, painting, digital/Augmented Reality, fiber art, poetry, drawing, and installation, the artworks engage hidden narratives, ancestral wisdom and unbridled expression to both sow and assert Black existence.

The opening reception for Black in Place will be held on Saturday, January 25th from 2pm - 4pm. This free, public event will include a performance of Ancestral Libation by Adeola Davies-Aiyeloja.

Black in Place will be on view in the gallery through March 29, 2025, with free public visiting hours Thursdays through Saturdays, from 10am to 5pm.


This exhibition is supported by the California Natural Resources Agency for the Museum Grant Program under the California Cultural and Historical Endowment, the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.

Please note that pets are not allowed inside our buildings. For questions, please email gallery@angelsgateart.org.

More information about AGCC is available at angelsgateart.org

Image: Denise ‘deLaSNP’ Coke, Bodega (Just Another Day), 2022. Digital print with augmented reality capabilities.

Black in Place

Angels Gate Cultural Center

Live Kawaii Die Sugoi will be showcasing artwork from 6 local artists ranging from the super cute to the super cool

Gina Cannella | Diana Nugit-Lauger | Renée Tay | Frank Forte | Alexa Simpson: Live Kawaii Die Sugoi

Please join us for the festive opening of El trineo, a sculpture by Enrique Martínez Celaya, in the Wende’s garden, with light refreshments and a speech by the artist.

About the artwork:

“On Christmas of 1967, my parents bought me a toy sleigh. In the Cuba of my childhood, where snow was as imaginary and foreign as Santa Claus, the sleigh represented the Land of Otherness. This land of Otherness was a place where people would go to and never come back, and where we would someday go as well. As such, the sleigh was a symbol of both our hope for a brighter future and a rejection of who we were. This duality between feeling-not-enough and hoping to be that other is a pervasive Caribbean ailment. Using my memories and biography as a point of departure, El trineo wavers between being a primary experience and being an allegory for the evolution of hopes and illusions that suggest connections between the personal, the familial, the political, and the physical.”

—Enrique Martínez Celaya

About the artist:

Enrique Martínez Celaya is an artist, author, and former physicist whose work has been exhibited and collected by major institutions worldwide. His notable projects and exhibitions include those at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia; The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.; the Museo Marino Marini in Florence, Italy; the Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin, Germany; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, Cuba; and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig in Germany. His work is held in over sixty public collections internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Martínez Celaya is the first Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts in the history of the University of Southern California and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, where he was also a Roth Family Distinguished Visiting Scholar. He is the author of nine books on art, art practice, philosophy, and poetry.

From April 26–October 19, 2025, the Wende Museum will present the exhibition Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Sextant.

Enrique Martínez Celaya: El Trineo

The Wende Museum

Xela Institute of Art is delighted to announce Repatriate, the first solo museum exhibition by Los Angeles based artist, Elijah Ford.

Ford's exhibition provides a fantastical discourse approach to a serious humanitarian issue regarding the displacement of hundreds of natives in the Chagos Island. The U.S and U.K secretly planned the mass deportation of the native Chagos, known as Ilois, in order to build a
U.S military base on the island. The Ilois are descended from enslaved peoples originating from Africa and Madagascar. Ford's lineage includes distant Malagasy ancestry, connecting them to the heritage of Madagascar.

Ford's Repatriate features several paintings and a sculpture piece that depicts the connection between dogs and humans with an extraterrestrial approach. Ford creates an alternate reality where the aliens have witnessed the injustices of the displacement of groups and the removal of their histories for the sake to benefit the world's superpowers. As an attempt to empathize with the losses, the aliens give their alien dogs to the displaced groups. Although the alien dogs cannot acclaim full reparations of what was lost, they provide a fantastical hope of a rhizomatic development of empathy amongst one another. It explores the connection between human and alien dogs- although different- an effort to understand one another as an act of care. Ford’s fantastical world serves as a sci-fi alteration of reparations for the loss of traditions, homes, families, sense of security and the displacement of natives. Ford yearns to provide hope for his ancestors and those affected by displacement forced upon by power-centric countries.

About the Artist
Ford is a California-born artist who embraces the juxtaposition of fantasy and reality through a range of characters, creatures, figurations, and compositions in his paintings. He utilizes historical art tropes with contemporary imagery to bring his imaginations to life.

About Xela Institute of Art
Xela Institute of Art is a nonprofit art exhibition space located in Wrigley Village, Long Beach, dedicated to showcasing the vibrant talents of both emerging and established artists. Xela Institute of Art viewings are by appointment only, if you’d like to schedule one- email info@xela.art

Address of Xela Institute of Art:
2176 Pacific Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90806

Elijah Ford: Repatriate

Xela Institute of Art

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

Unspoken Configurations focuses on the ripple effects of displacement on the Black and Indigenous diaspora, specifically from Cali, Colombia, and Oaxaca/Veracruz, Mexico. It considers the impact of migration and American expectations on the individual and familial unit by using stories of family, heritage, and legacy to portray the ever-conflicting restrictions of Northern systems and societies. 

Through Northern motifs, historical deities, and personal imagery artists Jones Gutiérrez and Elías Magdalena demand a reflection on the mainstream media beliefs on migration that are put out for consumption rather than a critique of the Northern states. 

The exhibition highlights JG’s and EMX’s use of several disciplines from mixed-media and painting to photography and performance.


Unspoken Configurations/Estructuras Invisibles

CCCM Mexican Center for Culture and Cinematic Arts

Sarah Brook Gallery is thrilled to present Une promesse que je veux résoudre / A promise I want to resolve, the second exhibition of French artist Carole Ebtinger. The show opens on Saturday, December 7, and will be on view through January 25, 2025. 

Standing before Promesse IV, you may see light flickering atop ruffled waters, streaming through leafy trees, or enshrining in gold, if for a moment, a pond’s mottled floor. But what you feel—what it makes you feel—is harder to place, harder yet to name. The rise and fall of light and shade across the twelve paintings comprising Carole Ebtinger’s A promise I want to resolve leads you toward the indescribable. Harnessing velocity, color, composition, and contrast, she renders interior experiences tangible, distilling all the intensity of emotion, sensation, and rumination in paint.  

Unfastened from representation but still of this world, her forms evoke the phenomena of light and her palette, the natural world of verdant meadows, gardens, grottos, bogs, and forests. In Promesse III, where wispy olive, mauve, and indigo daubs congeal and disperse, and citrine-chartreuse washes dissolve in colorless incandescence, it’s easy to think of water lilies. Yet, simply consigning her work to the enduring legacy of Claude Monet’s impressionism misses the novelty of her mark-making and her formidable ability to move through the emotional registers—from solemnity to ecstasy, placidity to frenzy—in a single compositional frame without even one recognizable shape. 

Rather than preserve the image of a particular place or vignette, Ebtinger reifies the volatility, malleability, and, at times, all-consuming nature of emotional states. Stirring miasmic gestures are skewered by sudden vertical slashes, limpid pools of color are smeared, and feathery textural strokes are overrun by opaque Twombly-esque scrawl. Elsewhere, variegated pastel hues are engulfed by an ever-encroaching murkiness if not entirely subsumed by lush yet acerbic shadowplay. This rhythmic interplay between harmony and turmoil renders the abstractions indefinitely absorbing, enchanting even. Look away, and you may miss the light fade and flare as despair turns to delight. What are moods but moments of enchantment? 

The dynamism of the work arises in part from the artist’s bifurcated process, which balances chance and deliberate acts. Ebtinger begins by moving a mixture of pigment, water, and glue across the paper. Using a large brush, she follows her intuition to imagine an initial composition that is as free of intentionality and premeditation as possible. To maintain a level of urgency and spontaneity, she works on two sheets simultaneously, moving quickly back and forth between them before either can dry. In the second phase, she returns with fine brushes and pastels, shaping the image’s final form by both embracing and resisting the underlying base. While the first stage happens quickly, the second may take several months.

Comparing this exhibition to her last in June 2023 reveals the artist's growing confidence in the intuitive aspects of her process. The heightened tension between restless and meticulous lines, between impassioned and refined gestures, affords the series its distinctive voice—a candor that is rigorously intimate, kinetic, and entirely original. 

In this way, coming to the final painting, hung on the rear-facing wall in the back of the gallery, where a blazing white form floats like a fallen flower upon a night-dark lake, you see a lily belonging to no other but Ebtinger. And experience a feeling, however ineffable, that this mixture of pigment on paper alone could affect. —Tara Anne Dalbow

Carole Ebtinger: Une promesse que je veux résoudre / A promise I want to resolve

Sarah Brook Gallery

"Uprooted Body: Alienation, Belonging, and the Poetics of Pain" - A Bold and Unapologetic Exploration of Identity and Resilience

"The personal is political, and the body is a battleground." 
— Barbara Kruger

The diasporic body, uprooted from its land of origin, serves as a living archive, carrying a history etched into its cells—an anthology of movements, memories, and languages. Migration is not merely the act of crossing physical borders; it is a journey through thresholds of identity, culture, and belonging. Uprooted Body delves into the profound tension between displacement and adaptation, the duality of estrangement and the longing for connection, and the dissonance of inhabiting a body that feels less like home and more like a battleground for transformation and negotiation.

An evocative group exhibition featuring the works of internationally acclaimed artists Shirley Tse, He Yunchang, Ray Ren, Sining Zhu, and Ruoyi Shi. The exhibition opens December 14, 2024 and runs through January 25, 2025, inviting audiences to explore the delicate intersections of alienation, identity, belonging, and the transformative power of pain.

At the opening reception on December 14 at 7 PM, Ray Ren will debut a live performance art piece to further contextualize themes explored in this show, offering an immersive experience to connect with the conceptual underpinnings of his work in the show.

Uprooted body: Alienation, Belonging and the Poetics of Pain

a poco art archive

Two new exhibitions open at Irvine Fine Arts Center on November 16, "For Me and You" and "End as Beginning."

"For Me and You" features multidisciplinary artworks by Ann Phong and Gloria Gem Sánchez that celebrate kinship and legacy and draw attention to our collective impact on the ecosystems we inhabit and pass on to future generations. "End as Beginning" features sculptural and installation-based works by Randi Hokett, Zara Kuredjian, and Patricia Liverman that foreground rupture, perception, and time as dominant forces that shape our worlds and our understanding of ourselves within them.

For Me and You | End as Beginning

Irvine Fine Arts Center

Working in the figurative tradition of Viola Frey, Elizabeth Scott uses clay to emphasize the tactile qualities of expression and gesture, exploring the body's relationship to memory and trauma with a keen sense of humor that transforms pathos into play. 
 
In Ace of Cups, her first solo exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, Scott presents more than 50 ceramic face cups. Each one is a portrait of an emotion, from a passing fear to a quiet hope. Some faces appear gleeful, evoking cartoonish English character jugs, while others look melancholy or even deranged, with an edge that evokes Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’ sculptures. Scott uses a needle tool to cut pleading phrases and oblique references into some of their foreheads: “take me home,” “not long for this world,” or simply, “Led Zeppelin.” Pastel glazes run like blood down cheeks and noses, symbolic of violent changes in the psyche. In tarot readings, the Ace of Cups card—which inspired the exhibition’s title—can be a sign of inner turmoil and repressed emotions, or, an omen of new love and burgeoning creativity. Just as a tarot card spread might help you make sense of the past, present, and future, Scott’s cups read as an ongoing attempt at consolidating a sense of self.

Elizabeth Scott: The Ace of Cups

Craig Krull Gallery

Cynthia Talmadge: Chevy Chase Syndrome

Marc Selwyn Fine Art

LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes presents Jaime Muñoz: Truth Is A Moving Target, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition featuring large-scale mixed-media paintings and ink diagram drawings. Muñoz’s body of work navigates themes of labor commodification, the conflict between colonial history, notions of modernity, and reveals nuanced narratives often overlooked. Through his decorative and symbolic imagery, he challenges myths about the American experience.
 
Muñoz utilizes industrial techniques and processes that effectively conceal his hand within the work. Yet, the pieces maintain a craft-like quality, adorned with paper appliqués, glitter, and velvet, with imagery that reveal layers of sparrows, butterflies, flowers, geometric borders, and ancient cosmic deities, inviting viewers to contemplate deeper meanings and find guidance within. As a first-generation Chicano, Muñoz’s visual language draws from his personal experiences. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Southern California, he pursued painting and design while working in structural concrete and temp warehouse labor in San Bernardino County. This period has been significantly informative to the way Muñoz sees and thinks about the world.

Curated by Karen Crews Hendon, LA Plaza Director of Exhibitions and Senior Curator in partnership with Jaime Muñoz, the selection of work in this exhibit comes from multiple private collections and presents a chronological and aesthetic evolution of Muñoz’s work from 2019 to 2024, including his Toyotería and Blood Memory series, offering a comprehensive exploration of his artistic evolution and thematic depth. The exhibition also displays the artist’s process through his collection of sketchbooks and features a new biographic film produced by LA Plaza.

Jaime Muñoz: Truth Is A Moving Target

LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes

This exhibition of rediscovered artworks, process pieces, and archival materials charts the evolution of creative projects by Yolanda López from the 1960s to the 2010s.

Curated by her archivist, Angelica Rodriguez, and her son, Rio Yañez, this body of work reveals López’s inquisitive approach to artistic mediums with daring and influential sensibilities that emerged in her practice through life experiences, research, and community activism. Included in the exhibit are studies for many of López’s iconic projects, such as the Guadalupe series, Three Generations: Tres Mujeres, and Women’s Work is Never Done as well as her political posters, photography, experiments with Xerox, and her final projects.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Yolanda López (1942–2021) was born in San Diego and became one of the most important Chicana artists and activists of her generation. Her formation can be traced to her student activism as an undergraduate at San Francisco State University in the 1960s and her ongoing role as a cultural worker within the Chicano civil rights movement. She was a founding member of Los Siete de la Raza, a Black Panther-backed movement that galvanized San Francisco’s Latino/a/x community and produced works of protest art. She later played a significant role in the San Francisco Bay Area working as the educational director for the Mission District Cultural Center and as an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, Mills College, the California College of the Arts, and other Bay Area colleges. López received the National Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, and a Latinx Artist Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2021. Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist is her first solo museum exhibition.

Yolanda@ucsdstudio, 1977. Courtesy of the Yolanda López Legacy Trust.

-

Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist is the first solo museum presentation of the work of Yolanda López, the pathbreaking Chicana artist and activist whose career in California spanned five decades. The exhibition presents a compendium of López’s work from the 1970s and 1980s, when she created an influential body of paintings, drawings, and collages that investigate and reimagine representations of women within Chicano/a/x culture and society at large.

In her best-known work, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe (1978), López depicts herself wearing running shoes and the Virgin Mary’s star-patterned mantle, an emblem of defiant joy. One of the most iconic artworks to emerge from the Chicano Movement, López’s Portrait challenges the colonial and patriarchal origins of the Guadalupe iconography, transforming the symbol into one of radical feminist optimism. López frequently used herself, her mother, and her grandmother as models and “prototypes” in her conceptual drawing projects of the 1970s, bringing visibility to women of distinct roles and life stages through heroic, often larger-than-life portraits.

This exhibition is part of the Feminist Art Coalition, a national platform for art projects that seek to generate cultural awareness of feminist thought, experience, and action. Working collectively, art museums and nonprofit institutions from across the United States will present concurrent events beginning in the fall of 2020.

Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist is organized by MCASD Senior Curator Jill Dawsey, PhD and made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Institutional Support of MCASD is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Fund.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Yolanda López (1942–2021) was born in San Diego and became one of the most important Chicana artists and activists of her generation. Her formation can be traced to her student activism as an undergraduate at San Francisco State University in the 1960s and her ongoing role as a cultural worker within the Chicano civil rights movement. She was a founding member of Los Siete de la Raza, a Black Panther-backed movement that galvanized San Francisco’s Latino/a/x community and produced works of protest art. She later played a significant role in the San Francisco Bay Area working as the educational director for the Mission District Cultural Center and as an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, Mills College, the California College of the Arts, and other Bay Area colleges. López received the National Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, and a Latinx Artist Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2021. Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist is her first solo museum exhibition. 

Runner: On My Own!, Yolanda López, from the series Tableaux Vivant, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe. Courtesy of the Yolanda López Legacy Trust.

Yolanda López: Women’s Work is Never Done | Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist 

The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture

Strut is an exhibition of new ceramic sculpture and photographs by Christina A. West that complicate tropes of masculinity common to representations of the male body. Referencing the stumps and struts common to classical marble sculpture, West’s new ceramic sculptures function as plinths and supports for models to interact with. Rather than mimicking marble, these ceramic supports are modeled and glazed to suggest the visceral, while also encouraging awkward, inventive positioning of the body. West’s work counters centuries of images of men (created by men) that depict the male body as a caricatured representation of power, strength, and heroism, instead blending beauty and strength with vulnerability and awkwardness to convey the complexity of embodied experience. 

Strut, which includes two large ceramic sculptures, photographs, and timelapse video, will be on view in the Igal & Diane Silber Vault Gallery at AMOCA from September 7, 2024–January 26, 2025.

Christina A. West: Strut

American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA)

Andrea Castillo and Will Zeng, DMST Atelier's current featured artists in the duo show Imagined Long Before, available for view from Dec 14 - Jan 30, explore concepts of utopic desire and dystopic reality against the backdrop of everyday California life. 

Andrea Castillo's surreal figures amidst vivid landscapes examine the varied selves we present to the world, while the familiar sites of her home city are portrayed in "Hollenbeck Park" and "Storefront I" in warm, vibrant hues. The attention to detail to objects in Castillo's work shows landscapes as characters unto themselves. This is as true in her depiction of the home in "The Visit" as it is in carefully rendered commercial displays of Sanrio backpacks, Nike shoes and Gucci shirts in "Storefront I", objects of a multicultural city economy. In contrast, the people figured within Castillo’s landscapes are purposefully archetypal, their proportions swelling and shrinking, almost blending into their environments. In an artist statement Castillo writes that her "painted contorted figures act as the interior life of a body": "Utility Planning" uses these contortions to capture the contradictions between the industrialized carscapes of the city, depicted in miniature form at the top of her painting, and the larger-than-life bodies of LA onlookers perched on the ground, whose limbs bloom and distort amidst the summer heat. 

Will Zeng's artwork places cars in focus as a method of interrogating taste, race, and queerness in contemporary LA. Zeng is drawn to the relationship between car culture and queer Asian American masculinity as a nexus of aesthetic inquiry. Cars feature not just as vehicles but as status objects, evoked by  “BOYRACER” which depicts an Asian man in a tank top lounging on a shiny pink new car. The car crash in particular, where these symbols of status, masculinity, and power meet their natural limits, is of special interest in "CRASH I" and "OOPS". “CRASH I” shows the aftermath of a collision, with a red figure turning away from the wreckage. "OOPS" counteracts the hopes of Asian-American assimilation and the "dream life", (Lauren Berlant’s famous critique “Cruel Optimism” comes to mind), represented through bumper stickers — "baby on board”, "proud parent of honor student" — contrasted with the harsh reality of the dented minivan.

Historian Norman Klein writes of Los Angeles as a city "that was imagined long before it was built" (2008), a sentiment echoed by Mike Davis decades earlier in "City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles" (1990): "[Los Angeles] is, and has been since 1888, a commodity: something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash ... The ultimate world-historical significance — and oddity — of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism." The promises of LA, whether exemplified by the dreams of its immigrant communities or by Hollywood and technological progress, have always been matched by messier histories of struggle, ongoing gentrification, and environmental disaster. 

Castillo and Zeng are united by their shared interest in the optimism amidst the commodified urban scene, from the perspective of the marginalized: the moments of beauty simultaneous with destruction. 

As a socially focused art gallery, DMST Atelier is honored to present their work.

For more information on this featured exhibition, DMST Atelier's gallery is present on Instagram at instagram.com/DMSTAtelier. The gallery can also be contacted, via email at hello@dmstatelier.com, for any questions.


  Andrea Castillo & Will Zeng: Imagined Long Before

Dmst Atelier

Collaboration with Zeeba Med. 

Raffle, champagne and more surprises! 

https://azziart.gallery/
@azziart.gallery_la
@azzi_art


Beauty and Art

Azzi Art Gallery LA

Melrose Botanical Garden is honored to present “ICANDY” a series of never before seen sexy & scrumptious food-art-photography-portraits by the one and only, iconic Angelyne. 

Curated by Lizzie Klein & Sophie Appel and opening on January 4th, 2025 at 6pm. With the remains of her meals at various Los Angeles restaurant locations, Angelyne constructs portraits, oftentimes of celebrities on her plate by channelling their spirit. She is able to harness the quality of each person in her portraits through the eyes, or facial expression, through their gaze. Her portrait of ET made from leftover beans, or Audrey Hepburn made of red cabbage leaves you able to hear the sounds of their voices. Each print is carefully hand painted and signed in glitter, rendering each photograph an original and unique work. 

Angelyne is a singer, actress, media personality, model, and billboard queen. She came to prominence when her first billboard went up in 1984. She was in the band Baby Blue and then began her own solo music career shortly thereafter. She has appeared in films and music videos such as Earth Girl's Are Easy (1988), Moby's "We Are All Made of Stars" (2002), & The Avalanches "Running Red Lights" (2020). She has exhibited her paintings at Plume Gallery and MODA Hollywood, among others. Angelyne is the honorary mayor of West Hollywood.

ANGELYNE: ICANDY

Melrose Botanical Garden

"Duality" brings together two artists, Sachiko Bradley and Kristi Head, whose work delves into the transformative power of color as a means of expression.  Through their distinct artistic approaches, both artists explore how color can evoke emotion, create contrast, and tell complex, layered stories.  

Sachiko, who works exclusively with abstract shapes, uses bold and contrasting color palettes to convey a sense of energy and spontaneity.  Her dynamic compositions pulse with emotion, inviting the viewer to feel the rhythm embedded within each shape. 

In contrast, Kristi employs representation and surrealism, using color to craft dreamlike worlds that evoke introspection, wonder, and curiosity. Her works, rich in symbolism and mood, lead viewers into a more reflective space, where color serves as a tool for storytelling and self-discovery. 

Together, their work in "Duality" invites viewers to explore the diverse ways color shapes our perceptions, emotions, and connections to the world, highlighting its profound impact on both our internal and external experiences.

Sachiko Bradley & Kristi Head: DUALITY

Taylor Fine Art

albertz benda is excited to introduce Zaachariaha Fielding to the United States with a bicoastal showcase of the Australian artist’s abstract paintings. Fielding’s work incorporates traditional Anangu children’s lullabies, transforming them into patterns on canvas. The textures of these pieces resonate with music, featuring bright colors and themes of a hopeful future.

The artist will open his first solo presentation in the United States from December 11, 2024 – February 1, 2025 at albertz benda, Los Angeles following a feature at UNTITLED Art Fair Miami with albertz benda from December 4 - 8, 2024.  Fielding will be present at both events, highlighting the creative and cultural spirit behind his vibrant and meaningful art.

Raised on desert country in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, Fielding comes from a long line of multi-disciplinary artists. His energetic and visceral paintings are embedded with iconography that reflects the way he lives in the present, as a constant feature of his world, honoring Anangu culture and his inherited Tjukurpa.

“Some of my artwork is spontaneous but predominantly it is memory based, sifting through, and digging around in my memory and drawing on experiences, sounds, shapes. When I find things that don’t make sense, that don’t have clarity, it creates a curiosity in me and I’m compelled to play with it, to tease it out, untie it and repackage it. Because of the two knowledges I possess; ancient and contemporary, culture is purely about connection. That’s my story at the moment. That’s where I sit." -  Zaachariaha Fielding

In addition to his prowess as a visual artist, Fielding has established himself as a critically acclaimed musician as one half of the Australian duo Electric Fields. In 2024 Electric Fields' Zaachariaha Fielding and Michael Ross represented Australia at Eurovision performing their song One Milkali (One Blood), which incorporates an Aboriginal language of the Anangu peoples, Yankunytjatjara. 

Utilizing all forms of art available to him, Fielding blends emotion, memory and experience in busy and expressive works that allude to the cosmologies of the APY lands.

Zaachariaha Fielding

albertz benda

GGLA is pleased to present Pleasures and Days, a solo exhibition by Bay Area-based painter Karla Wozniak. Referencing Proust’s first published book Les Plaisirs et les Jours, Wozniak’s recent paintings vibrate with a playful and effervescent energy as they oscillate between abstraction and representation. Having spent years painting inventive landscapes that stretched the historical genre, more recently Wozniak has shifted to exploring abstraction as a means of touching on such broad themes as time and seasonality, synesthesia and phenomenological reactions to color, and of course landscape, amongst other things. 

Within Pinwheel and Vines, the artist’s largest canvas of the exhibition, we see a litany of techniques and modes of paint application coalesce and radiate from a thickly impastoed bullseye at the approximate center of the canvas. Spreading out from this central point, are fields of layered dry brushed color, broken up by stippled contrasts, or bisected by a thickly caked line of periwinkle oil paint that waxes and wanes in depth. Wozniak distills so many senses of time, place, and color within one composition, that a certain sector calls forth a purple-y pink sunset, while another resembles a receding and sun dappled body of water. A range of abstracted plant forms climb the left of the canvas amid a warmth of summer-y earth tones, oranges and greens. It’s this quality that sets Wozniak’s work apart–the ability to bring harmony and lightheartedness to a canvas that is also chock full of so much information and feeling, rendering a painting that rewards the viewer time and time again. 

Play, immediacy and improvisation are integral to Wozniak’s approach to painting. Within the mid-sized Sun and Wheat, the artist flips the associations of landscape on its head as the canvas is divided into thin vertical striations, yet there still remain allusions to space and place, the warmth and cool of seasons, and the ways in which light falls from day to day simply through the application of color. Thick and thin lines traverse the canvas, creating what Wozniak terms, “pockets of experience”–smaller bits of the painting that become full universes in and of themselves, and have a kind of synesthetic quality. Yet throughout the artist’s work, it’s the line that is always present, evoking different things in different paintings, from smoke, wire and string, to plants, cursive and the distant echoes of modernist forms. And much like the lines that tie Wozniak’s compositions together, which commune with the origins and pioneers of abstraction, just as the fields of color speak to landscapes, nature, heat and sound in a variety of ways–Wozniak paints with a liberty and freeness that is unbeholden to the rigidity of traditionalism or dusty genres, instead allowing the paintings to develop and build in a logic and method that is entirely the artist’s own. 



Karla Wozniak: Pleasures and Days

GGLA

Southern Guild Los Angeles is pleased to present Methods of Flight, a dual presentation of mixed- media paintings by Zimbabwean artists Amanda Shingirai Mushate and Grace Nyahangare, opening on 21 November 2024 (until 1 February 2025). The exhibition platforms the artists’ distinct visual languages, each emerging from the exploration of self and art-making to reimagine modes of being from within a complex socio-political fabric.

Born in Bulawayo in 1995, Mushate studied fine art at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe Visual Arts Studio, graduating in 2016. Working primarily in oil, her practice operates from an abstracted, self-determined realm. Amorphous strands and spectres of diaphanous colour and light merge to build layered constructions. Mushate’s overlaid linework can be read as an ever-expanding topographical mapping of this space. These meandering pathways course the complexity of Zimbabwean life. The country’s history is punctuated with colonial violence, political disruption and threadbare attempts at post-independence reform. Her abstractions navigate not only the desire lines and avenues of survival within this overwrought context, but resolutely assert the necessity of beauty.

There is no discoverable beginning or end in Mushate’s paintings. Colour negotiates the gaps between and beneath her woven lines, as if seeking fertile opportunity to bloom. A current of disobedience runs through the body of work. In their generative, unburdened lyricality, her canvases do not allow us to be small. They insist on courage and beauty as twin flames. The artist tells us that splendour exists, that joy is real, not as a destination but as a way of being.

Building on a foundation of printmaking and photography, Grace Nyahangare’s monotypes combine oil and ink. Born in Harare in 1996, she graduated from the same institution a year after Mushate. Nyahangare’s practice has been catalysed by personal experiences of pain and growth, evolving through distilled processes of memory and emotional recall. In her early 20s, Nyahangare spent three years living and working in the UAE. After the failed promise of inclusion in a local art fair, she was driven to find work as a waitress. The job proved to be a form of enslavement. Her passport was confiscated and held for ransom while she worked 14-hour days and was subjected to racism and abuse. Devising a plan of escape, she returned to Zimbabwe with a new determination to succeed as an artist, as a woman and as a young mother.

Nyahangare’s paintings render her figures against horizonless fields of colour. Her subjects are hybrid, changeable creatures. Their floating bodies present as fluid, mythic in their undulating proportions and vibrant tones of pinks, blues and yellows. Some works present several figures as shared, chimeric organisms: an arm becomes the extended limb of another, splayed fingers suddenly read as tendrils of hair. Nyahangare’s works explore the physical self as a holding site for both trauma and transcendence. Often painting with her daughter present in studio, these kinetic explorations speak wholly to personhood, but more pointedly to the terror and ecstasy of inhabiting the female body.

Like Mushate, Nyahangare’s paintings manifest from a state of rapturous potentiality. Contemporary art emerging from Zimbabwe evinces a singular energetic verve. Mushate and Nyahangare are part of a generation shaped within a cyclical state of reinvention, shedding and active reclamation. Methods of Flight facilitates a space for new visual terms and poetries.

Image: Grace Nyahangare "Pandora's box"

____

Southern Guild Los Angeles is pleased to present Mbare Opera, a solo exhibition of oil paintings by Zimbabwean artist Wycliffe Mundopa, opening on 21 November, 2024. The exhibition brings together major works produced over the past several years, articulating the spectrum of the painter’s prolific visual vocabulary. Focusing on the symbolic value of images and their contextual references to the sub-culture of Harare’s notorious high-density neighbourhood, Mbare, Mundopa has developed theatrical and idiomatic narratives about life in Zimbabwe.

Mundopa’s rhapsodic paintings are populated with an ensemble of women and children. Multiple bodies are presented within immense canvases of Fauvist colour. Dressed in carnivalesque attire – striped stockings, polka-dot dresses, farcical buckled heels – these figures occupy a Bacchanalian version of reality replete with the revelry, erotic agency and hedonism synonymous with Dionysian myth. Mundopa renders Harare’s most vulnerable social factions – women and children – with a liberated hand. His use of non-objective form and lurid flashes of abstraction and absurdity disrupts our perception of these bodies, agitating the prejudices embedded in our ways of seeing. Within Mundopa’s practice, the personal and political coalesce. Behind the flux and vibrancy of our initial reading of his work, the politics of representation hums at the core.

Pathos and satire take center-stage in this body of work. Mundopa’s personages enter and exit the frame, each with their own characterisation, building densely layered storytelling that immerses us in a world both scintillating and disturbing. His pictorial language is laden with the symbolic use of animal imagery: crocodiles, life-size frogs, technicolour fish and dogs are all recurring characters. These do not function merely as visual devices, but as manifestations of colloquial expressions that are part of a vital urban sub-culture on Mbare’s streets. This vernacular encodes grassroots criticisms of the broader social ills and grievances of the country’s societal fabric.

The artist’s employment of the human form suggests an amplified consciousness of the body as a corporeal instrument for pain, rest, expression and desire. For his subjects, the experience of pleasure becomes a ritual act of defiance. These figures assert claim to gratification, indulging in all the earthly delights canonically associated with the painting traditions of the West.

In System and Dialectics of Art, John Graham proposed, “The purpose of art in general is to reveal the truth and to reveal the given object or event; to establish a link between humanity and the unknown; to create new values; to put humanity face to face with a new event, a new marvel.” The essential role of the artist lies in this process of metabolising, distilling, abstracting and magnifying the vast experience of the world around them.

Mundopa’s paintings hold a mirror to the unravelling of contemporary Zimbabwean life and the wider disarray and moral relativism of our post-capitalist era. He makes no judgement of this debasement. Within his liberated tableaux, there is a sustained joy and affirmation of both humankind’s fragility and resilient changeability.

Art is not a space for linearity and didactics. Mundopa creates a realm where agency is afforded to all those involved: himself as the artist, his subjects and his audience – whoever they may be.

____

Southern Guild Los Angeles is pleased to present Like a Fish in the Water, a solo exhibition by South African artist Terence Maluleke, opening on 21 November, 2024 (until 1 February, 2025). Marking his first solo exhibition in the US, this series of new paintings is a vivid development of Maluleke’s personal and religious symbology, exploring themes of self- determination, community, ritual and artistic freedom. Like a Fish in the Water is a reckoning with his faith and expression of the desire for a life inscribed with agency and meaning.

A visual storyteller whose pictorial language marries a graphic sensibility with elements of traditional figuration, Maluleke draws heavily on motifs from both Christian theology and indigenous African spirituality in this body of work. A golden halo that could also be read as a crown of thorns features prominently in many of the paintings, alongside copies of the Bible, a blue candle that his church gave to him as a child and various timber sculptures of fish. Alongside the association with Jesus and the miraculous catching of fish in the Gospels, the latter is deployed in homage to the visionary South African sculptor Jackson Hlungwani, with whom Maluleke shares a deep spiritual and artistic connection.

The two artists are of Tsonga heritage and trace their origins to nearby villages in Limpopo province. Maluleke’s father was baptised by Hlungwani and he visited the late sculptor’s studio
and compound as a child. The revered artist and pastor gave Maluleke’s family a large wooden carving of a fish, a subject he portrayed prolifically throughout his life as a representation of abundance, life and harmony between humans and nature. As a tribute to Hlungwani, Maluleke titled this body of work after the sculptor’s habitual reply when asked by arriving guests how he was: “Like a fish in the water,” he would respond.

In the starkness of their rendition, focus on foreground action against a flat background, and narrative impact, the works in this exhibition are reminiscent of traditional iconographic paintings. Maluleke’s palette is more subdued than earlier paintings, with a prevalence of golden/mustard hues, enlivened with an experimental approach to mark-making and inclusion of unconventional materials such as glitter. In contrast to the didacticism of religious art, however, he injects his own individual point of view and an ambiguous approach to meaning. He has cultivated a vocabulary of forms with personal significance that recur throughout his oeuvre – including calla lilies, which he describes as communicating the push and pull between strength and fragility; portraits of his sister Nozipho, whom he regards as an extension of himself; and the ‘lêkê’ plastic jelly sandal, which featured heavily in his first solo exhibition at Southern Guild, Grace in Grand-Bassam. All of these appear in this latest body of work alongside religious symbols and objects of contemporary relevance (including a VR headset), establishing the primacy and power of one’s own unique mythology in building a life of meaning.

Blue Dance depicts a crowd of worshippers clad in the blue and white uniforms of the Apostolic and African Zionist churches, surrounding a haloed figure. Inspired by the memory of physical energy experienced at a recent church service, the work transmutes the rhythmical pattern of colour and shape into movement and sound. The person in the middle, says Maluleke, is “the guider and the light”. He is intentionally depicted as an anchoring presence, grounded in his own centre, but the congregants are harder to read: they are moving in their own directions and it is not clear if they are attracted to or repelled from him.

A painting of a red-roofed house with a halo hovering above it also invites multiple readings. The work envisions the artist’s lifelong dream to build his own home – a place of refuge and warmth, blessed by divine intervention. The building in this work is intact but the paint drips down from its walls and windows, as if the structure is dissolving. Is the promise of sacred protection forsaken? Maluleke offers an alternative interpretation: “I like the idea of human fallibility and emotional dissolution living together with faith. Even when we are at our lowest, rather than close ourselves off from shame, we can still go to God.”

Birth, death, sacrifice, transcendence – Maluleke depicts the arc of human struggle and contemplates the pursuit of purpose and connection. His faith encompasses the creation of his own cosmology free from the strictures of doctrine and the confines of Western conceptions of formalised religion. His artistic practice is a pilgrimage of sorts, an insistence on the redemptive power of the imagination and a dreaming into being of his highest ideals.


Amanda Shingirai Mushate and Grace Nyahangare: Methods of Flight | Wycliffe Mundopa: Mbare Opera | Terence Maluleke: Like a Fish in the Water

Southern Guild 

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present While Light Still Falls Here, by Rio Asch Phoenix. 

At the northern edge of Los Angeles city limits, there is a 300-acre piece of wild land. It is home to oak trees and sagebrush, year-round water, gullies and streams and mountain lions. It is the ancestral homeland to the Gabrieleno-Tongva and Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians. It is now slated for development into a luxury gated community called "Canyon Hills.” While Light Still Falls Here memorializes a thriving ecosystem in an effort to not only preserve the land, but also to question what we value most in the face of the climate crisis.

If construction begins, it would mean the destruction of mature sycamore and oak trees, it would mean grading some ridges down by over 80 feet, it would mean paving over countless streams and waterfalls, and it would mean years of noise and pollution in the community. In a city that is in the middle of a housing crisis, where over 45,000 people are experiencing homelessness, another gated development of luxury homes is unconscionable.

In the system we are all operating under, land like Canyon Hills only holds value as a place for potential development. This system is enormously successful at creating wealth, but it erases the inherent value found in local ecosystems like this one. This work is both a memorial to an immensely beautiful place and a catalyst for people to imagine a more inclusive and sustainable land ethic - one that looks at these ridges and canyons vibrating with life and places just as much value on their continued existence as the potential profit that could be extracted from them.

I have hiked and fallen and crawled through this place for over a year, desperately trying to materialize its light into physical negatives. I might not be able to stop the land from being destroyed, but at least I can bear witness to its beauty while it still exists.

In conjunction with this exhibition please join us on a walk near the site, a closing ceremony featuring NCH leaders, and a risograph print available at the opening. 

NCH

No Canyon Hills (NCH) is a community coalition forged in solidarity with the plant and animal communities of the Verdugo Mountains in Los Angeles, ancestral land and unceded territory of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, and the Gabrieleno-Tongva Band of Mission Indians. Catalyzed by a proposal to build a luxury gated development on 300+ acres of intact native habitat in the Verdugos, NCH deploys cooperative actions and interventionist strategies across social, political, educational, and legislative registers. NCH works as a multiform entity to conceive and realize urgent anti-colonial land conservation solutions.

BIO

Rio Asch Phoenix (b. 1996) is a Los Angeles-based photographer documenting the contested boundaries between built and natural environments. Raised in North Florida, his work focuses on the intersection of these sites and the stories of destruction, renewal, and harmony that emerge from them. His photographs have appeared in Contemporary Art Review LA, Telegraph Magazine, and KCRW. Recently, he received an Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects and was selected for Review Santa Fe 2024. He holds a BFA in Photography from Northeastern University (2019)

Rio Asch Phoenix: while light still falls here

Monte Vista Projects

Artists: Ciana Anita Lee, Jamison Carter, Joe Davidson, Vita Eruhimovitz, Nancy Evans, Emily Lucid & Gosia Wojas, Atilio Pernisco, Levon Riggins, Gloria Sanchez, Molly Segal, Lior Shamriz, Rae Tweed, Olga Urbanek, Sammie Veeler, Kira Xonorika

Curated by Regina Herod, Emily Lucid, and Alexandra Wiesenfeld

Durden and Ray is thrilled to announce “who held their heart in their hands, and ate of it”, an exhibition featuring a diverse group of artists exploring interstitial moments of paradox using a wide variety of media. Please join us for the opening reception on Saturday, January 11th, 2025. Additional programming includes a video screening and discussion January 18th, and a night of performances on January 25th. 

“who held their heart in their hands, and ate of it” takes inspiration from  philosopher and writer Georges Bataille, whose work mines the terrain between opposites – atheism and faith, terror and ecstasy, the sacred and the profane. He considers the realms of the erotic and death as sacred, because both have the power to erase the boundaries that exist in the realm of the profane. The exhibition curators believe the everyday is marked by self- interest and self-control, which turns people into separate beings with separate thoughts. In moments when we approach impossible states—when everyday habits and ways of being are swallowed up by chaos, in instances of frenzy and ecstasy, eros and death-- life and consciousness temporarily fade away to create a meeting-place of terror and joy, where bliss, suffering, horror, and divine encounters can fuse into one. This is what Bataille calls the “great paradox.”

The artists in this exhibition exuberantly and courageously delve into that paradox, embracing inherent contradictions and eschewing predictability. In their works sensual beauty meets existential terror, matter meets energy, destruction meets creation. These topics have taken on another level of urgency as our politics have become more personal, urgent climate action more in doubt, and personal rights in question. It is difficult not to view the works in this show under the specter of today’s political climate. We exist in the realm of the profane, even though living fully in the paradox, the meeting point between opposites is where we come alive.


who held their heart in their hands, and ate of it

Durden and Ray

PURGATORIO

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos | Lucia Grossberger Morales | Xandra Ibarra | Yazan Khalili | Rurru Mipanochia | Vick Quezada | Marton Robinson | Miguel Ángel Salazar & Carlos Iván Hernández

Curated by April Baca

EPOCH proudly presents "Purgatorio," a group exhibition organized with UCR ARTS as part of the institution’s Getty Pacific Standard Time Art (PST ART) 2024 Art & Science Collide initiative Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World. Exhibited as both a virtual exhibition and physical installation, Purgatorio features intergenerational and globally dispersed artists whose artworks have been expanded in a virtual remodeling of the Chet Holifield Federal Building in Laguna Nigel, CA. Designed as a ziggurat by modernist architect William L. Pereira in 1968-71, the building has supported several government agencies since its initial use as an aerospace firm during the Cold War. This has included the U.S. Treasury Department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Citizenship and Immigration Services, a palatable contradiction given the legacies of the ziggurat as a sacred site intended to serve as a medium between heaven and earth.

The exhibition visualizes the Holifield's architectural and political contradictions as an incubator for political violence and communal displacement, particularly along the U.S./Mexico border, in an increasingly technologically mediated police state. Purgatorio takes its title from an unfinished poem by the American poet Hart Crane, a writer whose work mirrors the modernist fetishization of Mexico and border landscapes. Disillusioned with the burgeoning technological determinism prolific throughout the early 20th century, Crane conceived of exile from the United States into the borderlands as a type of purgatory – a romanticized (and seemingly uninhabited) space free from the reaches of technology.

Purgatorio borrows and problematizes Crane’s idealization of purgatory by underscoring the ziggurat and the borderlands' shared, albeit contradictory, position as a seemingly liminal yet transitory space and geopolitical site of containment. Nuancing otherwise polarizing sentiments surrounding the U.S./Mexico border as a space of death or possibility, the exhibition features work by artists who contend with the violence of the U.S. military-industrial complex, necropolitical surveillance, immigration, and the mutation of culture, identity, and life across borders.

PURGATORIO

EPOCH

Welcome to Of Spirits & Sirens! Join us at Galerie Lakaye for an enchanting evening filled with mystical wonders from Haiti. Immerse yourself in a world of magic and mystery as we celebrate the ethereal spirits and captivating sirens that inhabit Haitian culture. Let your senses be captivated by the artistry on display and jam session to follow, which will feature Giaco Guitars, the playable guitar sculptures of Pascal Giacomini. Don't miss out on this unique opportunity to experience the beauty, allure, and music at Hollywood's favorite contemporary ethnic art gallery for 30 years!

Works on canvas by Levoy Exil
Beaded and sequinned textiles by notable Haitian Vodou Flagmakers Evelyne Alcide, Edmond Eddy, Jean-Baptiste Jean Joseph and Fils LaFleur
Galerie Lakaye is located in a private Craftsman house between Fairfax & LaBrea, 1 block N of Sunset.

