ALBERTZ BENDA LOS ANGELES ANNOUNCES GROUP EXHIBITION FEATURING DUSTIN HAREWOOD, LANISE HOWARD, LARISSA DE SOUZA, NATALIE WADLINGTON, ROBERT PETERSON, AND SYDNIE JIMENEZ albertz benda Los Angeles presents Do You See Me?, a group exhibition that brings together six artists’ ongoing exploration of identity through their respective mediums of painting, collage, and sculpture. These artists engage with figuration to explore their own subjectivities, embracing representation to further social, political, and theoretical dialogues. Oklahoma-based painter Robert Peterson focuses on capturing the quiet heroism of daily life that is so often overlooked by main-stream media. Peterson paints black skin with a striking emphasis on bold color and strong contrasts. The result is a polychromatic, joyous, and exuberant expression of love for blackness itself. Similarly entranced by the beauty of black bodies and the prismatic quality of light, Lanise Howard integrates her female protagonists within fantastical, idyllic nature scenes. Her work examines femininity through the lens of the surreal, borrowing visual cues from sacred geometry and the esoteric. Natalie Wadlington takes her exploration of the illusive connection between humans and the natural world one step further in her symbolic paintings. Flattening and skewing perspectival space, Wadlington places her figures in expansive outdoor scenes rendered with impossibly vivid colors and streamlined geometries that speak to the subject’s state of mind. Brazilian painter Larissa de Souza’s multi-media acrylic paintings incorporate fabric and embroidery in their meditations on femininity, legacy, and family bonds. Often resembling pages from scrapbooks or framed family photos, these works aim to preserve the artist’s memories on canvas, resisting the historical erasure of the Afro-Brazilian population while also crafting new narratives of what it means to be a Black woman in Brazil. Collaging his works on paper with found materials, such as a plastic packaging, Dustin Harewood adds literal dimensionality to his figurative works. With a visual vocabulary that draws from 90s cartoons and contemporary toys, his work skews toward a darker subject matter and explores a range of topical issues from climate change to racial inequality. Ceramicist Sydnie Jimenez brings the investigation of identity into full three-dimensional form with her figurative sculptures of stylish, young people with ambiguous racial backgrounds. Echoing the style of both Mesoamerican pottery and notebook doodles, these works engage with the past while remaining firmly rooted in the present as a challenge to popular culture’s toxic Eurocentric foundation.