Join us for the closing of Patrick James Donovan's Man In A Ring Mold solo painting exhibition with an artist walkthrough with Patrick who will also bake a cake for the occasion, ,and we will serve up the John Stahl, Patrick's favorite cocktail from our Hollywood Walk of Fame days, Man in a Ring Mold, a premiere solo exhibition of paintings by Patrick James Donovan, reveals the artist as a playful jester taking artifice to heart; trompe l’oeil and subject matter fuses his socio self-awareness and musings on the institutional. Donovan writes, “The self-consciousness of these paintings presents themselves as the object of reality, rather than what is represented.” Man in a Ring Mold shows an oeuvre of paintings in various styles showcasing differing techniques and forms explored by Donovan. Shirtless men, Amazon packages, surveillance, laboring bodies, a baby wearing a VR headset, old ladies, homelessness, and 60’s inspired space age furniture are all rendered in studied representations with a palette of hues that diffuses the potentially polemic. The way a soft focus reduces sharpness, the colors of pinks, grays, light blues, yellows, and light greens transform these 21st century concerns. Man in a Ring Mold isn’t offering platitudes, instead it represents the pursuit of enjoyment in what painting can do when relational aesthetics smash into each other. What appears as a documentation of an outward curiosity also veritably defines a painter painting themselves. - Nilay Lawson, Artist