For Mind's Eye, Deana Lawson's first solo exhibition with David Kordansky Gallery, the artist presents a new body of work that includes photography and installation, and continues her ongoing engagement with myth, lore, intimacy, and the Black familiar. In figurative and landscape modes alike, Lawson’s work depicts entities that can appear mystical or otherworldly. As the daughter of a long-time Kodak employee, photography is deeply ingrained in Lawson’s personal history and has become an internalized knowledge that manifests as intuition. Her process relies on this intuition—or the mind’s eye—in what she describes as “rhythm of time ruptures,” where time seems to stop when the artist encounters a person or object she is drawn to photograph. Image: Deana Lawson, Afriye, 2023 ____ Light the Dark is an exhibition of new paintings by Shara Hughes and the artist’s first presentation in Los Angeles. Hughes looks to the coupling and uncoupling of day and night, of eros and pathos, and of joy and its brooding contrasts, as overarching metaphors for what it is like to feel, see, love, and live. The show is organized according to this basic distinction, with one of the galleries dedicated to “light” paintings, another to “dark” ones, and a third, transitional room to two large-scale works in a horizontal format that provide a bridge between the neighboring groupings. Connections between the galleries abound, both in terms of subject matter and visual atmosphere, so that light and dark function not so much as concepts or categories, but modes of inquiry engaged in urgent conversation. As a result, the paintings—and the show as a whole—feature both celebratory harmonies and heated conflicts.