Spanning the soft haze of the ’70s to the electric velocity of the early ’80s, Taggart’s early works depict a city in flux. In some works, freeways cut through the landscape like charged veins, their glow turning the urban sprawl into something hypnotic and unreal. Elsewhere, softly-rendered signs hover over fashionable shop fronts, while houses settle quietly into foothills. Taggart taps into LA as a city of surfaces—glassy, scintillating, and hard-edged—but also one of sun-faded posters, slow afternoons, and unpolished bohemia. Taggart renders both with equal clarity, attuned to the tension between the city’s theatricality and its moments of unexpected solitude. His portraits—of musicians, actors, and everyday passersby—likewise oscillate between sleekness and imperfection. Some are the refined, carefully staged images of an era transfixed by appearances; others, painted from life, catch their subjects in unguarded moments. Street scenes unfold with the rhythm of a place always on the move, where light, signage, and architecture shape an ever-changing stage. Though widely circulated at the time, Taggart’s work never fully aligned with the dominant fine art movements of the period. His commitment to figuration and cultural storytelling placed him outside an art world increasingly concerned with conceptualism and abstraction. This exhibition revisits his contributions, foregrounding an artist whose images—whether glowing with possibility or edged with intensity—distill something essential about the City of Angels. _____ For this interactive exhibition, curated by Michael Slenske, the gallery will begin as a near tabula rasa mise en scene for the New York-based Carr to conduct live portrait sittings for select visitors and LA's leading cultural creators. Carr, who previously conducted similar sessions in New York and Paris, will then transform these fleeting encounters into theatrical, stylized compositions throughout the course of the exhibition, which will conclude with a new, fully realized body of work: The Hollywood Walk-Ins.