Please join us at Track 16 | Downtown LA this Saturday for a conversation surrounding our exhibition Valence. Artists Azadeh Shladovsky and Daniel Wheeler will sit down for a conversation with Galia Linn, who curated the exhibition. Valence delves into the multifaceted nature of human existence through the lens of emotion and perception. Through sculpture, installation, and material investigations, the exhibition explores the intricate interplay of positive and negative emotions, their impact on our lives, and the enduring power of the human spirit to navigate the complexities of our internal landscape. Azadeh Shladovsky is a Los Angeles-based artist born in Iran and raised between Los Angeles and Spain. Her practice investigates visual consciousness and the social construction of visibility through what she terms “haptic dialogue”—conversations that emerge at the sensory intersection of materials. Her formative experience as an Iranian forced to assimilate within Western cultural systems revealed the contingent nature of visibility and how cultural identities are mediated through dominant power structures. This understanding deepened profoundly when her daughter’s loss of eyesight fractured her own perception of reality, driving her investigation of how vision operates beyond the individual. Her work engages with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied perception, exploring how tactile experience is fundamental to visual understanding. This theoretical foundation has guided her practice’s evolution across multiple media including functional art, film, sculpture and installation. Each medium has deepened her understanding of how different sensory approaches reveal or conceal meaning. Central to her practice is the transformation of archival materials—vintage artifacts, brailled texts, media and educational materials—into new substrates that demand multi-sensory engagement. Her work creates “moments of sensory friction” that generate new forms of meaning while interrupting broader “cycles of organized blindness” by making visible the systems that create invisibility. To further her social practice, she launched The Slit last year, an artist-run programming space that fosters new ways of seeing and understanding through artistic expression. Shladovsky’s interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, functional art, and film. Daniel Wheeler (born 1961) is an American artist and designer who works in sculpture, photography, drawing and industrial design. His early works are sculptural installations combined with performance and video. He has designed award-winning, kinetic sets for Los Angeles based dance company, Diavolo: Architecture in Motion Wheeler was born in New Haven, CT the first of four children. He was raised by his parents, an educator and a therapist, in Shaker Heights, Ohio until the age of 17, when his family moved back to the east coast, settling in Boston, MA. He studied art, comparative literature and semiotics at Brown University, graduating cum laude in 1984, and winning the Albin Polasek Award. Early training in sculpture included carving limestone in a quarry in southern France. After living in Japan, he moved to Los Angeles in 1986 where he still resides. Called a “free-form cultural anthropologist” once by an art critic, Wheeler’s production has been marked by meticulous craft and constant intellectual searching. Sculptures, photographs, installations, sets, decorative arts and furniture show the artist’s desire to understand the world and how we live in it by connecting the body to the movement of the spirit. His 2013 design of a multi-faith chapel for an episcopal school in Los Angeles won an award from The Interfaith Forum on Religion Art and Architecture (IFRAA) in the category of Liturgical/Interior Design. Additionally, his recent foray into the production of funerary urns and grave monuments provides a service to grieving families while remaining linked to the history of sculpture. Galia Linn is a sculptor, painter, and site-responsive installation artist living and working in Los Angeles. She has shown nationally and internationally, and her work is included in numerous private collections in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Paris, Brussels, and Tel Aviv. Her work has been featured in LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Art + Cake, and KCRW's Art Talk. In Los Angeles she is represented by Track 16 Gallery. A childhood and early adulthood spent in war-torn Israel surrounded by archaeological sites and spaces instilled her with intimate connections to ancient and contemporary relics from past and present civilizations, as well as the understanding that each place has a story to tell and relationships to uncover. Linn's work with sculptural materials, painting, and installation reacts to the stories, relics, and imperfections that emerge, conflating time and geography, allowing elemental tensions to come to the surface. In addition to her prolific studio practice, Linn curates exhibitions that explore themes of perception, connection, and cultural dialogue. She recently curated "Valence" (2025) at Track 16 Gallery, featuring works by Azadeh Shladovsky and Daniel Wheeler that examine the multifaceted nature of human existence through emotion and perception. Linn is the founder of Blue Roof, a multidisciplinary art hub and 501(c)(3) non-profit organization located in South Los Angeles. Founded in 2016, Blue Roof provides women artists with affordable studio space and financial resources through multiple artist residencies. The organization builds long-term relationships with artists and audiences to support accessible arts programming and meaningful arts experiences.