Touching Grass to open at North Loop West, November 21, 2025. The exhibition features four contemporary artists whose work considers human relationships with non-human life. Exhibition will run from November 21, 2025 – January 3, 2026, and an opening reception will be held at the gallery on November 21 from 6-9pm. North Loop West is delighted to present Touching Grass, an exhibition featuring four artists who explore human relationships with the natural world, opening November 21. In sculpture by Cameron Cameron, ceramics by Ryan Flores, paintings on silk by Benedict Scheuer, and wax pastel drawings by Pallavi Sen, nature emerges as teacher, metaphor, and source of personal and cultural meaning. Through distinct approaches, these artists conjure the natural world as a dynamic ground for relation and knowledge—one that invites acts of attention, creativity, and care. Los Angeles-based ceramicist Ryan Flores translates flora encountered on his walks through the city into intricately detailed ceramic forms. Raised in Southern California, Flores draws on plants and produce that carry both personal and cultural significance—fruits and vegetables found at vendor stands that dot the city’s sidewalks, or cacti discovered on different hiking trails. His works conjure a simultaneous sense of abundance and decay: much of the plant life depicted are mottled with wilting and rot. Evoking the vanitas tradition of painting made famous by the 17th- century Dutch Golden Age, Flores uses these visual signs of perishing as metaphor for the impermanence of each living thing. In new drawings, Pallavi Sen examines ecology—the interconnectedness of living things—via her gardening practice. The garden for Sen is an aesthetic pursuit, a site of care, and a space where relationships between nature and culture unfold. Living and teaching at Williams College in the Berkshires of northwestern Massachusetts, the artist cultivates meadows and gardens featuring plants that also thrive in her native Bombay, recalling the flora her mother once tended on their apartment terraces. Sen’s drawings depict moments from her most recent garden on campus— the viewer gets a glimpse into a dream-like night scene of corn stalks, the back of a woman’s patterned jacket enveloped by verdancy, as the artist conjures a sense of softness and human care necessary to build and care for a garden. Columbus, OH-based Benedict Scheuer also takes up the site of the garden in their paintings on silk. Scheuer’s works are in active dialogue with living material: if weather permits, the artist paints outside, next to the garden they tend at their home studio. The two paintings on view, Flower and Summer, are an exploration of natural patterns witnessed in plants seen in their garden. Using a new technique of painting and dyeing, the flow of color seen in Summer evokes an organic process, where time and gravity allows drips and dye bleeds that ultimately dictate the final composition. Considering the patterns in their silk works as visual scores of their own breath, Scheuer mirrors their natural rhythms of breathing through brushwork—each stroke of pigment is tied to an inhale and an exhale. As the artist undergoes their own gender transition, the garden becomes teacher—a living metaphor for constant flux and transformation, and a source of creativity and wisdom where multispecies entanglements flourish. Sculptor Cameron Cameron works with discarded materials from her studio and the streets of Los Angeles, reclaiming and remaking them with a slowness and care rarely given to such remnants. The arms of Cameron’s chandelier, on view in Touching Grass—created from a found object gifted by a friend—have been transformed into branch-like forms. Their thorn-covered surfaces are coated in a vivid blue enamel, achieved through layers of car paint, and host tiny metal ants that the artist meticulously sculpts by hand. Cameron refers to these small creatures as “my delicates…non-domesticated creatures whose lives intersect most intimately with our own: spiders in the shower, ants at the picnic table, hornets in the corner of the porch,” positioning them as agents that complicate boundaries between the domestic and the wild, the human and the nonhuman. Clocks like Windmill are composed of reshaped studio scraps of foam via a meditative process of molding and sanding. Their sky-blue, cloud-like resin surfaces evoke the atmosphere itself, grounding Cameron’s practice within a shared material and ecological context. Across all four practices, nature is explored not as an abstract or distant ideal, but as a site of everyday mutualism and multi-species cohabitation. Touching Grass will be on view at 508 Chung King Road through January 3. Please join us for an opening reception on November 21 from 6- 9pm! For an exhibition preview or more information, please contact izzy@northloop.art. ABOUT NORTH LOOP WEST North Loop West is the LA-based outgrowth of a seasonal gallery project based in Williamstown, Mass. The gallery program fosters conversation between artists working in the LA area and those in the Northeast and highlights close collaboration with artists to encourage experimentation. While the gallery’s primary location is now in Los Angeles, North Loop West will continue to host occasional programs in Williamstown, Mass. Image: Benedict Scheuer, Summer, 2024, hand-dyed 16mm Habotai silk, 45 1/2 x 82 in. Image courtesy of the artist.