Zipora Fried's Inaugural Solo Exhibition @ Sean Kelly Los Angeles Is Felt Before It Is Seen

Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes is an emotional polygraph that let’s you see through the eyes of a newborn.

Zipora Fried
Let Them Talk, 2024
signed by artist, verso
colored pencil on archival museum board
paper: 60 x 80 inches (152.4 x 203.2 cm)
framed: 61 5/16 x 81 5/16 x 1 3/4 inches (155.7 x 206.5 x 4.4 cm)

text by Summer Bowie

At the moment of every human’s birth, our field of vision is best at about twelve inches, or roughly the distance between a mother’s eyes and her breast. This is about how close you want to get to the work of Zipora Fried once you’ve seen it from a distance. It is like looking at life through the lens of a baby who is feeling and sensing the world wholly with their right brain. In Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes, Zipora Fried’s debut solo exhibition at Sean Kelly Los Angeles, the artist continues to refine her ability to conceal just enough of the scrutable so that you can properly feel the work before you know how to think about it. These works blur the lines between figurative and abstract, portrait and landscape, monumental scale and unsettling fragility. It is ultimately performance as a form of conceptual practice. 

Although it is a practice of interminable repetition, each time an idea is revisited, it is done so from a novel perspective. Playing off of her ’09 exhibition at On Stellar Rays called Trust me, be careful, which itself was taken from the text of a “drawing” in that exhibition which read: “The stammering of history, trust me, be careful, who has the sickest shoes, trust me, be careful,” it is a story of marching through the cyclical passage of time with an acute awareness of how each new step is unique to the last.

Zipora Fried
The Glass Octopus, 2024
signed by artist, verso
colored pencil on archival museum board
paper: 60 x 96 inches (152.4 x 243.8 cm)
framed: 61 5/16 x 97 1/4 x 1 3/4 inches (155.7 x 247 x 4.4 cm)

From a distance, tiny individual lines of color blur together into one fluid, unending stroke, which makes for an experience that is as philosophical as it is emotional. It feels Hegelian in both the interconnected idealism that it exemplifies, as well as in the synthesis of opposing perspectives that are resolved in the precision of their balance. Then again, at close proximity, they are Kierkegaardian in their boundless detail; millions of individual strokes existing and intersecting on their own discrete paths. There is certainly something divine in these details.

It is this tension that beckons the viewer to adjust their vantage point multiple times. If you stand and observe people engaging with the work, you start to see interesting patterns emerge. Each piece is initially experienced from a generous distance, moving from one side to the next. As you approach, new details began to emerge with each successive step forward. And from as close as common courtesy will allow, people tend to again start scanning from one side to the next before they back up to see it anew. If one were to trace the footsteps of all who attended the opening reception, I imagine one might find a sequence of marks that resemble the second half of a coherent dialogue between the floor and the walls. 

These are works that must be experienced in person. They float in their frames unmediated by glass, allowing the viewer to get in close enough to be visually enveloped by fields of color. From here we can see the gritty texture of the colored pencil. We can see just how these tightly-controlled strokes of equal length and exacting proximity start to slowly and delicately unfold into loose, sweeping strokes that breathe easy and intersect with other colors freely. These are the moments that allow for the character of each piece to express itself, which is ultimately only scrutable from a distance. 

 
 

The titles of her pieces often convey an oscillation of contradicting thoughts and feelings. There are the colored pencil drawings A Sad Parade (2025), I Was Perfect, I Was Wrong (2025), as well as the massive sculptural drawing on paper titled All I Thought and Forgot # 3 (deep cobalt green) (2016). One can’t help but wonder how such a thin and sweeping scroll of paper could ever support the imposing weight of such densely layered marks. These are the contradictions that typify the human experience and Fried is a master mark maker with an acute understanding of the affecting power of color. Her hand paces back and forth like the needle of a polygraph test, communicating an inner truth that is not necessarily involuntary, but it is perhaps articulated more clearly this way than in words. 

 

Zipora Fried
All I Thought and Forgot #3 (deep cobalt green), 2016
colored pencil on paper
312 x 53 1/2 inches (792.5 x 135.9 cm)

 

This is visual art that encourages you to look closer and alludes to the possibility that you are overly dependent on your eyes. As if to suggest that seeing less allows you to feel a lot more. On either side of the gallery we find two of Fried’s ceramic sculptures. They are inspired by ink drawings that are not on view. They are also inspired by kokeshi dolls; a Japanese tradition of wooden figurines that features a head with painted face, and a body without arms or legs. However, with these sculptures, even their faces are obscured by a crown of dripping hair. A singular, unending moment that reveals nothing but ambivalence. Again, the artist is choreographing our movement around an object without beginning or end. Seen from the other side, we might consider that when we allow ourselves to feel more, it’s often easier to see things more clearly.

 

Zipora Fried
Miron, 2025
glazed ceramic
51 x 16 3/4 inches (129.5 x 42.5 cm)

 

Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes is on view through May 3 @ Sean Kelly Los Angeles 1357 N Highland Avenue

A Meier St/ Installation During Frieze Los Angeles 2025

During Frieze Los Angeles 2025, Meier St/, located in one of 52 historic Gregory Ain homes in the Mar Vista Tract built in 1948, showcased a unique group installation by artists Mike Nesbit, Tofer Chin, Mieko Akutsu, Thomas Linder, and Daniel Derro Regen. This house, which is being re-imagined as a dynamic hub for community and creativity, became a platform for unique works that coalesced around the ethos of the home as a work in progress and Los Angeles as a constantly expanding sprawl of expansion. Tofer Chin’s charred black picket fence was a stark reminder of our dark ecological ambitions—it was especially prescient just after two of the most destructive wildfires in Los Angeles history. He said, “[The] work challenges notions of security, exclusion, and resilience in the face of climate change.” Photographs by Taiyo Watanabe

Borderlands: Read an Interview of Artist Hugo Crosthwaite on the Occasion of His Solo Presentation @ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Hugo Crosthwaite, La Linea (The Line), 2024, Acrylic and color pencil on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

Ex-votos are a form of Mexican folk painting, part prayer, part diary, they are a dedication to the saints and a plea for guidance during difficult times. They’re sometimes crude, sometimes polished, sometimes funny, sometimes heartwrenching. Te pido perdon virgencita pues jugue con fuego (I ask you to forgive me, Virgin, because I played with fire) reads one on a painting of a woman with red skin and devil horns beckoning a man in bed while the Virgen de Guadalupe looks on. Another celebrates two luchadors who met in the ring and found love. Another thanks the Santo Niño de Atocha for surviving a late night encounter with two extraterrestrials.


Inspired by his own close encounter with death, Tijuana and San Diego-based artist Hugo Crosthwaite decided to take on the tradition of ex-votos with a new series of large-scale paintings. The show, Ex-voto, is a series of overlapping snapshots of the city of Tijuana, dense narratives of daily life at the border. Just as in the ex-votos, the physical and spiritual world mingle in scenes of border crossings, street vendors, and women at rest. The Tijuana of Crosthwaite’s paintings is not quite the real one and not quite the sin city of the American imagination. Instead, it is multilayered, a place that we tell stories about and are always returning to across the border fence. Read more.

Georgia Gardner Gray's Chrysalis Reminds Us That Transformation Demands Confrontation

 

Georgia Gardner Gray
Walk-In, 2025
Oil on canvas
75 x 63 inches (190.5 x 160 cm)

 

Georgia Gardner Gray’s exhibition CHRYSALIS, currently on view at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, marks a defining moment in her career as her first large-scale solo presentation in the United States. Expansive in both scope and ambition, the exhibition encompasses new paintings, sculptures, and an original theatrical production, all bound by an intricate exploration of transformation, ritual, and cyclical processes.

At the heart of CHRYSALIS lies the chrysalis itself—a potent emblem of metamorphosis and renewal. Gray draws inspiration from Salvador Dalí’s 1958 pharmaceutical pavilion, a surreal structure that fused art and alchemical symbolism, to probe the nature of ritualistic reenactment, the repetition of history, and the evolving language of artistic expression. Her work reframes transformation not as a singular event but as an ongoing process shaped by cultural, historical, and personal forces.

Gray’s paintings interrogate the paradox of historical reenactment, specifically through the lens of Civil War pageantry. In Belles (2025), figures adorned in antebellum costumes evoke a distorted vision of Scarlett O’Hara, where the romanticization of the past collides with its inescapable weight. Through this juxtaposition, Gray exposes the absurdity of attempting to relive or aestheticize historical trauma, inviting viewers to confront the cyclical nature of cultural mythmaking and the complexities of inherited identity.

The exhibition also engages with contemporary notions of femininity and self-construction. Gray’s depictions of women in transitional spaces—trying on clothes, gazing from windows—resist passive voyeurism. Instead, these figures assert their agency, shaping their own narratives within the liminal spaces of modern life. Here, transformation is not merely biological or historical but psychological and performative, implicating the viewer in the act of perception.

Further deepening the exhibition’s conceptual rigor, Gray presents CHRYSALIS as a theatrical production. Performed by Los Angeles-based actors, the play unfolds as a meditation on modernity’s contradictions, drawing upon archetypal characters and fragmented narratives to interrogate the tension between progress and nostalgia, innovation and repetition.

Through CHRYSALIS, Georgia Gardner Gray’s deft synthesis of painting, sculpture, and performance constructs a multilayered inquiry into the nature of change—whether historical, social, or personal. The exhibition is a powerful reminder that transformation is not an endpoint but an enduring process, one that demands both confrontation and reinvention.


Performance documentation of CHRYSALIS by Georgia Gardner Gray. Regen Projects, Los Angeles. March 1, 2025
Photo: Evan Bedford

Read A Conversation Between Artists Darius Airo and Jon Pylypchuk on the Occasion of Airo's Solo Exhibition →

 
 

Between the minutia and the mirage of our fragmented contemporary existence, artists Darius Airo and Jon Plypchuk both create work imbued with a humorous and ironic darkness masked by playfulness. An inside joke, a half forgotten dream, a song lyric, abstracted figures caught between the waveforms of television static or the rain-drenched glass of a car windshield—our brains continually try to make sense of the world like an undecoded cypher. In Airo’s recent paintings and pastels, presented in the exhibition Mickey’s Mirror (opening May 25 at Abigail Ogilvy gallery in Los Angeles, curated by Josh White—whitebox.la), making sense of the world requires clever conceptual conceit of internal mirrors and the abstracted visages of iconic cartoon characters. In the following conversation, Airo and Plypchuk discuss how the world around them is absorbed into their work. Read more.

Find Infinitude in Callum Innes' Turn @ Sean Kelly in Los Angeles

Installation view of Callum Innes: Turn at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, March 16 – May 4, 2024, Photography: Brica Wilcox, Courtesy: Sean Kelly New York/Los Angeles

Callum Innes’ Turn at Sean Kelly in Los Angeles is an escapade into the shape. The exhibition features his latest Tondo works, alongside his Exposed Paintings, Split Paintings, and Shellac Paintings. Innes utilization of shape and color seeks to reinvent itself repeatedly. There’s a sense of playfulness with how the traditional shape can be rendered, and how the manipulation of color can transform the space within a shape. This transformation of space is what makes Innes’ work so iconic; the hardness of his rectangular and circular figures are almost intimidating. There’s a sense of intense certainty around Innes’ work: square, circle, rectangle, line. The infinite history of these figures is perhaps what makes them so sturdy in their presence; they stand in themselves like sargeants in command. There’s something calming about this sense of complete certainty; the deliberate alteration of the traditional shape is uniform, mechanical, and familiar. The occupation of space within the shape itself is what forces Innes’ work outside the confines of all that we know to be the average circular or rectangular formation. The geometric display is pervaded with different intonations of pigment, while still steadfastly holding onto the robust structure that is quintessential of Innes’ work. 

Installation view of Callum Innes: Turn at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, March 16 – May 4, 2024, Photography: Brica Wilcox, Courtesy: Sean Kelly New York/Los Angeles

His latest exploration of the Tondo simultaneously catalyzed an experimentation with materiality. For this series of work, Innes’ circular figures are made of plywood panels. The sleekness of the surface invited a new methodology involving the application of color. This embrace of movement in process further enunciates the notion of time in Innes’ work. The infinitude of the shape is subliminally apparent; we are conscious of the fact that the standard shape is something that has always existed and will always exist. The notion of time becomes further warped across materiality, where the time spent making these forms varies and is dependent upon the surface of the work. 

Turn becomes incredibly nuanced when it’s embedded within the context of time and shape. The rotation of a circular form is ubiquitous in its implementation. To turn is to move, and to simultaneously occupy time. Innes directly engages with the advent of motion, but does so in a way that is entirely unchaotic. The structure that he gives time can be comforting, but it’s more so reflective. The sturdiness with which Innes presents abstract concepts lies at the heart of this ability for reflection; the idea of turning becomes inseparable from the idea of shape. To turn becomes reminiscent of both the infinite and finite. The end of the turn finds itself at the end of the circle, which doesn’t exist.

Installation view of Callum Innes: Turn at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, March 16 – May 4, 2024, Photography: Brica Wilcox, Courtesy: Sean Kelly New York/Los Angeles

Turn is on view through May 4 @ Sean Kelly, 1357 N Highland Avenue Los Angeles CA

Read Our Interview of Avery Wheless on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition with BozoMag in Los Angeles →

Avery Wheless is a Los Angeles-based painter who was born and raised in Petaluma, California. With her mother, a ballet instructor, and her father, an animator for LucasFilms, it’s no wonder she became a painter and video artist with a penchant for the theatrical. Her video works often depict movement artists performing choreography, and her painted portraits often depict everyday people engaging in the unconscious performativity of everyday life. Her current solo exhibition Stage, Presence on view at a private residence in Beverly Hills with BozoMag includes portrayals of the artist and her friends occupying glamorous spaces, caught in moments that subtly reveal the effort that comes with looking at ease. These acts are not celebrated or bemoaned. They just are. One friend reaches into the cocktail dress of another to lift and expose the fullness of her breast in anticipation of reuniting with an ex. Other figures unwittingly become subjects as they applaud an unseen performer or spy pensively on others while sipping martinis. The pageantry of hyper femininity is as vulnerable as it is manicured when you look at it from the right angle and Avery Wheless has a way of depicting it all simultaneously like an emotional lenticular on canvas. Read more.

Read Our Interview of Artist Tim Biskup On The Occasion Of His 4/20 Exhibition at Face Guts →

 
 

American visual artist Tim Biskup is a rebellious outlier in the shark-eat-shark ecosystem of the art market. His project space, Face Guts, is a testament to his anti-establishment ethos. Ceremoniously opening on 4/20, his exhibition Spring Collection will include a new suite of paintings and drawings with Biskup’s unique brand of psychedelia—a vision quest of intuitive gestures and symmetrical forms that play with pareidolia through abstraction. It’s an ayahuasca trip chased by a Freudian drip of haunted symbolism that harkens to Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and maybe the brain scans of enlightened butterflies. Along with new art comes the release of a limited edition yearbook. “Face Guts Year Seven” is a 56-page document of exhibitions, installations, and “whatever else catches the artist’s eye.” Read more.

Read Our Interview of Holly Silius on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ Central Server Works in Los Angeles →

 

Holly Silius. George Clinton, 2023. Stone and gold leaf.

 

“I don’t have to sell my soul, he’s already in me” read the lyrics of The Stone Roses’ groundbreaking hit track “I Wanna Be Adored.” Perfectly salient in their minimal simplicity, they defined a generation who watched their idols on television with a yearning desperation for recognition. Los Angeles-based sculptor Holly Silius was in her youth living in Manchester at the time. It was the end of Thatcher’s era of neoliberal deregulation with its flagrant embrace of conspicuous consumption that made so many of her peers feel a hollow ennui; a listless lack of purpose that left them looking ahead to the next millennium without the slightest clue of where they fit in. Thirty-five years later, Generation X finds itself in an era of social media where everyone can build a virtual platform from which to project their image and ideals. Silius now finds herself adorning and casting the faces and bodies of countless people—some with humble followings, some with household names—studying their every angle to capture the elusive essence that makes them so alluring as subjects. Read more.

Read An Interview Of Kate Mosher Hall On The Occasion Of Her Solo Exhibition @ Hannah Hoffman In Los Angeles →

Kate Mosher Hall, 31,556,952 seconds, 2024 
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 
80 x 72 inches (203.2 x 182.9 cm)

I recently visited Los Angeles born-and-raised painter Kate Mosher Hall at her light-filled studio in a bricky industrial area of Glendale. With the 5 freeway buzzing nearby, she walked me through her complex and unique process, which involves silkscreening light-sensitive emulsion over gessoed canvas using anywhere from eight to thirty screens depending on the particular painting, Photoshopping, layers of collage, and paint. It’s a “choose-your-own adventure” as she says, to get the desired effect. To help organize things, she’s created a lexicon: box paintings, hole or mesh paintings, recursion paintings. Some paintings incorporate elements of all styles. Hall, a punk drummer, worked in silkscreen studios for several years before she began UCLA’s Fine Art MFA program. We talked about Never Odd or Even, Hall’s second solo exhibition at Hannah Hoffman, which is currently on view in Los Angeles and the way that the work employs both good and bad math, challenges modes of looking, and the infinite repetition within binary relationships. Read more.

Willfully Surrender to the Chaos of Nature in Tali Lennox's Tremors @ Nicodim in Los Angeles

In her first solo exhibition with Nicodim, artist Tali Lennox enlists erupting volcanoes, glowing forests and mystical landscapes to explore the pleasure of submitting to the chaos and the power of nature. Tremors finds a range of female bodies in varying states of capitulation to an onslaught of mother nature’s harshest elements, finding common ground between internal and external states of disorder.

Originally inspired by the German anthology of illuminations Das Wunderzeichenbuch: The Book of Miracles, this collection takes the lead from the book of Renaissance paintings that depict both biblical and folkloric tales with a decidedly apocalyptic flair.

Shells and oysters proliferate the canvases, appearing sometimes as ominous hallucinations and at other times morphing directly into the features of the painting’s subjects, symbolising a surrender and a fusing to nature.

 
 

Tremors is on view through April 6 @ Nicodim, 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue #160 Los Angeles, CA 90021

Intimacy, Intensity and Sensuality Are Magnified in Zoë Ghertner's Held in the Palm @ Zodiac Pictures in Los Angeles

Installation view courtesy of the artist and Zodiac Pictures.

Zoë Ghertner’s Held in the Palm dutifully maintains a level of intensity with all of her subjects, exploring and releasing their associative experiential qualities within the still image. With such a meticulous focus, rippling patterns or grainy textures become revealed in places where these qualities might otherwise go overlooked. Using color, texture, and light, Ghertner emphasizes the formal properties of her medium and exploits its immediacy. In some photographs, the artist toys with her compositions to soften and distort the final image—imparting a hazy, gooey, or warming sensation upon the viewer of the finished work. In these final photographs, time is ultimately suspended as each subject becomes an abstraction. Read more.

Held in the Palm is on view through March 23 @ Zodiac Pictures, 145 Bay Street #9 Santa Monica, CA

 
 

Brody Albert’s “Empty, Except for the Ghost” @ Hunter Shaw Fine Art

text by Hannah Sage Kay

An art deco jail turned squat, turned rave venue, turned arts organization, turned youth boxing club has sat abandoned for the better part of the last half century at 421 N Avenue 19. Broken glass and graffiti mark its facade of 16 pane windows, through which it seems idle riders walking to the bus stop across the street passed the time by throwing rocks. The composition that’s resulted has been documented and recreated by Brody Albert in a series of seven windows cast in white polymer gypsum which now hang across a warm gray wall at Hunter Shaw Fine Art. Supported by the clamps one might expect to find in some archeological display of a looted plinth or section of fresco ripped from its site to instead conjure the aura of times past for museum goers on the other side of the world, the windows on which these sculptures are based possess an indexical relationship with their city: a record of passing time, of resentment for its deplorable public transit, of ghost hunters in search of a troubled past and haunted present, of willful abjection that somehow passes for charm.

Proximity to the divine, the ancient, the supernatural, the famous seems to be a shared aspiration. Los Angeles undoubtedly draws those in search of the latter, and so it is a city marked by mundane lore wherein Hollywood bus tours will show you where celebrity lived, died, ate, and shat. But what about a bus tour for the city’s most desecrated spaces: abandoned buildings, vacant lots, discarded suitcases? 

A bird drinks from a small puddle of rainwater on the sunken surface of one such suitcase. Encountered by Albert on a morning walk—recast in epoxy and fiberglass and equipped with a hidden fountain to create a gurgling pool of water—the suitcase now sits at an odd angle on the gallery floor: a bird bath minus the bird. Absenting all signs of life, the suitcase and the windows together posit a future in which the desecrated is all that remains to represent our present—monumentalizing those banalities we try our best to ignore. Will anything else remain of the lives lived on N Avenue 19—except perhaps, the ghosts?

Brody Albert: Empty, Except for the Ghost will be on view at Hunter Shaw Fine Art until December 17.

WhiteBox.LA Presents Tim Biskup: EMERGENT @ Face Guts Gallery In Los Angeles

For the past 15 years, Tim Biskup has been perfecting a style of monochrome graphite drawings on paper that has come to define his artistic practice. The abstract images he creates with a single block of graphite draw on modernist forms simultaneously reminiscent of the Isamu Noguchi and Henry Moore, but are executed with the whimsy and humor of contemporary flat field artists like and Joe Bradley and Jonas Wood. Biskup has garnered tens of millions of views of his live drawing videos posted to his @tbiskup account on Instagram. Many of the works created live on this platform will be exhibited as part of EMERGENT. Culled from thousands of finished drawings and studies Biskup’s Face Guts exhibition examines the process and breadth of this body of his work and includes works created throughout the 2020 pandemic and some as recently as the day of the opening event. Face Guts Gallery will also host a series of live drawing events that will allow the public to witness the spontaneous birth of Biskup’s graceful lines and will be integrated into the show as they are created. EMERGENT will be on view at Face Guts Gallery from December 9 to January 7 2024 with an opening reception on December 9th 5-8pm. 4136 Verdugo Road Los Angeles 90065

Curt LeMieux "Heroes" @ White Box LA

 
 

WhiteBox.LA, renowned photographer Joshua White’s curatorial project, presents its second exhibition, Curt LeMieux: HEROES at The Desmond Tower from November 18 through November 30, 2023. A group of minimal, puerile paintings of classic LP albums, including the iconic album cover art from artists ranging from Dusty Springfield to Frank Sinatra, Patti Smith, The Rolling Stones, and Black Sabbath.

The works speak of LeMieux’s adolescent obsession with Rock & Roll imagery and his own teenage sexuality as he came of age on the outskirts of the rust belt on the late 70’s “Growing up working class on the outskirts the rustbelt, I had no access whatsoever to fine art. I had no idea that art existed. Nor did I relate much to regional expressions of culture. Large Green Bay Packer themed snow men littered every other yard. I first saw the cover of Meatloaf’s Bat Outta Hell while in a waiting room at Saint Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. I remember the experience with vivid detail. As a bored and impetuous child, this artwork excited me to my core. It was pop of color in an overwhelmingly drab setting. It was life and it was death stuffed together in one horrible little scene. It was dramatic and forceful. The paintings in Heroes paintings pay homage to the role music played in my development as a visual artist. I do not want to capture an exact likeness of a given album cover or a given artist. The forms are deliberately exaggerated. The characters are somewhat gawky and jovial; reflecting the ostentatious and campy attributes of the source material,” says LeMieux.

The exhibition incorporates live music, with a performance by Randy Randall of No Age Mark at the opening event on November 18 and a closing event featuring musician Ian Svenonius in conversation with LeMieux.

Noah Dillon New Works Is A Beautiful REM-State Dream

Pio Pico, LA presents New Works, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Noah Dillon curated by Noemi Polo. Noah’s unique trajectory as an artist is key to understanding his perspective and mission. Dillon spent his formative years in Durango, Colorado, a town situated upon the ‘ four corner’ of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. His upbringing in a rural environment, liminally positioned both nowhere and everywhere, inspired a fascination with the American imagination and landscape; how our internal landscapes are cathected onto the material world. Contrasted by his cosmopolitan career as a fashion photographer in Los Angeles, his perspective tensions the old west and the new gods of Americana. New Works explores the corporeal body and its relationship to the engineered landscape. Featuring a series of photographs captured from trail cameras installed across disparate parts of Los Angeles— a Whole Foods, Griffith Park, and MacArthur intersection— Dillon has amassed nearly 1 million images, of which a selection of ten are featured. The anonymous, mechanized capture of the trail cameras is imbued with a delicate attentiveness, one that Dillon uses to construct a non-linear narrative of space and time in the City of Angels. Within this microscopic attention to detail, there’s a discrete pathos in the imbuement of human touch to a camera that functions without it. Moments where the camera had been covered by someone’s thumb have been compiled to form “Untitled - Red Collage”, an experiment in color and form. Centered in the middle of the exhibition is “Untitled - White Dome” that acts as a gravitational center—turning the god-sized hole of late modernity into a reflective pool in which ‘the self’ is simultaneously implicated and alienated. On view until August 26 at Pio Pico.

Thania Petersen Constructs A Cohesive Identity From Her Malay & South African Roots in ZAMUNDA FOREVER @ Nicodim Gallery

Thania Petersen, Cake, 2023. Image courtesy of Nicodim Gallery.

ZAMUNDA FOREVER is Thania Petersen’s first solo exhibition in the United States. The exhibition divides Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles into three bodies of intricately embroidered narrative textiles, covering her family’s history, their present-day life as seen from the outside, then finally portrayals of their familial dynamic in more personal settings. Juxtaposed against one another, the three series are an honest depiction of how the journey that brought the artist’s people to South Africa resulted in a separation of selves that exist symbiotically to construct a new cohesive and contemporary identity.

Zamunda is the fictional African nation from which Eddie Murphy’s character hails in the 1988 film Coming to America. In these large-scale works, the artist reckons with the hyper-commercialization of her native continent, and the semi-truthfulness of the signifiers both Westerners and Africans use to market themselves to one another. ZAMUNDA FOREVER, like Petersen herself, embodies the plural histories, spiritualities, sonorities, and cultures of the Afrasiatic Sea. Also everpresent: the universal and readily identifiable signs of a family and community that lives, laughs, and loves with one another.

ZAMUNDA FOREVER is on view through September 9 @ Nicodim Gallery, 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160, Los Angeles, CA 90021

Witness Allen Ginsberg's Intimate Chronicle of the Beat Generation in Muses & Self @ Fahey/Klein in Los Angeles

Arthur Miller, William H. Gass, Hotel Royal Elevator, Copenhagen, November 1985 ©Allen Ginsberg, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Muses & Self: Photographs by Allen Ginsberg is an exhibition of Ginsberg's personal photographs balances our understanding of the public, outspoken poet and most prominent figure of the Beat Generation at Fahey/Klein Gallery. At his core, Allen Ginsberg was a witness and chronicler of the world; his profound admiration for the beauty of the vernacular, intense observation, and celebration of the present moment guided his photography and poetry. The photographs included in this exhibition are joyful, often tender, sometimes profound while at other times humorous—and capture Ginsberg’s numerous meaningful relationships.

Muses & Self is on view through September 23 @ Fahey/Klein, 148 N La Brea, Los Angeles

how swift, how far Explores our Environmental Woes @ Wonzimer Gallery

All images courtesy of the artist and Wonzimer.

how swift, how far—opening August 18 at Wonzimer Gallery—is a group exhibition of 9 artists that engage environmentalism beyond the realm of “documentary” images, creating transformative and metaphorical works about the various ecologies we inhabit in media that includes painting, photography, sculpture and video. While issues like climate change are always in the forefront, this show seeks to acknowledge the multiple issues that our environmental woes as a society interconnect with: concepts of identity, class and other cultural resonances that are relevant in our current discourse.

how swift, how far is on view through September 20 @ Wonzimer Gallery, 341-B S Avenue 17 Los Angeles 90031