Criterion Collection and Dover Street Market launch Holiday Curation In Los Angeles and New York

This holiday season, Criterion steps out from the living room and into the city, partnering with Dover Street Market to transform film history into a tactile, immersive experience. For two days only, December 13–14, dedicated installation spaces at DSM New York and DSM Los Angeles will host a carefully curated selection from the Criterion Collection—inviting visitors to browse, discover, and linger among some of cinema’s most enduring works.

At the heart of the program is a reverence for authorship and atmosphere. Collector sets spanning the radical tenderness of Agnès Varda, the baroque spectacle of Fellini, the aching romanticism of Wong Kar Wai, and the existential weight of Bergman anchor the offering, alongside Criterion milestones and cult-defining epics like Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films. Single editions punctuate the selection with sharp contrasts: the icy ritualism of Eyes Wide Shut, the restless rebellion of Breathless, the intimate spectacle of Grey Gardens, and the cultural urgency of Do the Right Thing.

The films and merchandise will remain available throughout December, extending the invitation to revisit, rewatch, and reframe the season through the language of film.

Volta Collective’s Loneliness Triptych Questions the Source of Our Unsettling Discomfort with Solitude @ New Theater in Hollywood

text by Summer Bowie
photographs by Roman Koval

As feelings of isolation grow increasingly profound in our society, it seems logical that we would bifurcate our psyche in an effort to keep ourselves company. Julian Jaynes, an American psychologist, proposed that the human race began with what he called a bicameral mentality, where our inner monologue was believed to be the voice of external gods making commands. There was no self-reflection, no ability to perform executive ego functions, such as deliberate mind-wandering and conscious introspection. British philologist Arthur William Hope Adkins believed that ancient Greek civilization developed ego-centered psychology as an adaptation to living in city-states. Could it be possible that the development of those city-states into supermetropolises infinitely connected by social media might effectively bend the arc of our psychological universe back toward bicameralism? Might Narcissus look so deeply in the mirror that he would eventually forget its existence?

Volta Collective’s Loneliness Triptych comprises three acts and an epilogue, directed and choreographed by Mamie Green, with a live, original score by Dylan Fujioka. When the house doors open, the stage is occupied by a rotating, black office chair, a folding chair, a small area rug, and an inflatable mattress propped against the wall. The first act, titled “Doppelganger,” begins with two women played by Bella Allen and Anne Kim. They are dressed identically in white tanks and black pants. One lies down on the rug so that the other can roll her up like a fresh corpse. Our narrator, Raven Scott, watches from above, the twin dancers serving as stand-ins for her allegory’s rotating cast of characters. She walks down the stairs to a mysteriously ambient symphony of bells, strings, and keys recounting her experience with cinema escapism—a coping mechanism for loneliness so firmly tied to the 20th century that you could almost feel nostalgic for it. She speculates on whether movies might actually be able to watch us back and celebrates the cyclical nature of time captured on reels of celluloid. The dancers start this act as a duet while our narrator tells their story. By the end, our narrator becomes integrated into the dance, the divide between subject and objects dissolves, forming endless constellations of triplets.

From the red velvet seats of the movie theater, we’re thrust into the 21st century with “Camgirl,” the second act, written by Lily Lady and played by themself and Mandolin Burns. Sonically, it feels as though we’re in a yoga studio and our heroes aren’t dressed identically, but their shared vibe is equal parts casual and sexy. They walk toward each other from opposite corners of the stage and meet in the center with the inflatable mattress. Lady rolls like a log across the mattress, mirroring the opening of the first act with the rug. Our camgirl doesn’t need a camera. Its existence is as inherent as the audience they can scarcely see behind the stage lights. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger wrote: “​​A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping.” Lady claims that they’ll do anything to avoid pain as their alter ego supports them through endless bouts of self-pity. The two embrace from either side of the mattress, and move together as a trio that is only two-thirds human. The mattress slowly deflates until the two melt into an embrace on the floor. The lights go red and the music gets industrial. Our dancers skip together across the stage; Burn fires on all cylinders in a solo dance that ends with her wrapping the deflated mattress around her body like a dress while Lady watches and contemplates a “form of introspection that ceases to be disaffected and self-indulgent.”

Act three, “The Kid,” eschews the text, pulling us into a pure movement experience with the office chair performed by Ryan Green and Ryley Polak. Practically indistinguishable in size and shape, they form a twisted counterbalance on the chair as it spins slowly centerstage. I’m reminded of how difficult it is to truly carry the full weight of oneself—to be solely responsible for the consequences of one’s existence. They are like the opposing forces of the id and superego, constantly keeping one another in check. The inertia of their movement echoes the chaotic percussion of dissonant, grungy drums and electronic glitching. Supporting one another through inversions and barrelling leaps through the air, their dance is an endless chain reaction of ever-impressive acrobatics. Suddenly, they are bathed in an ethereal overhead spotlight, and their spinning turns to melting. They’re like cogs propelling one another with teeth turning on opposite planes. Unlike the previous acts, their ending feels quietly triumphant.

The epilogue is populated by all of the dancers at once. The New Theater stage can hardly contain all seven of them, and yet each feels just as lonely as ever. Our cast is a mix of trained dancers and actors who know how to move. However, they don’t feel mismatched as mirrors. Their talents are perfectly complementary and masterfully executed. Green’s trademark, multidisciplinary approach to theater has found its most subtle balance in Loneliness Triptych. Her players embody their characters while allowing the text, music, and choreography to inform their lived experiences. They film themselves as they vape and exchange props to a remix of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River,” a turn-of-the-century ballad about refusing to forgive. We’re left to wonder if the source of our loneliness isn’t simply a product of our elective, disaffected self-indulgence. If we do not, indeed, prefer it.

Autre Magazine FW25 "Work In Progress" Celebration & Panel Talk with Caltech Astrophysicists @ l.a.Eyeworks

Last night, at the expansive new l.a.Eyeworks campus in Los Angeles, Autre magazine invited guests on a journey through space and time to celebrate its FW25 “Work in Progress” issue. The evening opened with a captivating panel featuring Caltech astrophysicists Katherine de Kleer, Cameron Hummels, and Mike Brown, moderated by Autre’s managing editor Summer Bowie, who guided a conversation spanning black holes, dark matter, and the possibility of life beyond Earth. The discussion gave way to an intimate cocktail soirée, where guests mingled under the stars with drinks courtesy of Madre Mezcal. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Moving to Keep Ourselves Whole: A Review of Choreographer Megan Paradowski's "Simulacra"

text by Avery Wheless
photographs by Skye Varga


We are living through a time when the worst human suffering imaginable is both televised and ignored, when disorientation is used as a tool of control. In direct response to this intractable cognitive dissonance, Simulacra, choreographed by Megan Paradowski, insists on the urgency of embodied memory. Paradowski’s 30-minute choreographed piece premiered September 11 at LA Dance Project’s LAUNCH, featuring dancers Jessy Crist, Maddie Lacambra, Travis Lim, Nadia Maryam, Jonah Tran, and Marco Vega. Paradowski’s choreography unfolded alongside a 40-pound ice sculpture by Heidi Ross, with a soundscape by Ian Wellman, costumes by Gabrielle Kraus, and lighting by Caleb Wildman—each element contributing to a fully immersive environment. What emerged was a work both haunting and hopeful, one that situates itself within a global landscape of suppressed truths and performative power.

Referencing Alexei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More—a study of the Soviet Union’s descent into “hypernormalisation,” where repetition transformed falsehoods into reality—Simulacra responds to the collapse we are currently living through: the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, mass deportations, the digital fog of misinformation, and the slow, aestheticized demise of the climate.

The stage was intentionally configured in the middle of the audience, dissolving any hierarchy of perspective and forcing viewers to confront the work from every angle. Ross’s monumental ice sculpture, carved from frozen beet juice, stood at the center, steadily bleeding onto the stage, staining the floor, and eventually the dancers’ garments.  The sculpture became both a visual anchor and sonic participant, as Wellman incorporated the crackling and fracturing of the ice into the score. Its gradual dissolution mirrored the choreography’s central theme: that violence leaves a stain. The red liquid’s gradual seeping into fabric and skin became a quiet insistence that history persists in the body.

 
 

Paradowski transforms the performance space into a site of collective witnessing. Her choreography doesn’t merely present movement—it reveals what we might otherwise refuse to see. The dancers’ bodies are both medium and message, extending and releasing with a tension that exists even in levity. Watching them push and pull, fall and catch, resist and support—this continual ebb and flow—called to mind the properties of water: its ability to buoy, to drown, to hold, and to erode. Grief, care, and survival are traced in gestures that feel both urgent and inevitable.

Having worked with Paradowski in the studio over the past few months, I’ve seen how she uses choreography as a tool for inquiry—how movement can reshape ideas and give form to what is otherwise unspoken. Simulacra is the fullest articulation of that philosophy. Her performance positions the body as both vessel and witness, capable of absorbing violence and preserving truth long after the events have passed.

Because she sees the world through movement, each phrase of choreography is like trying on a garment. In rehearsal, I might move a certain way and she’ll say, “Yes—that looks good on your body.” I thought about that often while witnessing Simulacra evolve—how certain gestures don’t strive for beauty, but for truth. Some are erratic, others jarring or uncomfortable, but each one fits. Each one says exactly what it must.

The more I’ve come to know Megan—both as a choreographer and as a person—the more I’ve come to deeply admire this work. Simulacra holds space for a world that feels as though it is unraveling, and in its insistence on movement, it seems to hold the threads together. As Pina Bausch once said, “I’m not so interested in how they move as in what moves them.” Megan’s work embodies that sentiment completely.

Dance has always felt like one of the most powerful tools we have for understanding the world—its violence, its tenderness, its chaos, its grace. Simulacra ends not with resolution, but with an image: of time slipping, collapsing, staining everything it touches. It reminds us that the world is changing faster than we can process—but that memory, like pigment in water, lingers.

Even in the aftermath of destruction, there is room for collective care. Amid dissolution, there is still buoyancy—a possibility for reforming, softening, and holding. Because the body—bearing trauma, rhythm, and breath—may be the last site of reality. And because in times like these, consciousness itself becomes an act of rebellion. We must move to keep ourselves whole.

A World With No Safe Word: Read An Interview of Nicolette Mishkan →

Nicolette Mishkan
Lethe's Harem, 2024-2025
Oil on linen
48 x 60 in121.9 x 152.4 cm

What if death were just a blackout between this life and the next? With its memories wiped clean in a cycle of spiritual cleansing, your soul might carry only faint notions of who you once were, like a SIM card with a brand new hippocampus. Such is the gist of the River Lethe, an underworld tributary from ancient Greek mythology whose waters wash away all remembrance of one’s existence. In Lethe’s Tavern, the fabled Greek river becomes a watering hole where painter Nicolette Mishkan’s ego goes to slosh around, bifurcate, and eventually sing its swan song. Informed equally by Sufi mysticism wherein wine is used to symbolize the intoxicating effects of divine love, she annihilates her sense of individuality by eliminating any distinction between herself and others. Together, these figures revel in the ultimate surrender to their fate, a resplendent transcendence into the unknown where who she once was lies buried without even an epitaph. The following interview took place at Megan Mulrooney on the occasion of the exhibition’s closing and has been edited for length. Read more.

AYA TAKANO'S World Comes to Los Angeles →

AYA TAKANO’S “how far how deep we can go" exhibition at Perrotin in LA invites visitors into a mystical world which offers an escape and hope for a brighter existence.

AYA TAKANO 地球上のすべての生物のスピリット  | the spirit of all life on earth, 2025. 130.3 x 162 x 3 cm | 51 5/16 x 63 3/4 x 1 3/16 inches. Oil on canvas. ©2025 AYA TAKANO/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin.

text by Poppy Baring

Inspired by all art forms from Expressionism to the erotic art of Japan's Edo period, from manga artists such as Osamu Tezuka to Gustav Klimt, AYA TAKANO has been creating her own intimate fantasy since the age of three. Born in Japan in 1976, the painter, illustrator, and highly recognised Superflat artist welcomes LA residents to her new exhibition titled “how far how deep we can go”.

TAKANO presents otherworldly nymph-like characters that are extraterrestrial and yet still connected to and reflective of our reality. Drawing from the past and thinking to the future, she creates a limitless existence where time, gender, and age are undefined. Through various mediums, the Japanese artist investigates our inherent consciousness, exploring what it means to be marked by the past and connected to all life that occurred before us and will exist after us. Held in LA, home to spiritual seekers as well as recent environmental catastrophe, the exhibition offers a universe where all souls prosper as equals, a space where compassion prevails. In this interview, TAKANO provides insight into her worldview and her day-to-day life, asking visitors to look inwards and reconnect with the “radiance of all life.” Read More.

The Weight of Lightness: Miya Ando’s “Mono no aware” at Saint Laurent Rive Droite, Los Angeles

In a city so often obsessed with permanence—ageless faces, endless summers, architecture designed to defy time—Mono no aware, Miya Ando’s luminous exhibition at Saint Laurent Rive Droite in Los Angeles, arrives like a soft exhale. Curated with elegant restraint by Anthony Vaccarello, the exhibition runs from April 8 through May 28, 2025, and offers visitors a meditative encounter with the ineffable: beauty that doesn’t last, and thus becomes more precious.

Ando, a Japanese-American artist based in New York, brings to Los Angeles a body of work that is both austere and poetic. Her materials—steel, redwood, washi paper, glass—are not chosen for comfort or ease. These are tough, elemental substances, but in her hands, they seem to sigh. Steel oxidizes. Wood is scorched. Silver nitrate glistens briefly before tarnishing into shadow. Every piece seems to exist in the act of becoming something else, caught in a slow dance between creation and decay.

It is this delicate tension—between the enduring and the fleeting, the seen and the sensed—that defines Mono no aware. The title, a Japanese philosophical term, loosely translates to “the pathos of things.” But it's not sorrow in the Western sense; it’s a tender, almost reverent awareness of the impermanence of all things. The falling cherry blossom, the shifting moonlight, the flicker of memory—Ando translates these moments not as loss but as sublime presence.

This exhibition is less a gallery show than a sensorial field. Ando’s paintings, with their subtle gradations and vaporous textures, resemble atmospheres more than images. One large piece—steel treated with silver nitrate—glows as if lit from within, a silver dusk caught in mid-fade. Stand before it long enough and you may find yourself breathing slower, drawn into its quietude. The light changes as you move. It is not just the painting that shimmers, but your own perception, altered.

Nearby, sculptures made of redwood anchor the space with a different kind of gravity. Ando uses the traditional Japanese shou-sugi-ban technique to char the surface of the wood, preserving it through fire. The result is a deep, inky black that isn’t void but presence. The carbonized surface absorbs light instead of reflecting it. Touch, were it allowed, would surely reveal unexpected warmth beneath the charcoal. These works feel ancient and future-facing at once—artifacts of a time out of time.

Silkscreen prints—subtler, perhaps quieter still—offer a more intimate scale, drawing viewers close. They echo the motifs of moonlight, fog, and celestial transience that recur throughout Ando’s work. There is a consistent language at play, not in symbols or icons, but in atmosphere. What binds the pieces together is not a narrative, but a rhythm, a kind of visual breath.

Ando’s training is as multidisciplinary as her art. With a background in East Asian calligraphy and metal patination, she bridges traditions with innovation. Her American upbringing meets her Japanese lineage in a hybrid that never feels forced. Instead, her work pulses with the complexity of in-between identities—cultural, material, temporal. The result is a deeply personal, spiritual vision, one that invites viewers not just to look, but to dwell in a different register of time.

Vaccarello’s curatorial touch is light but essential. The space at Saint Laurent Rive Droite—typically known for its sleek fashion displays and curated chaos—has been transformed into a vessel for contemplation. The works are given room to breathe, and the minimalist setting amplifies their quiet power. The collaboration between the house of Saint Laurent and Ando is more than aesthetic alignment—it’s an act of mutual recognition. Both traffic in forms of elegance that resist explanation, both seek out the sacred in style and silence.

It is tempting to categorize Mono no aware as environmental art or spiritual abstraction. But to do so would be to contain it too tightly. What Ando offers here isn’t doctrine—it’s sensation. It’s the way silver catches dusk. The scent of scorched wood. The hush that falls when you realize something beautiful is slipping away. And yet, Mono no aware does not mourn. It honors. In every oxidized panel, every blackened beam, every fading gradient, there is a kind of stillness that feels like acceptance. Not resignation, but reverence.

In a world constantly refreshing itself, where we swipe and scroll in pursuit of the next, the now, the new, Miya Ando’s work asks us to pause. To notice. To feel, just for a moment, the immensity of impermanence. And maybe, in doing so, to find a strange and fragile peace.

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