select commissions
on annie hémond hotte
“The labyrinth is the perfect oxymoron, which opposes the chaos of its tortuous and dark corridors to the geometric precision of its external forms,” wrote literary scholar Gaetano Cipolla. This sentiment can be applied to Annie Hémond Hotte’s meticulously rendered labyrinthine paintings. From a distance, the warp and weft of her innumerable marks coalesce in decorative textile patterns, such as herringbone, chevrons, vermicular lines, and tracery...continue reading.
*on anders scrmn meisner
The Danish author Inger Christensen begins her seminal Fibonacci-inspired poetry collection Alphabet by listing things that exist: apricot trees exist, greylag geese exist, hydrangeas, lakes, and June nights exist. The continued repetition and accumulation of images have a physicalizing effect: the words appear as vignettes. The corresponding objects, arranged in mise en scènes and still lifes, feel tangible as if by the poet’s final line, you could reach out and touch them...continue reading.
on zaam arif
John Keats once observed that all one needs to write poetry is a “feeling for light and shade.” Zaam Arif’s cinematic compositions make a similar case for painting. Arif modulates illumination and darkness throughout his canvases for Lost Time. His sparsely populated interiors tarry the porous boundaries between day and night, photographs and reality, memories and waking dreams...continue reading.
on colleen herman
The lyrical play of color and shape, line and negative space, evokes the theatrics of the seasons and their elemental atmospheres. To trace the gradated fields and translucent washes to their vibrant, saturated edges is to trace the painting's formal progression. From the initial pour to the shoring of details with oils, the artist's process is preserved on the surface like a diary...continue reading.
*on shara mays
Mays's singular use of color not only confounds easy comprehension but disrupts arbitrary binaries. For the artist, exploring identity through vibrantly pigmented oil paints is an exploration of relationality, multiplicity, and the unknown. As a Black woman born and raised in the United States, she’s familiar with the way color is wielded as a constraining force—just as capable of obfuscation as revelation...continue reading.
*on carole ebtinger
Standing before Promesse IV, you may see light flickering atop ruffled waters, streaming through leafy trees, or enshrining in gold, if for a moment, the pond’s mottled floor. But what you feel—what it makes you feel—is harder to place, harder yet to name. The rise and fall of light and shade across the twelve paintings comprising Carole Ebtinger’s A promise I want to resolve leads you toward the indescribable...continue reading.
*on allison schulnik
When the speaker in T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock says, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons," he means to say his life is burdened by the mundane. But for painter, sculptor, and filmmaker Allison Schulnik, spoons and all the quotidian activities they represent—nourishing loved ones, acts of service, comfort, and care—are from what a meaningful life is made...continue reading.
*on caro
“To know the history of embroidery is to know the history of women,” observed feminist art historian Rozsika Parker. Indeed, thread is amongst the earliest tools of meaning-making coeval with the charcoal mark, the ochre line. Even now, it’s difficult to name a material more inextricably linked than fabric to the human experience....continue reading.
on isabella cuglievan
Throughout, the lush, voluptuous brush marks feel generative, fertile, vividly alive, as if expressing the same energetic force that surges through all green things that grow toward the light. This vitality is, in turn, echoed and evolved with each restless brushstroke that proceeds sequentially from the one before...continue reading.
on jude pauli
Pauli’s segmented ceramics, with their asterisks, discs, skittery lines, arrows, orbs, cones, and dashes, appear like a physicalized language. Composed vertically, like archaic cuneiform, the three-dimensional symbols and glyphs form words, sentences, and stories whose meaning is entirely alien and intrinsic, even primal...continue reading.
on tahnee lonsdale
This is not to say that her new body of work doesn’t solicit slow-looking—it does—but that the paintings are immediately astonishing. Leonora Carrington once wrote, “I want to make people feel, to see what they haven't seen, to imagine beyond what is possible.” These celestial panoramas, populated by diaphanous beings...continue reading.
on david ‘mr.starcity’ white
as Loverboy makes flowers unfurl from the earth, Mr.StarCity coaxes his vibrant portraits from soil, sand, pumice, charcoal, and acrylic. Their rough-hewn surfaces are lush yet acerbic, the gritty textures recall the sensation of having one’s hands in the ground. Loversboy's face, a polychromatic bouquet, emerges from the confines of a tightly cropped frame...continue reading.
on gabrielle garland
“the house, even more than the landscape, is a "psychic state," even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy,” wrote Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. When I recall the quote to painter Gabrielle Garland, she’s quick to tell me that she, like Bachelard, is “definitely a phenomenologist. That’s me!” To view her luminous oil paint portraits of technicolor houses is to understand precisely what Bachelard meant by the “psychic state” of a home...continue reading.
*on gerald davis
to memorialize flowers in full wilt, stems bowed in acquiescence to the natural order of growth and decline, is to undermine the traditional imperative to rebuke the ephemerality of beauty and instead embrace life as it presently exists—yes, even wilted, yes, faded, yes cobwebs and all—....continue reading.
*on skylar hughes
resisting both narrative and categorization, the polychromatic images present an alternative way of seeing that is multifarious and dynamic. The world here is in flux, gracefully advancing toward knowability before again retreating, receding like the tide back into the sea. Inspired by the liminal periods of dusk and dawn, the muted palette emphasizes fluidity and ambiguity...continue reading
on james goss
goss sculpts, scrapes, layers, and manipulates enormous amounts of oil to emulate the crenelation of a flower petal, the lushness of a patch of grass, and the grit of a sandy beach. To see the ridges and grooves on the trunks of the elm trees is to feel their scaley bark beneath your palm in an inspired moment of synesthesia...continue reading.
*on jieun reiner and niki ford
both born of the earth, in subject or in substance, and shaped by the desire to manifest an internal tension in physical form, they enable the possibility of existing in the liminal space between nationalities, genders, and generations, between dreams and reality, past and present...continue reading.
on camilla engström
engström’s figures are rutilant, at once ethereal and carnal, the creators and creations of their landscapes. Their expressions are peaceful, pensive, and their dispositions benevolent, sublime. While fluid, glowing brushwork renders skin smooth and supple, complex chiaroscuro shading begets depth and anatomical definition....continue reading.
on cha yuree
to understand it this way, is to see how Cha’s women are engaged in something far more robust than their static poses could possibly convey and perhaps more fluid than the rigidity demanded by the roles they’re forced to perform...continue reading.
on brian robertson
we are, despite all our efforts to conceal it, animals. Animals, whose behaviors are determined, in large part, by a complex series of chemical reactions. “We’re blind to our blindness,” says psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the difficulty of knowing ourselves...continue reading.
on hiroya kurata
this is what food looks like 2023: highly processed white cake with frosting and strawberries. This is what children looked like: chaotic, cheerful blurs of energetic life force in cotton shorts. And light: dappled. And parks: serene. And mothers: overworked but ever-present...continue reading.
on super future kid
the twin figures seen throughout, rendered in an exuberant color palette and arranged in striking compositions appear as two halves of the same whole; their relationship, a third thing that transcends the limitations and boundaries of the self...continue reading.
on jonathan edelhuber
evidence of erasure, rupture, and addition indelibly preserved on the canvas’ surfaces affords the works not only a spatial depth but a temporal one as well. Each painting or sculpture reveals the stages of its creation, from blunt, flat strokes and splatters to robust finishes and scraped-down layer...continue reading.
on adam beris
in this way, the works become almost like Rorschach Tests, where each viewer sees themselves and their own tastes, assumptions, and experiences reflected back toward them...continue reading.
on andy dixon
portraying works of art as commercial objects, subject to reproduction and arbitrary market values, is to remove them from the realm of the sacred and the untouchable and understand them in their historical context, which is to acknowledge the social systems that made their creation possible and to interrogate the ways their subjects venerate and perpetuate those hierarchies...continue reading.
on annie hémond hotte
for the pit
“The labyrinth is the perfect oxymoron, which opposes the chaos of its tortuous and dark corridors to the geometric precision of its external forms,” wrote literary scholar Gaetano Cipolla. This sentiment can be applied to Annie Hémond Hotte’s meticulously rendered labyrinthine paintings. From a distance, the warp and weft of her innumerable marks coalesce in decorative textile patterns, such as herringbone, chevrons, vermicular lines, and tracery...continue reading.*on anders scrmn meisner
for the pit
The Danish author Inger Christensen begins her seminal Fibonacci-inspired poetry collection Alphabet by listing things that exist: apricot trees exist, greylag geese exist, hydrangeas, lakes, and June nights exist. The continued repetition and accumulation of images have a physicalizing effect: the words appear as vignettes. The corresponding objects, arranged in mise en scènes and still lifes, feel tangible as if by the poet’s final line, you could reach out and touch them...continue reading.on zaam arif
for the pit
John Keats once observed that all one needs to write poetry is a “feeling for light and shade.” Zaam Arif’s cinematic compositions make a similar case for painting. Arif modulates illumination and darkness throughout his canvases for Lost Time. His sparsely populated interiors tarry the porous boundaries between day and night, photographs and reality, memories and waking dreams...continue reading.on colleen herman
for sarah brook gallery
The lyrical play of color and shape, line and negative space, evokes the theatrics of the seasons and their elemental atmospheres. To trace the gradated fields and translucent washes to their vibrant, saturated edges is to trace the painting's formal progression. From the initial pour to the shoring of details with oils, the artist's process is preserved on the surface like a diary...continue reading.*on shara mays
for the pit
Mays's singular use of color not only confounds easy comprehension but disrupts arbitrary binaries. For the artist, exploring identity through vibrantly pigmented oil paints is an exploration of relationality, multiplicity, and the unknown. As a Black woman born and raised in the United States, she’s familiar with the way color is wielded as a constraining force—just as capable of obfuscation as revelation...continue reading.*on carole ebtinger
for sarah brook gallery
Standing before Promesse IV, you may see light flickering atop ruffled waters, streaming through leafy trees, or enshrining in gold, if for a moment, the pond’s mottled floor. But what you feel—what it makes you feel—is harder to place, harder yet to name. The rise and fall of light and shade across the twelve paintings comprising Carole Ebtinger’s A promise I want to resolve leads you toward the indescribable...continue reading. *on allison schulnik
for the pit
When the speaker in T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock says, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons," he means to say his life is burdened by the mundane. But for painter, sculptor, and filmmaker Allison Schulnik, spoons and all the quotidian activities they represent—nourishing loved ones, acts of service, comfort, and care—are from what a meaningful life is made...continue reading. *on caro
for sarah brook gallery
“To know the history of embroidery is to know the history of women,” observed feminist art historian Rozsika Parker. Indeed, thread is amongst the earliest tools of meaning-making coeval with the charcoal mark, the ochre line. Even now, it’s difficult to name a material more inextricably linked than fabric to the human experience....continue reading.on isabella cuglievan
for the pit
Throughout, the lush, voluptuous brush marks feel generative, fertile, vividly alive, as if expressing the same energetic force that surges through all green things that grow toward the light. This vitality is, in turn, echoed and evolved with each restless brushstroke that proceeds sequentially from the one before...continue reading.
on jude pauli
for la loma projects
Pauli’s segmented ceramics, with their asterisks, discs, skittery lines, arrows, orbs, cones, and dashes, appear like a physicalized language. Composed vertically, like archaic cuneiform, the three-dimensional symbols and glyphs form words, sentences, and stories whose meaning is entirely alien and intrinsic, even primal...continue reading.
on sydney zester
for the pit
Standing before Sydney Zester’s technicolor quilts, it is nearly impossible not to feel the exuberance—the sheer delight—of their creator. Harnessing the effulgent energy of color, the consonant pleasure of composition, and the embodied resonance of fabric, the eight textile works in Giddy and Gusto enliven and console in equal measure...continue reading.*on fedor deichmann
for the pit
One does not need Wassily Kandinsky’s synesthesia or even to know that the painting’s title is borrowed from a symphony by Paul Hindemith to see music in Deichmann’s mesmerizing six-foot-tall Mathis der Maler. Traversing legato planes, sweeping gestural lines, and restless staccato brushstrokes reify the reach and resonance of a musical score...continue reading.on tahnee lonsdale
for night gallery
This is not to say that her new body of work doesn’t solicit slow-looking—it does—but that the paintings are immediately astonishing. Leonora Carrington once wrote, “I want to make people feel, to see what they haven't seen, to imagine beyond what is possible.” These celestial panoramas, populated by diaphanous beings...continue reading.
*on hayley barker
for brepols publishing (print)
Her verdant compositions, teeming with the elan vital of diaphanous grasses, lacy petals, and succulent citrus fruits, compel viewers to stop and rest awhile. As musical tones make nearby objects vibrate at the same frequency, the tender thrumming emanating from Barker’s pictorial worlds encourages reciprocal harmony. The pervasive sense of benevolence and serenity is bewitching...continue reading.*on tidaywhitney lek and veronica fernandez
for night gallery
Both women plumb the depths of their experiences to render the ecstasy and agony of the human condition in painterly bids for connection and acts of witness. In densely layered compositions that merge past and present, inherited and embodied memories, self and other, both artists give form to stories of love and loss as personal as they are universal...continue reading.on david ‘mr.starcity’ white
for the pit
as Loverboy makes flowers unfurl from the earth, Mr.StarCity coaxes his vibrant portraits from soil, sand, pumice, charcoal, and acrylic. Their rough-hewn surfaces are lush yet acerbic, the gritty textures recall the sensation of having one’s hands in the ground. Loversboy's face, a polychromatic bouquet, emerges from the confines of a tightly cropped frame...continue reading.on gabrielle garland
for the pit
“the house, even more than the landscape, is a "psychic state," even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy,” wrote Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. When I recall the quote to painter Gabrielle Garland, she’s quick to tell me that she, like Bachelard, is “definitely a phenomenologist. That’s me!” To view her luminous oil paint portraits of technicolor houses is to understand precisely what Bachelard meant by the “psychic state” of a home...continue reading.
*on chase barney
for the pit
According to historical records, the proverbial wisdom in the 17th and 18th centuries saw god, not the devil, in the details. That is until Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced god dead and amended the original idiom to der teufel stecktim detail or the devil in the details. For Barney’s effervescent clay sculptures, god is nowhere because he is everywhere, and the devil predominates by hiding in plain sight...continue reading.*on alan prazniak
for la loma projects
irresolution consistently asserts the need for imagination and invention; here, the land is simultaneously water, sky, mountain, meadow, and vista, always already just up ahead. Where an exacting replica of a mountain range can only reveal something of itself, Prazniak’s compositions depend upon the viewer’s collaboration and revelation for their full meaning...continue reading.*on emily yong beck
for the pit
the sculptures in Soft Power visualize Beck’s reckoning with history’s claim on the present and her attempt to reconcile dialectically opposed truths about a beloved art form. Offering a poignant example of the ethical dilemma slated to define our contemporary moment: Can we cleave the past from the present? The artist from the art?...continue reading.on keita morimoto
for night gallery
the nocturnal cityscapes and portraits in as we didn’t know it are akin to stills captured from a single, atmospheric film or cropped sections along a much larger, continuous tableau vivant. The compositions feature moments of stillness while suggesting that action and revelation are imminent...continue reading.*on gerald davis
for la loma projects
to memorialize flowers in full wilt, stems bowed in acquiescence to the natural order of growth and decline, is to undermine the traditional imperative to rebuke the ephemerality of beauty and instead embrace life as it presently exists—yes, even wilted, yes, faded, yes cobwebs and all—....continue reading. *on skylar hughes
for la loma projects
resisting both narrative and categorization, the polychromatic images present an alternative way of seeing that is multifarious and dynamic. The world here is in flux, gracefully advancing toward knowability before again retreating, receding like the tide back into the sea. Inspired by the liminal periods of dusk and dawn, the muted palette emphasizes fluidity and ambiguity...continue reading on james goss
for the pit
goss sculpts, scrapes, layers, and manipulates enormous amounts of oil to emulate the crenelation of a flower petal, the lushness of a patch of grass, and the grit of a sandy beach. To see the ridges and grooves on the trunks of the elm trees is to feel their scaley bark beneath your palm in an inspired moment of synesthesia...continue reading. *on jieun reiner and niki ford
for la loma projects
both born of the earth, in subject or in substance, and shaped by the desire to manifest an internal tension in physical form, they enable the possibility of existing in the liminal space between nationalities, genders, and generations, between dreams and reality, past and present...continue reading.on jonathan casella
for the pit
“Poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau advised in his masterpiece Walden that “if you have built castles in the air…that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Jonathan Casella imagined palatial vessels capable of holding the elusive, incandescent...continue reading.on camilla engström
for over the influence paris
engström’s figures are rutilant, at once ethereal and carnal, the creators and creations of their landscapes. Their expressions are peaceful, pensive, and their dispositions benevolent, sublime. While fluid, glowing brushwork renders skin smooth and supple, complex chiaroscuro shading begets depth and anatomical definition....continue reading.on cha yuree
for over the influence hong kong
to understand it this way, is to see how Cha’s women are engaged in something far more robust than their static poses could possibly convey and perhaps more fluid than the rigidity demanded by the roles they’re forced to perform...continue reading.on brian robertson
for everyday moonday gallery
we are, despite all our efforts to conceal it, animals. Animals, whose behaviors are determined, in large part, by a complex series of chemical reactions. “We’re blind to our blindness,” says psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the difficulty of knowing ourselves...continue reading.
on hiroya kurata
for over the influence gallery los angeles
this is what food looks like 2023: highly processed white cake with frosting and strawberries. This is what children looked like: chaotic, cheerful blurs of energetic life force in cotton shorts. And light: dappled. And parks: serene. And mothers: overworked but ever-present...continue reading.