Shulamit Nazarian

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to announce the opening of An Egg in Your Shoe, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by UK-based painter Dickon Drury. The artist’s thematically rich, meticulously detailed paintings mine diverse corners of art history and the genre of still-life painting to delve into themes of self-sufficiency, preservation, and regeneration with tenderness and humor. Drury's latest series of oil paintings on linen invites viewers to contemplate the complex relationship between material possessions and a sense of home amid an uncertain future. The still lives present collections of objects that work like visual puzzles, prodding the viewer to piece together clues about the mysterious inhabitants of these scenes. Drury's practice seeks the humor and idiosyncrasy embodied in our selection of material possessions, and his research has often looked to the supplies collected by apocalypse preppers. Boxes in the process of being packed or unpacked evoke a sense of urgency and an impending move, while rolls of bubble wrap allude to themes of protection and value for one's beloved objects. The compositions present their diverse groupings of objects democratically, without a hierarchical division between a whistle, a lighter, or a high-end ceramic vase. Without a human figure in sight, Drury's paintings offer an imaginative narrative played out in the background by the invisible, implicit inhabitants of his eccentric world. The title of the exhibition references the whimsical threat, "Put an egg in your shoe and beat it." This absurdist declaration also poses the question, how might it actually feel to walk with an egg in your shoe? An off-kilter sense of space and a diffuse feeling of disorientation pervade the tablescapes and bookshelves of Drury's works, which he depicts as if viewed from many angles at once. The punning title also alludes to the objects and shapes that suggest multiple meanings in Drury's compositions. In another sense, we might think of the many "easter eggs" that appear to discerning viewers of these paintings, such as cleverly rendered art historical references, hidden optical illusions, and tongue-in-cheek visual jokes. This exhibition marks the artist's first body of work created in his new studio in Cornwall, a coastal, Southwestern county in England, where a tidal creek flows just beyond his windows. The gentle, reflected light has softened the artist's saturated color palette somewhat and infused many of the works with rich blues. Drury's watery surroundings, as well as his interest in analogous forms and referential images, are emblematized in the painting A River Ain't Too Much to Love. Here, the roaring water depicted in a perfect miniature reproduction of early twentieth-century artist Marsden Hartley's Smelt Brook Falls echoes across an array of plastic water bottles, tinned fish, and ocean scenes on product packaging. The upper portion of the painting depicts a ceramic teapot inspired by the classic British potter Bernard Leach adorned with the image of a well. For Drury, the well motif is symbolic of the processes of introspection and gathering inspiration, but also signifies hopes for self-sufficiency as our climate crisis causes freshwater levels to drop across the globe. Throughout Drury's recent paintings, the eclectic throng of objects—from packaged foods and condiments, to solitary earbuds, seashells, and snails, to first aid supplies and batteries made from fruit—is suggestive of our sense of precarity in a world colored by global pandemics, political instability, and environmental catastrophe. Snails became a prominent motif in Drury's work during lockdown as a signifier of our collective retreat into the safety of our shells. Another pervasive image throughout the works is a slender apple core, which, on closer inspection, reveals two faces shaped by the fruit's negative space. The apple core is inspired by Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin's classic optical illusion, known as the "Rubin Vase," in which an image of a vase that produces two faces confuses our perception of figure-ground relations. The ambiguous relationship between figure and ground embedded in the apple speaks to the larger sense of personality evoked by these scenes of strangely evocative objects. In a world in which we are confined to our domestic spaces more and more, perhaps our sense of self begins to blur with the contents of our homes, and still lives become portraits.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Monster in the Maze, an installation of new sculptures by Cammie Staros. The artist explores the tropes of classical art history and mythology by appropriating and transforming the visual language of Greco-Roman architecture and artifacts. For her third solo exhibition with the gallery, Staros has designed a site-specific labyrinth of gallery walls to contain three new bodies of work: ceramic vessels, stone sculptures, and tapestries of hand-made ceramic coins. The exhibition's installation alludes to the labyrinth of Greek myth as well as the maze-like quality of encyclopedic museums. By juxtaposing the storytelling structure of museums and myths, Staros makes space for us to question these institutions as sources of insight that blur the lines between truth and fiction. In addition to calling on the museum as a source of knowledge, the exhibition's title, Monster in the Maze, alludes to the iconic figure of the Minotaur, a man with the head of a bull, as a cultural locus that invokes issues of nature and humanity, identity and otherness, and desire and violence. Art and literature featuring the Minotaur are ubiquitous and diverse—the story and its characters have fascinated countless creators, from Dante Alighieri's medieval epic to the Surrealist movement of the 1930s, to the mid-century English novels of Mary Renault. Across these manifold cultural interpretations, the Minotaur is sometimes figured as a terrifying product of unnatural desire and sometimes a tragic antihero imprisoned by an unjust society. As established in the writings of Ovid and Virgil, the Cretan King Minos prayed to the sea god Poseidon to send him a snow-white bull as a sign of favor. When Minos failed to sacrifice the bull, Poseidon punished Minos by making his wife, Pasiphaë, fall hopelessly in love with the animal. The Minotaur was the monstrous, hybrid product of their love-making, a ferocious creature who required annual human sacrifices. Minos commissioned an inescapable labyrinth to contain the beast, turning his source of shame into a force of gruesome power. Staros's labyrinthine exhibition alludes to the legacy of the Minoan story in poetic and multiplicitous ways. Like the Minotaur at its heart, the labyrinth has been a potent carrier of metaphor. For the Surrealists, the labyrinth symbolized dream states—traversing the esoteric maze of the unconscious was the fantastic journey necessary to access the untamed center of the human mind. For Staros, the exhibition's labyrinth also alludes to the principles of organization and display that characterize museums' approach to remnants of ancient culture. As institutions steeped in the history of colonial exploitation, so-called "encyclopedic" museums traditionally construct a maze of different wings to house the relics of various cultures and time periods. Staros's artistic practice considers the ways that the structures and ideologies of museum display shape the narrative of archaeologic objects by recontextualizing them to fit a particular story about history and art. Staros's methods of display ask viewers to consider how institutions shape the meaning of cultural objects by displacing them from the flow of life and suggest the conceptual links between museums and mausoleums. The exhibition comprises three types of objects that refer to traditional categories of Greek artifacts featured in museums: vessels, coins, and marble sculptures. The terracotta vessels draw their form from ancient red and black amphorae, Greek or Roman handled jars, and feature warped and morphed figurative scenes of warriors, gods, and animals hand-painted by Staros. While the artist has used slip-painting on her ceramic vessels before, this exhibition features the first body of work to feature recognizable narrative scenes, including images of the Minotaur, Poseidon, Theseus, and Athena. The "coins" in the exhibition are ceramic forms made from numismatic molds, their red earthenware glazed in shades of blue and green, with silver and gold luster to evoke the tones of ancient, corroded treasure. The coins are linked with jewelry hardware and strung into wall hangings adorned with delicate spider webs made from thin silver chains, suggesting the fragile economic lifeblood and moldering remains of bygone empires. The stone sculptures, carved from cream travertine, present fragments of bodies, their elegant posture contorted by the artist's digital and physical manipulations. The color of the travertine and the image of fractured bodies evokes the skeletal remains of the Minotaur's victims. Like the amphorae, Staros draws the forms of these works from specific sculptures from the Archaic period (circa 650–480 BC) but distorts and glitches them to appear as if viewed through moving water, or melted in a wave of destructive heat. Together, these artifacts link ancient past and ominous present, portending a posthuman world in which artworks outlive their creators and become esoteric relics lingering amidst ecological destruction. Finally, the Minotaur also alludes to the "bull-headed" stubbornness of contemporary culture and our refusal to accommodate the inevitable encroachment of climate change and natural disaster. At the center of the labyrinth, visitors encounter a provocation to consider their own relation to the artwork on view, and to wonder if monstrosity is, perhaps, a matter of perspective.

Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles is pleased to announce Spooky Action, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Wendell Gladstone. This marks the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Wendell Gladstone’s figurative compositions examine the indescribable psychic impact of human relationships. Drawing from elements of Jungian psychology and taking inspiration from quantum physics, the artist engages a variety of visual styles and painting methods to conjure extraordinary scenes free from the governing principles of reality. With a bright, often candy-colored palette layered with transparent mediums that subtly reveal the forms beneath, his paintings lure the viewer in to consider the boundless realm of the human psyche. The paintings presented in Spooky Action consider the circuitous flow of influences and effects set in motion by intimate relationships. The exhibition title cites “spooky action at a distance,” Einstein’s incredulous quip about entanglement—the phenomenon where distinctly independent subatomic particles are somehow tethered to each other, equally affected by external forces to share an identical state, even when separated by large distances. Expanding upon Gladstone’s interest in figurative painting that is at once human and alien, worldly and otherworldly, structured and fluid, Spooky Action articulates the potential for deep connections to open to such inconceivable superpositions. Throughout the exhibition, interactions among figures activate a synchronous pulse that traverses through and beyond the boundaries of physics, materializing the invisible, potent force of intimacy. As the figures’ interlace fingers, dance, wrap their limbs around each other, and, most often, just barely make contact with the tip of a single finger, the space around them shifts into a mercurial plasticity. Additional limbs inexplicably pop up from entirely different corners of the scene. Contact lingers and evolves into a psychic touch impervious to the limits of time and space. Gladstone articulates the curious qualities of entanglement and superposition contained within relationships through both the content of the narratives, as well as a systematic material approach. With a palette that ranges between muted and intense hues, the scenes are consistently staged in the shallow space just beyond a stone facade, punctuated by a single window and the leaves and branches of a meandering tree. Gladstone reiterates this quality of compressed depth through a skillful sculptural painting technique, masking and applying extensive layers of acrylic to match the contours of mosaic, concrete, bark, pulp, hair, and fabric—creating bas relief from paint. Echoing the glass surface of window panes and the waxy sheen of leaves, the artist’s use of transparent gel mediums also introduces portals for the viewer to literally see through one layer into the next. The compacted, plastic depth lends itself to the peculiar narratives occupying the settings in Spooky Action. In Dream Glider, a figure peering out from a window with dark galactic eyes is somehow everywhere. A perfectly manicured hand plucks a leaf from a branch outside, while the rest of their body hybridizes with the masonry and supports, brick by brick, a second figure sleeping in the tree outside. Rendered with stylistic shifts across the interior, architectural, and exterior planes, the gazing figure maintains the narrative across three distinct dimensions. While the chimerical Dream Glider considers the way a meditative state can create an out-of-body experience, the titular painting of Spooky Action hones in on the magnetism and influence of intimacy. A couple rendered in Gladstone’s naturalistic style sits together in a tree, surrounded by warm autumn leaves. Gazing intently at her partner, the touch of the woman’s finger causes the knit of the man’s sleeve to warp out of its pattern. As though their connection has lit a fuse capable of reconfiguring matter, a third, disembodied hand appears grasping the man’s thigh, initiating yet another ripple in the man's clothing. Visible from the open window behind them, a third figure peaks from behind a curtain, their hands raised as if conducting some kind of magic. Enchantment permeates the scene as each figure gazes in a different direction. Situated between reality and fantasy, Gladstone’s paintings reside in an ambiguous space where logic and reason fall short. His figures, held in the thrall of embrace, reflect on intimacy and connections as though bewitched by their vitality. Amidst the swirling energy of these relationships, however, Spooky Action also makes conspicuous the superimposed force of isolation. Absent the yearning and longing for closeness, the bonds lose their foundation. The initial analyses of quantum entanglement revealed physics’ paradoxical observations of matter, leading physicists to conclude that science has yet to provide a complete description of reality. Spooky Action posits that the qualities of deep relationships, too, possess an invisible force beyond our wits and comprehension, unveiling a psychological realm as yet impossible to square.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Friends and Lovers, an exhibition that brings together over twenty artists exploring ideas of kinship. Featuring painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture, the exhibition spans eight decades, uniting a cross-disciplinary and intergenerational group of artists. Friends and Lovers explores the subtleties of intimacy, foregrounding quiet moments typically shared privately among couples and small groups. Lingering on these moments, the exhibition uncovers the power, promise, and fantasy inherent to such deep partnerships. Presented in a salon-style with artworks dramatically ranging in scale, Friends and Lovers invokes the manner that family photographs and ephemera are often encountered in a domestic setting. Together, the works uncover the senses of longing and delicate connections in romantic, familial, and platonic relationships, allowing the affirmations of friends and lovers to place otherworldly dreams within the realm of possibility. Featuring: Alina Perez Alex Bradley Cohen Anthony Iacono Charles Snowden Clifford Prince King Daniel Gordon Gabe Cortese Elijah Burgher J. Carino Jared French Katja Farin Kyle Coniglio Minami Kobayashi Mj Torrecampo PaJaMa Paul Cadmus Peter Hujar Roksana Pirouzmand Ruby Sky Stiler Shagha Ariannia Star Montana Summer Wheat Tamara Santibañez Vincent Pocsik Widline Cadet

Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles is pleased to announce Overtime, an exhibition of new paintings by Kansas City, Missouri-based artist Mikey Yates. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Los Angeles. Sourcing from memory and family photographs, Mikey Yates’ paintings illustrate the tender intimacy of quotidian experiences and personal relationships. The artist centers his exploration of these universal themes on his upbringing as a Filipino-American with both parents in the military. Having relocated every few years in his youth to cities around the globe, his genre scenes evoke a sense of transience, shifting between memory, the present moment, and the anticipation of change to come. Drawn from a significant period of the artist’s life between 2002 and 2006, Overtime recounts the tense narrative of coming of age as an adolescent on military bases at the height of America’s war with Iraq and Afghanistan. Time is a prevalent and recurring theme in Yates’ practice. The sustained moments preserved in his paintings take on an urgency in Overtime, as the artist unveils the emotional stakes at the heart of his work — both on the court and in life. Underlying the paintings is the mental strain from perpetually running the odds of your loved ones’ survival within the military industrial complex, alongside the repeated loss of childhood friendships that occur when a family is perpetually uprooted. Nested within the standardized architectural structures on the military base, the basketball court played a significant role for Yates throughout his adolescence. As one of the only spaces for imagination and creativity, the court stood in stark contrast to the foreboding realities of life on the base. Yates transfers the function of the court into his paintings, infusing a sense of optimism and play into memories from an otherwise apprehensive time. In lieu of nostalgia, his luminous palette and fluidly modeled scenes uncover a path for healing and recovery despite the looming presence of military action. With time and place electrifying the scenes presented in Overtime, Yates captures the setting, both physical and mental, of these memories in both large and intimately scaled paintings. In the largest painting in the exhibition, a work from the artist’s Imaginary Defenders series, Yates’ depicts a solo game on a basketball court dimly illuminated at dusk. The primary action takes place on the foregrounded court, where a boy plays with a group of translucent figures, their limbs elongated by the rapid motion of the game. In addition to the unbounded space of imagination and memory, these works illustrate the enduring, expressive inner world of a child isolated within a space that suppresses creativity. Around the court, kids cross the street on their way back from school and a series of military figures wait at a bus stop. Everyone is on the move to the next place. The distant horizon is broken by tall military buildings quoted from childhood photos. Stacked tightly together and overlapping, the buildings press in to enclose the totality of the composition, underscoring the mental space of anticipation that permeates the military base. In contrast with the basketball paintings, we also find the artist’s subjects rendered in domestic settings, depicting a range of emotions that speak to intimate familial connections, loss, and play. The ritual of remembrance as a salve for isolation from one’s community rests at the heart of Yates’ practice. Confessional in nature, these paintings recount private moments that occur with dearest friends and family. This restorative gesture is highlighted in So Far Away, a glowing domestic scene affectionately depicting the artist’s mother serving lumpia (a Filipino dish) while the family dog looks on intently. A wooden spoon and fork sculpture, a common decoration in the Philippines symbolizing health and prosperity, hangs on the wall above her. Minimally accessorized with select meaningful objects, the temporary home becomes wholly comforting while pointing to many places at once. Beyond the window of this warm interior, the rigid structures of the base loom in the suspense of the cold night sky, the same dusky blue found in other works. Despite the overall contrast between the interior and exterior scenes of Overtime, Yates shows consistent moments of individual expression and imagination that withstand the often stifling conditions of the base. Acknowledging the anxiety and fear of transitional states of life, the paintings of Overtime illustrate a practice for reclaiming control in unstable conditions and celebrating the cherished connections that are sources of peace even during moments of turbulence. Rendered with reverence for the past, Yates’ work is deeply rooted in the personal—a persistent attempt to remain connected to one’s cultural background, friends, and family—and the formative moments of youth that create the very foundation of self.

Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new quilted, stitched, and painted textile wall works, alongside custom functional sculptures, by Oakland-based artist Maria A. Guzmán Capron. For her second solo exhibition with the gallery, Capron draws from the beyond-believable narratives of the telenovela, presenting new works united through the title Pura Mentira, a Spanish-language expression, directly translating to pure lie. Capron shares, “This body of work centers on the concept of lies, small colloquial distortions of reality, as the catalyst for experimentation, role play, and the loss of inhibition.” Under the banner of lies, the artist brings the extraordinary potential of her surreal figures into the realm of daily life. Rather than casting judgment on dishonesty, she approaches the subject with empathy, embracing the many ways we all use lies to distort the reality of mundane scenarios as simple as running late. She celebrates the power of these subtle everyday moments, allowing them to become bridges to a hospitable space that not only permits but also encourages an indulgence in hyperbolic experiences. The artist states, “The pieces build on the themes of the embodiment of multitudes to open to alternate, unruly narratives. Pura Mentira is a work of fiction in which passion, guilt, and secrets reign freely.” Joining together a spectrum of colors and clashing patterns to construct bodily forms, Capron’s practice explores cultural hybridity, a non-binary sense of self, and the competing desires to assimilate and to be seen. Born in Milan, Italy to Colombian and Peruvian parents and later relocating to Texas as a teenager, the artist recognizes the challenges of toggling between various cultures and geographies and the impact this has on one’s sense of self. Rooted in her personal experiences, often drawing directly from her most intimate relationships, her work offers a physical manifestation of the polyvalent influences that shape us—from our cultural identities, experiences, and communities to our desires, distastes, vices, and virtues. Capron’s multilayered textile works emphasize that as individuals we consist of several identities, some that we repress and some that we exalt. Capron’s fiber works are constructed from an extensive palette of vibrant and often playfully patterned fabrics. Collaged, sewn, stuffed, and quilted together, the artist finishes each piece with a mix of acrylic, spray, and latex paints. Using both fabric and paint to define the features and dimensions of the figures, the final mélange of faces and limbs have a fluctuating relationship with each other. Exaggerated body parts —signature moves in Capron’s work—render muscular arms, puffy fingers, and slinky legs that intertwine to become one. By design, it’s not readily apparent where one figure begins and another ends. Her works highlight the diversity within many of us, where several individual personas assembled together can be understood as reflections of a single person. Capron thinks of identity as something that constantly shifts and evolves, constructing figures that are simultaneously extensions of herself and collective portraits of those who often influence identity formation, such as lovers, caretakers, and friends. Upon entering the space of the exhibition, we see the individual fiber works in Pura Mentira are held by oversized curling limbs in an open embrace, painted directly on the gallery walls. This abstracted body stretches across the walls in each room of the exhibition, with some features appearing in sculptural form. The figure culminates in the final room to reveal the face of this giantess, the eyes in the form of tables and nose and mouth in the form of seats. In the central gallery, an open heart, made from two curving crimson benches, has been placed inside the torso. These gestures not only constitute a single creature housing the multitude of personas occupying the walls in the artist’s fiber works, but also act as a welcoming invitation for visitors to travel through this body, to rest within its heart facing one another, to take up time and space. Though their presence dominates Pura Mentira, we cannot see the totality of this oversized figure; instead, their presence builds slowly as we move throughout the exhibition. Pura Mentira systematically positions visitors within this compositional logic, inviting them to experiment with their internal and external influences to draw out latent personas buried within. The artwork Desátame dramatizes this almost literally. The central figure appears in a crouched position, ready to spring into action. Their hair billowing behind them and one arm reaching above, they appear with utmost strength and confidence, while two flanking figures wrap their arms around—one alien-like figure at the waist and another traditionally-femme figure at the shoulder—pulling in opposite directions. This trio exudes the pageantry of Pura Mentira while showing a figure simultaneously embracing and pulling away from different influences. At its core a celebration of self-expression and existence beyond binary systems, Capron intentionally structures her works from fibers due to the materials' culturally inherited referentiality. Acknowledging fabric as a social marker of class, gender, and cultural identity, she fuses luxurious fabrics like silk with recycled, and off-cut, materials such as cotton and nylon. With this gesture, Capron levels the very materials that are designed to signal a hierarchy of wealth and exclusivity. In addition to serving as a metaphor for society’s inequities, her use of mainstream and mass-market materials functions as a subversive act to challenge the homogenizing capitalist landscape. Enlisting an intentional range of materials readily accessible to all, Capron demonstrates that the very fabrics used to reinforce hierarchies of class can instead be used to dismantle them while staging a space for difference to thrive. Speaking to the concepts explored in Pura Mentira and the telenovelas consumed in her youth, Capron states, “Within these works, we recognize ourselves, our passions, our faults, and desires… but here they are extra. This is a space to push our boundaries—I want the close-ups, the makeup, the fashion. Sexy, dangerous, femme identities. Sweaty, hairy masculinity. Intrigue, whispers, secrets. Plot twists and Spanish gasps. The end of purity—a space full of guilt and, because of it, pleasure.” Ultimately, Pura Mentira is an invitation to join its players in performative gestures, expanding our boundaries and embracing our ineffable qualities, all while deepening our sense of empathy and acceptance.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to announce Seeds, a two-person exhibition featuring the works of Los Angeles artists Fay Ray and Daniel Gibson, on view from April 8 through May 13. Joining Ray’s suspended sculptures with Gibson’s mixed-media works on paper, Seeds unites two gallery artists for their congruous approaches to the desert landscapes of Southern California. Harvesting desert imagery for alternative methods to represent the body, these artists reference the natural world to address socio-cultural experiences, unearthing a liberated state of being that exists within all. Linking weathered aluminum sheets with precious stones, wire, chain, and cast-aluminum desert objects into suspended sculptural masses, Fay Ray’s visual vocabulary explores her familial and religious roots relative to the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity. Returning to the High Desert in Southern California where she grew up, she collects a variety of materials intimately linked to her past, giving equal attention to the industrial trucking equipment and metal scraps of her family’s multi-generational agricultural trade and to the corn, cacti, agave, and seashells found naturally in the desert landscape. Representative of labor and harmony with nature, the artifacts are imbued with a human touch. Cast in aluminum, Ray joins these amulets to sheet metal with individually-formed chain links, borrowing their hand-fastened structure from the compositions of religious relics and the visual language of the occult. Shifting between specificity and mystery, Ray’s artworks embrace ambiguity as the realm of endless potential. In addition to the California desert’s relations to migration and labor, Ray also looks to the materials of the desert landscape for their symbolic power relative to femininity, fertility, and motherhood, enlisting a systematic organization of abstract form to evoke a continually materializing body. By shifting the experience of the work between visibility and invisibility, the artist embraces the primary mode of desert ecosystems. Indicating the potential for abundance in its apparent absence, the compositions are in a perpetual dance with the concept of expansion and contraction, the fundamental cycle of all living things. The suspended and wall-mounted artworks resemble an oversized body adornment, such as a necklace, earring, or keychain, implying the invisible presence of a massive being to whom they may be offered. At the same time, Ray counters the large scale and visual weight of the metallic works with spaciousness and lightness. Ray’s works are rooted in femininity, drawing out the parallel power to generate and sustain life in motherhood despite the adverse conditions women face in contemporary life. In works that constitute the building blocks for his paintings, Daniel Gibson employs references to the natural world to speak to hardships, resilience, and freedom. With a practice rooted in symbology, his works on paper serve as the conceptual foundation for all of his compositions. Often shifting back and forth between canvas and drawing, Gibson’s works in Seeds serve as artifacts of the artist’s process, catching oil paint and other marks from the studio while providing an opportunity to understand the abstract language and read the narrative works. Like Ray, Gibson establishes a lexicon of motifs that relate to his familial past and his identity as a Mexican-American. Growing up along the California border with Mexico, he witnessed the harsh realities of migration to America at an early age. In an effort to face the bleak nature of these grueling desert journeys, he turned to his imagination—often reshaping reality with fantasy. Conjuring people from his past as a means to examine the present, Gibson uses memories to create dream-like narratives that explore themes of identity and migration. Using the desert landscapes and seasides of Southern and Baja California as their fertile ground, his surrealistic scenes are populated with lush flora that often take on an anthropomorphized quality. Beyond a metaphor for migration, butterflies conjure a specific childhood memory of the artist desperately trying to understand how a person could safely make their way across the desert border with little sustenance. As a child, he imagined giant butterflies benevolently relieving these individuals from their grueling journey by carrying them safely to distant lands. In his visual practice, Gibson now uses angel’s trumpets, ocotillos, and other flowers as proxies for the people navigating the desert, presenting memories and family stories from the point of view of his earliest years anew. For the artist, his works are as much autobiographical as they are collective stories that document moments of struggle and celebration that would otherwise be lost to time. While the artists’ respective practices reach distinct formal endpoints—Ray’s subtle metallic sculptures and Gibson’s dense organic scenes—both build from the same methodology. By employing icons from the deserts of their youth, Ray and Gibson thoughtfully utilize the landscape’s flora as proxies for the people at the heart of their narratives, representing the experiences of women, migrants, and the Latinx communities of Southern California without drawing on essentialist tropes. Further, the artists seek out these symbols not only for their relationship to the desert setting, but also because they speak to their broader natural beliefs. Reverence for nature is at the heart of both Ray and Gibson’s practices. With the harmonic balance of the natural world throwing social inequities in sharp relief, the artists’ gestures pay homage to the natural world over the man-made and monumentalize the natural forces that constitute all beings. The flowers and plants of the desert in Seeds become symbolic not only of familial and biographical relationships with the landscape but also of the rich capacities of humanity, signaling our interior capacity to be in harmony with the natural world as our innermost pathway to liberation.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to announce Rabid Heart, an exhibition by Philadelphia-based artist Coady Brown. This exhibition marks the artist’s second solo show with the gallery, on view from April 8 through May 13, 2023. Coady Brown’s paintings thoughtfully orchestrate psychologically charged environments that pulse with a sense of cinematic mystery and wonder. The figures that inhabit this world are rendered with a careful awareness of the politics inherent in depicting feminine and androgynous figures, illustrating a dedication to methods of representation that shield figures from the binds of voyeurism and over-determination. The paintings presented hone the artist’s long-standing commitment to depicting wholly autonomous figures, cultivating and preserving an interior psychology impermeable to the viewer and artist alike. Rabid Heart celebrates the uninhibited passion, verve, and power these figures retain, regardless of those watching. Brown’s practice examines how groups, couples, and solitary figures navigate self-presentation in private and public life. Located across domestic interiors, nightclubs, and transitory public settings, figures are compressed into tightly framed, intimate spaces that expose the subtle complexities of interpersonal connections and relationships. Brown stages her scenes to pinpoint the ways expression is negotiated across different environments, lingering in moments when people are free to present themselves in their most natural states. In Dark Matter, one such scene located at the edge of a nightclub, a hand from the lowermost register grasps around the central figure’s arm. Illuminated by the club lighting, the composition brings a quiet embrace to our attention while the exchange remains under the private cover of darkness. Rendered in reaction, though not exclusively in opposition, to traditional Western portraiture and its tendency toward reductive depictions of women, the figures themselves have no living referent beyond an amalgamation of individuals closest to the artist. Invested in capturing the nuances of her communities’ lives and experiences, her primary interest is the manner in which women’s stories are told and the different vehicles that carry out their narratives. She shares, “It’s not that I’m making some kind of ideal. I felt compelled to make things that are true to my experiences—of what it’s like to be a woman in the world, to be looked at, to be consumed, to have my own autonomy—how is that represented? It’s a lifelong continuation of this agenda to try to capture what it feels like to exist in the world, to try to make that an image.” The artist’s sense of responsibility in depicting femininity looms over the works of Rabid Heart, as Brown foregrounds the correlation between vulnerability and femininity—or, more precisely, the disproportionate risk of harm in the absence of masculinity—throughout her painting process. Here, Brown’s compositional strategy to crop and conceal the individuals’ physical forms carries a dual signification. Borrowing techniques of geometric abstraction and op art, she shields figures by abstracting the shape of their bodies to rectilinear planes of color and pattern, deemphasizing contours of the body and allowing the figures’ chosen garments and accessories to communicate their selfhood. In connection with her figures, flower bouquets punctuate the exhibition and are symbolic of all sorts of deeply personal relationships: an expression of care, gratitude, love, grief. Brown utilizes several of these strategies for self-presentation in the painting Out of Reach, a club scene that features three figures, each presenting their femininity in different ways. Composed below the sightline of a table, the staging omits the faces of two of the figures altogether. A seated figure pares an electric blue satin blouse with dynamically patterned slacks, their polished toes peeking out of yellow block-heeled sandals. They reach across to embrace the bare thigh of a standing figure who wears bright purple boots and a short red skirt. The face of the third figure peers out from underneath the tablecloth, staring directly at the viewer, illuminated only by the light of their phone screen. A dark blue handbag that appears across a number of the paintings in Rabid Heart lies on the floor. Embroidered with expressive lashed eyes, the purse looks out at the viewer, just as the figure does. Here, Brown methodically diverts the narrative of the scene away from the visible bodies. The viewers’ eyes are directed to their clothing and accessories—the ways they have chosen to present themselves. In this way, Brown’s use of heels, jewelry, nail polish, lipstick, purses, and other objects of femininity elevates them from their connotation as unserious quotidian accessories, instead positioning them as symbols of the figures’ agency in their self-presentation. Throughout Rabid Heart, our perspective revolves around the figures’ choices and the intimacies among them, preserving the insularity of their world. Whatever powerful, sensual, or spiritual forces affecting the figures in the moments we observe are never overtly defined by the artist. The intensity of their shared experiences remains inaccessible to us, maintaining their privacy and positioning us as outsiders, but not as voyeurs. Brown shares, “These figures have their own emotional intelligence and they’re allowed to exist in total autonomy. They inhabit their own psychological spaces that we can observe, but don’t have access to. These aren’t portraits of people that exist, but I paint them until they feel real.” Beyond daily life, self-styling, and histories of portraiture and abstraction, Rabid Heart gets at authorship and disclosure: how does an individual navigate self-presentation when their visibility reveals vulnerability outside of their control? We define ourselves with our actions, accessories, and communities, but our bodies remain subject to external projections. Brown addresses this by subverting the object of the viewers’ gaze. Through attention to lighting, vibrant clothing, and high-contrast colors, the figures’ inscrutable expressions hint at an unknowable and independent selfhood, conjuring a precise instant within a specific and stylized world.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to announce Breaks and Suspensions, an exhibition by Israeli-born, New York- based artist Naama Tsabar. This exhibition marks the artist’s second solo show with the gallery, on view from February 15 through March 25, 2023. The exhibition title, Breaks and Suspensions, references colloquial terms for two of the artist’s ongoing series: Melody of Certain Damage and Gaffer. This exhibition marks the first time that these two series are exclusively shown together, making clear the conceptual and utilitarian connections shared by each body of work. Tsabar’s practice fuses elements from sculpture, music, performance and architecture. Collaborating with local communities of female identifying and gender non-conforming performers, Tsabar writes a new feminist and queer history of mastery. Her interactive works expose hidden spaces and systems, reconceive gendered narratives, and shift the passive viewing experience to one of active participation. The artist draws attention to the muted and unseen by propagating sound through space and sculptural form. Resting someplace between sculpture and instrument, form and sound, Tsabar’s work lingers on the intimate, sensual, and corporeal potentials within these transitional states. Tsabar’s Melody of Certain Damage series subverts the hypermasculine, destructive and cathartic action of smashing a guitar on stage by re-thinking the broken pieces back into a functioning object, bringing the sculptural into the realm of the aural and tactile. Beginning alone in her studio, Tsabar breaks the guitar against her floor. After impact and break, she maps the exact location of each scattered piece and then reconstructs the instrument so that it can once again emit sound. The resulting form of each work from this series operates as an artifact of the studio-based action, while allowing the new instrument to shift into the realm of sonic sculpture. Tsabar’s use of ready-made objects and the significant role of chance in Melody of Certain Damage introduces a dialogue with Dada practices of the early-twentieth century—a canonic period of art history now scrutinized for its preferential treatment toward male artists and its exclusion of their female contemporaries. Her works in this series are exhibited on low lying plinths on the gallery floor, just as one might find them scattered on a stage or in the artist’s studio. Rather than positioning the viewer solely as spectator, Tsabar opens the possibility to activate the artwork through touch. Viewers and performers can rest their bodies on the floor, beside the object, allowing their touch to elicit an emotional and sensual experience, as well as a sonic expression. In her newest works from the ongoing Gaffer series, instrument cables travel through fields made from layering numerous strips of tape, the same material used to mask and stabilize cables in performance spaces. The monochromatic field of tape holds the cables suspended in different visual compositions as they flow in and out of the rectangular frame. In these works, Tsabar continues her interest in gaffer tape as a hidden utilitarian material within a performative order—a material she first used in her works Twilight (Gaffer Wall), 2006 and Encore, 2007. This series, which both critiques and pays homage to the aesthetics of Minimalism, moves the tape from the unseen location of the stage floor to its scrutable position on the gallery wall. Tsabar specifically calls attention to the hidden labor associated with the material through the meticulous layering of the tape, creating a significant thickness and a subtle textural rhythm of lines on its surface. She further calls attention to the labor involved in their creation by naming the people who contributed to the act of “gaffering” in the credit lines of the work. These artworks refuse to be confined to a single category, borrowing from elements of painting, drawing, and sculpture. They hinge the functional and the visual; while the cable running through the work can be read as a gestural mark, and the tape itself a color field, the works never lose their potential to actively transmit sound. Within the exhibition, works from each series are not only united by their concept, at times they also become physically linked. Audio cables transmit sound from the broken guitars in Melody of Certain Damage, move through the physical plane of the Gaffer works, and ultimately connect to a live amplifier that emits sound throughout the gallery. With this gesture, Tsabar activates each artwork and the gallery itself, turning the viewer, artwork, and architecture into active collaborators. Throughout these works, Tsabar’s invocation of Dada and Minimalist processes and aesthetics is not only an act of feminist reclamation, it also highlights the influences within liberatory movements: Dada's anti-war anarchic absurdism, Minimalism's socialist use of industrial objects to create material accessibility, and both movements’ rejection of institutional spaces. Citing these approaches within her work, Tsabar’s practice goes beyond revising art history to diversify the canon. It harnesses these elements as part of a modus operandi that is feminist and a practice that positions individual viewers and local communities as direct participants.

Opening Reception Friday February 17th, 5-8pm Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present A War on Wars, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Amir H. Fallah. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from February 15 through March 25, 2023. The exhibition title, A War on Wars, suggests an active resistance to conflict, one that is centered on awareness, education, and protest. Fallah was born in Iran and lived in the country during the Iran-Iraq war. This exhibition draws from early childhood memories of wartime, combined with a consideration of contemporary global conflicts. Synthesized through painting and sculpture, the artist combines a range of imagery to invoke parables that address an ever-shifting geo-political landscape and structure of power The exhibition combines two distinct and ongoing series for the artist, Veiled Portraits and Grid Paintings, alongside a new series of life-sized figurative sculptures. The artist’s Veiled Portraits deconstruct traditional notions of identity formation, while simultaneously defying expectations of the genre of portraiture by obscuring the appearance of his subject. In these works, the absence of the sitter’s physical likeness is substituted with a wider representation of their personhood—one that is articulated through a network of symbols and imagery. The Grid Paintings employ seemingly disparate images and symbols that amalgamate personal narratives with historical and contemporary parables. The paintings serve as a diary of lessons, warnings, and ideals providing coded insight into cultural values often passed between generations. In the painting We See This Fight as Worship, for example, Fallah stages a central figure holding two ceremonial scepters—one orbed, the other bearing a head with horns—crossed against their chest, flanked by two mirrored figures kneeling with their palms pressed together. Any sign of the three figures’ gender or race is obscured by mod patterned fabrics. Drawn from mid-century design, these covers reference a period when Western nations consolidated power domestically, while engaging in tactical destabilization throughout the Global South. Ornate borders, like those of Persian manuscript paintings, disrupt the hierarchic organization of the figures, zig-zagging to a Miniature style equestrian figure engaged in battle with a dragon in the upper register and trumpeting angels in the Art Deco style characteristic of Erté in the lower register. On opposing sides of these vignettes, the bold letters of “we see this fight as worship” are sublimated into decorative floral patterning customary of Persian rugs. While angels and dragon slaying present clear-cut metaphors for good and evil, the remainder of the imagery complicates matters. The title “we see this fight as worship” quotes from one of Khomeini’s speeches during the Iranian revolution—a rebellion which sought to unseat the government formed following the 1953 coup orchestrated by the US and UK. While the revolution liberated the country from direct Western influence, it also established an authoritarian theocracy, ushering Iranian people from one oppressive external influence to another even more restrictive administration. Bringing together these loaded symbols, Fallah maps the suspect dynamics of power, cautioning us to be weary when placing faith. Fallah combines elements from both the Veiled Portraits and Grid Paintings for a new series of sculptures. Hand painted on cut aluminum, the sculptures similarly exclude signifiers of ethnicity, age, gender, and class. Here, however, the sitter stands composed in the anatomically neutral position characteristic of medical treatises and their form is flattened to a narrow plane. The ornate cultural patterns that appear elsewhere in the artist’s works—draped over sitters in the Veiled Portraits and obscuring the text in the Grids—cover the entirety of the sculpture, while the range of symbolic objects are literally cut from within the body, only discernible from the outlines they make in both the positive and negative spaces of the work. Together, these works address the way identity and culture are staged and presented to secure systems of power and oppression. A War on Wars will be presented concurrently with a solo exhibition at the Fowler Museum at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Titled The Fallacy of Borders, the exhibition features twenty-five works spanning painting, sculpture, and stained glass. This exhibition marks Fallah's first solo museum exhibition in his adoptive home city of Los Angeles, while returning the artist’s work to UCLA, where he received his Master of Fine Arts in 2005. Both the Fowler Museum and the gallery’s exhibitions also coincide with Fallah’s public project CHANT in support of human rights in Iran. The debut presentation of a large-scale neon artwork will be displayed on the gallery’s facade on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood concurrent with his solo exhibition. A radiant sun—in reference to ancient Persian traditions and a contemporary symbol of dissent—bears the face of a woman. While Persian rulers have added and removed the sun’s gender to validate their own power and authority throughout history, Fallah reclaims the symbolic female sun to foreground women’s rights, elevating the power of people rather than any one ruler. Interchangeably displaying "WOMAN. LIFE. FREEDOM" in Farsi, English, and the phonetic Farsi, CHANT operates as a beacon of light carrying the rallying cry of the ongoing liberation movement in Iran. On CHANT, Fallah shares, “First and foremost, this project is a tool for public education, joining the demand for urgent change in Iran, using the power of art to elevate the dialogue, spark press coverage, and keep it in the public eye. The sun in the center carries great symbolic weight for the future of the Iranian people, an ancient symbol representing change, hope, and positive growth. CHANT is a visual statement that will help serve as a beacon for all those united in the struggle for freedom.” The three presentations, A War on Wars, The Fallacy of Borders, and CHANT, collectively provide an expansive understanding of the artist's prolific oeuvre over the past decade, while also demonstrating new directions in public sculpture, each addressing a nuanced and emotive inquiry about identity, the immigrant experience, and the history of portraiture.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Sensory Homunculus, an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Bridget Mullen. This will be the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from January 7 through February 10, 2023. Known for paintings that combine decisive mark-making with experimentation, Mullen’s intuitive practice conjures psychedelic compositions that oscillate between abstraction and figuration. For Sensory Homunculus, the artist introduces a dialogue on the “problem” of painting, the evergreen discourse on the role of interpretation in art, inviting writer Lara Mimosa Montes as her respondent. Addressing the statement to her peer, Mullen’s dialogue serves as an invitation to consider painting’s ambivalent potential—those distances between painting and artist, observer, body, world—as the space for reflection.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Contours of the Vast, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Annie Lapin. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from November 12 through December 17. Known for paintings that merge the art-historical genres of landscape, figuration, and abstraction, Lapin compresses geological space and time within a single picture plane to explore how both our bodies and minds shape the way we perceive the world. Initiating each painting with generous pours of paint and liquid graphite, Lapin’s abstract marks become the armature around which pictorial space is built. With figures often subsumed by the surrounding environment, vignettes from history collapse against flashes of the everyday, just as our memories and experiences continually come together to define culture. Although the body dematerializes in these imaginaries, Lapin poses this porousness as a relieving liberation. “There is a comfort in overcoming the vulnerability of our boundaries,” she shares. Contours of the Vast restages the cognitive processes we use to write history and define humanity, inviting us to reflect on the stories we tell every day.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Good Grief, Bad Grief, a solo exhibition by the Houston-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Exploring a mythology that spans over twenty-five years, Hancock has created a cast of characters, a lexicon of symbols, and an evolving, non-linear narrative of epic proportion. Storytelling is at the root of the artist’s practice, drawing equally from the world of comics, film, art history, and religion. Employing his classic rough-and-tumble aesthetic, Hancock’s works often include richly textured surfaces composed through collage, drawing, painting, and found objects, such as bottle caps. Good Grief, Bad Grief builds on Hancock’s ever-expanding iconography, uniting several individual bodies of work and known characters—such as his alter ego Torpedo Boy and his classic Vegan antagonists. Developed from the artist’s celebrated Step and Screw series, these new works depict Hancock wrestling with ideas of self, the meaning of his own artwork, and prevalent systems of power and oppression in America. These works speak defiantly to many of our nation’s deepest and darkest histories, shining a light on good and evil, and the gray in between.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Senescent Stone, a new series of free-standing and wall-based ceramics by Los Angeles-based artist Charles Snowden. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Using symbolic imagery from antiquity and everyday life, Snowden’s ceramic sculptures reflect on the cycles of life and death. Invoking ancient rituals, he recasts apotropaic objects—protective forms intended to ward off threats of evil or harm—with imagery from nature. Senescence refers to the process of deterioration with age, indicating the loss of a cell’s power for division or growth. With the garden as a site for the investigation of mortality and clay as a material synonymous with the body, Senescent Stone reinterprets historical imagery as a vehicle for understanding the temporal nature of our existence. The exhibition weaves together references to domestic spaces and gardens—including architecture, the body, plants, and a variety of imagined creatures—with specific rituals. With symbols of metamorphosis, growth, deterioration, and decay throughout, the artist presents existential imagery with mystery and humor. Snowden shares, “I imagine possibilities within the relationships between the human, non-human and by extension non-living world to cultivate experiences that feel regenerative and playful, yet melancholic.”

Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles is pleased to present 10 YEARS, a special group exhibition celebrating this milestone anniversary for the gallery. To mark the anniversary, founder Shula Nazarian and co-owner Seth Curcio have selected works by more than twenty artists from the gallery’s program. The exhibition will be on view from July 9 – August 27, 2022. A day-long opening, with many of the artists in attendance, will take place on Saturday, July 9th from 2 – 6pm. Shula Nazarian says, “10 YEARS, proudly unites the artwork of each gallery artist within the context of a single exhibition. While we look back and consider the accomplishments of both the gallery and our artists over this past decade, we also look to our future with the addition of several artists that are new to the gallery, placing the next generation of artists in dialogue with those that have long been pillars to the creative development of our shared space. This inclusive presentation underscores the gallery’s belief that artists have the unique ability to help us understand the most pressing issues of our day and to illuminate new pathways for tomorrow.”