This article was originally published on September 15, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.

By Hugh Leeman
Don Scott Macdonald and Jeffrey Beauchamp's exhibition, Cloud Songs at Pamela Walsh Gallery, pairs two artists equally talented as musicians and painters, looking through distinct lenses in their exploration of the sky. Their panoramic vistas, depicted largely from imagination, create compelling portraits of clouds resulting in compositional convergence, yet their diverging creative processes and unique personalities produce altogether different emotional atmospheres. 

Don Scott Macdonald returned to painting after a music studio rehearsal accident led to what he describes as "An 80% hearing loss [that] has a big influence on my paintings." Amidst the loss of hearing and a change in life direction, the artist's creativity emerges as a light between the dark of cloud's shadow. His process evolves like an ongoing exchange between a master and apprentice in an atelier. Beginning with a small pencil sketch of his imagined landscape, he then uses a Sharpie marker to add notes that guide the drawing towards a painting by marking portions with color labels and indicating the forms he will alter. After enlarging the work, the thinning of oil paint begins a methodical painting process with some 30-40 layers of glaze, creating gradient tonal shifts at times entirely eliminating edges, resulting in an atmospheric quality he compares to his music.

Jeffrey Beauchamp's process is a playful experiment where accident can become an artwork's joyful essence. He will paint with such a broad spectrum of colors on his palette that, during the artist talks at the exhibition, he laughs about the later challenge in its required cleaning. In using so many colors, he will hold multiple brushes between the fingers in his non-dominant hand, a torso twist between palette and painting seemingly capable of causing smears of pigment to erupt like jazz music riffing off of rolling hills. The artist's excited ad-libbing counters deliberate compositional constructions of place and color that the painter speaks of as starting with muted tones to soften the vibrant, saturated color he will add as the artwork evolves. 

Birds and human figures are immersed within Beauchamp's improvisational brushwork; its spontaneity liberating his technical acumen from the academy's unwritten rulebook while hillsides emerge from psychedelic ribbons coiling around clouds. Contrasting such light-hearted energy, Macdonald's landscapes appear as if Mark Rothko inspired the light and clouds of the sky to perform for the admiration of the color field painter's eyes. Although Macdonald's artworks in Cloud Songs don't depict the birds or bodies of Beauchamp's paintings, trees, stones, and even a rushing river run through his layered glaze's compositions. Nature's forms are solid yet blurred, recalling Gerhard Richter's brushwork and a sense that we are not in a physical place so much as a passing state of the painter's mind. 

Macdonald's paintings feel like sublime memories capable of transmitting painting's ability to speak where photos falter. In Westbound, golden yellow transitions into its opposite, first passing through orange and reds, finally resting in purple above a body of water. A blurred central tree overlooks the land, sitting beneath a cloud form that graduates through tones of purple so soft they heighten the beauty of the canvas's complementary colors, while adding to an air of mystery that Macdonald has mastered through spaces that exist at the edge of earth's archive. 

At times, Macdonald creates sky-scapes that he speaks of as being inspired by the attributes of someone he knows, one honoring the brilliance of a girlfriend who died too young, another a dear friend who is never far. In each, the conditions are set by condensed floating masses of water filtering the color of light reaching our eyes. The composite of such ethereal elements allows us to leave meaning behind amidst the emotional features found in Unfurling, where a trail cuts through the brush, mirroring the open space between the vapor-condensed, ephemeral forms above. Their separation paves the way for the sky to remind us that the passage of time is like vision itself, shifting with the heavens' tones.

Beauchamp's sense of humor and beauty merge through titles and a playground of candy colored abstract forms, lightheartedly chuckling with the governors of celestial rhythm. Pavarotti Sings the ABC Song in His Sleep moves between stunning and silly, showing us the joy in painting multi-lined land masses that look as if Wayne Thiebaud's cakes became linear, organized streaks of rainbow icing awaiting the nourishment of a psychotropic rain sure to emerge from forms at the intersection of musical notes and ancient Mesoamerican speech/song scrolls. Somewhere deep in the distance, a yellow-green glow highlights the artist's humor, who laughingly describes the sound of his paintings as "Sesame Street all the way." Later, adding that Bach is a big inspiration because the composer "is sort of the Jim Henson of classical music."

In Rosemary Unleashed the Nerf Jihad, an expressionistic gestural landscape evokes elements of a Joan Mitchell masterwork, spreading across an expanse at once convincing and absurd. Within the rainbow gestured brushwork, women sleep in the grass. In the distance, someone walks a puffball of a dog in a red raincoat, backdropped by a mysterious structure and a wisp of land, all of which seems to suggest the sleeping women here, like Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, are amidst dreams beneath a textured sky that, should the light change, could become a landscape of its own. Skillfully, Beauchamp allows us, like Lewis Carroll, to explore fantasy and relinquish control, so that the profundity of creativity can explore nature and the construction of reality.

Through both painters' uniquely differing landscapes, Cloud Songs performs in magical notes, highlighting beautiful terrain easily overlooked under the 21st century's deluge. From Beauchamp's Dr. Seussian landscapes to Macdonald's color field cloud forms hovering at the periphery of mirage, the exhibition's visual spectrum pushes viewers into the ether of imagination, celebrating the artists' diversity of creativity. Macdonald's paintings harmonize a language of memory, while Beauchamp's works smile as they sing in the accent of dreams, both playing beautiful songs recorded through the musical score of oil on canvas. Don Scott Macdonald and Jeffrey Beauchamp's panoramas evolve at the edge of contrasting trails, allowing us to explore internal space manifest as clouds of thought and land masses of moments just beyond the present. 
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Reference:

“‘Cloud Songs’ Artist Talk With Don Scott Macdonald and Jeffrey Beauchamp.” Pamela Walsh Gallery, www.pamelawalshgallery.com/video/17.

This article was originally published on September 8, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.
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​By: Hugh Leeman

Caleb Hahne Quintana's exhibition A Boy that Don't Bleed, at Anat Ebgi, invites viewers on an uncanny coming-of-age odyssey through male vulnerability. The exhibition unfolds as a cinematic narrative connecting the dynamic complexities of the internal landscape with "nature's wrath." The exhibition's title and elements of inspiration are taken from the artist's poem, Manos de Piedra (Hands of Stone)[1], which begins:

A body made of stone
Cracked by natures wrath
Man has his options 
A fork in the path 


Soul of two birds 
Salt of two seas
Blades of cut grass
A boy that don't bleed…

The odyssey's protagonist, a blond-haired boy often bathed in yellow ochre light, strikes a deeply introspective mood evoking a Magical Realist revival in dramatically lit spaces. Counterparted at times by a horse amidst enchanted scenes imbued with inner struggle, the poetry of Quintana's paintings suggests the self-actualization of Joseph Campbell's transformative hero's journey.

Etheral realms with glowing tones range a spectrum stretching from two-tiered waterfalls to an enchanted forest, and sleep to struggle, luring viewers into an emotional space documented by The Record Keeper, a diary-sized painting where the artist stands contemplatively in his studio beside an empty easel backdropped by Between Flesh and Stone, another work in the show. Between Flesh and Stone's tenebrism parallels the contrast between the tender nature of tissue and unforgiving substrate of the rocky landscape upon which A Boy that Don't Bleed's protagonist stands, his head hidden by a sapphire blue towel, obscuring the identity he questions. 

Left to our imagination of an open water swim at a half-lit water hole, though never shown, speaks of youth's summer. The swim shorts and towel in blue are a recurring motif that hints at deeper significance, drawing on art history's precious use of the once-rare color. As the boy dries his body, he is light and dark, dry and wet, a contrast of soft tissue and hard rock, themes of a world between the nebulous nature of identity and a solid sense of self, all underscored by the implied changing of clothes, yet to come. 

Quintana's paintings are to witness the solitary moments of a boy becoming a man, internally conflicted, toes atop an edge he doesn't understand, isolated on the picture plane, navigating an emotional terrain, dangerously unfamiliar. In Specter (Threshold), a wild white horse, nearly neon in its contrast against the penumbras of a forest's dark depths, splashes through a river of black with the night sky's reflection in the recurring blue disturbing the still of water with untamed movement. Horses form a part of the artist's family history and a recurring symbol in his visual storytelling, the artist says, "My great-great-grandfather used to steal horses with Pancho Villa for the Mexican Revolution." [2] The boy's spirit manifests in the ancestral story and the colt, a horse born in the wild that is eventually driven from the herd to form one of its own. As the title implies, we witness a spectral form crossing a threshold. Seen here, as the colt crossing a river of black and blue. 

The horse as counterpart is best seen in A Flicker in the Ancient Rhythm. Standing in awe, hands at his side, palms turned out, the protagonist's posture disquieted by his arrival at the cusp of an ongoing half-lit trail. A two-tiered waterfall's crashing mist, combined with the passing of a celestial body's supernatural light, has created a rainbow, suggesting a kaleidoscopic shift in perception. Once again dressed in blue, the boy has taken steps ahead of his horse to marvel at the cascading water central to the more than 6-foot-tall painting. As we admire the brilliance of the painter's poetry, we can momentarily become the boy, standing between luminance and the water hole with hints of the moon reflecting across its ripples, its dark body suggesting the profundities of the unknown and all that lies beyond what light allows us to see. 

Although the artist plumbs the darkness, he is brilliant for what he holds us with under the bright yellow ochre light. In The Soul Is the Body's Witness, Quintana shows us from above the barefoot boy in blue jeans and a white t-shirt, considering the self through a downward gaze cast across his elongated shadow. The shadow's heart glows amidst its center, creating a sense of spiritual engagement with the alter ego. The scene is calm, blending realism with inquiry under blazing light, and we are witnesses to his confrontation with the intangibility of the internal. The curious yellow-orange light lends the painting a mythic feel, perhaps inspired by the forest fires of the artist's native Colorado, which have appeared in previous paintings, and he speaks of plastering the sky in orangish tints.[3]

The relative calm confrontation of The Soul Is the Body's Witness erupts like the volcano; Quintana paints in Study of Vesuvius Erupting (Alessandro d'Anna) as the boy is hit by the storm of shadow and self in The Boy Fights Himself. Backdropped by a tree bent to its trunk's extreme nature mirrors the corporeal struggle between the boy who won't bleed and the elements within. The inevitable inner conflict has turned to violence, recalling the ancient Judeo-Christian conflict of Jacob wrestling the angel, visually synthesizing humans' ongoing conflict between shadow and self. Artists from Rembrandt to Chagall and Delacroix to Gauguin have painted the story inspired by the book of Genesis, which presents the event as "And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day." [4]

The seeming opposites of conflict and internal exploration interestingly parallel Quintana's personal life, an amateur boxer who trains in jiu-jitsu, a submission-based wrestling. The artist notes, "I've always been involved in these, really, I guess, violent or intense expressions. But then my work is the opposite of that. I really try to harness the power and complexities of these sensitivities. Human beings are more than just one instrument." [2]

The confrontation in The Boy Fights Himself is clearly internal as identical figures of the boy, both in blue shorts, illustrate the shadow and the self in a heightened state of violence, with feet on the ground, the boy throws his alter-ego in a belly-to-back suplex of ancient Grecian wrestling. In the book of Genesis, Jacob violently engages the angel, pleading for a blessing. Wrestling through the night, Jacob ultimately receives his blessing, yet is injured in the process. In Quintana's painting, we are eye-level witnesses to the impending corporeal crash landing that shakes the deepest sense of one's identity. 

The picture, freed of cultural symbolism, elevates the scene to the universality of psychological allegory. Through suspending the shadow in flight, illuminated under a golden light, despite the violence, perhaps, the painting suggests, this conflict is the path towards transcendence. Echoing such potential, Quintana's poem, from which the exhibition's title is taken [1], concludes:

You asked me how I got there 
But you created the ache 
What good is your heart
If it does not break

The conflict under golden light returns to a dimly lit space of vulnerability in Hour Without Shadow. The boy in blue shorts rests on a couch. The tenebrism of light graces his near-nude body backdropped by a darkness almost black, contrasted by the suggestion of a light left on in the distance. Ring on his finger, the boy's body, no longer clutched in the violence of wrestling's flight, is caught in a dream, enveloped in dark and light. The artist has said of his practice, "When it comes to making the place I want it to seem like somewhere but also nowhere." [3] The drama of light enhances the ambiguity of place, and Quintana's cropping of the figure places us close enough to hear his inhales, heightening the psychological weight of his solitary stillness in color fields that create a sense of spiritual suspension. 
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Amidst the grand themes of inner struggle and the path through the darkness of self found in the exhibition's large-scale paintings, it is the small pieces in the show, like Let's Talk (After Friedrich) and Over The Hills, that pull the narrative together. The cinematic beauty of such small pieces acts as a sequence of short shots as if a montage, condensing time, thematically constructing connections. The boy, in an exploration of self, appears awakened by the thought that it was all more than just a dream. He is the protagonist of a hero's journey, the paintings akin to what Joseph Campbell called the artifacts of the journey, documenting the artist's heeding the call to adventure, encountering conflict and confronting the ordeal to be resurrected after passing through the dark, back from across a threshold through which Quintana like all great storytellers emotionally engages as he skillfully keeps us wanting more while subconsciously reminding us of ourselves.  

Citations:
1. Anat Ebgi Gallery Inc. “Caleb Hahne Quintana: A Boy That Don’t Bleed - ANAT EBGI GALLERY.” ANAT EBGI GALLERY, 15 Aug. 2025, anatebgi.com/exhibitions/caleb-hahne-quintana-a-boy-that-dont-bleed.
2.Editor--Evan. Juxtapoz Magazine - Caleb Hahne Quintana: A Permission of Otherness. www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/caleb-hahne-quintana-a-permission-of-otherness.
3.Newchild Gallery. "Newchild Voices | in Conversation With Caleb Hahne Quintana." YouTube, 30 Apr. 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=R32SYERUn8o.
4. "Genesis 32:24-32 (KJV)." Bible Gateway, www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2032%3A24-32&version=KJV.

This article was originally published on August 29, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.

By: Hugh Leeman

Pamela Carroll's exhibition, The Beauty Inherent, at the Bakersfield Museum of Art presents 45 hyperrealistic still-life paintings depicting brightly lit produce, plants, and seashells, staged in elegant minimalism with complementary tonal shift backgrounds. Beneath her thin-layered glazes, history's symbolism hints at a contemporary commentary connected to the 17th-century Dutch and Spanish masters who inspire her art. 
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Although the paintings transmit the academic acumen of an atelier education, Carroll is a self-taught artist. She began making art as a child, and in adulthood, she was taken by photorealism, painting fruits and vegetables in the 1970s before taking a 16-year break from her art practice to raise a family. The long-running thread through her career of still life realism stretches towards the 1950s as she notes, "From a young age I really liked copying things and making them look real." [1]

Still-life painting remains synonymous with the 17th-century Netherlands for its hyperrealism and coded cultural commentary amidst phenomenal social change. Yet, Carroll's works are far more compositionally influenced by the contemporaneously created bodegónes. The term "bodegón" comes from the Spanish word "bodega," which refers to a storage room often used for storing food goods.[2] Unlike the more lavish 17th-century Dutch still life, which featured dynamically stacked objects to add depth, bodegones were typically minimalist in their composition, with objects isolated in shallower space, often depicting uncooked food stored in such a room. 

Bodegones, like Dutch still life, often appear as a celebration of objects, the former frequently more aesthetically austere than the latter, which testify to the rapidly expanding 17th-century Dutch economy, globalization, and their brief domination of the colonial sphere. Both, though, possess the potential to tell stories through their often inanimate objects that expand our understanding of social issues and, to varying extents, warn of excess.[3] In Carroll's work, at times a vegetable is just a vegetable, undeniably celebrating the beauty in daily life; yet, in others, a complex syntax of symbolism speaks to societal changes similar to those experienced by her 17th-century predecessors. The origins of which date back to her early fascination with still life, as the artist says, "When I started painting still life, I thought it would be fun to weave a story around the objects."[1]

For Carroll, like her precursors in the 17th century, fruit on a table may well be simply fruit, though through her careful curation of objects, an encoded allegory emerges. Such a story of societal change, woven around objects, is best illustrated through Succulents with Basket. The succulent, well-known for its ability to survive in water-scarce areas, acts as a symbol of adaptive resilience. The basket, long used as a symbol of harvest, contains multiple succulents that rest atop a raw wooden table, beside a wrinkled linen cloth hanging off the edge of the table, its squared fold pattern indicating attempts at imposing order. Light from above heightens the soft organic tone of the table and the basket's wood.

In 17th-century Netherlandish still life, objects like lemon peels and tablecloths frequently hung precariously off the edge of tables, underscoring the inherent uncertainty of the future while alluding to the dangers of excess. In Carroll's Succulents with Basket, the hint at modernity is in the mass-produced plastic pot, suggesting the succulent it holds is to be transplanted, yet for now it sits so close to the edge, its freshly watered soil has released a small puddle dripping over the edge.

The painting's objects and precarious placement paint a portrait of the artist's native California, specifically where she lives in Carmel. Carroll has said of her paintings' realism, "I want the viewer to feel like they have a connection to my work."[4] Such a connection is deeply felt in her hometown, where water scarcity poses such a significant challenge that it has led to building moratoriums.[5] While the artwork was painted in 2021, four years before the museum exhibition in Bakersfield, the visual metaphor of water scarcity easily extends to the historically rich agricultural area that makes significant contributions to America's domestic food production. It has and is currently experiencing such water insecurity that fields have gone fallow, and barren land is being covered with solar power.[6] Through the warp and weft, the basket of historical abundance weaves a modern warning that the artist made four years before, around an ancient idea: what we reap is ultimately sown.

While Pamela Carroll's storytelling through subtle symbolism is present in several works, her technical prowess is never absent. Making her paintings all the more impressive in a technologically dependent modern world is her process. Reached by telephone at his home in Monterrey, Post-modern artist David Ligare, who exhibits with Carroll at Winfield Gallery in Carmel, noted of Carroll's art, "Pamela is a wonderful artist, in a very interesting way. First of all, those still lifes are all done by eye, using no camera. She is able to look at a piece of fruit or shell and then analyze it and recreate it on the surface of the painting. It is an important metaphor to analyze something, act on it, and recreate it." This process, like the symbolism within her still-life realism, distances her from contemporary still-life painters' use of photos for reference and further connects her to the 17th-century masters who laid the foundation that she builds upon. Ligare adds, "She is a camera, she has an incredible eye to see what is on the surface, seeing what is there, seeing the light and what is coming from the surrounding area."

In Lemons in Spongeware Bowl, the artist further connects symbolism from past centuries' still-life masters to contemporary challenges through subtle tones of allegorical prose and phenomenal realism. An idealized prime of the life cycle is transmitted via pink citrus flower buds and lemons at all phases of growth from unripe lime green to plump lemon yellow. An abundance of fruit overflows the Spongeware bowl, and some have rolled across the table. Such bowls gained popularity in 19th-century Scotland and were subsequently exported to America via England. Notably, they often emulate luxury-priced blue and white Chinese porcelain and its later Dutch Delftware counterpart.[7]
However, Spongeware is the most modest of imitators as it is neither porcelain nor glazed in cobalt blue; it is simple, earthenware clay painted with blue splotches using a sea sponge. It served as a utilitarian object in the common person's kitchen, underscoring the beauty the artist indicates is inherent in everyday life. Its presence here conveys humble restraint, contrasting the desires of overflowing excess. The gorgeous citrus's surplus seemingly whispers of an external beauty contrasted by the sour insides of excess.

In allegory's absence, there is a spiritual presence transmitted through Carroll's hours of looking, observing, and rendering an object. Such a presence shines off the skins in Heirloom Tomatoes; the greatest element of the image is its imperfection. The fruit's asymmetrical form, unmodified by modern agriculture's mass production, and marbled flesh with the green curling calyx recount what is often lost in an era of Photoshop and filters. In the absence of a camera in Carroll's process, we can reconnect with the painter's profound role throughout centuries of art history when documenting was more than the push of a button.

Beyond produce, Carroll's talent as a realist painter shines in glistening light reflecting off the edge of seashells. A collection of conch shells and bivalves decorates a linen-covered table in Sea Shells. The wrinkled linen beneath the collection of shells bears square fold lines suggesting humans' desire to impart order and structure amidst the wrinkled chaos of daily life. The shells' beautiful luster makes it all too easy to forget they were once a living thing's home, reminding us of loss.

While Spanish and Dutch Still Life painters depicted such shells to address a broad spectrum of their contemporary concerns, a common theme was the fleeting nature of worldly possessions, as seen here one can't help but return to Carrolls native California and her town's Carmel Bay, where significant ocean acidification, makes it difficult for sea creatures to produce shells effecting their ocean ecosystem.[8] Carroll's careful rendering of the shell collection as one pokes past the table's edge, coupled with current circumstances, imbues the beauty of the shells with a powerful, foreboding tone in our era of excess.  

Still Life with Shell, Books, and Tea Chest collects elements of symbolism through the objects, setting them on a worn-down bedside table, whose seams widen like those of the dented tea chest; one can imagine the table wobbling under the weight of the objects. Its well-worn state forms a visual connection with the aging edges of the fraying book covers' yellowed pages. One book's title, Treasures From the Deep, infers a deep-sea of memories, a protruding bookmark denoting the passage of progress toward the end of a story, reminding us that objects like life itself give way to time. The seashells take the well-worn metaphor one step further as two of the three bear the mark of predatory holes, their body gone, the third shell cracked in half, each telling us, amidst the shiny veneer, what once was is no more. 

David Ligare went on to share with me that "Though she [Pamela Carroll] is not looking at Cézanne, she is making something that is made of Cézanne's thinking, where he said he would like to paint the world in an apple, what he meant is that he paints the apple and the atmosphere that the object is in and this is what Pam does, with the reflections, the wonderful points of light and the lightened areas around these points that make them so round and so real." Clearly, at times, an apple is just an apple; yet, at others, the whole world can be found in the light that reflects off the fruit's skin, allowing us to see the world in novel ways as it is reflected back at us through art. 

Amidst Carroll's pursuit that started in childhood to copy things and "make them look real," she describes her love for still life as a place where one can find what she calls "part illusion, part reality."[9] She has clearly created an incredible visual illusion, but the reality they express is more complex. Amidst the grammar of art history, Pamela Carroll's The Beauty Inherent constructs sentences that speak of the present through a language of the past bearing echoes of history's tendency to, if not repeat, then rhyme. Patiently, in immaculate depictions, they display the beauty of a simple berry and the profundity of observing. Via a ciphered syntax, Carroll's more complex compositions remind us, with optimism, that if we heed the warnings found in the still life of 17th-century empires, cautioning against excess, our resilience, like that of the succulent, can carry us through.

Citations:
1.Art, Southwest. "Portfolio | Keeping It Real." Southwest Art Magazine, 20 Oct. 2015, www.southwestart.com/articles-interviews/feature-articles/portfolio-keeping-it-real.
2.Bodega, N. Meanings, Etymology and More | Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com/dictionary/bodega_n?tl=true.
3.“Bodegones.” Obo, www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199920105/obo-9780199920105-0094.xml.
4.Carmel Art Association. “Solo Show, ‘FRESH PRODUCE’ Featuring Pamela Carroll | Carmel Art Association.” YouTube, 18 Nov. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZpvjgJCl20.
5.“Fact Sheet | Mpwsp.” Mpwsp, www.watersupplyproject.org/fact-sheet.
6.Vollmer, Madi. “KERO 23 ABC News Bakersfield.” KERO 23 ABC News Bakersfield, 20 May 2025, www.turnto23.com/news/in-your-neighborhood/bakersfield/as-water-dries-up-solar-moves-in-across-the-central-valley.
7. Diagnostic Artifacts in Maryland. apps.jefpat.maryland.gov/diagnostic/Post-Colonial%20Ceramics/SpongedWares/index-spongedwares.htm.
8.“Monterey’s Not-So-Hidden Secret for Addressing Ocean Acidification: Marine Protected Areas.” Center for Ocean Solutions, 28 Oct. 2015, oceansolutions.stanford.edu/news/montereys-not-so-hidden-secret-addressing-ocean-acidification-marine-protected-areas.
9.Principle Gallery. “Pamela Carroll - Principle Gallery.” Principle Gallery, 17 July 2025, www.principlegallery.com/alexandria-artist/pamela-carroll.

This article was originally published on August 25, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.

By: Hugh Leeman
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Abi Joy Samuel and Zachary Oldenkamp's exhibition Dialogues at Ryan Graff Contemporary brings together the intimate embrace rendered in Oldenkamp's graphite and charcoal works on paper, seemingly whispered into existence like words in half lit rooms, glancing across lovers' chests, with Samuel's minimal figurative paintings, whose aggressive brushstrokes transmit a visceral vitality imbued with inner turmoil. Samuel and Oldenkamp's creative conversation cast the viewer into an incongruous ocean where waves and troughs come together, forming an emotional texture of palpable vulnerability. 

Abi Joy Samuel, from England, describes herself as an expressionistic figurative artist. Based in London, she often depicts her own body in vulnerable positions, transmitting a tension between tender human form and aggressive mark making bordering on violent, evoking a Jungian attempt to integrate the shadow into the self. She notes that, "there is something flowing through me and we are essentially vessels and I think human beings we have a responsibility to try and access that because it does rear its head in ugly ways otherwise."[1]

Samuel's intensity summons Tracey Emin's raw physicality through energetic brushwork and a scrawling calligraphic angst, eliciting Cy Twombly. Her minimal high contrast palette gives as much voice to negative space as to figures constructed in gestural strokes of reds with bits of black and white. Despite artworks with such potential for pathos and channeled anger, she speaks with youthful wonder at the beauty of the art-making process, saying it is "kind of life changing because you can literally take the world around you and see it on your paper, I just think that's brilliant."[2]

Zachary Oldenkamp, a San Francisco-based American, uses a soft diffusion of light and curving human forms to guide one's eyes into the unknown, combining ambiguity with sharp realism to depict scenes steeped in oxytocin. Tightly cropped compositions situate the viewer within moments of passion, often focusing on feet emerging from sheets. Individuals and partners remain anonymous, yet a biography of lovers is outlined through forms realistically rounded in the toned poetry of flesh's intimacy.

Oldenkamp's charcoal backgrounds create a dramatic chiaroscuro effect that evolves into the folds of white sheets or the inverse, in which detailed body parts in light emerge from within charcoal-rich linens, recalling the technical impact of Georges Seurat's Boy with a Charcoal Hat. Oldenkamp's modeling develops a meditative mood that mostly resists the voyeuristic gaze, as we are only allowed to see bodies in positions that often leave the act of coitus cropped off the edge of the artwork or concealed beneath sheets and shoulders. Such effects invite us to something more intimate than sex, the human potential for psychological connection. 
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The confluence of Oldenkamp's tender intimacy and Samuel's unsettling intensity comes together most convincingly in their collaboration, Untitled. In the charcoal and graphite work on paper, just 14" x 17", all the pain of a spurned lover wells up. The viewer is situated just past the foot of the bed, looking down at entangled legs beneath sheets and the embrace of lovers whose faces we finally see, delicately rendered yet deliberately destroyed as anger that seethes of betrayal has scratched them out. The man's face exists yet only under the graffiti of scratches; it's the top half of the woman's face, though, that has gotten the worst of it, as the flames of pain burned away echoes of a bygone affection, the ashen edges of anger crawled across her forehead, nose, and hair. What once was, no longer is, yet the tattered memory remains, suggesting human nature's dynamically entangled bedfellows, attachment and abandonment.

Samuel's titles and imagery extract themselves from a dark pathos of poetry and the vulnerability of diary. In Be You but Not Too Much, a gestural oil sketch shows us what appears to be love's embrace, the picture plane developed through negative space, a face and a mouth pulled towards an ear, perhaps murmuring the words of the artwork's title into one's conscience, telling of the tension between rejection and acceptance. Such tension is amplified in the oil on paper work Weight Beneath as two forms suggesting a sexual act are rendered in red and black. A form like a hand from the figure on its back pushes at the suggestion of a face above. Is it rough love, internal angst, or is the human form just a weight beneath aggression, the psyche, or that of the world? Like much great art, the figure's abstraction allows us a place to water the fertile fields of imagination's fear and fantasy. 

The profundity of Samuel's work is her ability to synthesize insecurity and channel it into creation. In Overcome, breasts framed by bent legs rendered several times, suggest movement, as a hand nears the face, almost in anguish. Yet, we won't know as much from the identifiable forms as from the aggressive brushstrokes in black that eliminate the face and turn into the edge of what appears to be a bathtub. Despite the absence of all facial features, the artist has created a compelling self-portrait. 
Oldenkamp's titles and imagery speak romantically of embodied connection, as in Expanse I, the embrace conveys less a sense of the act of coitus and more one of lovers whispering to one another, untethered to daily life's constraints. Yet, in Expanse II, the work leaves behind suggestion, whispers, and romantic embrace, trading it for a direct depiction of two people engaged in sex, though far from obscene, the work lends itself to voyeurism as we are left no doubt about what is taking place. The artist maintains elements of privacy and anonymity while heightening emotional tone as the heads and faces are cropped or covered by a lover's back, and the dramatically shadowed setting ranges from dark charcoal black to a near pure white pillow pushed aside amidst the physicality of the moment. 

The corporeal landscape of connection found in Expanse I and Expanse II expands in Vacuum, where a clothed woman lies face down on a bed, her arms wrapped around herself, right hand resting on the left side of her abdomen. The sheets' folds and pleats pull us towards her face, largely obscured under the weight of its compression into the soft of the bed. Is she in physical pain, longing for a lover, experiencing exhaustion, or the anguish of isolation? The ambiguity of emotion, the abstraction of form, and the contrast of light push Vacuum towards the height of Oldenkamp's oeuvre. Clearly, in all of his artworks, he has incredible technical acumen, yet here he offers something more, a place for the 21st century to ponder the unedited elements of itself. 

Abi Joy Samuel and Zachary Oldenkamp's exhibition Dialogues's incongruous ocean of emotion spans the technical spectrum from Oldenkamp's western academic traditions in technique rendering the modern nude enveloped in contemporary psychology's search for connection in a deeply disconnected world to Samuel's break from traditions to deliver unsettling emotions evoking existentialism's wrestle with isolation and anxiety birthed on the dreaded bed of uncertainty. The artists offer the viewer two unique lenses through which to see the self. Oldenkamp's lens of Sfumato-like transitions is a contemplative examination of intimacy, while for Samuel, fractured forms and smeared pigment suggest the morphing of emotion and internal instability. 

In a world where everything but genuine psychological intimacy is more accessible than ever, alienation, despair, and the search for connection persist like a wound that won't heal. Oldenkamp and Samuel's Dialogues plays such chords of humans' animalistic nature floating upon that which remains amidst society's ocean of change, corporeal vulnerability's intimate symphony with interdependence, through their art, we are reminded of human song amidst the societal noise. 

Citations:
1. Incubus Update. “Brandon Boyd With Abi Joy Samuel on Paintguide’s Instagram Live. 2/23/21.” YouTube, 23 Feb. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=crPXqfqCUYs.
2. NeoLucida. “NeoLucida Artist Profile: Abi Joy Samuel.” YouTube, 29 Jan. 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2wN1SOycMs.

This article was originally published on August 8, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.
By Hugh Leeman

David Antonio Cruz's show, stay, take your time, my love, at ICA SF contrasts layered black and white drawings with the saturated camp of colorful group portraits displaying contorted bodies stacked on Chesterfield Sofas that destabilize the traditional gaze through a top-down perspective. Elements of art history and the academy's technical acumen blend with experimentation and the affection of queer kinship to challenge perceptions and celebrate the dynamic nature of identity while evolving the genre.
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Each oil painting is an exploration of technique, leaving traces of the process behind. The backside of a paintbrush scratches through a layer of wet paint to make pinstripes, revealing a wash of rainbow colors beneath a Prussian blue so deep it borders on the spectrum of black. An alizarin crimson underpainting is left alone without the typical cover of skin tones, seizing our attention with its near neon glow, becoming a part of the final product, alongside vulnerable gazes transmitting fleshy intimacy. Optically blended layers vibrate beneath the surface as the greens of Renaissance-era underpainting skillfully distinguish pinks and reds in the subjects' skin. The artist has said of color in his paintings, "That's why my work is so loud now. Some of the works are so seductive and bright and luscious and loud. I'm speaking out against the pain and trauma of silence that so many people of my community experience." [1]

Amidst such colors, it's almost too easy to overlook the artists' backgrounds that evoke elements of what cultural theorist Rina Arya calls Francis Bacon's space-frames, geometric cage-like structures within which Bacon often confined his figures, suggesting isolation.[2] For Antonio Cruz, elements of Bacon's so-called space-frames, slightly simplified, are set behind his figures, suggesting steps of liberation. The artist also paints visual parallels to Bacon's semi-circular compositions of gradation color fields to create abstract structures upon which the figures rest as if on a pedestal or small stage. Similar curving fields of color form the backdrop to the theatrical scenes. For Antonio Cruz, the further these Bacon-esque curving color fields are from the viewer, the less gradation of color, giving depth to scenes that are otherwise tightly focused on chosen family, a prominent theme in Antonio Cruz's LGBTQ+ community. 

The artist's fabrics say as much as the figures, whose clothing goes from nylon and shiny polyester to printed cotton button-ups, all of which fall into velvet and satin sofas, displaying the artist's virtuous handling of patterns and stripes that offer a masterclass in fabric painting. The bodies become theatrically compressed into the picture, supported by Chesterfield Sofas, a symbol of status and social order since the late 18th century, taken from their aristocratic past to be reclaimed for a modern queer aesthetic connected to Susan Sontag's camp. Sontag in 1964 wrote, "the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques." [3]

Antonio Cruz's oeuvre merges the small urban cliques associated with the camp aesthetic and the aristocracy of the Chesterfield Sofa, transforming it into a safe space of intimacy through his realistic renderings of the chosen family. Researcher Seohyun Kim writes, "A chosen family is a group of individuals who deliberately choose one another to play significant roles in each other's lives…chosen families in the LGBTQ+ population are considered more emotionally and psychologically supportive than biological families".[4] The artist began painting around the concept of chosen family during the pandemic.[5] Through these group portraits of chosen families, the artist subverts social and artistic expectations of past centuries.

Curator and art historian Dr. Susanna V. Temkin astutely connected Antonio Cruz's paintings in his 2021 show Icutfromtehmiddletogetabetterslice to regentessenstuk, 17th-century Dutch group portraits depicting the regents of elite social clubs.[6] While the parallels can be seen throughout stay, take your time, my love, and much of his work of the last several years, the grandest example at the ICA SF is the painting canyoustaywithmetonight_causeyouarehere,youarehere,andweareherewithyou, from the same 2021 show which Temkin wrote about. The connections are seen in the realistic flesh and fabrics of the portraits, whose performative groups offer themselves to the paintings' posterity.

Conceptually, though, Antonio Cruz's paintings are antithetical to the colonial hierarchy financially connected to the Dutch Golden Age's regentessenstuk, conveying status that upheld highly structured societal norms of the wealthy guilds in a devoutly Christian society that coded its class largely in black and white cloth. In stay, take your time, my love the artists relies on hyper real saturated colors which vibrate with contrast and camp visualizing the world that NYU Professor and Author Jose Esteban Muñoz wrote of in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, "The queer utopian project addressed here turns to the fringe of political and cultural production to offset the tyranny of the homonormative. It is drawn to tastes, ideologies, and aesthetics that can only seem odd, strange, or indeed queer next to the muted striving of the practical and normalcy desiring homosexual."[7

The aesthetic to which Muñoz refers and that of Antonio Cruz is in conversation through the group portrait genre, goes beyond color and symbol for the artist and into a process that involves getting to know his subjects through dinner parties, sharing elements of art history, and talking fashion before the performative posing for his paintings begins. The pose forms a unique part of Antonio Cruz's contribution to group portraiture, "The way you pose for me isn't just sitting, there's this sense of dripping, of leaning; we're performing and being extra, and for me that's the radical part, that's the joy of being non-conforming and not falling into rules."[8] Significantly, artists like Antonio Cruz contribute to a growing list of contemporary artists whose sitters' race and gender challenge past conceptions of portraiture. "I'm interested in interjecting the portraiture canon with Brown and Black bodies, as well as gender fluid and queer bodies, to complicate hetero-normative perceptions of racial and queer identity and highlight intersectional identities not often discussed or represented in history and society."[9]

Similar to previous shows, Antonio Cruz not only depicts safe spaces that challenge structures of the past but constructs them within the exhibition space, offering sofas on which visitors can sit under dozens of crystal chandeliers, taking their time with paintings hung on walls covered in digitally designed patterned wallpaper, embedding elements of San Francisco within the exhibition. In the wallpaper's muted gray tones, the parrots of Telegraph Hill and the palm trees of Dolores Park speak in metaphor of migration, while alluding to the artist's Puerto Rican ancestry. Of his installation for a previous show at the ICA Philadelphia in 2023, the artist said, "The whole space is mapping out a sanctuary, a place of meditation and quietness. I wanted a place where people could walk and just enjoy." 

Further places of quiet and meditation amidst stay, take your time, my love's proudly ostentatious paintings are found in subdued black and white works on paper, echoing the feel of one's gaze looking up through trees to see stippling dots of negative space between leaves. The spaces between leaves manifest in hundreds of pieces cut from a large sheet of paper layered over a second sheet stained black and gray with white chalk drawings of hands and arms emerging from tree limbs. The black and white drawings, a distinct deviation from the light and color in the oil paintings, are described by the artist as shadow moments that take place in the dark.[10]

The drawings' shadow moments hang between the group portraits at ICA SF allowing the viewer to pause between paintings to consider the distinction of what takes place in the dark and the celebratory color of the chosen family paintings, calling to mind social structures that have long written codes pushing those with queer identities to blend in with the environment, muting the colors of self, obscuring the body beneath the trees of dominant social landscapes. Dark history's shadow moments emphasize the beauty in the artist's process that encourages performance amongst models who donn their camp, contort themselves across couches amidst an orgy of individuals coming together collectively to create community at dinner parties setting the scene before the first sketch while evolving art history via being proudly and permanently captured in such an act within Antonio Cruz's paint. 
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At ICA San Francisco, the artist invites the visitor to participate and perform similarly, as a scene seemingly out of the oil paintings is set up for selfies, complete with a couch, multi-colored pillows, backdrops of opposing fabrics, and a synthetic rug with a Near Eastern aesthetic resting atop blue and purple checkerboard carpet. If we sit and take our time, we might just find something as radical as intimacy and quiet sanctuary amidst the beautiful riot of contrasting colors. 

Citations:
1. "David Antonio Cruz: One Day I'll Turn the Corner and I'll Be Ready for It | 7 September - 26 October 2019 - Overview." Moniquemeloche, www.moniquemeloche.com/exhibitions/16-david-antonio-cruz-one-day-i-ll-turn-the/overview.
2.Arya, Rina. "'The Existential Dimensions of Bacon's Art.'" Francis Bacon: Critical and Theoretical Perspectives, edited by Rina Arya, Peter Lang, 2012, pp. 81–100.
3.Sontag, Susan. "Notes on 'Camp'." Partisan Review, vol. 31, no. 4, Fall 1964, pp. 515–530.
4.Kim, Seohyun, and Israel Fisseha Feyissa. "Conceptualizing 'Family' and the Role of 'Chosen Family' Within the LGBTQ+ Refugee Community: A Text Network Graph Analysis." Healthcare, vol. 9, no. 4, Mar. 2021, p. 369. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare9040369.
5. "When the Children Come Home — Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art and Storytelling." Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art & Storytelling, www.sugarhillmuseum.org/when-the-children-come-home.
6.David Antonio Cruz -  - Art - Lehmann Maupin. www.lehmannmaupin.com/art/david-antonio-cruz.
7.Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009.
8.Esposito, Veronica. "'They Don't Come With Rules': David Antonio Cruz Celebrates Queer Chosen Families." The Guardian, 17 Aug. 2023, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/aug/15/artist-david-antonio-cruz-lgbtq-chosen-families-exhibition-philadelphia.
9.Monique Meloche Gallery. DAC 2019 Publication. Monique Meloche Gallery, 2019.
10.Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. "David Antonio Cruz: Hauntme." YouTube, 18 Apr. 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVqyra6twT8.

This article was originally published on August 3, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.

By Hugh Leeman
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Gil Batle's show Almost Sanctuary at Catharine Clark Gallery delves unabashedly into the artist's dark past through symbolism and storytelling that speak of the artist Filipino American identity, a life of freedom and incarceration, as well as self destruction and creativity all intricately rendered in faux blue-and-white porcelain, hand carved ostrich eggs and two trophies made from the reassembled glass of broken whiskey bottles celebrating his victory over the demons of addiction. 

Batle, a Filipino American raised in San Francisco, California, was first incarcerated at 14. Early struggles with drug addiction led to forging checks and IDs, leading to two decades in the California state prison system, from the infamous San Quentin Prison to Jamestown, known amongst inmates as the "Gladiator School" for its violent reputation [1]. At the end of his last stint in prison, a prison counselor suggested he move to the Philippines to break his cyclical entanglement with crime on the streets of San Francisco [2]. The counselor used the money Batle earned from prison jobs to buy the plane ticket that would change the course of his life when he moved to his parents' native Philippines. He continues his current art practice from a remote island in the archipelago.  

While in prison, he drew portraits of inmates' loved ones and began teaching himself to tattoo using soot from burning plastic chess pieces, mixed with shampoo or lotion, to create black tattoo ink [3]. This skill earned him fame among inmates, providing him protection and income. The intensity of circumstance channeled into his creativity, at which Batle marvels, "Deprivation brings out the creativity in any man. It's unbelievable, the creativity there [in prison]. Unbelievable."

From a previous body of work, Almost Sanctuary exhibits two of the artist's phenomenally skilled carvings on ostrich eggs, from which he first gained renown. Batle went from showing the carved eggs at a convention center trade show to art museums through recounting his experiences incarcerated in bas-relief on the 1/16-inch-thick surface of the egg, using a high-speed dental drill [4]. The egg for the artist is a symbol of new life and fragility, while the stories are a testament to his transformation from the darkest parts of society. Of this precarious journey, he says, "If you go past that sixteenth of an inch, you practically destroy the egg. And I think that kind of fragility is where I stand emotionally, I think.”[5]

In the two ostrich eggs on display, the shell is carved away to create chain link forms, exposing the egg's interior. Handcuffs frame a prison scene as an inmate gets a tattoo on his head, or a blind man with a cane attempts to find his way, stepping from tree trunk to tree trunk in an endless forest of the unknown. Carved above the scene of the man searching for his next step are Common Swifts, a motif associated with prison tattoos that, as the artist notes, is a species of bird that spends much of its life searching for sanctuary. 

Two trophies, each standing over a foot tall, made from the shattered glass shards of whiskey bottles, etched with personal symbols created with the same dental drill used on the ostrich eggs, are soldered together to celebrate the artist's overcoming addictions from his dark past. The artist notes, "I struggled with drugs and alcohol. During that struggle, in anger or sadness, there were times I would smash my whiskey bottle in a drunken stupor. Today, I know [sic] longer fight with alcohol. These glass trophies are an evolution from that struggle of drinking to conquering it. The symbol of victory made of shattered whiskey bottles." [6]

Trophies and ostrich eggs aside, Almost Sanctuary's focus is Batle's blue-toned paintings on plates that take on the appearance of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, which was traded to the Americas through the Philippines during Spanish colonization of the islands. Yet, these artworks are neither porcelain nor is the blue pigment the traditional cobalt glaze associated with Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. Instead, the works are ceramic and acrylic, reflecting the resourceful nature of Batle's creativity while alluding to his past as a forger. Batle's early profit from his artistic ability was making hand forged cashier's checks [7] to support his meth addiction. Batle saw the forgery of checks as a form of art, saying, "The only thing I knew best was art, which was fraud and forgery." [2]

On several plates, flowers grow atop prison shanks, knives handmade in prison from a single piece of metal, with cloth wrapping one end to protect the aggressor's hands. The shanks are delicately rendered, as if roots stabbed into the soil, which resembles a close-up of the layers of skin, epidermis, dermis, and subcutaneous tissue. From the steel shaft of the prison shank, tiny roots branch out into the surrounding environment. Above the shank's cloth-wrapped handle, the detailed bouquets blossom. A decorative pattern in black rounds the plate's basin. The simplicity of the pattern bears the heavy weight of Batle's long-time reality of counting days served, as upon closer inspection, the pattern recurs in several of the show's plates, featuring roman numeral hashmarks bundled in countless clusters of five encircling the plates' central scenes.
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In Pineapple (2025), the fruit that is a major export crop of the Philippines, reveals its prickly patterned surface to be rows of inmates with their heads bowed and their hands behind their backs. On one side of the plate's edge is a prison watchtower, on the other a paradisal beach.

Beyond flora, birds form another recurring theme in the artist's visual vernacular. Swifts escape from cages with prison yards and towers, on the plates' lips, the Swift's freedom contrasts with Maya Chestnut Munia (2025), in which six Maya Munia, the national bird of the Philippines, sit on a branch, chain-ganged together, the edge of the plate depicting the tropical fauna of the Philippines.

While the bird paintings are largely allegorical icons in The Tinikling Bird (2025), a layered narrative appears in linear depth perspective. The Tinkling, a bird woven into the cultural fabric of the Philippines, is revered for its dance-like movements that enable it to avoid traps and navigate through difficult terrain, inspiring generations of folk dances in the Philippines [8]. In such performances, a dancer stands in the middle of two bamboo poles, both several feet long, held by the dancer's companions, who move the poles back and forth, striking them together, forcing the dancer to hop and dance to avoid having their ankles smashed between the poles. In Batle's rendition, the bird replaces the dancer, and instead of performance companions, corrections officers move the poles, surrounded by the community clapping and playing percussion with the steep palm tree topography of the Philippines as backdrop.

Self-portraits add to the show's central theme of unflinching honesty intertwined with self-actualization. In a particularly nuanced piece, Fil-Am Self Portrait (2025), a double-headed Carabao, the traditional draft animal of the Philippines used for plowing rice, looks in opposite directions. An inner conflict of the shadow and the self arises from the Carabao's back, as two versions of the artist confront one another. One with his hands raised, ready for a fistfight, wears a prison-style knit hat and a standard-issue shirt, while the other wears no shirt, his head crowned by a traditional conical rice farmer's hat adapted for the sun's heat. In this case, his raised hands gently hold a bird as if readying it for flight. Covering the Carabao's body is a combination of Tagalog, the widely spoken language that serves as the basis of the island's national language [9], and English text. Words like "Im Busy" in English are aside phrases like "Salamat Po", meaning "thank you", with the word "Po" denoting respect to an elder. Interlocked handcuffs threaded with cloth, as well as Carabao horns inscribed "Fil-Am" (Filipino American), relate complex elements of the artist's life: incarcerated and free, fighter and sustainer of the bird. 

Striking a deeply vulnerable tone through a recurring motif in his oeuvre, a belt in Precarious (2025), inscribed with the words "I beat you because I love you," encircles a naval officer squatting on a spinning sphere emblazoned with keys, locks, and barbed wire. Batle's father was a naval officer; the belt appears in previous series aside scenes of abuse endured as a child. 

The artist's survivor spirit appears throughout Almost Sanctuary, yet in Caudal Autotomy (2025) it is most apparent: a realistically rendered lizard turns to look towards its missing tail; in place of its spine is a broken chain, while around the plate are dozens of lizard tails broken off the reptile's body. The work and its title reference the biological phenomenon in which lizards can detach their tails from their bodies, releasing themselves from a predator's grasp, and eventually regrow the tail. The painting suggests that this phenomenon is a skill the artist developed to survive life in prison, which, combined with creativity and dedication, empowered Batle as an ex-convict outside prison.

Life after prison has been a challenge in itself that Batle has taken on through his art. Encouraged by his brother Agelio to "create something that is you," the artist says he had no idea who he was yet, as he thought about it, his brother said, "what makes you angry, what makes you sad, what makes you alive." Ultimately, the word anger stood out, and then he realized the answer was prison. He started carving stories from prison, asking his brother if it was ok. His brother said, "It's not that it's ok, it's true, it came from a real place." [2]

In a world starved for truth, Batle's art speaks from a place unafraid to remove the mask and reveal a history of afflictions beneath the eggshell veneer. Fragile as it may be, when mixed with his creativity, something remarkable happens; we find an artist and artwork that are astonishingly and refreshingly human.

This article was originally published on July 1, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.

By: Hugh Leeman

​Taiwanese artist Yuan Goang-Ming's major exhibition, Everyday War, at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, uses allegorical single-channel videos to place the viewer at the threshold of being overwhelmed by the immensity and dynamic complexity of Taiwan's socio-political existential threat, pitting history and ideology against one another over China's long proposed "reunification" with its "breakaway province."

Goang-Ming, the father of Taiwanese film art, subsumes the museum visitor within cinematographic symbolism to introduce a war waged on the ordinary Taiwanese citizen’s psyche, caught in a web of historical threads amidst decades of the daily threat of invasion from mainland China. To immerse the visitor in this reality, the artist includes domestic furniture that furthers his allegorical narrative and a single pencil drawing which offers insight into the very chairs which the viewer has used to view his emotionally charged videos. 

Central to the historical conflict is the Chinese Civil War, which concluded in 1949 with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong, over the Nationalist Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek. Following the defeat, the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan. On the mainland, the Communist Party asserts authoritarian rule, while Taiwan has evolved into a democracy.

Everyday War, both the name of the solo exhibition and a single-channel video installation that premiered at the 2024 Venice Biennale, was curated by Abby Chen, the Contemporary Art Curator at the Asian Art Museum. Chen brought Everyday War and additional videos, spanning a decade of the artist's career, to San Francisco amidst the ever-evolving potential of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. 

Before entering the exhibit, the viewer encounters a single vertical banner bearing the show and artist's names in both English and Chinese, hanging at head height. The vertical banner takes on a tone of significance relating to the modern history of vertical banners used in pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong to protest mainland China's Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 and, more recently, in 2014, Hong Kong protesters unfurled a massive vertical banner stating, "Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow Taiwan." The latter banner, connecting Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement and Taiwan's Sunflower Movement, both of which protested Chinese influence on their democracies. 

As the viewer ducks under or walks around the title banner, a dimly lit room is entered with the exhibit's only wall text, once again vertical, first in English and then in Chinese. The wall text in the vertical banner style begins with a tone that reads like a defiant poet's staccato: "sirens, explosive blasts, sudden pounding, a slow tempo anthem, and a child's babbling." It ends its first paragraph posing questions to the visitor: "Is this a site of allegory reflecting the past and present? Or a prophecy of the human future told through an exhibition? To Yuan Goang-Ming, a second-generation war refugee born, raised, and living with his family in Taiwan, it's likely both."

Moving past the entry vestibule's wall text, one enters a sprawling exhibition space of darkness lit only by the brilliant glow of the artist's videos. The first screen, some 12 feet tall by 15 feet wide, is from the artist's 2018 single-channel video with sound, Everyday Maneuver. The video shown on both sides of the large screen pulls the viewer into a disconcerting reality. 

Once on the far side of the screen, viewers can sit in slightly reclined white beach chairs to watch the 5:57-minute video. Beyond the vastness of the image and the drama of flying above a bridge towards a metropolis, the intensity is heightened by an air raid siren.

The visuals transform just before the bridge ends, with the new perspective boxing in the viewer between the city's skyscrapers. While looking down from above, not a soul is in sight at the height of the day as the siren wails. The camera pans past a plaza and towards Taipei's central subway station, which doubles as a bomb shelter for Taipei residents. The sirens, the empty streets, and the station are a testament to the reality of Taipei's transformation into a ghost town during the Wanan air raid drills held annually since 1978. Each drill lasting 30 minutes readies residents to shelter in place in the event of an invasion from mainland China. 

Importantly, the significance of the chairs the viewer sits in is revealed through the artist's nearby pencil drawing, What Lies Beyond Us? (2024). The chairs are just like the ones observers sat in to witness the development of nuclear bombs tested on April 18, 1951, on Parry Island of the Marshall Islands in the West Pacific. In the realistic drawing, just as at the actual event in 1951, the viewer sees the now-familiar white beach chairs filled with civilian and military brass, wearing specially designed protective goggles, turning the world-changing moment into a spectator-like event. 

After the unsettling aerial fly-through of Taipei, the air raid sirens come to an end as the screen fades to black. The journey through Taiwanese citizens' reality, backdropped by the threat of war seen on the exhibition's largest screen, is not yet finished. Comfortably seated as modern spectators on the beach furniture, the next video comes into focus. 

The same screen's second video, The 561st Hour of Occupation, 5:56 minutes, (2014), takes us inside the internal conflict of Taiwan's Sunflower Movement, a rebellious protest within the democratic chamber of Taiwan. The video's opening view emerges inside the legislative building in March of 2014 when students protested Taiwan's free trade agreement with China, the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement, seeing it as a threat to democracy and Taiwanese businesses. 

The camera pans in on unfurled vertical banners hanging from above the parliament floor as youth occupy the space, displacing the politicians from discussing the trade agreement for 23 days, ultimately preventing the agreement's ratification. The scene transforms from a peaceful protest filled with dozens of youth into a vacant parliament that looks as if a rowdy fraternity party got out of hand. What remains are the strewn-about banners in Chinese and "Free Taiwan" signs in English, as well as numerous tripod-supported cameras of the press. 

Taiwan's peaceful Sunflower Movement stands in stark contrast to those in 1989 when hundreds, if not thousands, of student protesters were killed in China's Tiananmen Square Massacre. The discrepancy in the death toll largely depends on who you ask and where they are from. A fact that is underscored by Goang-Ming's video, slowly panning across dozens of press cameras and their tripods focused on the parliament floor. The imagery is testament to one of the great ideological divides between Taiwan and China. In China, access to information and freedom of the press are deeply restricted, whereas in Taiwan, the press's cameras and their freedom to report to the people highlight the profound ideological distance between the opposing shores of the Taiwan Strait.

Beyond the videos, the museum visitor comes to a table set comfortably with a white tablecloth, crystal wine glasses holding healthy splashes of white wine, and full water glasses awaiting dinner guests. The optimistic scene is shattered, and the viewer is shocked to their senses as hidden haptic sensors intermittently rattle the table, as if a bomb has dropped in the distance, its reverberations have shaken the hopeful scene to the darkest potential lingering in the back of Taiwan's mind. The table's invited guests will never come. The table and the domesticity of the installation prepare the viewer for the headline video, Everyday War (2024), 10:33 minutes.

For museum visitors witnessing Everyday War, the artist has exchanged the reclined beach chairs for couches with a side table topped by a dimly lit lamp, seemingly straight out of a Dwell magazine domestic fantasy. Sitting comfortably on the household furniture, facing an oversized screen that loops the artist's single-channel video, a camera pans in on an apartment scene, then back out, over and again, always in slow motion.
The video opens from the far side of the working-class Taiwanese apartment furnished with a couch, kitchenette, coffee table, bed, bookshelves, and a modest flat-screen television. Tranquility, intimacy, and symbolism create an uncomfortable peacefulness that the viewer knows is about to end. The artist heightens the intimacy by creating the entire scene within his own house. What's about to happen gives a glimpse into the foundational fears of the nation's nightmare, seemingly creeping towards a reality. 

The immediate symbolism of a Chinese language newspaper on the coffee table while an English language newspaper sits on the bed is clearly the home of a person with their feet in disparate realities. 

A coffee mug, filled nearly to the brim, sits beside a MacBook laptop, actively displaying a multicolored screensaver. Just beyond the MacBook, true to 21st-century form, yet another screen showing a first-person video game, with a soldier running through an urban setting and shooting at houses. No one is guiding the video game soldier. This screen within the screen asks the viewer what our role may be as the onlooker in a world inundated with the perverse entertainment of warfare. 

The video slowly pans in towards goldfish in a tank, then the first bullet pierces through the tranquility, shattering the window behind the TV screen with the video game. The first bullet is followed by several more, destroying the coffee maker, which vomits up water. The lamp above the couch is hit, and its glass comes raining down. Distracted by the bullets, the camera has now fully zoomed in on the goldfish calmly swimming in their watery world, unaware of the chaos. 

The camera begins to pan out from the fish. More bullets ring across the room, shattering dishes, a Coke can, and all manner of domestic appliances that once hit by bullets dance through a slow-motion state of destruction before collapsing to the floor. The camera pans in towards the fish again. Are the fish an allegory of the privilege to be unaware, or is there simply nothing they can do? The camera pauses at the back of the room.

Once again, in slow motion, it pans back in, and flames skim books on the shelf beneath the fish. As the camera zooms in for a close-up of the fish and their tank, an even greater eruption causes the books to be engulfed in flames, thrusting the paperback Art and Power from the shelf. Its information collapses to the floor beside leaves from a plant that once sat on the window ledge.

The camera pans out one last time; at the back of the room, pink and white flowers are overwhelmed by bullets shot through the apartment's window and walls. Still, the goldfish swim in a tank isolated within their artificial reality. A bullet hits a cushion, and its feathers flutter like oversized snowflakes. The book 1949 precariously teeters on the shelf, its title marks the end of China's Civil War. Albert Camus' The Rebel explodes off the shelf in flames, its cover fully facing the viewer in slow motion. Camus published the book just two years after China's civil war. In it, he critiqued Soviet communism and revolutionary ideologies that justify violence and oppression in the name of history.

The most striking part of the Everyday War is the video game never stops amidst the frenzy of bullets and an accompanying audio clip, presumably from one video game player to another: a man with an American accent recounting a youthful story says in part, "We had airsoft guns, and we would shoot canoes next to the Boy Scouts… We took it seriously. We wore ghillie suits. We would wear camouflage throughout the night, dude, it was a special operations mission for us."
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Suddenly, it seems the intended audience was always the United States, entertained by war, and long protected by oceans of security like the fish from the bullet-riddled frenzy. A map once untouched above the bed is now singed from the explosions; the West Coast of America and Taiwan get the worst of it. 

Finally, though it's the fish's turn, the tank is hit, creating a waterfall that rushes over the bookshelf. Slowly, its emptying cascade becomes a mere drip; the camera focuses on the fish tank's shards of glass suspended in time, now empty, the tension released, everything is still. 
The video returns to the peaceful domesticity where it began, just a day in the life of an everyday war.
Yuan Goang-Ming doesn't decorate homes and museums with the subjective nature of beauty or send viewers home with a happy Hollywood ending. Instead, he is giving us what great art offers: ideas that challenge our understanding of history, ideology, and the world as a whole. In this world, all things are up in the air, fluttering like the feathers of the shot-up couch cushions, from America's global influence to the mental health of those who live through the menace of invasion, and most especially Taiwan's autonomy.

This article was originally published on July 27, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review

By: Hugh Leeman
David Huffman's A Brilliant Blackout at Jessica Silverman Gallery expands on the artist's visual narrative of journeys of healing as the artist's Traumanauts, black astronauts that serve as metaphors for transcendence, make their way through abstract environments, allowing for a merging of social commentary on a dark past with a speculative future and autobiography. 

Huffman says, "Social abstraction is my term for the work that I do. I lean toward the political; that's what I was used to growing up, going to Black Panther rallies. Art should carry an element of social relevance." [1] His artworks contribute to Afrofuturism, a multidisciplinary creative movement that originated in the 20th century, combining African diasporic history, science fiction, and technology to reimagine dominant narratives by picturing optimistic futures that transcend contemporary cultural constraints. 

The artist's Traumanauts, rendered in minimal linear form, evolved from Huffman's graduate school thesis in the late 1990s. Before donning their space suits, they were cartoon-like minstrel figures with giant smiles that he referred to as Trauma Smiles. Their grins embodied the black body and the social mask developed to conceal inner suffering. Over the years, the Trauma Smiles became black astronauts; gone were the grins, now they were on an intergalactic journey of healing. [2]

The Traumanauts carry forward aspects of modern African history through Zambia's Afronauts. Amidst the Cold War's Space Race of the 1960s, Edward Nkoloso launched the Zambian Space Program, proposing his program would send not astronauts but Afronauts to space.[3] The project was initially viewed as absurd at best by the international media and world powers, including UNESCO, the United States, the USSR, and others, who rejected its funding petitions. Yet, beneath the surface, Nkoloso was illustrating that, amidst billions of dollars spent on going to the moon, there was a phenomenal need on earth. By situating black Africans in an optimistic future of space exploration, set against the backdrop of poverty experienced in the colonial sphere, Nkoloso challenged perceptions while highlighting the traumas endured by Africans. 

Over the past 60 years, Nkoloso has inspired numerous artists worldwide. Huffman's art contributes to international discourse with creators inspired by Nkoloso's Afronauts, such as Ghanian filmmaker Frances Bodomo's Afronauts (2014), a sci-fi retelling of the story, Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga in her performance lecture Afrogalactica (2011) or Belgian photographer Cristina de Middel's series The Afronauts (2012), situating Black Africans wearing components of space suits within desolate African landscapes, or more recently, Zambian artist Aaron Samuel Mulenga's The Afronauts (2020) series, treating this history. 

Huffman's unique voice in the Afrofuturist genre draws from elements of African American culture and his youth growing up in Berkeley, California. A recurring theme in his paintings and previous museum installations is the presence of basketballs, basketball hoops, backboards, and basketball courts, as seen in Celestial Amnesia (2025). He has even used the game's inner-city chain net to create undulating designs by employing the chain as a sort of stencil for spray paint. Huffman links this to his experiences growing up playing basketball in his urban community, which he relates to African-American identity and culture, referring to it as an urban vernacular. The artist describes the court as an enchanted space acting as a portal within the concrete urban landscape. Of this portal, one can pass through to another space, of which Huffman relates, "African-Americans where I grew up didn't go into nature much. We did because my mom insisted on it." [1]

The nature that his mother insisted on manifests through abstracted landscapes incorporating a multitude of media, visually situating the healing journey and highlighting the act of painting that Huffman sees as healing in and of itself. As tenured faculty at CCA, he shares this with his students: "We explore what painting can do. It's more than becoming a known artist with a gallery; it's about a path of the soul, a kind of fulfillment that you're not missing out on life. If you get that practice down, you really get something in your life." [4]

The artist's social abstractions can feature peace symbols or a flag waved by a Traumanaut with the word "love" written on it, layered atop collaged wallpaper. In Under the Sun and Moon (2025), cartoony flower blossom wallpaper reminiscent of a Takashi Murakami painting has an inner child unleashed on it through scribbles and sketches in crayon that become obscured by puddles of marbled paint. The puddles flow like tributaries of rivers, breaking into splatters and drips to create a geography of visual depth, accented by detailed tree trunks topped by painterly bundles of foliage. At times, the trees are of colors found in nature; at others, his trees evoke the vibrating colors in a Richard Mayhem landscape, the artist's Traumanauts carrying a narrative throughout the ambiguous environments to which they have arrived on their journey that dually references one of healing and being brought across the Atlantic to a foreign land. 

The concept of the transatlantic journey is best conveyed in Depths of Time (2025) and Many Rivers (2025). In both paintings, the Traumanaut rides a horse. In the former, the experience is in solitude amidst a celestial skyscape, while in the latter, the Traumanaut sees an African elephant in the distance. The symbolism of the horse and the migratory nature of elephants convey the concept of a transformational journey, as the horse, in its current form, was introduced to the Americas during European colonization, altering the course of history.

The painter connects his imagined futures to a West African past through Traumanauts who honor the animistic spirits found in Lobi art. The Lobi have inhabited the borderlands of Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso for centuries. "Lobi" is an umbrella term applied to seven distinct cultural groups [5], marking the name and the place with scars of colonization. In a piece titled Lobi, a Traumanaut sits between neon trees backdropped by a marbled color field of leaf green, sitting in a meditative lotus posture, the Traumanaut looks honorably toward a Thil dorka [6], a powerful Lobi deity capable of seeing in all directions, akin to Huffman's paintings showing a past, present, and optimistic future. In Initiation (2025), the artist alludes to generational healing as a standing paternal figure lovingly places his hand on the back of a Traumanaut youth who kneels in reverence to a West African deity sculpture. These elements and their changing environments are a synthesis of an inner journey of healing.

Beyond West African culture's art, a deep reverence for nature is conveyed in Huffman's painting, Boundless (2025), in which a Traumanaut raises his arms, venerating a tree, as if collecting energy from its neon-orange foliage. The painting's reverence for nature also honors pop culture as the Traumanaut and tree are backdropped by vertical stripped fabric that has the feel of a summer picnic blanket stretched over the canvas's top half onto which the artists has repetitively stenciled the glittered words Soul Train from the show's logo, creating a visual rhythm of the overlapping letters honoring the T.V. series that for more than 30 years did as author Nelson George says "the "Soul Train" dancers had the afros, and those crazy colors. I mean, one thing that you really saw when you saw "Soul Train" was vibrant - the set was vibrant, the colors of the dancers was quite dynamic, it was California-style brought into homes in New York, Detroit, Atlanta and affected everything." [7]

David Huffman's paintings pull at the threads of pop culture, stretching across America and into autobiography, to weave a tapestry that extends iconographically to the distant shores of the Atlantic, tethering history to futuristic journeys of the Traumanaut. A Brilliant Blackout celebrates Afrofuturism's creative optimism, which the artist shares from a place of vulnerability, highlighting his talent to transmute trauma into artistic treasure, all part of a healing process further shared into the future through Huffman's passing this creative practice on in his classroom.
Citations:

1. Chan, Cristina. "First Person: David Huffman on His Creative Process · SFMOMA." SFMOMA, 14 Feb. 2025, www.sfmoma.org/read/first-person-david-huffman-on-his-creative-process.
2. "David Huffman: Trauma Smiles · SFMOMA." SFMOMA, 31 Mar. 2023, www.sfmoma.org/watch/david-huffman-trauma-smiles.
3. "The Story Behind the Zambian Space Program." National Air and Space Museum, 28 Feb. 2025, airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/story-behind-zambian-space-program.
4. "Faculty Spotlight: David Huffman, Painting and Drawing and Fine Arts." CCA, www.cca.edu/newsroom/faculty-spotlight-david-huffman-paintingdrawing-fine-arts.
5. Gundlach, Cory K. Spirited Objects. 1 Dec. 2019, https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.005214.
6. "Learn More: Lobi 1 | African Art Collection | Pacific Lutheran University." Pacific Lutheran University, www.plu.edu/africanartcollection/figures/lobi-1/learn-more-lobi-1.
7. Npr. "How 'Soul Train' Shaped a Generation." NPR, 3 Apr. 2014, www.npr.org/2014/04/03/298736685/how-soul-train-shaped-a-generation.

This article was originally published on July 20, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review

By: Hugh Leeman
Michael Reafsnyder's exhibition, Summer Jam of impasto acrylic action paintings at Scott Richards Contemporary Art offer viewers a painterly portal into a world of partially combined ebullient colors that create space for the story-making machine of the mind to turn off and tune into a state of experiencing the self unadulterated by the knee-jerk reactions that today's attention economy depends upon. 
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Reafsnyder's layered paintings transmit a genuine sense of the rare artist immersed in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi termed a flow state, where one finds the self enveloped in a sense of joy, losing track of time, and achieving optimal experience. Csikszentmihalyi described achieving the optimal experience as "...a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like." [1]

In an era of seeking instant gratification and generative artificial intelligence, planting its seeds of fear of displacement in fields far beyond the image makers of the arts, Reafsnyder's works remind us that the aspirational role of painting today can be what it has been for thousands of years: a mechanism to express connections with the sublime, be they ecstatic emotional states, the gods, or spirit realms. He says that "when I go through intense periods of painting, kind of, the world slips away and I get seduced by this world that's evolving and materializing on the canvas." [2] Academic Susan Magsamen, in her book, Your Brain on Art, writes of similar possibilities, "When you make art and you don't know what's going to happen, you're involved in the mystery that life really is." [3]

Reafsnyder's streaks and splatters of paint leave maps of the unknown behind that, if we could follow them, suggest they might lead us to the places humans have sought for millennia, a path towards self-transcendence. Telling of the flow states that Reafsnyder's paintings seem to record is the common acknowledgment that one achieves such a state by intrinsic motivation as opposed to society's external rewards. 

The artist's paintings speak of someone who for moments of their making forgot not just about society's rewards but about society altogether and for the betterment of those who see his artworks as they call to mind 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal's suggestion that, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." [4] With his paintings' thick layers acting as an abyss in which we can follow our emotions and wander through thought, we can get delightfully lost in a room alone and perhaps find ourselves. 

His paintings blend elements of Gerhard Richter's Abstract Picture artworks with Pollock and de Kooning's energy. Reafsnyder speaks of his inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, yet not being weighed down by its post-war angst; instead, he sees his painting as a place of joy and pleasure. In the place of Abstract Expressionism's indirect support from the CIA to illustrate, amongst other things, what was possible in a capitalistic society [5][6], Reafsnyder reminds us of what is possible today in a similar society, but in a very different way. He exchanges today's fallacy of efficiency for the magic of making with one's hands, without a predetermined destination, to celebrate an exuberance of being amidst his kaleidoscope of color. Were it not for his skill, the paintings could easily collapse into the chaos with which they skim the surface. 

The artist's use of his hands to paint evokes the raw connection between the creative medium and the self of cave painters and uninhibited children. Paintings like Beagle Break (2025) illustrate what it looks like when one can paint with the freedom and joy of a child, yet the equanimity of a master.

Beyond his hands, Reafsnyder relies primarily upon palette knives and, to a lesser extent, found objects that unveil an immediacy of emotion, such as in Pastry Store (2025) and the unbridled intensity of color with its ability to influence our mood, such as in Rippin Good (2025).
Works like Jet Stream (2023) pass through the spectrum of greens and blues, mixing with white along the way to relate a process in which the artist is loosely guiding his painting until being guided by it. When this ends, the world that seduces the artist begins evolving and materializing on the canvas.
With so much impasto paint collecting on the palette knife, an intense flipping motion of the wrist towards the canvas from a few feet away splatters entropic dollops over the streaks of paint, such as in Chop Shop (2025). Reafsnyder impossibly layers a multitude of tinted colors in Summer Glide (2024), his streaks of cake icing thick colors’ uniform direction interrupted by paint scraped from the artwork, revealing elements of what came before, returning at times nearly to the canvas itself. 
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The artist's canvases both record and evoke emotion over an attempt to convey direct meaning, similar to Abstract Expressionist action painters of the post-World War II era. Summer Jam's works through the artist's use of his hands to apply paint, the paints unplanned movement and thickened formations convey an instinctual passion that invites viewers to stare off into their embers of emotion calling to mind how prehistoric cave painters whose painting, while meant to be seen, were also made to be experienced in the dark depths of a cave, acting as a portal to an inner world that both the creator and the participant could experience. The prehistoric participants were those who dared walk into the cave, risking discomfort, to find something deeper within. Great thinkers have long proposed that places of seeming abstract nothingness are significant sources of inspiration. 

Carl Jung noted that, "Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his Notebooks: 'It should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud, or like places in which … you may find really marvelous ideas.'" [7] Reafsnyder's paintings embody such places that foster marvelous ideas, which can allow for a deep sense of joy amidst his painterly voids, blending a landmark in memory of what life should be like with the mystery that life really is.

Citations:1. "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive." Internet Archive, 25 Oct. 2021, archive.org/details/flow-the-psychology-of-optimal-experience-pdfdrive.
2. McEnery, Miles. "ARTnews | in Conversation With Michael Reafsnyder." Vimeo, 13 July 2025, vimeo.com/383828033?fl=pl&fe=ti.
3. Magsamen, Susan, and Ross, Ivy. Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. United Kingdom, Random House Publishing Group, 2023.
4. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. United States, Dover Publications, 2013.
5. Cockcroft, Eva. "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War." Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, edited by Francis Frascina, 1st ed., Harper & Row, 1985, pp. 125–133.
6. Saunders, Frances Stonor. “Modern Art Was CIA ‘weapon’ | the Independent.” The Independent, 21 Oct. 1995, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html.
7. "Man And His Symbols : Carl Gustav Jung : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive." Internet Archive, 1964, archive.org/details/B-001-004-443-ALL.