California artist Ruth Pastine's Colorscape at Scott Richards Gallery offers a sensorial experience through engaging, vibrating colors on tonally graduated, allover canvases that evoke a sense of intimacy and wonder at color's ability to alter mood. Pastine's paintings construct an environment adjacent to the piece by beveling the artwork's back edge, casting shadows around the work, and creating a subtle sense that one has approached an object framed by the very shadows it casts. Such shadows enhance the sense that light comes from within the canvas itself, turning the paintings into places that could be entered as if perceptual portals into another world. 

While Pastine's colors appear to hover or vibrate by stimulating the rods and cones in our eyes, causing asynchronous stimulation that forces our eyes' photoreceptors to adjust between the signals of light and color and the brain's ability to process them, her results are more spiritual than scientific. Sitting in front of her canvases and staring off into their space creates a sense of motion that summons descriptions of audio-visual hallucinations shared by patients in psychedelic trials, which carry them to states characterized as "my thoughts wandered freely", "I felt a general sense of gratitude", and "I felt open to all emotions". 

Colorscape's canvases evoke mythology's rich history of entrances situated amidst the mortal world, which lead to the beyond. These openings in legendary recounting are said to be accessed by chance, through screen-like veils of foggy mists, where the otherworldly resides parallel to here and now. 

Pastine's canvases act like such screen-like veils, opening into a space parallel to our world of attention-grabbing, dopamine-drenching content, through her colorfield mist, entered with the payment of focus. The artist describes the experience of their creation as "Being in the present moment for the sublime is an understanding of both a terror and a beauty, being confounded by an awe, something much greater than ourselves."  
​
20th-century art critic Clement Greenberg once noted that, "The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced." For Pastine, those influences call forth modern artists who abstracted light, layered color, and similarly stimulated the rods and cones in our eyes to create spaces both real and metaphysical. For the viewer with imagination and the time to pay focus, the trip is awarded a passage to the phenomenon that could carry us toward the sublime she experienced in making them.  

Red Magenta, Colorscape II, 2026 recalls minimalist light artist Dan Flavin's homage to color field painter Barnett Newman. Flavin's piece, untitled (to Barnett Newman) two, used fluorescent lights to frame a corner where two gallery walls met, constructing a spatial bath of light, distorting our sense of place. In doing so, Flavin pulled the banality of a room's corner towards the realm of a mythological portal. For Pastine, the light ballast appears as blurred streaks of purple that equally frame the viewer's focus towards a levitating magenta colorfield that falls away from the red edges of the artwork, offering us entrance into the distant corners of perception. 

VIOLET (YELLOW), COLORSCAPE, 2026 summons the viewer's attention to its center by framing the artwork's edges in violet, then layering nearly imperceptible yellow that optically blends with the violet to create a hazy purple that skirts the edges of gray. The spatial effects from afar recall light artists James Turrell's construction of space, while her layering of paint to achieve sensorial effects recalls Mark Rothko's allover color field canvases, where color hovers over the artwork as if a misty screen we penetrate to pass from our world into one illuminating the present moment's ability to confound us with awe. 

In 1943, Mark Rothko and fellow abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb, with the support of Barnett Newman, co-authored a letter to The New York Times stating that "art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks." That same year, in a draft manuscript, they waxed equally poetic, "we deny that the world of art has any objective appearance. The world is what the artist makes it." Pastine has made a world that, if we engage, leaves behind the noun of attention captured by the screens of our hands to experience the verb of focus, where the passage through her mist-pigmented screens into the adventure of an unknown world, parallel to here, is unencumbered by any time but the presence of now. 

In past decades, Pop artists situated similar low-culture comic book imagery in art as a means of elevating it into the realm of fine art, blurring the boundary between low and high art at a time when Warhol famously predicted today’s internet culture, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." In Kearns's paintings, that future has arrived as his works highlight how low culture and appropriation function as the language of everyday communication.
​
The paintings form a tightly staged sequence of photoshop composited atmospheres from glassy water to postcard skies. The tension arises from the high contrast in aesthetics between the scenes and the figures, as internal landscape lays bare the stark reality of America's deteriorating sense of self. Was the dream worth having, America?

Answers, tongue-in-cheek, come from The Dealmaker, a well-to-do mid-century blonde in white gloves with lace cuffs, holding a cigarette and a stack of cash, toward the viewer, asking, "THIS MAKES US EVEN, RIGHT? DO YOU TAKE CASH?", standing in front of a flooded modern architectural masterpiece backdropped by a mountainous landscape in the distance. Sea levels have changed, and so too has the shoreline of beachfront property. Her offer and eye contact with the viewer break down the fourth wall, directly engaging us. What is the price to be paid for such destruction? 

Making the show as poignant as ever in the era of the internet is the work on paper, The Thief. In the flat matte pastel-colored painting, The Thief's damsel in distress buries her head in a pillow, eyes clenched, her speech at once flirtatious and confrontational, pleads for the truth that's left in a well-worn art-world taboo. "SO SUGAR, I HEAR YOU STEAL PICTURES & WORDS. WELL, DO YA?"

Just as Lichtenstein stole words and images from the comic book illustrators who were scarcely compensated as he made millions, and research suggests Warhol’s fame magnetized words and ideas to him that he never actually uttered, like "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Kearns rightfully turns the lens of appropriation and inheritance on his own work and, more importantly, on the 21st-century internet phenomenon of digital piracy and appropriation. 

The 2022 work was done the same year that ChatGPT was released to the mainstream public by developer OpenAI. After years of "training" or vacuuming up and plagiarizing phenomenal amounts of pictures and words that have led to countless lawsuits in which everyone from an ongoing list of artists and authors to media companies like The New York Times are suing the company for doing as the painting’s protagonist notes "stealing pictures & words." 
Kearns says of the pastel tones in his works on paper and cartoon style aesthetic, "The use of the 1950's cartoons reflect my desire to locate personal / psychological dialogues that read as implications of long-term societal shifts away from the values of an earlier moment in America's cultural history. The quieting of the compositions, along with the pastel colors, suggests memories of things gone by. The image becomes a dream-like echo of personal and societal loss."

The societal shifts are as evident as ever in his large acrylic paintings featuring aging men burdened by the loss of status; both paintings are aptly titled Untitled. The once idealized masculinity of the 20th century slumps into a space between confession, defensiveness, and self-questioning. In one, a man in a suit sits in a director's chair on the beach, back to the ocean, head slumped and burdened by the pensive state of societal change. His wealth may remain but his emotional sense-of-self is entirely unclear, "I DO KNOW HOW TO LOVE." Is he able to convince himself, let alone anyone else? 

In the other Untitled painting, the psychological state is less ambiguous. A blue-collared male smoking a cigarette slumps over, his thought bubble pleads, "WHY DON'T YOU LOVE ME LIKE YOU USED TO DO?" This piece is the only painting in the show where the background style matches the comic-book style of the figure; an angry lone wolf peers out at the viewer.

Good Times pulls us into the paradox of America's present as much as any one work. A bosomed woman with an exaggeratedly thin waistline leans against a wall, smoking a cigarette, backdropped by a modern skyline. Between her and the city, the legs of anonymous laborers with work boots soles to the sky and toe down in the dirt speak of the hill the middle class succumbs to in the zero-sum game that made America great as the bombshell blithely states, "SURE, I'LL REMEMBER THE GOOD TIMES."

Kearns neatly condenses America's social crisis into single phrases for the culture of 280 characters per post. The aesthetic harkens back to an era of America when it was more confident, less self-aware, and uninhibited by the burden of its past or that its future would one day be questioned.
 
The artist says, "During the time I was making the works in this show, I was aware of a much more transactional mindset pervading public thought." Through 15 artworks, Kearns Zero-Sum surrounds the viewer with images of class experienced as a negotiation performed within a system that rewards transaction. In America’s zero-sum culture, there have always been winners and losers, yet Kearns paints pictures “of the time and place where we live” in which even the victors inherit the loss that comes with winning the past through having mortgaged the future.

Beyond the artworks’ focus on water, the scope of the exhibition and its programming offer a welcome counterbalance to an art world searching for relevance amidst profound societal change. Niemeyer told me, "This is an exhibition of community creating art rather than art seeking community, you can talk with people and learn things and establish collaborative ideas for the future."

The gallery, TIAT Place (The Intersection of Art and Technology), is a pop-up space run by Ash Herr, who built a community by bringing creative technologists together for art salons. Her space is in one of the many vacant retail stores in San Francisco's once-vibrant Powell/Market corridor. TIAT Place has generated a much-needed boost of creativity and, perhaps more importantly, conversation through robust programming. The gallery is supported by a grant from the Svanne family, which supports downtown vacancy activation to encourage creatives to transform dormant spaces into places that attract people back to San Francisco's city center.

For Niemeyer Water Futures, programming was not a peripheral add-on to the exhibition artworks instead, it was a central component that brought in speakers like Jenny Rempel, a postdoc at UC Berkeley and board member of Community Water Center, to speak about community activism around access to drinking water for migrant agricultural laborers in California's Central Valley and California's precarious water supplies. Speakers like Luiz Barata, a senior planner for the Port of San Francisco, spoke on the rising sea levels’ impact on San Francisco and the $13.5 Billion proposal to build a seawall on the city's Embarcadero.

In addition to curating the show, Niemeyer had artwork in the exhibition. He told me the exhibit's goal is, "Collaborative meaning-making rather than competitive dealing, competition can be positive as it can produce great outcomes, but we've seen a lot of that, and now we need an alternative." Niemeyer told me this in the context of society as a whole, but expanded that focus equally onto the traditional commercial gallery model, noting that at TIAT Place, there is no such focus on transaction. Traditional art gallery models are transactional, he said, and have long produced adversarial relationships in which artists compete to make work that sells. At the same time, buyers seek to buy work of “value.” The gallery competes to find the “right” buyer, while the “right" buyers are coveted by other galleries, creating competition between the gallerists. That, he added, is less about producing cultural value and more about manufacturing financial value.

A similar contrast plays out on a grand scale in standout work from artist Sin Sombras (Without Shadows), a Mexican artist from Oaxaca,  whose photography and short film in the exhibition shine a light on communal land rights as major corporations produce financial value through resource extraction in her native Oaxaca, one of Mexico's poorest states. The artist's photographs highlight the beautiful, dramatic topography of the region, yet hidden in plain sight is the darker reality: extractive mining for minerals and sand extraction from rivers for concrete production that can permanently damage the river ecology, ultimately impacting people who for centuries have depended on the river as a food source.

In the artist's short film Naishisaa, or water in Oaxaca's native Zapoteco language, shots of Christian and indigenous traditions intermingle and fade as a visual metaphor questioning what passes from one generation to the next, alongside the river that has sustained humans for millennia. Today, these traditions and their people face displacement and conquest through hydrocolonialism, the political control, privatization, and resource extraction that affects communities around the world.

The dynamic complexity of these challenges plays out most poignantly in the banality of daily life as we see a man ride off through a small village on his motorbike. The artist told me this is one of her family members who, like many others, works for the mining company and feels trapped between preservation of the past and the economic necessity that pushes many to participate in the destructive mining practices that have left Oaxaqueños with few options as they witness an exchange of land rights and clean water for financial opportunity.

The video is set against Sin Sombra's soft voice, "Los rasgos (features), only the traces on the earth, on our land remains of what once was…I am reminded of the importance of keeping our traditions alive. But what traditions if we value material wealth over the richness of our lands and culture? What traditions if my generation and those to come are left with the traces of what used to be?" Where is this greed taking us?”

A bag of Oaxacan sand sat in a plastic freezer bag on a sculptural pedestal, evoking the high value placed on fine art through a material all but overlooked by society, save the sand mafias. So valuable is sand in places like Oaxaca that, per the BBC, sand mafias have been linked to hundreds of murders around the world over the last few years. This led the artist to adopt the moniker Sin Sombras to protect her family amid the criticism she levies against the extractive practices that transform rivers into destroyed ecosystems and sand into concrete.

Sin Sombras haltingly recounted the hostile actions mining companies had taken against locals who oppose them. A neighbor who spoke out against the practices at a public assembly in her town was later pulled from his home, stripped of his clothes, and beaten, his body left beside the river he was trying to save. Her community organized a blockade of trucks extracting the sand, but few consequences followed, leading to a fatalistic pessimism in which resistance seemed futile; many, like her cousin and uncle, now participate in the extraction.

Greg Niemeyer, digital photos of Kenya Vision 2030 dam constructionDown the hall from Sin Sombra's work, Niemeyer's photographs highlighted China's uber-ambitious Belt and Road Initiative through Kenya Vision 2030, in which the Kenyan Government contracted a Chinese construction company to build the dam to power the "Silicon Savannah.” Through Niemeyer's lens, we see Chinese officials planning a massive dam. Under the agreed terms, if the Kenyan government defaults on payments, China would take over the dam and control its electricity. Adjacent photos show the early effects on Kenyans who are already adjusting to the precursors of such a developing reality, in which centuries of shared use of water holes have been reduced to private property and paying to use water now controlled by corporate entities.

Around the corner, artist Asma Kazmi created Begging Bowls, a poignant installation in which dozens of ceramic pinch pots sat on the concrete floor as if upturned mushroom caps. The artist made the pinch pots to resemble kashkuls, or begging bowls, historically used in the artist's native Pakistan by mendicant Sufi monks known as dervishes, who use the bowls to accept sustenance offerings in exchange for spiritual guidance. The empty bowls wait in line to be filled with water from a leaking street-side faucet that runs on a video loop. Kazmi made the video with AI. AI data centers can require significant water withdrawals, leading to fears that AI's incredible water consumption will have a major environmental impact. As the AI video can't pass from its digital world into ours to actually fill the bowls with sustenance, it leaves one to wonder about the exchange of this new technology for an essential resource. The empty bowls hint at what society may well be getting in return for generative AI's magic act of transforming water into information.

A nearby room filled with informative posters on the San Francisco seawall’s potential impact took on the feel of a trade show, educating stakeholders on what's to come. Yet, amid the exhibition and a piece on loan from James Lowry's mining museum, above the posters hung two pipes from a rope. Niemeyer told me the wood and bent lead pipe hanging from the rope represent America's centuries-old practice of using toxic lead pipes and wood to deliver water to homes. Niemeyer noted that both lead and wood pipes are still used as service lines to deliver water to parts of America today.

Koh Terai, Go With the Flow, 2025     Amid the dark shadows brought to light in the exhibition, optimism emerged through installations that framed water as a prism, allowing us to see our impact on it and its impact on us. In Koh Terai's meditative water/light/glass installation, Go With the Flow, water dripped from above onto a glass plate illuminated by the room’s sole light source. Each time a drop splashed onto the plate, the illusion on the wall changed. The work invites us to see water as a lens through which light passes, affecting color and perception, and to consider water not as something to control but as a medium with which we interact. A sound installation by Niemeyer and his wife Lisa gave water's calming sounds a place in a dark room, where overstimulated gallery-goers can catch their breath and reconnect with what has been done for thousands of years, listening to water's movement as a sound of personal and ecological rejuvenation.

Yehwan Song's Fountain, 2025Yehwan Song's Fountain highlighted the materialization of digital media's human impact. By inverting screen scrolling's attention-grabbing power, the viewer becomes a witness to interpassivity, or the phenomenon of a person outsourcing their joy and beliefs to an external agent like a smartphone. Here, the intimacy of a human face with closed eyes is trapped in the machine. Then the eyes open, the face comes to life with expressions of emotion as water, a metaphor for the flow of information, floods across the iPad's surface. Instead of the subject scrolling, they are being scrolled, the viewer's perspective has become that of a device, allowing us to see society's screen addiction and interpassivity.

Of the programming, Niemeyer told me that after Luiz Barata spoke to the audience of some 60 people on San Francisco's $13.5 billion plan to build a protective sea wall, the curator polled the audience on whether the money would be better used to fund relocation rather than hardening the shoreline, 90% remained undecided. "This is the point of exhibitions like this and using spaces for collaborative meaning making and art, sea levels are rising, it's inevitable, and none of us knows what to do about it." Niemeyer went on to tell me in a phone conversation that society is threatened by "A failure of imagination. If we keep refusing to imagine massive change, these things in our environment will inevitably change, and we will suffer for it. Art helps us imagine these new potentials and reimagine water as a medium to develop solidarities with and not simply view it as an object."
​
Although the exhibition closed in San Francisco on January 25, 2026, and was preceded by one in Detroit at the Gordon L. Grosscup Museum of Anthropology at Wayne State University, Niemeyer expressed optimism that it could continue at a future location in another city. Water Futures shows us that an equitable and sustainable future with water won't be solved with infrastructure alone; we also need spaces that foster non-transactional dialogue and collaborative imagination. If the exhibition model holds true, it isn’t just relevant to the future of water but also a needed direction for the future of the art world.

In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. Within months, it became shorthand for ‘AI’ in mainstream media, reaching 100 million users in two months and becoming a mainstream tool on phones and computers. At the start of 2026, ChatGPT and similar LLMs like Claude and Gemini are estimated to be used by more than 1 billion people. LLMs are trained on phenomenal amounts of data, from articles and emails to published books and online forums, allowing the model to generate and analyze text.

Language Models have been studied and experimented with, albeit in a rudimentary form, since the 1960s, when MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA. The early language model was named after Eliza Doolittle, a fictional character in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, written in 1912. In the British play, Eliza quickly loses her Cockney working-class accent and, with the help of Henry Higgins, a phonetics professor, refines her speech to blend in with upper-class society. Eventually, Eliza rejects Higgins, who treats her as an object, and asserts her independence.

Wizenbaum programmed ELIZA to interact with human users as a psychotherapist would a patient, asking open-ended questions to encourage self-disclosure, which the program could reuse to continue the exchange. While Eliza was a far cry from today's LLMs like ChatGPT, it served as a signpost into the digital jungle of machines, taking steps towards the threshold of the profound feature of human intelligence: complex linguistic capabilities.
Between ELIZA in the 1960s and today's language models, artist Ken Feingold in the 1990s began experimenting with language models prognosticating through his artwork The Animal, Vegetable, Mineralness of Everything, on the potential impacts of AI if the technology were widely adopted by mainstream society.

The piece, which first showed in 2003 at the Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery in Shropshire, United Kingdom, before touring the United States, used three life-sized silicone self-portraits that "debate the nature of violence with each other, and discuss their fears – generally their fears about each other." Each head takes on a persona representing a different realm of existence; one speaks for the animals, another for the vegetables, and yet another for the minerals.

Feingold created the software that empowered the silicone heads to speak while their faces animated the exchange. The conversations are always unique. The artist writes that "each has its own personality, a vocabulary, associative habits, obsessions, and other peculiarities, which make their conversations quirky, surprising, and often hilarious. They challenge our understandings of our relationship with emerging forms of artificial life." 
Looking at the artwork, if you are wondering about the black-and-white object just beyond the heads, you are in good company, as the heads, too, are fixated on what it might be. Viewers witness unscripted conversations between the heads as they "wonder about 'that thing' before them, and we hear how they project their own interior worlds onto it in an attempt to figure out what it really is."  

They, like we humans, are meaning-making machines, capable of projecting their fears and desires onto the unknown to make sense of the world.
In a transcript published on Feingold’s site, the discussion waxes philosophical:

Animal: Minerals are so hard. Minerals don't care about us at all.
Mineral: We are the basic material of everything.
Animal: Is struggling for survival a kind of violence, or not?
Vegetable: Animals are so violent, all of them.
Mineral: Animals make war.
Animal: We are the only ones who really think, so we have the right to do whatever we please.

Feingold writes that "Although the heads hear each other, nothing seems to penetrate or influence their ideas; no matter what the subject matter discussed, they eventually return to their own interests and fixed ideas." In this, we see a reflection of today's information silos of the internet.
​
Today, the internet's information silos, particularly AI-governed algorithms of social media and Google searches, illustrate how we humans are drawn to information that best agrees with our preexisting beliefs, reinforcing opinions until they feel like facts. This is exemplified by information largely influenced by a single point of view, incapable of integrating nuance into the dialogue; any information that is an outlier is not to be considered; instead, it is just wrong, reducing society's beliefs and thoughts to an oversimplified discord. The black-and-white of the curious object evokes the binary of such social discord, devoid of the near-infinite spectrum of nuanced grayscale that occurs between extremes.

As the same conversation from the transcript above carries on between the heads, it devolves into antagonistic accusations:
Vegetable: Animals are the most violent of all – everything you do hurts us.
Animal: We are the ones with technology to make things better.
Mineral: You have no technology beyond smoke and mirrors.

Feingold's piece made at the start of the 21st century could well be a testament to the often cited 20th century Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who once said, "I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. Art acts as an early distant warning system, warning the old culture about the psychic and social targets so that we may have plenty of time to prepare for change."

With more than two decades of hindsight, Feingold’s work was the Distant Early Warning system warning us about the psychic and social targets, yet the smoke and mirrors of technology now subsume a society unprepared for change.

Today it would be naive to believe that we like George Bernard Shaw's character Eliza, will assert our independence from these systems as amid the smoke that clouds our house of mirrors, what remains clear is humans most precious resource, language and its ability to form connection that enable collaboration upon which culture is constructed is no longer solely in human hands, now it sits in AI's "black box" which no one entirely understands. Yet, it has enough access to our ideas to control our attention and silo our information, leaving humans to question if truly "We are the ones with technology" while pondering the nuance of its ability "to make things better." 

In the coming years, the first email would be sent, the Apple II would make its way into homes across the U.S., floppy disks would dramatically expand information storage, and early Ethernet proposals would emerge. Despite these advances in the 1970s, the pace of development offered humans ample time to evolve with their technologies.
​
Amid today's premature arrival of the future, Mark Engel paints a contemporary vision that visualizes Toffler's prescient prediction. In doing so, Engel captures the culture shock of an exponentially accelerating world. His exhibition, Shifting Terrain, aptly on view in Silicon Valley at the Triton Art Museum, uses the ancient medium of paint to lend static permanence to the pixel-shifting technological intensity the digital terrain imbues on its inhabitants.

Engel's figures recall art history's figura serpentinata, seen in the ancient Laocoön sculpture and 16th-century mannerist painters twisting forms that dramatically stretch and writhe to convey the intensity of their time. In the former, the gods punish a father and his sons with a strangling snake for warning that the Trojan horse at the gates could not be trusted. In the latter, painters broke with the classical tradition of proportion, exaggerating human form to heighten the drama of social instability. In Engel's works, Laocoön's ancient serpent could well be the technology gods tightening their grip on humanity, as the Trojan horse, once made of wood, has since become an invisible algorithm that previously promised social connection, yet after being brought inside the gates, has, as Yuval Harari posed, unleashed its merciless army on society.

Engel's chimeric forms vacillate between realism, abstraction, and painterly passages silhouetted to read as an arm or leg. Burnt sienna flesh tones abruptly end alongside highly saturated yellows, blues, and streaks of hot pink; a glitch-in-the-matrix appears to have made a myth out of what it means to be human. Amid a civilization seemingly intent on entertaining itself into oblivion, Engel does as great artists of the past have done, show society the invisible world in which it floats. The omnipresence of today's digital ether transforms distant, organic-toned traditional landscapes with clashing neon paint whose splatters deliberately destabilize our gaze. In a conversation with the artist, he tells me, "We have so much information that we're hit with rapidly; it affects how we connect with others. It affects how we connect with ourselves."

Shifting Terrain comprises multi-paneled canvases with interacting figures, singular figures, and cut-out freestanding paintings. At times, the titles are as powerful as the colors. In Echo Chamber, a single figure stands enraptured by the technicolor dream coat of colors that she wears or has become. Each colorful form never takes full shape, implying divided attention. Inside a cupped hand held beside her ear, concentric circles evoke a visual echo. The sum of the divided elements reverberates as if an echo chamber, a digital space where information reinforces pre-existing beliefs as though they were facts. Engel says, "The solitary figure paintings draw influence from the Bay Area Figurative painters such as Nathan Oliveira, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, who merge figuration and abstraction to express a deep sense of existential isolation. In my work, however…they are captured amid transformation where body and environment are porous and blended into one another."

In Strata, a wall-hanging, cut-out acrylic painting on birch panel, the artist has captured the visual culture of the internet's parallax scrolling, each horizontal band of the face evoking the web design technique where background content moves more slowly than foreground content to create the illusion of depth. A similarly designed, sculptural freestanding version, Uprising uses the parallax effect to seemingly collapse form and attention in on itself. In both Strata and Uprising, the portraits are subsumed in flowers, each bloom never taking full form, and our eyes are always moving on to the next. Uprising's facial features capture a breathy exhale of visual stimulation's pleasure, contrasted by red bags under the eyes and dilated pupils, suggesting that all the internet's visual stimulation comes at a cost.

Engel elevates his ideas with multiple interacting figures evoking compositions made in centuries past to capture the viewer in mythological narratives connecting humans' struggle between desire and disappointment. In Three Graces, a dopamine overload of Damien Hirst-esque dots and interlocking candy-colored patterns pushes flesh-toned figures beyond their bodies. The nude figures search for the silhouette of the self, contrasted by the lush green backdrop of the jungle. Engel's Three Graces joins a long line of artists who have taken on the story of Zeus's daughters, whose ancient names mean radiance, joy, and flowering, crafting a myth for the modern age. Despite all the attractive newness, Engel suggests that what remains the same is our collective destination, as a memento mori peers from within a figure into our world.

Continuum suggests human histories of gradual change remain consistent over time as exponentially accelerated musculature erupts into the abstracted malleability of Francis Bacon-esque flesh, transforming from one being to the next. The disembodied figures form a cubist, shoulder-to-shoulder pose, recalling ancient friezes that symbolized stories of unity and shared purpose, allowing the visual narrative to unfold.

The path forward in Engel's art is not immediately legible. Yet, similar to Toffler's 1970 book on future shock, the author optimistically put "forward a broad new theory of adaptation." Shifting Terrain is more than a mere critique of our world; the paintings hint at the positive, but where is the path that his figures seem all too distracted to find?

Engel tells me that he finds optimism amidst the incredible challenges, "The light in society today depends on how you view things, the light is the shifting of hope or perspective …really there is no resolution in the work. Everything's kind of in this state of flux."

While an infinite-scroll anxiety and society's shifting terrain palpably permeate Engel's visual glitches, accurately evoking Toffler's future shock throughout our conversation, the artist speaks of society's uncertainty as a moment of opportunity, suggesting it is a catalyst for transformation. Although inspiring, I can't help but consider Toffler's dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.
​
The morning following my conversation with Engel, the artist texted me, "I want to add one thing to your question about where I thought we [as a society] were headed, and I should have said, 'closer to the heart,' because I feel that is the whole point of transformation. It could have been an alternate title for the show." Through Engel's alchemical optimism, one can see how Toffler's serious malady of how disorientation becomes a catalyst for transformation. Unlike the world of saturated scrolling images, the most compelling part is not the paint's surface but the world Engel allows us to enter. Depending on the direction we choose to walk through the darkness of the digital jungle and the perspective through which we see Shifting Terrain, beneath the surface, getting "closer to the heart" winds inevitably through the unavoidable algorithmic distractions. Yet Engel and his art remind us that beauty and respite rest in the shared organic tones of human fallibility, the chimeric improvise, and connection with carbon-based life.

Wu's overflowing dinner tables situate the viewer as if we are the camera in an influencer's socially empty experience. Her flat planes of saturated color recall Alex Katz and Barkley L. Hendricks; the paintings' heightened chroma amplify the scene's artificiality. The artist says the exhibition is structured around titles that echo the courses of an Italian meal: primo, secondo, formaggio, and dolce, "like a love letter" to her Italian partner. However, Feast's central theme centers on Mukbang culture: online videos featuring content creators known as Mukbangers who gain followers by consuming prodigious quantities of food.

Mukbang, which began in South Korea as a way to virtually eat together, has shifted into a spectacle competition of follower counts. What was once a virtual space for eating together has become a globalized, solitary affair in 21st-century digital-mediated realms. Wu, born in 2001 of a digitally native generation, tells me of Mukbang culture, "It has shaped my relationship to my body and how I see myself. I was interested in the voyeuristic aspect and the aspect of the Asian women who participate in it. You only see them from their busts up. I did Mukbang paintings before the ones in this show. In Feast, I wanted to interrogate it more. It heightens the surrealness of life around me. It becomes more apparent that everything online is a lot of smoke and mirrors."

Wu connects today's voracious appetite for digital consumption with art history through Dutch Pronkstilleven, 17th-century still life that focuses on copious quantities of food set on lavish tables. Wu's feasts like Pronkstilleven are choreographed scenes, leaving viewers to sift through objects of desire symbolizing globalization while provoking reflection on excess, impulse, and the pleasure of looking.

The artist grounds Feast in contemporary academic discourse on race, gender, and class status as they relate to eating. Wu tells me that scholar Kyla Wazana Tompkins's book Racial Indigestion has inspired her, causing her to consider "How you consume and what you consume are related to how we are perceived. We are making bodies consumable bodies. It is a performance around the body and race." Beyond Tompkins, the artist notes, scholar Anne Anlin Cheng also inspires her: "She inspired me with ideas in her book Ornamentalism on how Asiatic femininity is experienced in Western imagination as ornaments." 

In Feast, Wu's subjects become ornamental vessels allowing for Mukbang's vicarious, calorie-free consumption; yet, stepping out of the smoke and mirrors, we see that the Asian female subjects in her paintings are the object. The usual act of seeing the food consumed by an ever-slender internet star translated into paint adds depth to their digital context, in which they are less a person and more an objectified persona in the algorithm of internet life. 

In previous exhibitions, Wu confrontationally situated viewers, on the ground beneath the aggressive shovel of a topless woman or perhaps as being watched through the mini blinds by a bare-breasted female, yet in Feast's most commanding pieces, the viewer sits across the dinner table from young women who sitting tall, skin tones as monochromatic as the backgrounds, leave an aesthetic contrast between the food's realism and its adjacent consumer. The sitters' overly energetic eyes fix on the viewer as their unnaturally large smiles feign for our attention. 

In Sweet Treats (Dolce), a mountain of desserts appears to compress Wayne Thiebaud's oeuvre with a 1970s-saturated cookbook photo, pulling us past the female figure's bust towards her overly enthusiastic eyes, loaded with faux pleasure. Returning our gaze, the sitter is backdropped by an Italian countryside; its atmospherically shaded sky appears painted by the brush of an anime artist. Yet despite the fabulously painted realism of the food, nothing, it seems, in her world is real. 

A similar composition in Costco Chicken (Secondo) situates the viewer in the direct gaze of the Mukbanger backdropped by a monochromatic wall that collapses depth, heightening the confrontation. The chicken is not just any chicken; it's Costco chicken. The piece speaks to the artist's inspiration from Tompkins's writing on race, social class, and its connection to the food one consumes, according to Numerator, a market research firm: "Compared to the average American consumer, Costco shoppers are 81% more likely to be Asian." Wu says of being Asian American, "I was lucky that I could go back to China on a semi-frequent basis. I've gotten to go back, and it's a different world for me from the suburb I grew up in, Tampa, Florida. It's become very important for me to understand contemporary Chinese culture. All of my family is still there." The bulk brands' cost efficiency contrasts with the Mukbanger's pinky finger etiquette, historically a status symbol of the elite, later emulated by the working class. 

Wu reveals the often unseen influence of different worlds in Local Perversion. The twenty-something sitter in the oil paintings has been exchanged for an adolescent rendered in colored pencil who, left alone to eat, is readying to consume a thin, bikini-clad Barbie doll, suggesting an early infusion of Western beauty standards and a melding of worlds in Wu's life and paintings. 

L. Song Wu's Feast entices, confronts, and questions our world with a dynamic mix of emotions as if an id for the digital age from the supposed safety of screens, leaving the consumer stuffed with food and surrounded by online followers, yet empty and isolated. The artist says of her inspiration, "I found Mukbang so fascinating. There are so many reasons why people engage, like the voyeuristic aspect and living through the Mukbanger's experience; there is an erotic aspect to it. It's about consuming the person more than the food. It's erotic to watch; there is a social aspect that makes it popular. But people in the West don't eat with one another anymore. We eat alone at our desk, we eat fast." 
​
Wu speaks with a vulnerable honesty, her paintings with confrontational humor, all of which allow us to see society, the online gluttonous subculture, and the consumers of screen culture as the consumed; her artwork asks us: with all this consumption, does anyone ever feel full? 

For millennia, humans have explored meteorological phenomena as countless cultures around the world have colored such elements the home of gods, the place of utopia, and the source of deadly storms. Sandström's washes, pools of paint, and brushstrokes visualize the ancient fascination with the heavens, infusing her pigment with the mystery of the sky's water passing from ocean shores to the porous nature of rain clouds, casting the entire hydrologic cycle in technicolor. 

In interviews, Sandström recounts merging with nature as she skis from her house to the studio, experiencing a sense of floating on winter snow. Once in the studio, she describes the painting process as a meditative experience that releases internal conflict. Amidst this process, her canvases take their first pigment as she pours diluted acrylic liquid paint, whose pooling edges spread like alluvial fans, recalling Helen Frankenthaler, with orbs and uninhibited brushstrokes that evoke the work of Adolph Gottlieb. Sandström's paintings exude an effortless flow as if clouds of color are narrating a poem on the dynamic nature of their existence.
​
The artist is not imposing her will as much as she is collaborating with drift, saturation, spill, eclipse, amidst condensation and marine masses. The fluidity of forms manifests states that range from tranquil to just at the edge of a vortex's intensity. Her works gain depth through optical breathing, a visual space between layers created by shifts in color and form, which, devoid of a vanishing point, suggests expansion and contraction, much like respiration.
As vapor defies gravity, forming clouds, pools of color combine, invoking storms on Sandström's canvases. Streaks of cadmium red get left behind the sky's moving mass of aerosol, lending movement to layers which gain context aside orb-like celestial bodies the artist employs as if illustrating Plato’s description of the formation of the universe as fire, earth, water, and air all existed in disorder before the god began to shape them… He set them in proportion, binding the visible and tangible world together so that it might be one and whole and complete. Calling forth such elements of the earth's forces, Sandström's works convey a sense of overseeing the intersection of meteorology, myth-making, and emotion. 

Intimate interactions equally exist between the sea and the sky, as do danger and beauty. The work Undae, taking its name from the ancient Latin plural for wave, shows us the beauty of the ocean that belies its ferocity. Bottomless blues create depth that pulls us into a wave's dark chasms, touched at its edge in a wash of red. At center stage, a decadent dollop of un-emulsified sea foam white awaits the crest of a curling dark wave's crash, creating tension that the floating foam is about to be pulled into a dark blue abyss. 

In an exhibit that spans a spectrum from pure abstraction to hints of place, Nimbus’s composition suggests it dreams of becoming a landscape once the canvas's fire-red sun sets. A lone cloud appears to float out at sea, far from the safety of the shore, in places most of us will never see. Paradise Lost’s celestial orb performs a similar act as if the clouds hinted at throughout the exhibit have here become a place where the moon rests when the sun is seen. With their sweeping chromatic veils, Sandström shows us atmosphere in flux, what light becomes as darkness sets in, and of the darkness when it meets day.

Sandström's Ravel series suggests an artist keen on showing us the parts that compose the sum, upon which all systems depend. Ravel IX evokes a diffusion of inks steadied despite time, just as night eventually overtakes light, without the sea, how would we perceive the sky? If atmospheric elements are interdependent, what of the worlds between antipodes? 

Penumbra produces a horizonless space, layering sea storm with nebula and nimbus. In the space between dark and light, Sigrid Sandström visually manifests vast systems that have long challenged comprehension. Her paintings create a visual language for the unstable, reflecting uncertainty as an essential component of awe and wonder. True to the nebulous nature of the cosmological systems that have inspired us since the dawn of time, Sandström has said of her work, "My paintings have many secrets and hidden layers beneath the surface." Breathing between her hidden layers, the artist creates a dynamic screen for emotive experience and the projection of imagination, recalling ancient myth-making and the mysteries that exist in half-lit shadows, shrouding elemental forces in secrecy.

The excess of unimportant information Richter referred to in his art before the advent of the internet has since become the norm, burying us under an avalanche of information, pushing the historical power of painting past the threshold of obsolescence. Yet the physical nature of viscous paint and Völker's wet-on-wet techniques in constrained space continue to capture attention through conveying the increasingly rare experience of seeing something handmade. Völker's blurring brushstrokes become a countercurrent to internet immediacy, evoking the essence of a glitch in the digital matrix, which has conditioned society to see reality on a screen. Here, the artist's blur counters the subject matter, pushing our eyes to search for visual stability amidst illusion. 

In the search across the canvas and through the exhibits' paintings, illusion and reality blur as the viewer's eyes bounce back and forth between the painter's effects. The imagery conveyed in his subject matter is always a dancing glance of the brush past realism, venturing into the painterly. Through the materiality of his paint and bold colors, Völker recalls Édouard Manet’s painterly accents, bridging realism and Impressionism, which helped manifest modern art in the 19th century. Völker's brushstrokes move from representation and abstraction to optical distortion, challenging the very nature of seeing. What could be more apt for a painter in our digital world? 

The artist situates his subject matter between classical observation and post-digital consciousness informed through layers of art history. In pieces titled Vase, flattened perspectives, tight framing, and a luminous contrast of saturated light reflect the attention-capturing visuals of social media. Völker's use of these effects transmits a play of the internet's illusion, allowing the ancient medium of paint to breathe from a grave the internet helped dig. The artist's subject matter draws inspiration from 17th-century Dutch floral still life, often depicted at the height of beauty, which symbolically prognosticated on the fragility of the wealth of the Golden Age's expanding capitalist economy. In Völker's still life, we are past the point of prognostication, standing at the threshold of consumer culture’s decay; petals have come undone, their stems bend impotently. 

Beyond Gerhard Richter's painterly blur effect, Völker's Zwei Kerzen (Two Candles) references Richter's renowned candles series, here sharing its title with Richter’s 1982 piece. Richter began painting candles that he noted were only intended to look pretty, though he shared that they did evoke contemplation on memory, yet later they came to be interpreted as a protest against East Germany's oppressive Communist government. Richter's candles, once tall, have been reduced to short nubs by Völker, leaving us to the final moments of blurred flames. What was once intended to look pretty and later came to be seen as honoring cultural memory through protest in Völker’s hands evokes feelings of a 21st-century society at the threshold of darkness and the dimming of collective memory. 

The exhibit's disparate subject matter forms a transgressive network, each piece a node in a greater system of communication. Calf's Head and yet another Vase connect death with life and the permanence of plastics. The flower's cellophane reflects our age of packaged consumption as light bends through the vase's water, creating visual refraction that plays with perception.

Bon-Bons Herzen (Sweet Hearts) plastic wrappers contrast the sweet candies, to be consumed in minutes, with the bitter reality that their wrappers will last for multiple lifetimes, a dear price for a moment of pleasure. The artist, a vegetarian, pushes the viewer further into the depths of contemplating the human condition of consumption through Zwei Herzen (Two Hearts). The candies' cutesy hearts in sugar become that which was taken from an animal's chest, the vital organs' brushstrokes re-creating the fleshy soft tissue's elasticity, reminding us this meat once moved. 

     Völker's Heart to Heart pulls us in for an intimate conversation on the fleeting essence of desire, perception, and humans' ancient obsession with triumphing over nature. While 17th-century still life meditated on humans' worship at the altar of consumption, Völker's possess the potential to act as a vehicle for redemption from a world of immediacy, presenting painting as a critical technology of materiality that contemplates the ethics of seeing. As the artist challenges viewers to have a heart-to-heart, he reminds us of paint’s ability to blend illusion with reality and leave us with questions on the blurred nature of perception. 

For Magos, a third-generation Mexican-American, painting operates as a form of visual storytelling inspired by the ancient traditions of Mesoamerica. His dense, flattened picture planes recall codices, early American manuscripts that used equally flattened pictograms, from the ancient Maya to the Mexica, to record histories, myth, and cultural memory. Magos’s paintings could operate as an ethnographic encyclopedia of Mexico's visual culture while evoking the contemporary cacophony of consumer branding to offer commentary on the blending of social identity. "My work is multiversed, multilayered, multidisciplinary, and introspective," he explains. "It speaks to cultural identity and weaves a narrative about who I am."[1]
​
Beyond ancient symbology, Magos draws from modern Mexico's urban vernacular traditions, particularly the rótulos, hand-painted commercial signs whose humor and bold color long animated cityscapes. Once an attribute of working-class expression, the rótulo has recently faced erasure through corporate "whitewashing" campaigns designed to standardize urban aesthetics. By incorporating rótulo motifs into his canvases, Magos honors their history of coloring urban aesthetics. The artist says of the exhibition, "Over the span of this series, I have been reading about Mesoamerican groups, how they structured their societies, how they wrote and documented their belief systems. I have a linguist book that breaks down the symbols used in Nahuatl, the original language of the Mexica (Aztecs). You could say I am an anthropologist-social-psychologist-historian. I really like learning about the past as a way to understand modern times."[1]

Visually similar to the rótulos, Magos incorporates the rich folk art traditions of La Lotería, a card game of chance associated with social gatherings in Mexico, tracing its history to Spain and Italy.[2] Often, the elite would play the game during the colonial era before adoption by the working class. The artist's direct reference, seen in El Frijol de La Madre Corazón (The Bean of The Mother Heart) through the lotto card El Corazón (The Heart) makes a layered commentary of the historical blending of identity, further indicated when set aside La Virgen de Guadalupe (The Virgin of Guadalupe), the most widely reproduced image in Mexican art history and one of the most revered and viewed images in the world which tells the story of blending Indigenous culture, narrative, and imagery with Catholicism and Spanish colonization.[3]  

​Magos recontextualizes The Virgin of Guadalupe as being literally consumed by the Mesoamerican Feathered Serpent, indicating the indigenous cultures of Mexico's consumption of a new brand of thinking and identity: colonialism’s Catholicism.  Art history is further referenced through the prayer hands common in Catholic Mexican folk art, countering the Indigenous man recalled from a codex, all cast in the bold colors, which evoke Mexico's rich history of muralism. This menagerie of influence and pop art aesthetic draws parallels with contemporary Mexican and American artists, such as Enrique Chagoya, whose codices and Esther Hernández's Sun Mad (1982) also incorporate pop culture references and visual wit to expose contradictions, injustices, and absurdities. 

Magos' stories and messages occasionally resemble emojis that, when contextualized through the show title Ancestral Download, one can read the tension of a past informing the present while the present exerts its influence of interpretation on the past. In Pesado (Heavy), the titular script recalls the typeface associated with Chicano lowrider culture. Beneath the text, a laborer drags a hand cart weighted down by ancient cultural icons. Carrying the stone sculptures of multiple Mesoamerican cultures alludes to the burden of representation and the nebulous nature of identity. Humorously, the sculptures of the past are stacked beside a box of popular Mexican brand beer, Modelo (Model). The brand's name plays on the irony that we are witnessing a model of labor and the burden of carrying cultural memory and its expectations into the modern world. Pesado's simple design and composition contrast with the complex cultural weight of Mexican history, both romanticized and stigmatized. 

The influence of Rasquache, a Chicano artistic sensibility that evolved from the resourcefulness of making art from basic materials to blend Mexican traditions with American life,[4] is evident throughout the exhibit's artworks; it is most clearly illustrated in the painting, Joyero con Joyas de Calidad (The Jeweler with Quality Jewels). A street vendor sells plastic inflatable toys and balloons of ancient cultural symbols; his presence separates the words Joyero, Joyas, and Calidad, recalling hand-painted signage of jewelry stores in working-class communities. The vendor's DIY resourcefulness is both a financial necessity and a sense of pride, suggesting these elements often comprise the hyphen in Mexican-American.

Like all other elements the viewer is downloading in Magos' paintings of layered cultural meaning, color takes on particular significance. Each painting's background in rich yellow recalls corn's prehistoric connection to Mexico. The staple crop of Mesoamerica is Magos' recurring motif, referencing the food that many of the region's greatest cultures relied upon and revered through gods. In Cristal Fritos Baile (Crystal Fried Dance), an ancient Teotihuacan mask, some scholars suggest is an early ancient reference to a corn god in the Americas,[5] [6] is crowned by the new corn god of the Americas, Frito-Lay's corn chips. 
​
Rayos Magos Ancestral Download takes viewers on a visual journey through the art, styles, and symbolism of the Americas, telling stories of how the past blends with the present under the pressure of circumstance to create something altogether unique. Embodying this, the artist says, "I love the ability to create something from nothing. This to me has always been a magical process. Therefore, I consider myself a magician/alchemist because I can take various materials and slap them together and make something new."[1] Such alchemy of syncretism, often associated with religion, as we see through Magos' paintings, is intrinsically interwoven in Mexican-American cultural identity. While offering social commentary and cultural insights backdropped by the dark clamor of today's cultural wars, Magos provides respite from the labor of trumpeting ideology through inviting us to consider the complexity of what we download with nuanced introspection and the ability to laugh at the absurdity of our present. 


References:

1. Belly, M. (2025, October 1). Studio Visit & Interview With Rayos Magos — Moth Belly Gallery. Moth Belly Gallery. https://www.mothbelly.org/studio-visits-articles/studio-visit-interview-with-rayos-magos
2. ¡Lotería! — MOLAA | Museum of Latin American Art. (n.d.). MOLAA | Museum of Latin American Art. https://molaa.org/loteria
3. Kilroy-Ewbank, L. (n.d.). Smarthistory – Virgin of Guadalupe. https://smarthistory.org/virgin-of-guadalupe/
4. Rasquachismo : a Chicano sensibility · ICAA Documents Project · ICAA/MFAH. (n.d.). https://icaa.mfah.org/s/en/item/845510#?c=&m=&s=&cv=1&xywh=-1136%2C-1%2C3927%2C2198
5. Stone mask from Teotihuacan in Mexico. (2023, November 22). Uffizi Galleries. https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/mask-teotihuacan
6. Teotihuacan artist(s) - Mask - Teotihuacan - The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (n.d.). https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/307771

In a conversation with the artists, he speaks of the inspiration of the take-out containers, saying, "I saw all these plastic and paper take-out containers and pizza boxes piling up in my building's recycling bin during Covid. So I began using my own take-out containers and setting them up in my studio. It seemed cliché to do it, but after I did it, I liked it, and I thought, 'How do I fight against and push through the cliché?' The more I worked with them, the more I realized their potential. I wondered, 'What can I do for this period where we don't know what is going to happen? How do I document the uncertainty?"​

Ultimately, the artist employed Renaissance-era compositional techniques and 17th-century Dutch still-life motifs to create geometrically sound pictures capable of capturing our collective memories. Beyond masterpieces from centuries long past, Diehl's compositions evoke the restrained sensibility of a 21st-century Giorgio Morandi, the 20th-century Italian artist best known for his muted, minimalist still life depicting quotidian vessels. Diehl speaks of his inspiration from Morandi as gradual. "Im a big fan of Morandi. I was at one of Wayne Thiebaud's lectures, and he would always mention Morandi. Initially, it didn't catch for me, but at a second lecture by Thiebaud, he mentioned Morandi again, and the more I looked, the more I saw. You have to be quiet with yourself."

Diehl's series, Take-Out Only of the single-use, disposable containers, collected during the pandemic, reflects on a pathogen's impact on humanity while reminding us of our shared ephemerality. Beyond the subject matter's connection to the pandemic, his renderings of the mass-produced single-serving containers could equally allude to the 21st century's culture of consumption and its isolating solitude. The disposable packaging testifies to the anxieties of touch and contamination becoming contemporary society's fruit bowl and serving dishes, commonly seen in the 17th-century still life. 

The works created on handmade Renaissance-style linen hemp paper made at Magnolia Editions, in Oakland, California, possess a texture and durability that become an artwork in itself, elevating a realistic drawing into an emotive visual memory, giving shadows a sculptural depth to lend an air of importance to the food containers, soon to become trash. 

The paper is a perfect substrate for connecting the Renaissance's plague and the adoption of new ideas to the 2020s. Diehl says, "This show is as much about the paper as what I've drawn on it." His works offer continuity with convention through his use of chiaroscuro and gradation, yet the subject matter marks a rupture with tradition. The paper's archival permanence meets disposability, conferring historical weight upon objects of crisis and consumption. 
   
Drawing's straight-on, frontal perspective situates the viewer as if we are in an intimate conversation with the work's compositions, which recall early Renaissance training in geometry and perspective that later shaped the still-life genre's spatial logic. At the time, the learned understood the mathematically sound shapes to be a manifestation of divine order. 

For Renaissance artists, the circle symbolized God’s perfection and the square the earthly realm. Diehl's square pizza boxes and take-out containers recast the once sacred form as disposable matter destined for landfills. Yet, the sphere, sitting at the table's edge, connects with a 17th-century Dutch still-life motif in which the fragile nature of human existence could roll off the table, shattering on the floor.

For centuries, skulls have acted as an overt symbol of Vanitas, a reminder of life's transience, the futility of pursuing earthly pleasures, and a visual reminder to maintain our attention on the divine. In Life is Precarious (Skull and Glass Marble) #2, Diehl employs such symbols; the sphere sits just a breath's whisper from the table's edge. The skull's matte density contrasts with the sphere's translucent fragility, establishing a visual dialogue between opacity and reflection, mortality and consciousness. Importantly, in this sphere, we see the artist's reflection staring down his subject matter, a historic motif of artists meditating on their mortality, pushing viewers to ponder the relationship between reflection and memory, art and reality. 
The artist's experiences during Covid became a transformative chapter in his life, its gravitas becoming its own motivation, of which Diehl says, "My partner passed away during Covid, and this whole thing about our existence and the phrase we always hear, ‘life is short’, got me thinking about these artworks as Vanitas. I count my days, but I love what I do, a lot of it is subconscious. Covid showed us that life is short. I lost the love of my life; she was my muse, my high school sweetheart, and it was what happened after her death and during Covid that these experiences of life being short really began to register.”

Simple objects, as in Still Life Study with Glass Marble, backdropped by such stories, stir emotion and inspire curiosity. In the 2024 drawing, the vessels' liquids suggest medicinal tonics set in constrained space, aside glass marbles, prompting viewers to consider whether the vessels are half full or half empty. Though clearly evoking Giorgio Morandi, the piece set amongst the exhibit's pandemic-inspired take-out containers recalls the uncertainty surrounding vaccines, medicines, and home remedies during the early years of Covid. 

Diehl's subject matter takes on a dramatic shift in Stick of Butter #2. Experimenting with Steel Wool rust powder, the artist's medium becomes a message of aging through an image both precise and fragile. The packaging seen throughout the exhibition in this 2025 piece is finally coming undone. The medium of rust, as unstable as the butter it depicts, counterposes the butter's nourishment with rust's oxidation, suggesting that time is the true pigment. 

Guy Diehl's Drawings emerges as a quiet meditation by an artist in his eighth decade, revealing a resonant honesty toward impermanence. "The purpose of my paintings is to slow people down. People walk away saying' They calm me down, they lure me in." Through rust and traditional mediums on handmade paper, he invites us to contemplate the nonmaterial texture of time, while expanding on universal themes transmitted through transforming the pandemic's take-out boxes into contemporary Vanitas.
​
His works succeed through a mastery of formal aesthetics that lure us in to consider the uncomfortable concept of mortality with an existential tenderness. As the lavish feasts of centuries past have given way to solitary single-serving meals, the artist composes an elegy of our precarious era, illustrating that even the most ordinary objects can reflect humanity's mortality and capacity for deep introspection as we collectively move toward the same vanishing point.

Maize's art practice thrives through roots deeply embedded in the Midwest, having lived in Michigan for more than three decades after getting a BFA and MFA at Indiana University. The exhibition feels as if a handwritten story whose author is genuinely taken by the tranquil rhythm of rural life as the length of days fades. Two paintings depict solitudinous houses, one draped under autumn's long shadow the other imbued by winter's light along with a lone self-portrait are outliers of the show's focus, one and a half dozen still life evoking memory's soft edges. 

In Maize's Recent Paintings, vessels emerge as protagonists, poised at the edges of tables or balanced on otherwise bare shelves, drawing our gaze with the same softness as a whisper animating silence. Vases are carefully arranged as if a curator's eclectic modern collection inspired by an era when their antecedents were less for decoration and more utilitarian. While Cézanne's post-impressionistic color planes enrich the canvases, soft hints of Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin inform the compositions that feature fruit, yet it is the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi who most clearly inspires Maize.
Morandi once said, "I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else." Maize summons such moods through her painterly brushstrokes, emphasizing atmosphere over precision and a shadow's depth of silence, gently focusing our eyes on privacy’s effect on perception.

In (Untitled) Landscape, the artist offers us the exterior within which her still life could reside. The house's door and windows are hardly more than a suggestion; the structure acts as an archetype for rural life. The piece's red underpainting offsets the foliage's changing greens, coupled with a harvested amber field and the chimneys' shadow cast long across the roof, all suggesting days are shortening and life is decelerating towards a contemplative time. 

Bowls on Table tells us of the beauty in rural life's quiet persistence as enamelware dishes separated by homemade bread rest on a honey-colored farmhouse table. The ordinary objects take on a meditative mood in the painting's cool light as a visually textured blue-gray background, and golden ochre paint layers highlight Maize's ability to create a complexity of depth through visual texture. 
Beyond her skillful use of scumbling to suggest depth, she does so through the table's geometry receding into the distance of constrained space, constructing a dynamic composition that at just 6 inches by 6 inches combines Chardin's 18th-century still life celebrating the ordinary with Cézanne's dynamic color patches to romantically evoke houses where food is made by hand.

The solitude of simple life appears within reach through Chair and Table with Yellow Vase. The artist creates ambiguous edges and casts dark shadows on the yellow floor, contrasted by the pastel periwinkle wall. Her underpainting, scumbling, and bright light hold our attention, yet it is her clear use of a horizon line and orthogonals that pull our eye through the picture, allowing us to linger in a room comprised almost entirely of negative space.

Morandi's influence is best felt in the exhibit's most colorful painting, Yellow Carafe with Vases, where we find Recent Paintings’ brightest celebration of the 20th-century Italian painter's meditative still life depicting his serial collection of vases. Maize similarly employs such objects as the Italian painter did to bring us into the mystery of silence that long inspired Morandi, who once mused, "Everything is a mystery, ourselves, and all things both simple and humble."

Catherine Maize's Recent Paintings at Paul Thiebaud Gallery draw from the abstract realm of imagination, blurring the edges of reality's forms, visually summoning the quiet corners of rural life, capturing the essence of Giorgio Morandi's simply prescient idea, "To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see."
​
Maize skillfully paints such humble simplicity, offering us room to introspectively explore the organic nature of ideas, uninterrupted by the digital world's demand for attention. In the artist's small, powerful corners of quiet farmhouses far from the city's sounds, she turns our gaze from the glow of a screen to the beautiful nature of light and objects' ability to create shadow. Maize makes the ordinary interesting, reminding us, amidst the acceleration of life, that her quiet, stillness, and simplicity can give us back needed portions of the attention and tranquility society seems to have lost. 

Just inside the gallery, a soft hum from the neon sign's transformer signals one's arrival at an uncanny intersection where creative imagination, inspired by modern scholarship, converges with art history and immigration, as ancient history synchronizes with contemporary agony.

The neon sign’s text, set in an Old English typeface recalling Chicano lowrider culture, [1] reads: “America Your Not is America My.” Seen from the street, its red glow evokes the red-light district where Morales grew up in Tijuana, Mexico. The unusual layout pushes the eye to flow back and forth as if following the bends of a river while searching for meaning. Tijuana itself sits beside the Tijuana River, which originates in Mexico and crosses the border into the U.S.; its currents have left an imprint on Morales’ life and art. During his artist talk, he reflected: “I grew up crossing the border every day until I was 20 years old.” [2] Finding meaning through reordering the phrase into “My America is not your America” underscores the vastly different cultural, economic, and historical realities shaping the Americas.

The exhibit's most powerful works are a series of eight watercolors titled Gemelos, Spanish for "twins." In each piece, two bodies cram into a confined space that the artist describes as portals.[2] The paintings are based on images documenting children smuggled across the Mexico/U.S. border by hiding themselves in the stuffing of car seats.

The Gemelos series' social commentary draws from an ancient past while reflecting on today's most pressing struggles. In ancient Mesoamerica, the Popol Vuh, a Maya origin myth, centers around twins who, throughout their transformational journey, overcome deadly tests of endurance as they pass through portals that allow them to traverse disparate worlds. Along the way, they dress themselves in humble rags of the poor, experience a process of death and resurrection, all before triumphing over malevolent forces through self-sacrifice and magical performances.[3] 

The Gemelos works are separated from the wall by small, raw wood beams, a recurring medium the artist uses to reference a common building material that he notes alludes to the act of immigrant labor. [1] The assembled wood structure suggests a fence creating a border between the artworks and the gallery's wall. As viewers, we are capable of seeing the watercolors through the empathic eyes of attempting to understand, yet remain incapable of knowing what it's like to be on the far side of the border fence separating the United States' culture of consumption from the desperation of circumstance. Nevertheless, the exhibit's Gemelos passage through Morale's proposed portals reminds us that, like any historical separation wall, it is not impenetrable, as the expanse of white paper that surrounds the gemelos' isolation functions as a visual wall through which their bodies pass.

The figure's shared space is so confined by the intimacy of their interconnected bodies, suggesting they have returned to the womb, alluding to the potential for rebirth. Incongruously, the dark claustrophobic constraints evoke a coffin-like structure, underscoring the duality of twins and the space they inhabit, characterizing a separation from the mother (land) and family, acting as a death of oneself with the opportunity for a new life on the far side of the wall. Their experience of death and rebirth is bound in a feat of endurance and self-sacrifice, recalling the Maya Hero Twins.

A variation on the theme My America is not your America echoes through the exhibit via music collaboratively created by Morales and Mexico City-based musician and producer, the Mexican Institute of Sound. The music emanates from a makeshift sound booth installation constructed of the same raw lumber as the fence behind the Gemelos. Inside, visitors can listen to music playing on a turntable. “It was designed for two people to enter at a time,” the artist explains, [2] a constraint that mirrors the intimacy and confinement of the Gemelos series.

A neon glass tube hangs inside the sound booth, saturating the room in a red glow, mapping the border between Mexico and the U.S.A., yet like the text at the front of the gallery, the border is upside down, intimately understood when one's world has been upended, the confined room's ambient protest music envelops visitors with a chorus of Your America is not America, My America don't let me down.[4]

Tucked beneath the turntable, in a space recalling the cramped dimensions of the Gemelos, we see Morales modernized La Mano Poderosa (The Powerful Hand), a widely produced 19th-century Christian symbol representing divine intervention that protects against malevolent forces, attracts prosperity, and promotes health. The imagery commonly circulated in rural towns in central and northern Mexico before migrating to the Southwest United States.[5] The artist has enlarged the hand's stigmatic wound into the land mass of the Americas. The modern evolution and dynamic symbolism in Morales' art history reference align with celebrated Chicana author Gloria Anzaldua, who wrote in 1987, "The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta (an open wound) where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms, it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture".[6]

The complexity that forms what Anzaldua termed a third country, border culture, could represent the artist’s family, Morales says, "I have a complicated family where there's coyotes, people who give safe passage to migrants coming across, there's judges, police, many different variations in my family." [2] His family, as influenced by the border culture, is hardly an outlier. Notably, the 'artist's family shares similarities with that of author Francisco Cantu, a former U.S. Border Patrol agent and grandson of a Mexican immigrant,[7] whose book, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, has inspired the artist's neon artworks.
​
Great art, it has long been said, holds a mirror to society. At Gallery Wendi Norris, Morales unearths a buried mirror reflecting hidden aspects of America's unsettling social landscape. Considering the parallels between his Gemelos series and the legendary Maya Hero Twins' self-sacrifice, journeys through portals, and magical performances, one clearly sees reflections of an ancient world. Yet, today, Morales' Gemelos' magical performance is one of invisibility, the unseen labor of immigrants performing for a culture of consumption. In Julio Cesar Morale's My America, the invisible twins, with one foot in this world and one foot in another, are citizens of a liminal land whose national anthem's chorus reverberates My America is not your America across a divided continent.


Citations:

1. “Julio César Morales | My America.” Gallery Wendi Norris, gallerywendinorris.com/exhibitions/105-julio-cesar-morales-my-america.
2. Morales, Julio Cesar. Artist Talk. Gallery Wendi Norris, 18 Sept. 2025. Unpublished recording by the author.
3. Christenson, Allen J., translator. Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiché Maya People. University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. Mesoweb, 2007, www.mesoweb.com/publications/Christenson/PopolVuh.pdf
4. "Mexican Institute of Sound (Ft. Graham Coxon) – My America Is Not Your America." Genius, genius.com/Mexican-institute-of-sound-my-america-is-not-your-america-lyrics.
5. Smarthistory. "The All Powerful Hand and Private Devotion in Mexico." YouTube, 15 Feb. 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=F16_D_B91n8.
6. "Borderlands = La Frontera : The New Mestiza : Anzaldúa, Gloria, Author : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive." Internet Archive, 2012, archive.org/details/borderlandslafro0000anza_k1y9.
7. Carr, Jane Greenway. "The Line That Rips Through People's Lives." CNN, 27 Apr. 2018, www.cnn.com/2018/03/02/opinions/francisco-cantu-immigration-border-jane-carr-opinion.

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. 
​
Reference:

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

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. 
​
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.

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.

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. 
​
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.

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. 
​
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.

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.
​
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.

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."
​
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.

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. 
​
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. 
​
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.

This article was originally published on July 13, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review

By Hugh Leeman
American artist, Chris Cosnowski's exhibition Shimmering Tale of still life oil paintings depicting toys and trophies at Dolby Chadwick gallery in San Francisco ask the viewer through the ancient coded language of the genre to decipher meaning in our era of postmodern myth-making, examine cultural narratives, and consider the absurdity of the present as we analyze images the artist spent countless hours producing by hand to realistically represent objects made in mere seconds through mass production. 

Shimmering Tale's use of still life contributes critical contemporary social commentary to a genre that has historically shown us that beneath the surface of material culture lies the opportunity to examine the values of the societies that consume the depicted objects. More than three millennia ago, the ancient Egyptians realistically depicted food on the tomb walls of the elite, believing that these images could become real in the afterlife. Two millennia ago, in ancient Pompeii, similar works reveal the society's sense of self. Although early 16th-century art critic Giorgio Vasari looked down upon the genre, by the late 16th century, Caravaggio brought it new life with his talents and inspired painters across Italy and Spain. Still life, however, is most often associated with the excesses, evolutions, and phenomenal social changes of the 17th-century Netherlands.

In 17th-century Dutch still life, one finds stunning representations of personal possessions, testament to commercial prowess, and the diversions of everyday life with an undercurrent that meditates on time. These works are best known for their flowers, whose ephemeral beauty speaks to life's transience while hinting at ethical dilemmas. In Shimmering Tale, Cosnowski's paintings perform a similar act, as his hyperrealistic representations speak to social concepts similar to those found in 17th-century Dutch still life, while humorously hinting at the dilemmas of today. 

Cosnowski's paintings conceptually connect deeply with the late 20th-century French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's writing. Baudrillard coined the postmodern term hyperreality to describe the growing avalanche of images in society and the yearning for distraction that had led to the creation of images less intent on showing us reality than on reshaping our perceptions of it. In Baudrillard's hyperreality, the genuine experience loses its luster to the shimmering appeal of the multiplicity of imagery. When real life becomes inferior to the images that depict it, society's affliction is most readily, albeit temporarily, treated through nostalgia. 

Cosnowski has expertly rendered and curated the still life as if photo shoots on social media aggrandizing mass-produced toys and trophies, nostalgic for a great American past that the artist hints is ambiguous at best. Nostalgia, his paintings suggest, is a natural reaction to postmodern skepticism triggered by the overwhelming amount of information and imagery. The objects rendered as plastic, gilded in cultural critique, speak to the power of myth to cast itself through multiplicity as if fact, and eventually into Baudrillard's hyperreality.
 
The great role of the artist is to expose cultural narratives that have become so normalized that we forget they are constructed. The stories encoded in Cosnowski's still life remind us of the stories a culture consumes to make meaning of its fears and project pride from its fantasies as if they were reality. Such a process is visualized in Shimmering Tale through the artist's depiction of plastic objects mass-produced from a mold.

In Old Mold (2024), the artist brings to life a pressed plastic trophy of a king in faux gold, backdropped by a gradient of lush purple, the color long associated with royalty, whose complement to the yellows in the gold trophy sets that painting alight. The artist's talent is evident in both technical acumen and concept. As the plastic has seeped out of the side of the mold, it has misformed the edges of the trophy king because the old mold has cast so many copies that its edges no longer align. Perhaps, the artists suggest through cipher, society is ready for a new mold to create a new ruler.

The exhibition's titular painting, Shimmering Tale (2025), shows us through the oversized trophy of a Cowboy on a bucking bronco the allure of America's great cultural tale: the tough guy who tames the wild west, bringing civilized culture and the freedoms of individualism through westward expansion to the teeming masses. The cowboy and his metallic luster, alas, are just plastic made to resemble gilded metal, confronting the viewer with the conceptual reality of identity construction through the mass production of artifice.

The cultural narrative extends beyond the American West and into the Western Hemisphere's most fertile field, feeding countless cultural values and inequalities, Eden. In Cosnowski's Eden (2025), a deer, a serpent, and a pink bunny meet in front of The Tree of Life, all elements cast in plastic, offering a postmodern interpretation of the classic. Here, the artist's humorous repackaging of the myth, once rich with ancient theological gravitas, becomes fit for our age of challenging universal truths.

The toy animals and tree in Eden exchange the story's sense of cosmic centrality for a modular group of accessories, as if Fisher-Price were commissioned to depict the book of Genesis. In doing so, moral tales become the commodified playthings of a consumer society's imagination. The deer is a proxy for the presence of Christ or longing for God, and the serpent for temptation, along with the tree itself, are deeply connected to the original telling of the tale. Yet, the pink bunny appears as if a glitch in the story, a result of society making a copy of a copy of the story for so long that it begins to mirror the artificiality of the bunny's pink plastic color. Cosnowski's pink toy bunny further evokes Jeff Koons' Inflatable Flower and Bunny (Tall White, Pink Bunny) (1979), a readymade from vinyl with mirrors, whose presence in the world of high art challenges cultural hierarchies and questions value systems. Precariously, in Eden, the pink bunny is easily within striking distance of the serpent's temptation.

In Step Right Up (2025), the viewer is greeted by Disney's smiling plastic Jiminy Cricket standing proudly atop a Rubik's Cube set on a pure white table. The unsolved Rubik's Cube stands as a visual shorthand for the complexity of society. To solve the 3D puzzle, there are reportedly 43 quintillion potential variations. Amidst so much possibility, the artist asks what is guiding our decisions in solving such perplexing situations as those with which we are faced today. 

The answer, it seems, is found in Jiminy Cricket, who served as the conscience to the famous lying puppet Pinocchio. Pinocchio wanted, more than anything, to be a real boy, not just a toy, yet for such a transformation, he would have to tell the truth and be unselfish. Thus, Jiminy Cricket was set to task to keep the puppet's nose from growing amidst the prevalence of complex decisions Pinocchio would incur. Chris Cosnowski, ever the conceptually clever tactician, nods at the absurdity of our current state of reality, his paintings acting as time capsules of our era's complexity. With a bit of nostalgic memory, one might recall it was Jiminy Cricket who famously said, "What's a conscience! I'll tell ya! A conscience is that still, small voice that people won't listen to. That's just the trouble with the world today."

The brilliance in Shimmering Tale lies in its coded language, which reads as a modern American saga. If one looks closely enough, the viewer can untangle allegories painted into the plastic pieces of nostalgic realism that allow us to see the beliefs, behaviors, and cultural memories of a nation, akin to more than three millennia of still life painters, from anonymous ancient Egyptian tomb painters to the 17th-Century Dutch still life or an Andy Warhol soup can, all tell fascinating tales about the societies in which the material culture was consumed. 

This article was originally published on August 18, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.

By: Hugh Leeman
     Daniel Cabrillos Jacobsen's show, Yesterday as in Tomorrow, of six small oil paintings at Municipal Bonds, invites the viewer's imagination to wander amidst muted tones, flattened shapes, and simplified forms, offering just enough to consider the past without telling us of its details. In detail's absence, the artist allows the rich tactile nature of texture to speak as canvas tooth shows through paint, or the rough fiber of burlap becomes an artifact acting as medium as much as support, and a fraying book cover that appears found at the far edge of memory establishes the fringes of a contemplative landscape. 
     
​     Cabrillos Jacobsen's artworks recall the paintings of early 20th-century French Impressionist Pierre Bonnard. Jacobsen, like Bonnard, often focuses on the realm just beyond our current place in the picture, past a window on the other side of a threshold, varying applications of paint permit one's eyes to pass through previous layers of paint on a visual journey into the artwork. Bonnard unlike many impressionists would not paint from life instead he would paint from memory [1] and this is where Cabrillo Jacobsen situates the viewer as what pulls one in is not what is in front of us but that which is beyond the doors and windows in an ambiguous space where brushstrokes record the beauty of banality over burlap adhered to canvas, uneven seams, and the fraying book cover lending a sense of confidence from a soul's well worn introspection.
  
     The works share a joy of solitude that consoles the yellowing pages of aged books whose earthy aroma takes us to an era of analog life. Bibliosmia is the pleasant smell caused by the chemical decomposition of binding glue and paper that supports the word's ink, its subtle sensory experience wafting into nostrils, softly whispering, one day I will be no more. Cabrillo Jacobsen's paintings remind us that memories' ultimate eventuality is to be forgotten, yet in their nebulous nature, on a journey to obsolescence, is the space left for imagination. 
     
     Such a space for imagination appears in the door in Untitled Yellow Home, where we stand before a modest table that hints at the quotidian through a coffee mug, a bowl of ripening fruit, and a vase with two yellow flowers blending with the monochromatic palette. Untitled Yellow Home shows a brown bookshelf with a plant hardly seen in brown greens, a humble wooden chair with an artwork on the wall, no details shared; it's simply a textured screen to explore. The potential in the painting comes from a vanishing point that borrows the bookshelf's brown and plants' green to construct a void, like a miniature Barnett Newman painting, line down the middle, here, separating the dark space from the door whose tiny knob transmits just enough information to mark the trailhead of what is just after the light. The entryway's orthogonal boundary furthers the effect of focus that the artist frames through a geometric cage rendered in a soft yellow-green, slightly obscured by later layers of ochre, recalling Francis Bacon's use of a similar structure. 

     Untitled Home arranges a similar scene to Untitled Yellow Home through open space created by a door's frame and the trapezoidal structure of its open door, inviting us into a place, at once certain and barely there. Unlike Untitled Yellow Home, here, after the threshold in the second space, the light is at its best, coming from a nondescript place with structures formed by soft edges heightened by the rounded corners of the canvas. The true call to curiosity is the textured strip of burlap upon which the second room is rendered with its fading details telling of a landscape just past yet another open door, pulling our eyes onto a terrace overlooking the soft topography of hills and a valley below. Eventually our eyes leave the distant topography's texture and return to the foreground, a room in browns the same tone as the unpainted portion of burlap peeks out at the top of the painting as subtle as the wooden wardrobe whose open door suggest the storage chest of mind upon which a vase, once again, supports two yellow flowers all hinting at metaphor through the sequence of open doors.
   
     The pensive atmosphere turns playful in When the Parents Away, the Cats Will Play as cats in soft silhouettes walk across the picture plane. Bonnard added cats to several of his paintings, lending his interiors a relaxed tone. Cabrillo Jacobsen performs a similar act through the cats to challenge the room's muted blues and softly shaped landscape under the dusky light of the sky seen past the wood slats of a window that leaves a lingering sense of contemplating change. Contemplative atmosphere aside, the cats, the title, and division of space between floor and wall created by a sloping seam in the canvas along with Cabrillo Jacobsen's flower vase from which two stems emerge sits all too close to the table's edge alluding to mischief indicating a story that sits untold with the books on the painting's shelf.

     Stories like memory shift with time, yet stories' malleability allows the seams of disparate memories' threads to be tied together. In Woman Reading the season shifts as early spring or late fall is rendered just past the window in leafless trees. Comfortably sitting inside, the space's protagonist, face devoid of detail, wears a shirt whose grid pattern, like the tablecloth's squares, visually connects to the several squared seams binding otherwise separate portions of canvas into a coherent whole. The show's recurring motif, a vase from which two yellow flowers emerge, sits atop a table, this time beside two mugs, one red, one blue, and a purple teapot signaling someone might sit, share tea, and a story like those of the countless others sitting on the shelves. 

     In Moonwatching, the room, its doors and windows left behind, underpainting's orange peeks from beneath a blue-purple sky, highlighting the moon's glow around the edge of leaves. Two figures in conversation, perhaps the fading memory of a first kiss, a distant horizon, and rising moon reflect across the water, story intimately interwoven with memory recalls Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest in which Algernon Moncrieff says, "Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us."[2]

     The stories from such a diary of memory are best told in Nightsky painted on a found book cover whose tattered edges and fraying fabric frame a landscape rich with elements of a Rothko in hand-held size. The book cover's red color vibrates around the border of green trees and through a thin beige wash forming a field all while enriching a purple night sky whose gradation tells the passage of time, a sense redoubled by the stars fading light that having finally reached our eyes carrying memories of places left behind, the ones we'll never know, their abstract truth like stories well told. In six small paintings, Yesterday as in Tomorrow holds the viewer through giving us places that, amidst their muted tones and simplified forms, allow us to set aside distraction and recollect with wonder how fleeting yesterday was and tomorrow will be. 


Citations:
1. “The Open Window.” The Phillips Collection, www.phillipscollection.org/collection/open-window.
2. Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. Boston: W. H. Baker Company, 1920. Baker’s Professional Plays. PDF file. Internet Archive, https://ia601308.us.archive.org/12/items/importanceofbein1920wild/importanceofbein1920wild.pdf.

By: Hugh Leeman
This article was originally published on June 17, 2025, in full with photos on Roborant Review.

     Masako Miki's show, Midnight March, at San Francisco's Institute of Contemporary Art, transports the viewer into a mythological realm that connects a deep folkloric past with contemporary social circumstances asking the viewer to question the stories society is built upon. 
    The artist's brightly colored, rounded sculptural forms made from densely matted felt, supported by tiny wooden legs within the ICA's dimly lit basement, backdropped by black walls of a stylized star-crowded night sky, transform the banality of the basement into a place where a distracted society can begin to gain a new angle on the shadows cast across the social landscape.
​
      In addition to the felt sculptures, the artist shows three paintings on paper and three small bronze sculptures. The ICA's new location was formerly the Bank of America's flagship San Francisco branch, with the small bronze sculptures appearing alongside empty lockboxes of former bank customers.
The artist is at her best with the three dimensional felted sculptures, which draw from her Japanese heritage, inspired by Japan's oldest religion, Shinto, and its supernatural beings known as yōkai. While viewers who follow Miki's work will see images they are familiar with from previous shows in the three paintings that pull from Shinto folklore, like her cheerfully stylized fox, it is the felted yōkai sculptures that are the central theme at the ICA and so prevalent one feels that we inhabit their space as opposed to the other way around.

     To enter Midnight March, the viewer descends a staircase aside a wooden terraced forum. One can imagine the terraced forum allowed the seated, when still a bank, to take in corporate talking heads giving presentations on interest rates. For Midnight March, viewers are presented with an entirely different perspective as one can look down past the seating and steps into what used to be the bowels of the bank at a half lit world of Miki's furniture sized felt sculptures. After the viewer walks down the steps, they enter a fantastical space populated by the artist's brightly colored, mostly ambiguous entities, giving the sense that they are encountering a visual representation of what 20th-century author Joseph Campbell referred to as the poetry of metaphor in mythology.

     The yōkai's role in millennia-old Japanese folklore ranges from malevolent to benevolent spirit-like forces understood to inhabit nature's awe-inspiring landscapes, from mountains, waterfalls, and forests to the commonplace corners of a dark closet. Whatever the intentions and location may be with each yōkai, they come out at night or the times between the changing of light when day breaks to dusk, acting as warning signs or simply inciting fear. Despite the foreboding nature of their appearance in Shinto belief, Miki has recreated them as cute, soft characters that seemingly challenge perceptions of their power.

      As the show title, Midnight March implies, it is the darkest hour of night when, according to the Japanese folkloric tale famous for its yōkai spirits, Hyakki Yakō, the supernatural breaks into the real world. The yōkai's midnight march from Japan's Hyakki Yakō and into the ICA traces its way through a rich tradition of stories deeply woven into the Japanese landscape and loosely understood as a manifestation of pandemonium. 
   
     The show becomes a fitting first site responsive exhibition for the newly relocated ICA as the ancient mythological spirit world the artist has created in rainbows of colored felt break into our real world through the darkened ICA basement once stacked with the real world of bank lock boxes and filing cabinets of financial spreadsheets. The timely exhibit speaks through metaphors that pull from the past and connect to today's society, deeply searching through the fabric of its cultural history amidst what seems to be an era enmeshed in a pandemonium populated by forces inciting fear and warning of what could come or already is. 

     Dozens of Miki's colorful yōkai sculptures sitting throughout all parts of the subterranean space allow viewers to come face to face with some as tall as 6 feet while others barely reach the knee. Yet, save the rare pair of closed eyes or lips that hang from the ceiling, the forms are largely unfamiliar, allowing the viewer to experience the potential of myth to pull us from time and place and situate us in the collective unconscious. 

     Miki's installation of the felted yōkai sculptures compels us to an internal place of pondering rather than paving the way for escape. Entirely unlike the escape of dopamine drenched infinite scroll rabbit holes of internet culture that can spread pandemonium, in Midnight March, we are taken to a place that has existed all along yet is often forgotten. A place where cultural myths, when questioned, often become unstable stories swaddled in candy colors appealing to the cultural imagination. Miki's show asks us if we examine these stories, can they act as reminders of society's contemporary folklore that can then be buried in the graveyards aside ancient beliefs to which society no longer subscribes? 
​
     Masako Miki's Midnight March allows us to consider the greater potential in our understanding of the cultural imagination by contrasting the dark history of yōkai in the dimly lit basement with soft, fuzzy, colorful felt forms all too large for the support of their tiny legs. Through this visual metaphor, the artist suggests the stories embedded in cultures' collective imagination and their invisible forces connected to contemporary culture's pandemonium can be toppled. This poetry of metaphor pulling from seemingly disparate sources points to art's potential for profundity and speaks directly of Miki's creative prowess.