969 Chung King Road
december 13, 2025 - JANUARY 3, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: DECEMBER 13, 5-8pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present She Who Holds the Sun, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles artist Mary Anna Pomonis. Pomonis combines sacred geometry with feminist iconography to create visual systems that hold, transmit, and protect energy. Her crisp geometric abstractions on shaped canvas meld ideas from mathematics, feminist theory, spirituality, and history in paintings that are both objects and thresholds. The title of the exhibition reimagines the title of Shelley Parker-Chan’s 2021 novel She Who Became the Sun, a historical epic that follows its main character in pursuit of self-obliterating greatness. Pomonis flips this pursuit, instead describing a female artist who, rather than becoming the thing she creates, holds it for a time and lets it go, like a mother releasing her child. This fundamental act of creation and release also describes the process by which these paintings came to be: each one reimagines a painting lost in the devastating Eaton Fire that ripped through Altadena in January 2025, resulting in a transformational body of work that turns loss into spiritual and creative growth. 

Pomonis lost an entire exhibition of paintings to the wildfire, over a half decade of work destroyed overnight. Writing about the loss in the days immediately following the fire, Pomonis declared the burned works offerings to the feminine divine: “I gave my best work up in this fire to a power greater than all of us and I believe that power cannot truly be lost. I will be transformed by the power that consumed my artwork.” She Who Holds the Sun is a tribute to the creative process that came after the fire, a burst of potential born from the ashes of lost work. Each painting in the exhibition takes a burned painting as its starting point, evolving in form and color into a transformational composition that both holds its antecedent close and lovingly lets it go. By looking simultaneously to the past and the future, Pomonis pushes the boundaries of her own practice to achieve newly resonant heights. This work is not about rebuilding what was lost, but rather about listening to what the loss made possible. 

Pomonis uses commercial airbrush techniques to realize complex geometric abstractions built using wireframe geometry, which uses points and lines to describe three-dimensional forms in a two-dimensional space. Pomonis’s forms suggest shields, crowns, portals, and celestial structures floating through picture planes as if arrested in the midst of tumbling, heaving, or folding in on themselves. Their vibrating color creates a highly physical viewing experience, just as the intricate mathematical forms invite close looking – the viewer cannot help but attempt to visually untangle these complex topographies. Pomonis collaborates with a mathematician to build the geometric forms, which are closely connected to naturally-occurring crystal structures. She sees them as manifestations of sacred geometry, illustrations of the connectedness of all life and the power of the divine feminine through which creation flows. Each canvas acts as a window into a sacred space, much like the rose window of a cathedral.  

Many of the works reference mythological queens and goddesses, tapping into the feminine divine that has ruled over transitional spaces for millennia. Yet these works are atemporal: they invoke a historical sacred feminine while also embodying a futuristic vision of female power. Their art historical precedents range from Judy Chicago’s feminist declarations to Agnes Pelton’s transcendental desert paintings. Pomonis draws upon deeply rooted symbols and ideas – the temple, the crown of thorns, the ascension, the void – and in so doing activates a foundational symbolic energy. 

In the downstairs gallery, Pomonis has curated a group show, She Who Made Me, featuring many other feminist artists whose work have held up her practice over a long but quiet career prior to the fire. With this exhibition, Pomonis continues to ponder on the sacred nature of female relationships and their power to transform the world through their web of social, spiritual, academic, and political influence.

Mary Anna Pomonis is a Los Angeles-based artist recognized for her abstract paintings that employ commercial airbrush techniques to explore themes of sacred art and feminine power. In 2025 her work is featured in Affirmations: Mindfulness in Contemporary Abstract Painting at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art in Rancho Cucamonga, California as well as Goddesses and Monsters at the SUNY Potsdam Art Museum. Pomonis has exhibited in notable galleries and institutions, including the Western Carolina University Museum of Fine Arts, the Torrance Art Museum, and the Lancaster Museum of Art and History. Her work has been covered by prominent publications such as the Los Angeles Times, The Art Newspaper, Cultured, Art Forum, Whitehot Magazine, Smithsonian, ArtNews and Artweek. Her curatorial projects and essays have been showcased in various museums and gallery spaces across Southern California. Pomonis is the Director of CSUF Just Arts, a campus-wide initiative dedicated to fostering creative collaborations that emphasize social justice and community engagement. Through this program, she works with students and faculty to connect artmaking with activism and collective support. She is also the founder of the Association of Hysteric Curators, a feminist collective based in Los Angeles. In 2024 and 2025, the collective presented Goddesses and Monsters: Works on Paper at the SUNY Potsdam Art Museum. Pomonis is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at California State University, Fullerton. Her achievements include receiving the Junior and Senior Faculty Research Grants in 2022 and 2024, respectively, and the Distinguished Legacy Award from the University of Illinois in 2022.

Selected Works

Installation

Press & News

Publications

969 Chung King Road
december 13, 2025 - JANUARY 3, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: DECEMBER 13, 5-8pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present She Who Made Me, a group exhibition curated by Los Angeles–based artist, curator, and educator Mary Anna Pomonis. The exhibition opens in conjunction with her solo show She Who Holds the Sun at Charlie James Gallery. Together, the two exhibitions form an interrelated dialogue about loss, renewal, and lineage, rooted in Pomonis’s personal experience of the 2025 Eaton Fire, which destroyed an entire body of her paintings. The new works in She Who Holds the Sun were created as acts of reconstruction, rising from the fragments of that loss.

She Who Made Me serves as the conceptual and emotional foundation for this process of recovery. The exhibition brings together artists who have profoundly shaped Pomonis’s artistic practice, including teachers, peers, and collaborators whose work embodies the matrilineal networks of influence and mentorship that sustain creative life.

The curatorial framework takes inspiration from Amelia Jones’s landmark 1996 exhibition Sexual Politics at the Hammer Museum, which positioned Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party as both anchor and provocation. In She Who Made Me, Pomonis extends this strategy, placing her own work in conversation with artists who have been central to her understanding of feminist practice, spirituality, and resilience.

Part memory book and part devotional, She Who Made Me is an exhibition about artistic inheritance, connection, and the continuum of care that defines women’s creative histories. It asserts that no artist works alone; every act of creation is sustained by the voices, visions, and labors of those who came before.

Participating artists: Alexandra Grant, Allison Stewart, Carole Caroompas, Carolyn Castaño, Cayce Zavaglia, Daniela Garcia Hamilton, Elise Neal, Judy Chicago, Julie Orser, June Edmonds, Maya Mackrandilal, Paula Wilson, Sabina Ott, and Susan Mogul.

 
Artist Bios

Alexandra Grant is a Los Angeles and Berlin-based artist whose work explores communication across languages and cultures through painting, drawing, and sculpture. She is represented by Miles McEnery Gallery in New York and carlier | gebauer in Berlin and Madrid.

Allison Stewart is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work examines American identity through the relics and mythologies of war. Her photographs are held in the Rubell Family Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Carole Caroompas (1946–2022) was a Los Angeles painter and performance artist known for narrative feminist works merging pop culture and classical imagery. The Carole Caroompas Estate is represented by Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

Carolyn Castaño is a Los Angeles artist using ecofeminist frameworks to explore landscape, migration, and identity. She is a 2025 Guggenheim recipient.

Cayce Zavaglia is a St. Louis–based artist known for her hyperreal embroidered portraits that merge painting and textile art. She earned her MFA in Painting from Washington University in St. Louis and is represented by William Shearburn Gallery, St. Louis.

Daniela Garcia Hamilton is a first-generation Mexican American painter whose vibrant works explore ritual, family, and immigrant identity.

Elise Neal is a Chicago-based artist exploring feminism and the body through pierced and modified figures. Originally from Los Angeles, she is completing her BFA in Studio Art with a focus in Painting at Columbia College Chicago.

Judy Chicago is a pioneering feminist artist best known for The Dinner Party. Over six decades she has redefined art history through collaborative, gender-centered practice. She is represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, and lives in Belen, New Mexico.

Julie Orser is a Los Angeles–based artist who deconstructs popular cinema to explore gender roles, narrative, and identity through video, photography, and installation. Her work is currently on view in Metro Art’s moving image installation at Leimert Park Station.

June Edmonds is a Los Angeles painter whose abstract works explore color, rhythm, and cultural identity. She is a 2022 Guggenheim recipient and is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

Maya Mackrandilal is a Los Angeles interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose work explores transcultural memory, gender, and labor through performance, sculpture, and writing.

Paula Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist based in Carrizozo, New Mexico, whose vibrant, layered works explore hybridity and embodiment across painting, printmaking, and performance. She is represented by Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami.

Sabina Ott (1955–2018) was a Chicago-based artist working across painting, sculpture, and installation. She was the founder of Terrain Exhibitions and received both NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships.

Susan Mogul is a Los Angeles multidisciplinary artist known for autobiographical feminist video and performance work. Her videos are in the collections of MoMA and the Getty Research Institute. She is represented by As Is Gallery, Los Angeles.

 
About the Curator

Mary Anna Pomonis is a Los Angeles–based artist, curator, and educator whose work bridges painting, social practice, and feminist collaboration. She has exhibited at the Western Carolina University Museum of Fine Arts, the Torrance Art Museum, the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, the Art Museum at SUNY Potsdam, and the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art. Pomonis is the founder of CSUF Just Arts, a campus-wide initiative fostering social justice through creative collaboration, and the founder of the Association of Hysteric Curators, a feminist collective whose exhibition Goddesses and Monsters (2024–27) is traveling nationally. She is Associate Professor of Art and Director of Graduate Programs at California State University, Fullerton. Her honors include the BlueRoof Firefly Residency (2025), CSUF Faculty Research Grants (2022, 2024), and the Distinguished Legacy Award from the University of Illinois (2022).

Selected Works

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961 Chung King Road
november 8 - december 13, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: november 8, 5-8pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present May the Ground Seethe, a solo exhibition of painting and sculpture by Los Angeles artist Shizu Saldamando. Saldamando’s intimate portraits distill figures from context, focusing on the body as the site of political struggle and communal joy. The title of the exhibition borrows a lyric from the song “MML” by Dorian Wood, whose portrait is a centerpiece of the show. Wood’s lyrics describe a collective movement built on love and rage, one that Saldamando takes up in this body of work. By spotlighting figures within her community who embody resistance to the prevailing currents of division and hate, Saldamando offers an alternative path of joyful, beautiful revolution.

Saldamando works on raw wood panel and incorporates mixed media collage into her paintings. The compositions often take into account the natural grain of the wood supports, most dramatically here in the portrait of Narsiso Martinez, where shades of green paint delicately follow the woodgrain, evoking a rolling landscape. Martinez is framed by gnarled fruiting tees executed in paint and enhanced with washi paper collage, nodding to both the artist’s Japanese heritage and the subject’s history in farm labor and his artistic focus on the dignity and rights of the often undocumented people who make up the agricultural labor force. The composition is framed at the corners in delicate gold leaf, lending the picture an almost baroque sensibility.

For Saldamando, materials are extremely important as signifiers of history and carriers of memory. Her wood panels nod to the beautifully crafted woods of Japanese design, but also to the small wooden sculptures made by the artist’s grandfather while he was interned with other Japanese-Americans during the second World War. The panel rejects the often heroically masculine twentieth century art history of painting on canvas. Instead of beginning with a blank canvas, Saldamando works with wood as a readymade, inviting its natural individuality into the work. Pigment fuses with support to create soft, nuanced surfaces that lend themselves to the delicacies of skin. Saldamando also often works with washi paper, collaging it into painted compositions or building delicate sculptural elements from patterned paper – as with several small paper flower sculptures in the exhibition – incorporating a rich history of craft production into the work.

Each painting pays homage to its subject, honoring their artistic spirit through detail and embellishment. Dorian Wood shines in a hot pink dress over intricate black lace, their defiant energy feathering around their body in ethereal bits of collaged silver and pink. Kindred spirit and fellow fine and tattoo artist Tamara Santibañez confidently wears a brick wall on their sweatshirt, a nod to their deeply-researched work on the brick as a symbol of resistance and power. The punk rocker and community organizer Marin is captured at local festival, Dyke Day LA - relaxed, joyful, present. The largest work in the exhibition finds counterculture photographer Louis Jacinto and his partner Kene Rosa in their living room, surrounded by Louis’ artwork and cushioned in striking patterns, a nod to Kene’s history in the fashion industry.

Each portrait, at its most basic level, counteracts the erasure of marginalized people by simply asserting their existence. But more importantly, Saldamando captures the spirit of resilience and confidence that true resistance requires. Her cast of characters together provide a portrait of the artist’s community. Each portrait captures and celebrates the specific details that people use to construct their personhood. The portraits also serve as memorials, uplifting and honoring the work of creating a joyful and revolutionary existence amid interlocking systemic oppressions. Each work keenly sees its subject and celebrates their contributions to the community, a vital project in this moment of widespread erasure and uncertainty. Just as Wood sings in “MML,” this body of work seeks to be “a mouthpiece of love, rising rising rising” in collective power and rage. These seeds have the power to rise from the ground and grow into a movement of community and care that builds upon foundations laid by histories of queer resistance, labor organizing, and environmental justice. Saldamando transforms legacies of prejudice and exclusion into odes to resilience and flourishing.

Shizu Saldamando’s work depicts American social spaces through portraiture. Her work celebrates peers, friends, and loved ones through paintings and drawings that honor the brief moments of connection that occur throughout daily life. Shizu was born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission District and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from UCLA School of Arts and Architecture and her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts.

Solo exhibitions include Momento, Pasadena City College Art Galleries, LA Intersections, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA; Shizu Saldamando, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; To Return, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; When You Sleep: A Survey of Shizu Saldamando, Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; All Tomorrow’s Parties, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA. Selected group exhibitions include: Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA), Phantom Sightings at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Trans-Pacific Borderlands, part of the Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA; We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles, an official collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale; Drawing the Line at Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA and The High Art of Riding Low at the Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, CA.

Saldamando’s work resides in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA), the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, Princeton University Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museu, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Fidelity Collection, the Cleveland Clinic Collection, and numerous other public and private collections. Saldamando lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Charlie James Gallery.

Selected Works

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969 Chung King Road
October 25 - december 6, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: october 25, 5-8pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is proud to present Elmer Guevara: Yesterday like today / Ayer cómo hoy, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In this new body of work, Guevara explores ideas of intergenerational memory and trauma, reflecting on his own family’s experience of civil war and unrest across time and space. The paintings meditate on the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising, which tore through South Central near where the Guevara family settled after fleeing violence in El Salvador. Time folds in on itself in these paintings, layering the civil war, which predated the artist’s birth, on top of the chaotic experiences of 1992, while also gesturing to the natural disasters and political unrest of the present moment. Despite his heavy subjects, Guevara never loses sight of the personal stories of regular people working to make a life in tumultuous times.

Mural-sized painting The Get Down is Guevara’s largest to date, stretching to nearly 14 feet. It depicts an amalgamation of scenes from the 1992 events, including not only a tussle between the central five men with looting and burning in the background, but also children playing and witnessing the event. The figures are rendered nearly life-sized, creating a bodily experience that places the viewer in the midst of the action. Guevarra relishes the very distinct fashion and color palette of the 1990s – jerseys of popular sports stars find their way onto several figures, and bright, primary colors add a popping visual energy to the chaotic scenes. Here, the chaos is aided by supernatural forces: skeletons pour gasoline on the fire and call for backup, black cats dot the landscape, and an ominous oarfish snakes across the ground. These elements underscore an interest in the power we give to symbols and the ways in which lives can change in an instant.

The exhibition’s cast of characters is largely made up of the artist’s family and friends. His brother joins the looters in Our Come Up, and Updates and Relief finds the artist’s mother studying a newspaper spread across her kitchen table whose splashy headlines tell of chaos and crackdown amid the 1992 uprising. Guevara sources archival print stories to create the newspapers in his paintings, stitching and collaging them together to create an imagined paper that enters the canvas through a phototransfer process. He uses this same process to infuse figures with ghostly hints of past traumas: images of war and rioting that are carried in the body like tattoos on skin. And yet many of the paintings here emphasize the resilience of continuing daily life – children playing, the work of family and care continuing – amidst the unrest on the doorstep.

Guevara often riffs on art historical precedent, posing his contemporary figures as Renaissance nobles and saints. The large self-portrait Couple Hours after 3:15pm mirrors the figure of the 17th-century painting Portrait of a Man with a Sheet of Music from the Getty Museum collection. The classical setting has been swapped for a Los Angeles sidewalk, where the figure sits holding a newspaper announcing the beating of Rodney King. The scene appears placid at first, but the violent headline is echoed in the painting’s title – referencing the time at which the officers’ acquittal was announced – and the flames that erupt in the far distance. The contrast between the sunny California scene and the eminent violence glimpsed behind builds a tension that plays out across the exhibition.

The particular quality of California light is important to understanding Guevara’s works. His interest in California color bloomed while in art school in New York as a way to counteract that city’s prevailing grey and brick palette. His study of Bay Area painters such as Wayne Thiebaud and Elmer Bischoff comes through in his use of rich, saturated color that brings a sense of playful light to areas of both sun and shadow. The rooftop landscape Ghetto Bird View brings this sensibility to South Central. A portrait of both the family home and a major site of looting in 1992, this work combines the light’s particular beauty and the ever-present reminder of unrest. In this remixing of family history and personal experience, Guevara processes the impact of political unrest on his own life and his wider community, both strengthening his connection to the past and grounding himself in the very present.

Elmer Guevara (b.1990) was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. Guevara’s upbringing took place in the South Central neighborhood. In the 1980s, his parents fled a war-torn El Salvador finding refuge in the City of Angels. Along with South Central’s vibrant energy and the culture his parents brought with them, he became inspired to reflect on his upbringing and the hybridity of cultures along with the struggles his parents experienced with leaving and adapting to city dwelling. He often constructs narratives by sampling family photos from his youth, reframing compositions that form dialogue about identity and concepts of inter-generational trauma. Furthermore, he depicts observations from his own and neighboring immigrant families and surrounding environment. Reflecting on his adolescence and into his teenage years, he met with friends, commuting throughout the city on public transit and becoming obsessed with exploring the city’s crevices. This obsession later opened an appreciation for painting and an education in the arts.

In 2017, Guevara received a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Cal State University Long Beach and in 2022 an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College in New York City. Elmer’s work has been exhibited domestically and internationally at M&B Gallery, F2T Gallery, Residency Art Gallery, Lyles and King, and Barbati Gallery among others.

Selected Works

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961 Chung King Road
september 27 - november 1, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: september 27, 5-8pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Hug the sky for it, an exhibition of paintings by Oakland-based artist Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa, his first with the gallery. Samayoa works in several different modes, most prominently with airbrush on canvas, and across media achieves a hauntingly expressive greyscale palette. His works speak to his own Guatemalan and Mexican heritage, his Oakland community, and his Islamic faith; Samayoa taps into the visual power of muralism and the narrative potency of dreams, yet retains the intimacy of memory or whispered prayer. His compositions are layered with meaning, all held within a kind of dreamspace that emphasizes the beauty and power of community. The title of the exhibition comes from the chorus of a 1998 DMX song, which warns the listener that one has to be willing to give everything to the hustle.

Two of the largest works in the exhibition exemplify the artist’s signature compositional dream-logic, weaving symbols and icons with elemental, cosmic imagery. Both Share My World and Funk the World serve as introductions to the Samayoa’s personal pantheon of saints, martyrs, and familiars, welcoming the viewer to his particular cosmic storytelling. Do you see me now? Or shall I become much greater offers a much more personal tale. One of several self-portraits in the exhibition, here the artist depicts himself as a child with his father in a domestic interior. The child, however, is not fully realized, but rather appears as an outline containing a swirling cloud of portraits and symbols, as if his inner psyche has been revealed. The artist’s mother sits at his heart, along with figures from the history of rap and Motown, a snarling pitbull, and a madly grinning cartoon. Together these provide an image of defiant resilience, of misunderstood figures judged on appearances, and of intergenerational trauma and healing.

Two smaller airbrush works, Self portrait and A Change Within, investigate how power is gained and wielded within a community. The latter features a close-cropped image of Michael Corleone’s furrowed brow from the climactic baptism scene from The Godfather, in which Michael steps into his power as the new Don at the great cost to his own soul. This is paired with a self-portrait of the artist as a young adult, sporting a grill and cheesing for the camera. With this pair, Samayoa ruminates on the ways in which one can show up for the community. Reflecting on his younger self prompts consideration of the temporal and spiritual space between past and present and the transformation that space allows – how one can grow to be a positive force rather than succumbing to the ruining power won through violence. 

Samayoa also explores the power that systems hold over us. Enjoy life forever juxtaposes collaged lotto scratchers with advertisements for bible study, above the artist’s own injunction: “don’t stop praying / playing”. This piece plumbs the sense of hope – and often frustration – that comes from both gambling and religion. The found objects emphasize how both systems  are deeply integrated into communities, both in West Adams, Massachusetts, where this was made while Samayoa was in residence at Mass MoCA, and in his hometown of Oakland. Elsewhere, Samayoa calls upon American flag symbolism and fragments of 19th century color theory to question the extent of racial progress in this country. Yet there is also hope – in the legacies of the icons included in the large airbrush paintings, and in the ideas of revolutionary figures such as Assata Shakur, represented here in a small printed portrait. This work is framed in a soil-like texture, which hearkens back to the artist’s childhood spent working in landscaping alongside his father. Samayoa weaves himself throughout this body of work, visually building upon a foundation of memory, community, and resilience.  

Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa (b. 1994, Sacramento,CA) is a Mexican-Guatemalan artist based in Oakland, CA, whose practice is a profound exploration of cultural heritage, identity, and transformation. Working across charcoal, painting, ceramics, and installation, Samayoa’s work captures intimate moments of nostalgia and resilience, drawing from personal and communal histories. His mastery of black and white charcoal drawings serves as the foundation of his practice, rendering evocative scenes that feel both deeply personal and universally resonant. Beyond monochrome, he embraces vibrant color and rich textures, incorporating materials like burlap, plaster, and soil—elements that pay homage to his Guatemalan roots and the tactile nature of memory.

Selected Works

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969 Chung King Road
september 13 - october 18, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: september 13, 5-8pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is proud to present Neighbors, a group exhibition curated by Erick Medel. The exhibition features painting and sculpture by artists who make up Medel’s own community of peers.

The show includes works by

Alex Becerra @alex.smells

Alan Chin @alanchinart

Daniel Gibson @hotburrito1

Sean Hutton @swhutton

Sarah Kim @sarahrkim

Higinio Martinez @higgyslug

Alex McAdoo @alexmcadoo

Ohad Sarfaty @__0h4d

Curator Bio:
Los Angeles-based artist Erick Medel (b. 1992, Puebla, Mexico) creates intimate portraits of immigrant life using a sewing machine and thread much like one would use a paintbrush and oils.  Medel began working with textiles while completing his MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. Medel moved to the United States from Mexico as a teenager, and he positions his work in the context of the wider history of immigrant labor. Medel’s work has been shown internationally and domestically in locations such as Plan X Gallery, Milan; de boer, Antwerp; Omni Gallery, London; Martha’s Contemporary, Austin; F2T Gallery, Milan; and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. His work is in the collection of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. Medel lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by Charlie James Gallery.

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969 Chung King Road
september 13 - october 18, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: september 13, 5-8pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is proud to present El Mañana, a solo exhibition of works by Los Angeles artist Erick Medel, his second with the gallery. Medel captures the vibrancy of his eastside neighborhood in works that range from intimate snapshots to expansive street scenes, always with the aim of distilling and preserving the ephemeral feelings and fleeing moments that make up a thriving community. These works also celebrate a bustling street culture that has suffered a summer of ICE raids and unrest, which has stolen a sense of security that will be slow to return. Medel captures the resilience and ingenuity of this community, preserving its small joys and hidden beauties as a reservoir of hope for tomorrow.

Medel’s medium is fiber – he “paints” with a sewing machine on dark, heavy gauge denim, intuitively selecting color from a wall-sized bank of threads. The deep denim support enhances color by contrast, lending Medel’s compositions a quiet luminosity. Denim also brings to the work its long association with labor and its origins as a sturdy fabric developed to protect the bodies of workers. More personally, denim recalls the protective wear used by the artist’s father in his work as a gardener. Denim provides a strong base for many layers of stitching, which lend depth and shading to the compositions – most apparent here in his portraits of the neighborhood’s animal denizens. This body of work also finds Medel experimenting with abstraction, transforming backgrounds into blocks of solid color that lock together like puzzle pieces. This development grew out of a deepening interest in the history of abstract figuration by artists such as Alice Neel and Noah Davis.

The largest work in the exhibition is City Angels which takes as its focus a food vendor pushing her cart through a sea of blue-clad Dodger fans. Medel builds compositions based on his own photography, and he has a particular skill for finding visual and narrative tension. Amidst World Series celebrations, he foregrounds the enterprising hustle of the vendors who are a staple of any Los Angeles street scene. The vendor’s focus seems turned inward, as if Medel has captured a private, thoughtful moment that sets her apart from the wider crowd. At this moment in time, a crowd taking to the streets cannot help but evoke the city's recent anti-ICE protests. For Medel, being on the street is a political act, both a defiant reclamation of space and a holding for those who don’t currently feel safe enough to participate. 

Medel also celebrates the hustle of immigrant communities by showcasing the wares of neighborhood street vendors, who sell colorful lucha libre masks or smiling imitation Labubus. These objects are aspirational – fancy toys being made available at bargain prices, shiny second skins rich with cultural significance. On the one hand, lucha libre represents a masculine sense of strength and cultural pride, but it can also be read as a stand-in for the metaphorical masks required for assimilation in a sometimes-hostile place. The masks are shown here empty and lifeless, perhaps an allusion to the diminished vibrancy of street culture in these trying times. Medel offers a kind of solution in Limpias, whose spiritual cleansings may provide hope against the hardships of the moment.

Above all, Medel’s subject is the vibrant street-level culture in and around his studio. His compositions capture moments encountered in life and tenderly rendered in polyester and thread. A series of small works feature the flora and fauna of his Boyle Heights neighborhood – the hibiscus and hollyhocks that dot front yards and curbsides; feisty chihuahuas, proud backyard roosters, and fluffy street cats. His superb sense of color and shading is most on display in these works, whose close-up view allows for subtleties of tone and shadow. This is all the more impressive considering that for these works color is mixed only in the eye; each thread’s distinct hue stands apart yet visually blends into the wider whole. The resulting images appear soft when viewed from a distance, but up close vibrate with expressive visual energy.

 In the downstairs gallery, Medel has curated the group exhibition Neighbors, featuring painting and sculpture by artists who make up Medel’s own community of peers. The show will include works by Alex Becerra, Alan Chin, Daniel Gibson, Sean Hutton, Sarah Kim, Higinio Martinez, Alex McAdoo and Ohad Sarfaty.

Los Angeles-based artist Erick Medel (b. 1992, Puebla, Mexico) creates intimate portraits of immigrant life using a sewing machine and thread much like one would use a paintbrush and oils.  Medel began working with textiles while completing his MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. Medel moved to the United States from Mexico as a teenager, and he positions his work in the context of the wider history of immigrant labor. Medel’s work has been shown internationally and domestically in locations such as Plan X Gallery, Milan; de boer, Antwerp; Omni Gallery, London; Martha’s Contemporary, Austin; F2T Gallery, Milan; and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. His work is in the collection of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. Medel lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by Charlie James Gallery.

Selected Works

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961 Chung King Road
AUgust 9 - September 20, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: August 9, 5-8pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is proud to present Abel Rodriguez: Aguante, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper from the artist’s Fotos y recuerdos series, which reexamines photographs and ephemera from the artist’s childhood in the 1990s and early 2000s. By reproducing photo snapshots in soft pastel and pencil, Rodriguez introduces a subtle blur into the image that speaks both to the nature of photography in a pre-digital era and to a distinct feeling of nostalgia that infuses the scenes. The exhibition’s title refers to the endurance – the grit and guts – required to build a life that honors community and celebrates difference, one that resists the homogenizing force of assimilation.

The son of migrant farmworkers in northern California, Rodriguez’s peripatetic childhood introduced him to a rotating cast of friends, insular groups under whose influence the artist came into himself. These friends, who so evocatively populate the works on view, not only came together for the usual antics and dramas of early adulthood, but also supported each other through the small and large traumas and indignities of poor, rural life. Aguante is full of these kids – teenagers in posed groups or informal portraits, more often than not playacting their most macho, confident personas for the camera’s gaze.

The snapshots of Rodriguez’s Fotos y recuerdos series capture the expanses of unsupervised time that characterized adolescence in the pre-digital age. Teenagers lounge in backyards, double up on bicycles, and flash hand signs as they pose. The images capture young people, many first-generation Americans, coming of age in a world that often felt adversarial and crafting personas to survive. Many of the works include text that reference nicknames and locations, often in tattoo-style script or blocky, stylized lettering of graffiti – writing inherent to the source photographs. Rodriguez archives these particular moments in time, both in his original photography and in the successive reimaginations of the series. The work preserves memories of places long lost to redevelopment and friendships dissolved by time, resisting the coming changes by keeping these stories alive.   

Fashion and music radiated out of Los Angeles and into California’s smaller communities in the 1990s, along with a particular genre of gang culture that pitted native-born Chicanos against those who had immigrated to the United States. Absorbed into this system, Rodriguez found safety within a ride-or-die bond that protected his queerness from outside harassment. Fotos y recuerdos walks a fine line between celebrating gang culture and honoring the feeling of belonging within the group that stood in for wider cultural acceptance.

A set of larger works on paper bring together photographs and clippings from classic teen magazines in collage-style groupings. Poderosas takes its title from a hot pink Teen Angels cover featuring a fierce woman with a shiny black bouffant and long silver hoops. The painting is populated entirely by women, and honors the powerful women in Rodriguez’s life. These larger works bring together cultural touchstones – in the form of magazines such as Teen Angels and Street Life – and the real-world fashion and attitude they inspired. As in the other works, objects depicted seem to lift off the page as Rodriguez’s deftly-executed photorealism brings his long-lost subjects crackling back to life.

Abel Rodriguez (he/him) is a Queer Xicano artist from Fairfield, California, born to farm-working parents. He earned a dual Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Drawing and Painting, and Graphic Design from California State University, Long Beach in 2007. Later, he pursued a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Painting at Yale School of Art, graduating in 2010.

Rodriguez’s figurative works delve into personal and historical narratives, exploring the intersections of memory, power, and class. His art often reflects the lingering impact of colonization, offering commentary on the human condition. Through his pieces, he captures the collisions of the past with the present, revealing the aftermath and repercussions of historical events on contemporary life. A firm believer in the transformative power of art, Rodriguez’s own life attests to this belief. Growing up as a gang-entrenched youth, art became his pathway to becoming the first in his family to attend college. This transformative journey fuels his commitment to using art as a tool for social change.

In 2011, Rodriguez was selected to participate in the Artist-in-Residence Program at Recology in San Francisco. Building on his vision of art as a catalyst for community and cultural dialogue, he co-founded the Comalito Collective Cultural Arts Center in Vallejo, California, in 2015. Alongside his partner, he established this center to create networks through exhibitions, provide support, and foster opportunities for marginalized voices. The center focuses on artworks that explore intersections of race, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, and gender through a decolonial lens. Rodriguez’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He continues to live and work in Vallejo, California, where he remains dedicated to creating impactful art and supporting his community.

Selected Works

Installation

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969 Chung King Road
july 19 - AUgust 30, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: july 19, 5-8pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present America (Soy Yo!), a group exhibition curated by Los Angeles artist, curator, and gallery director Ever Velasquez. America (Soy Yo!) brings together artists from across the United States, Mexico, Central America, South America, and Canada who collectively interrogate ideas of forced migration, land ownership, and the man-made borders that separate us. The exhibition highlights the dissonance created when familial histories of land stewardship exist in conflict with bureaucratic divisions of property, questioning who and what constitute belonging, either to a nation or to the land itself. The exhibition’s title is a nod to lyrics from the Los Tigres Del Norte song “América Soy Yo” - a song that celebrates the cultural melting pot of America, one of many that share the stories of immigrants and help to create community through shared experience.

One thread that runs through the exhibition explores the relationship between the land and the body, either through labor or sustenance, and the idea of borders as sites of generational wounds.

Exhibiting Artists:

Judith F. Baca
Luis Bermudez
Israel Campos
Barbara Carrasco
Avis Charley
Nehemiah Cisneros
Liz Cohen
Gina M. Contreras
Nube Hawk Cruz
Alinka Echeverría
Mitzi Falcon
Genevieve Gaignard
Anaid Garcia
Jessica Carolina González
Michela Griffo
Leah King
Ann Liu
Ruben Luna
ADESHOLA MAKINDE
John Rivas
José de Jesús Rodríguez
michon sanders
Deán Santo Santiago 
Martin Sorrondeguy
Eduardo Soto
Julio Cesar Toruño
Ashlynn Trane
Anna Tsouhlarakis
Laura Ortiz Vega
José Delgado Zúñiga

Selected Works

Installation

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961 Chung King Road
June 21 - AUgust 2, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: june 21, 4-7pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Daniela García Hamilton: Amanecer / Atardecer (Sunrise / Sunset), the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. García Hamilton creates hybrid canvases that combine embroidery and oil painting, capturing an intergenerational family story drawn from an archive of family photos and stories. As a first-generation American from a Mexican family, García Hamilton investigates legacies of tradition, the inevitability of assimilation, and the ways in which family histories replay themselves over time. The works thread family members together across generations and borders, reinforcing the ties that transcend time and geography.

García Hamilton began working with embroidery after the passing of her grandfather, as a way to connect with her own family history. Both grandparents had worked in textiles, but her grandfather was the storyteller of the family. His dedication to craft and to family memory became the foundation for her art practice later in life. García Hamilton is drawn to embroidery’s marriage of evident markmaking and vibrant color, where color is mixed in the eye rather than on the canvas. This allows for an expressionist effect. Perhaps paradoxically, García Hamilton employs embroidery mainly for figures, and especially hands and faces. Her deft use of embroidered color lends her figures an almost inner glow, as if, through these works, we are allowed to see more than just their physical appearance.

Many of the works in the exhibition dwell on García Hamilton’s late grandfather and her young nephew, his great-grandson. Though the two never met, the young boy’s resemblance to his ancestor in looks and manner proves the strength of blood as it moves through time and space. The two appear together in La tejana de mi abuelo. In this poignant tribute to her grandfather, his portrait – one of the few images of him hatless – hangs in an elaborate frame reminiscent of a home altar. Just above, his cowboy hat hangs in a dust bag on the wall. Deep purple fades into blue around the hanging portrait, as if to signify the sun setting on one generation. A golden snapshot of his young great-grandson tucked into the bottom corner of the frame reminds us that hope is found in the legacies passed to new generations. The lush En el Jardín de mi abuelo finds the same young boy confidently striding across beautiful tiles of the family’s ancestral Guadalajara home.

The vibrant yet enigmatic High Noon is based on a snapshot from a family wedding. The dusty flat expanse and vibrant blue skies of the high desert stretch behind the group, all of whom pose stoically for the viewer’s gaze. In place of the sun, a pre-Columbian coyote howling whistle floats in the dense sky – a souvenir from the Temple of the Sun outside of Mexico City. The spectre of the coyote stalks through several works in the exhibition, often watching over the youngest members of the family and serving as a reminder of the family’s immigrant history. In 2nd Generation, one of the few strict paintings of the group, a silhouetted coyote overlays a portrait of a young boy. The coyote is a vibrant red-orange that, because of its precise tone, all but disappears when viewed in black and white. The family’s Mexican roots grow weaker as each generation inevitably becomes more assimilated – tradition loses potency until it is almost imperceptible, yet never fully disappears. 

Music is also important to the exhibition as a trigger for and container of memory. García Hamilton’s first experimentation with found objects comes in the form of a pink denim jacket, the artist’s own, embroidered with three patches featuring popular cartoon characters. Each bears the name of a music artist who prompts a particular memory: the famous Marco Antonio Solís (MAS), Mexican crooner José José, and the early-2000s regional band El Trono de México. These musicians are literally worn on the sleeve, full of emotional meaning. Similarly, Jálale bursts with potential energy, an accordion caught mid-pull evoking its own sound and movement in the mind of the viewer.

The largest work in the exhibition captures the comfort and ease of a domestic scene. Over three panels, La sala’s disjointed visual narrative conveys a sense of time and movement within the space as figures relax in each other's presence. Here and elsewhere, the space around the figures has been distilled into its simplest detail, allowing the eye to focus on the vibrancy of the figures themselves and of the sky glimpsed through the windows. A sense of continuity flows through the scene, as if we are watching an entire afternoon pass by. Past and present exist together throughout this body of work. Beginnings and endings intermingle, yet all is suffused with a serenity born in community.

Daniela Garcia Hamilton (b.1995) is a first generation Mexican-American painter. Her work explores the rituals and traditions she experienced as a child of immigrant parents. Color and pattern is integrated throughout her work as she describes the vibrancy of her traditions through portraits of her family members. Settings are fabricated to draw attention to social-political commentary on past and current immigrant experiences. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting from California State University Long Beach. Her work has been exhibited throughout California and abroad including Chicago, Mexico City, Amsterdam, and Sweden, with galleries such as Artbug Gallery, Luna Anais Gallery, Artshare LA, the Irvine Fine Arts Center, Residency Art Gallery, Keijers Koning Gallery and Charlie James Gallery. She was the recipient of the Lakers In The Paint Grant for the 2024 season, the MRH Grant Foundation and has been published in Artillery Magazine, Southwest Art Magazine, and the New American Paintings issue #163.

She has been a keynote speaker for the undocumented commencement at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and continues to hold a strong connection to her Mexican-immigrant roots. She currently teaches High School Art in Ventura County.

Selected Works

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969 Chung King Road
June 7 - july 5, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: june 7, 5-8pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present 99¢ Plus & More, an exhibition of new works by San Francisco-based artist Jeffrey Sincich. Sincich draws inspiration from the built landscape: signs, murals, and advertisements are transformed into idiosyncratic quilted compositions that emphasize the handmade quality of much of the urban landscape. The exhibition takes as its starting point the kinds of everyday shops that dot city neighborhoods: corner stores and tire shops, laundromats and bars. Together these places fulfill the needs of the neighborhood, providing a kind of fourth space where the communal and personal meet. Sincich captures all of this in meticulously pieced and quilted works, stretched and finished with artist’s frames.

Sincich’s interest in legacy materials was born in the garage sales he would frequent with his family throughout his childhood. Always drawn to the specificity of handmade items and interested in the intersection between functional items and art objects, Sincich eventually became a professional sign painter and pursued this career for almost a decade. Quilting fits naturally into this paradigm, carrying a storied history of craft and communication not dissimilar to handmade signage. Traditionally quilts were cherished objects that were passed down through the generations; Sincich brings this history to the work by using quilting as a medium for his compositions. 

The exhibition’s largest work plays with a mural-sized appliance advertisement. Four common kitchen and laundry appliances are lined up on a multi-hued brown background, arrayed across a surface that feels peeled from the side of a building, its specific zagging shape reminiscent of architecture. Sincich elevates the humble appliance as functional sculpture, works of art that keep us fed and clothed. Across the gallery, a nearly life-size stack of tires brings to mind the sculptural installations built from car parts often found at local repair shops. Here and elsewhere, Sincich celebrates the everyday and the overlooked, asking the viewer to consider the humble artistry of an urban landscape that too often disappears under the homogenizing force of gentrification.

The images in Sincich’s works are simplified, distilled down to their essence. As with sign painting, these works are meant to be immediately legible, yet reveal themselves in details that reward close looking. Subtle shading adds depth, while irregularly shaped canvases provide a sense of volume to the compositions. Quilted forms are built using only straight lines, giving the resulting images a sort of Cubist visual instability, as if Stuart Davis had turned his eye to the bodega. Sincich brings life to everyday objects, creating a distinct sense of place that he enhances through installation: many works hang in the gallery in a way that reflects where they might be found in the real world – a parking sign high up on a wall, a lit clock and liquor advert above a doorframe.

The back room of the exhibition is transformed from a white wall gallery into a more domestic space, with wood paneled walls and a buzzing glow from the show’s titular work, 99¢ Plus & More beckoning the viewer in with crisp neon light. Like quilting, neon is old technology, one that often signifies warmth and nostalgia. The gallery is filled with smaller works depicting items that might be found at the discount store – everything from shirts to shelf-stable food to knockoff “Dolce + Cabbana” perfume. In the downstairs gallery, Sincich takes on the grander scale of the strip mall marquee and roadside billboard signage, continuing his investigations of a particularly California visual vernacular with characteristic humor and insight. 

Jeffrey Sincich (b. 1990 • Belleair, FL, he/him) is an artist living and working in San Francisco, CA. After studying ceramics in school, Jeffrey pursued the trade of sign painting for seven years. His love of hand painted signage, typography and architecture later merged with his fascination with handmade quilts. He combines his process of quilting lettering and illustrations with neon signage, found wood, salvaged window grates and building materials to highlight the overlooked and underappreciated everyday signs and objects that help the city function day to day. 

Jeffrey earned his BFA from the University of Florida in 2012. His work has been exhibited domestically and internationally in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, Miami, Portland, OR, Tokyo, Japan and Paris. He has shown at venues including Charlie James Gallery and the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, and Gallery 16, de Young Museum, Park Life in San Francisco. He produced a one night installation at SFMOMA in San Francisco. His work has been featured in publications including Juxtapoz Magazine and Popeye Magazine. 

Artist website: www.jeffreysincich.com
Artist Instagram: @jeffreysincich

Selected Works

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961 Chung King Road
APRIL 19 - June 7, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: april 19, 6-9pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Jay Lynn Gomez: Butterfly Dream, an exhibition of paintings and mixed-media installations that locate Gomez’s artistic practice within the context of her transition. The exhibition asks: what does it mean to exist in this new identity, instead of constantly striving to realize it? Through a series of dreamlike paintings, Gomez makes clear that community and self-acceptance are central. Butterfly Dream documents the people and places that make up the community of trans women Gomez has found in Los Angeles, all captured in her signature documentary style. The exhibition also tackles the concerns of the artist’s past work, including issues of labor and immigration, now through a trans lens. Butterfly Dream is the artist’s fifth show with the gallery, and her first exhibition post-transition mounted in Los Angeles.

Central to the exhibition is the story of the butterfly dream, a Chinese fable originally told in an ancient Taoist text. In the story, Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly happy flitting about with no knowledge of his human self. Upon waking, he recalls his dream and wonders whether he is in fact a human who had dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi. Gomez evokes the butterfly dream by constantly questioning the boundaries between dream and reality, using vibrant pinks and purples to signify dreamlike spaces and images of butterflies as a symbol of transformation and freedom.

One small self-portrait references a famous 16th-century depiction of the butterfly dream. In the original drawing, Zhuangzi dreams while slumbering on a rock. In Gomez’s version, she reclines on a bright teal bean bag, wrapped in a fuzzy pink blanket. A collaged butterfly flits through the picture plane, which is a bright pink that for the artist represents feminine dreamspace. Unlike the sleeping figure of Zhuangzi, Gomez stares out at the viewer, inviting us to inhabit the dream world alongside her. The bean bag itself appears in the gallery space, paired with a book of poetry by fellow trans artist Farrah Fang. Both the object and painting enshrine the radical importance of trans rest in the face of the current onslaught of anti-trans sentiment and legislation in this country.

Butterfly Dream captures the community of trans women Gomez has found in Los Angeles. Many of the paintings on view depict one of three anchors of this community: the TransLatin@ Coalition, the Trans Wellness Center, and the communal home for trans women where the artist resided for a time. Working from the constant stream of photographs that smartphones make possible, Gomez finds small moments of beauty and peace within a world that can often be chaotic and ugly. In her paintings, trans women laugh and dance, primp and smile and strut. They come together to receive care and build community. She has not fully left behind her past work, however: one piece captures staff vacuuming a hallway of the Trans Wellness Center, while another sees two men changing out signage in the LA Metro. These works hearken back to Gomez’s past paintings foregrounding the labor and laborers who often go unseen and unappreciated, but locates that conversation inside of a new setting.

Much of the action of these paintings takes place along Los Angeles’ Wilshire corridor. In one such work Gomez transforms a hot pink wall on the boulevard into one of the exhibition’s dream spaces: the artist confronts the viewer in the form of a full-length self-portrait, defiantly contrapposto in a magenta crop top. She stands between two figures: a construction worker in high-visibility orange represents her past work as Ramiro Gomez, which often featured construction and domestic workers as they go about their days. He strolls determinedly out of frame, as if to signal a sunset of past ways of being. To the right, a trans woman in a cheetah skirt and platform shoes uses the pink wall to drop into a twerk, confident and joyous in her body. A butterfly flits overhead, reminding us that the dream can be reality. This work, and the exhibition as a whole, seeks to accept Ramiro and to find love for the person she was, while at the same time moving joyfully into the future as Jay Lynn.

One of the most poignant works of the exhibition seeks to reconcile Gomez’s past and present selves. A small painting reimagines a baby picture of Gomez with her parents, set against a soft pink background. The image is closely cropped on the three of them, two smiling parents holding up their young child. Gomez has added a pink bow to her own head, dreaming of a world in which she was able to experience girlhood from a young age. With this body of work, Gomez seeks to poetically stand up for trans lives by practicing radical acceptance and finding love for her past and present selves. 

Jay Lynn Gomez was born in 1986 in San Bernardino, California to undocumented Mexican immigrant parents who have since become US citizens. Gomez has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the University of Michigan, Institute for the Humanities, Ann Arbor, MI; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and the West Hollywood Public Library, West Hollywood, CA as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, MA; the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University, Portland, OR; and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA; among others. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; and the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; among others. In 2016, was the subject of Domestic Scenes – The Art of Ramiro Gomez, a monograph by Lawrence Weschler, published by Abrams.

Selected Works

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969 Chung King Road
APRIL 12 - MAY 24, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: april 12, 6-9pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present SEISMIC, a solo exhibition by artist and activist Nancy Baker Cahill, the artist’s first with the gallery.  Presented at a moment of catastrophic environmental urgency and social reckoning, amplified by recent events in Los Angeles, Baker Cahill tackles timely concerns that have long animated her practice. The exhibition includes new bodies of work in which Baker Cahill mines her own archive, refashioning archival drawings as raw material for works on paper, sculptural installations, and digital projects that plumb the constantly shifting crises of the current moment. This perceptual play interweaving natural and digital worlds is a keystone of Baker Cahill’s practice, which aims to alternately make sense of and combat cultural and geological instability through ecological concepts of interconnectedness, systems-thinking, and interdependence.

The exhibition opens with nine luscious Pia Mater works, in which crisp, vibrant digital images are doubled and layered, once on a firm canvas base and again on a sheet of silk that flutters with the ambient breeze. Baker Cahill plays with luminosity in these imagined spaces, accentuating the diversity of texture and material that coexists within. These works play with the fragility of perception, pairing soft and hard, fixed and free. “Pia Mater” translates to 'tender matter’, and is the delicate protective membrane that encases the human brain. An interest in cognition and processing runs through the exhibition, where images from one series or archive are used as material for another – the Pia Mater images, for example, show up again in the Carbon films. This iterative process utilizes a personalized dataset to “train” Baker Cahill’s work in a manner similar to the way artificial intelligence is trained on vast reams of existing data, while at the same time paying homage to the rich history of recombination in digital art.

The Widows, a series of wall-based sculptural works evocative of elaborate flora or dramatically plumed birds, are built from torn paper and printed silk heavy with graphite, ink, and paint. Three Widows hang in the main gallery of the exhibition. If the jagged edges darkened with carbon recall a fire’s charred remains, these works are the phoenix rising from the ashes, demonstrating the constant cycle of death and rebirth. Their beauty evinces an ecofeminist sense of hope, a faith in nature’s vast capacity for healing and regeneration. The primary floor of the exhibition also includes a suite of Distortion collages in a range of sizes. These works combine soft graphite drawings and collaged elements on white iridescent paper, mounted to aluminum, creating a sense of irresolvable space between the digital and the physical. Each element reads as an isolated pixel in a larger image and as a window into a wider world, collapsing distinctions between natural and manufactured perspectives.

Downstairs, Baker Cahill’s massive Slipstream installation stretches across the walls of the basement gallery like a living organism or sprawling botanical landscape. The sculptural work is made from an archive of graphite on paper work encompassing over a decade of drawing, torn and reassembled into something completely new. Slipstream retains the energy of the original drawings like a beating heart at its core, a feeling amplified by a dynamic projected image that animates the work in movement and light. Slipstream invites the audience to reconsider their perception, as the work seems to slip between material and immaterial forms, resisting easy interpretation.

The exhibition also includes Baker Cahill’s film Carbon 1, the first in a series of six films, one for each of the planet’s six mass extinction events – the last of which we are currently living through. Carbon 1 opens on a lush green landscape, slowly panning towards a rippling body of water. The horizon is lit by the glow of several acid-colored flames, the largest growing into a swirling fire tornado. Barely visible beneath the surface of the water lies the remains of the fossil fuel industries and technofeudalist system that contributed to this destruction. Pixelated distortions increasingly obscure Baker Cahill’s vision of a burning planet, much like the flood of disinformation that seeks to deny the realities of climate change. These interruptions recall the accreted images of the Distortion works, brought to life here as they grow like a digital virus. The occlusion created by pixelated noise refers first to the structure of diffusion models, which involve noising and denoising imagery during training to “learn” how to produce AI images. It also underscores how algorithmic social media structurally incentivizes noise over signal.

Concurrent with the exhibition, Baker Cahill will debut part two of Substrate, as part of her LACMA Art + Technology Grant awarded in 2022.  This project takes the form of a co-built, participatory monumental Augmented Reality (AR) sculpture at LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion. Based on concepts of mycelium communication and regenerative networked systems, this social sculpture reimagines civic institutions as mother trees, supported and fed by interconnectivity and community. The work invites viewers to interact with and feed the system via spores that are visualized via AR. With both Seismic and Substrate, Baker Cahill marries ideas of technological and ecological perception, investigating how technology mediates our experience and how communal ways of being may set us free.    

Nancy Baker Cahill is a transdisciplinary artist and expanded filmmaker with a research-based practice. Her work examines complex systems, with an emphasis on the relationship between consciousness, intelligence, and embodiment. Systems thinking plays an important role in her poetics; she is especially concerned with systemic power and its biopolitical impacts, particularly ecological and social harms.

Using a blend of analog and digital media, Baker Cahill creates immersive experiences, video installations, sculptures, and conceptual projects that engage the human sensorium and are rooted in drawing. Since 2018, she has been the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free, augmented reality (AR) public art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression. Her monumental AR artworks build on the lineage of ecofeminist land art, often highlighting interdependence and the more-than-human. She takes a critical approach to all of the emerging technologies she uses, subverting convention to offer alternative imaginaries.

Her work has been profiled in publications including The Art Newspaper, Frieze, and The New York Times, among others. Her essays appear in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nam June Paik Art Center Reader and October Magazine. Baker Cahill is an artist scholar alumnus of the Berggruen Institute and a TEDx speaker. In 2021, she was awarded the Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor and a C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellowship. She is a 2022 LACMA Art + Tech Grant recipient, winner of the 2024 Infinity Festival's Monolith Award for New Media Fine Art, and is an Affiliate of the Harvard metaLAB. Her work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Georgia Museum of Art, GA, The Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; RFC Art Collection, Miami, FL; The Winthrop University Collection, SC, and 0x Collection, Prague, CZ.

Selected Works

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961 Chung King Road
march 8 - April 5, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: March 8, 6-9pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Can I Live, a solo exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles artist Kristopher Raos, his third with the gallery. Raos invites the world into the space of painting, using his unparalleled eye for the aesthetic possibilities of the city’s neglected corners and discarded debris to elevate the quotidian to a higher realm. His crisp lines, sharp colors, and chic abstractions only seem detached; their cool exterior hides a deeply personal body of work whose razor-sharp humor playfully comments on class, struggle, and the hustle necessary to make it in a world that often feels made to keep you down.

The exhibition takes its title from a track off of Jay-Z’s 1996 debut album, in which the rapper alludes to the mental toll of the hustle and a foundational desire to rise out of poverty. Raos brings his own experience of scarcity to this body of work. The key to the exhibition lies in its smallest painting: the diminutive canvas of Untitled (Product of Poverty) sits snug within an appropriated cardboard box that once held a block of so-called government cheese, that highly processed product distributed for free to low-income households since the Reagan administration. Raos, himself a product of the Reagan ‘80s, has debossed his own birthday into the soft cheese-orange canvas in the style of On Kawara, stamping his own identity into the annals of art history and reclaiming what was once a source of shame.

Raos brings to his work a deep knowledge of and admiration for his art historical precedents. The vibrant bands of color in Untitled (Outchea getting bread, if you wonder where i’ve been) read like Ellsworth Kelly’s iconic Red, Yellow, Blue paintings turned ninety degrees. But the work also refers to the Wonder Bread factory outlet, whose discounted near-expired foods were a staple of the artist’s childhood. Untitled (Never had the tools), meanwhile, takes its subject and altar-like shape from John Baldessari’s 1988 Banquet, calling into stark contrast the states of plenty and lack on display. Raos gives himself a seat at the table, though, his name playing like  alphabet soup across the oval bowl of the spoon.

Mingling high and low referents has become a signature for Raos, whose elegant lines often conceal collected bits of the gently decrepit Los Angeles he inhabits. His eye is attuned to the comic potential of the city’s palimpsest, finding aesthetic value in juxtapositions and refuse. Untitled (Space Kraft, Miracle Whip) recreates a fractured plastic jar lid picked up off the street. Its shaped canvas carefully reproduces the sheared edges of its referent, transforming a beat-up found object into a vehicle for precision and perfection. The elevated, vibrant blue retains roots in the scratched-up Kraft plastic, the same scratched blue of the plastic chairs that filled the waiting rooms of government assistance offices. The color palette of midcentury idealism, filtered through high-art minimalism on one hand and the aesthetics of administration on the other, reconverge in Raos’s confident hand. 

Raos pushes his use of shaped canvas and embossed detail to new heights in Untitled (Out of options). The painting takes its shape and color from the iconic Le Creuset frying pan, its raised rounded edge painstakingly recreated in layer after layer of built-up paint. The French brand is a luxury in any kitchen, and that the model for this work came from the artist’s own is a symbol of how far he’s come since his childhood, when it wouldn’t be unusual to find someone cooking drugs in the family kitchen. Raos found escape in art, and inspiration everywhere: from the aspirational bravado of 90s rap to the bright, flat colors of signage and commercial packaging to bits of trash fished off the streets. Techniques honed over years of self-taught practice have coalesced into a robust and singular vernacular confident enough to plumb this very personal material with polished élan. 

Kristopher Raos (b. 1987, Bakerfield, CA) is self-taught painter based in Los Angeles, CA. Raos grew up between Bakersfield, CA and Mexico City, Mexico, his early domestic life characterized by instability and privation. He found focus in graffiti art, painting the trains that move through the agricultural landscapes of Bakersfield. His street art practice took him all over the world and ultimately led him to Los Angeles. It also shaped his name, RAOS being his former graffiti moniker which he adopted as his surname. A visit to LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007 was formative, as Raos saw Ellsworth Kelly’s works for the first time and became fascinated w Minimalism and hard-edge abstraction. Raos transitioned from graffiti art to his studio painting practice in 2011. Raos’s work has been featured at galleries including As-is Gallery and MaRS Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, F2T Gallery in Milan, Italy, Baik Art in Seoul, South Korea, Venus Over Manhattan in New York, NY, Chris Sharp Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, and the Torrance Art Museum, RDFA, and Peripheral Space all in Los Angeles. In 2022 Raos had his debut solo show at Charlie James Gallery titled No Escaping the Housework. In 2023 Raos had a solo booth at EXPO CHICAGO and was featured in a two-person booth at Feria Material in CDMX, Mexico. Raos exhibited in Tracing the Edge at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, curated by Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia and Ananya Goel, which was on view thru January of 2024. Raos will be the subject of a solo museum exhibition opening Fall of 2025 at the Bakersfield Art Museum. Kristopher Raos lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Charlie James Gallery.

Selected Works

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Installation

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Publications

969 Chung King Road
march 1 - 29, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: March 1, 6-9pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Memesis, a solo exhibition of woven works by Los Angeles-based artist Kayla Mattes, who brings a modern sensibility and wit to the traditional art of weaving. Her handwoven tapestries investigate digital forms of expression, drawing from internet memes, symbols, and texts to convey the pervasive anxieties of contemporary life. She tackles themes of environmental crisis, unchecked capitalism, and political upheaval with a humor that allows space for processing and acknowledgement. Mattes marries the grid-based images built out of warp and weft with the pixelated grid of the screens that mediate so much contemporary interaction, furthering the long interconnected history of weaving and technology.

Mattes’s compositions pull inspiration from the bold colors and chaotic aesthetics of the early internet, which she utilizes as a structure for integrating symbols, viral memes, and news of the present day. Her project is archival in nature; she transforms the ephemeral and non-physical, preserving them in weavings that are emphatically grounded and tactile. Mattes archives the evolving interface design and fleeting touchstones of our digital lives. The source material – common signs and symbols, memes – is often overlooked or dismissed as unserious, yet in an increasingly digital world this mode of communication becomes ever more central to our self-expression. Fittingly, tapestry as an artform has long been used to communicate political ideas and to document the current moment, and Mattes brings this history screaming into the 21st century.

Mattes’s works begin as drawings, which are translated into Photoshop and enhanced with appropriated symbols and imagery sourced online or from photos of advertisements and signage found in the real world. The final digitally collaged image is then projected and transcribed onto paper as a tapestry cartoon, which is placed behind the warps as a guide while weaving. Weaving happens on one of two floor looms from the 1970s, the larger of which can accommodate works up to 75 inches in width. Mattes utilizes warp and weft to control the resolution in her images, often using hand-dyed yarns of different gauges to achieve varied effects. She also experiments with materials to create texture or three-dimensional elements, as in the fuzzy pink scrunchies in … Baby One More Time or the furred squirrel in Orinoco Flow (turn it up).

Many of the works capture the idiosyncratic visual language of the screen, something continually encountered but rarely considered. Images duplicate across space like so many pop-up windows, WiFi symbols and battery levels haunt corners, the memory of the screen manifested in the real world. The crowded visual field of Existing?? captures the anxiety of living through the multifold disaster of climate change, economic decline, and the proliferation of toxic online culture.

The portrait of Britney Spears declaring “my government is killing me” in a traditional meme format provides a sharply layered critique both of our current moment and of the treatment of women in the early 2000s, a time contemporaneous with much of the tapestry’s imagery. Car Dependency Propaganda takes a popular children's rug-turned-meme and cheekily reverts it back into its original form. One wall of the main gallery takes on the dissonance between the digital and natural worlds, overlaid with the spectre of climate change. Fight or Flight distills this juxtaposition, a screaming emoji presiding over a swarm of dying bees. Yet Memesis also includes messages of hope and resistance, including several works memorializing the viral orca uprising. With all the works in this show, Mattes plumbs the connections between the digital and physical, between humor and despair, and the collective modes of communication we develop to make sense of it all.

Kayla Mattes (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA, USA) received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and her MFA from University of California Santa Barbara in 2019. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including Eli & Edythe Broad Museum (Michigan), Charlie James Gallery, (Los Angeles), Asia Art Center (Taipei and Beijing), Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Portland, OR), Torrance Art Museum, Richard Heller Gallery (Los Angeles), and Collaborations (Copenhagen). She is one of twenty weavers included in the 2018 book, Weaving: Contemporary Makers on the Loom and her work has been featured in Artnet, MacGuffin Magazine, New American Paintings, and i-D Magazine. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

 Artist Instagram: @kaylamattes

Selected Works

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961 Chung King Road
January 25 - march 1, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: january 25, 6-9pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Igokochi, an exhibition featuring paintings and installation by San Francisco based artist Maya Fuji. Fuji interweaves Japanese myth and folklore with contemporary iconography to explore ideas of identity and space, history and heritage. The title of the exhibition refers to the particular feeling of a certain place, and the works negotiate the constant push and pull of living between two continents and two cultures. Fuji populates remembered Japanese interiors with ancestors, playful deities and spirits, imagining them all coexisting in the modern day. The work celebrates traditional Japanese craftsmanship and spiritual tradition while simultaneously embracing a playful, modern sensibility.  

The women in Fuji’s paintings represent shinto gods called “Sorei” – gods formed by an aggregate of ancestral spirits. Every family has their own Sorei, who are protectors of the home and future generations. The artist imagines the figures in her paintings embodying all the women who have inhabited the home she grew up in, beginning with herself and reaching back through the generations. Formally, the figures embody two powerful aesthetic influences from the artist’s childhood: Nihonga painting – a traditional style often found in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines – and manga illustration. Plush bodies and elegant, expressive hands hail from Ukiyo-e painting of the Edo period, while the simplified faces and large, sparkling eyes have roots in manga.  By embracing these two deeply Japanese styles, Fuji reclaims an aesthetic heritage that she felt carried negative stereotypes in the US.

Smaller, often half-glimpsed female figures also cavort across Fuji’s compositions. These miniature women are colorless, with long black hair, and can be found rummaging in drawers, hanging off fan blades, peeking around corners, and tumbling across floors. These are manifestations of the artist’s interest in Tsukumogami, household objects that obtain a spirit or soul over a century, as well as Yaoyorozu No Kami, which arise from the Shinto belief that gods reside in everything in this world. Both manifest as trickster deities who both help and harm, and here Fuji imagines that these spirits have emigrated with the family into the new world.

Borrowing a playful sense of perspective from Edo-period prints, these interiors press against the picture plane while also inviting the viewer to imagine the action just out of sight. The spaces feel lived in and comfortable, our access is intimate without any hint of voyeurism. The figures relax or go about daily tasks, and the spaces are infused with a fleeting nostalgia. Saudade・母の味 simultaneously evokes memories of a mother’s cooking and a fire that destroyed the family home. Insects appear in many forms across the paintings, adding a small element of unease to these colorful interiors. In ancient Japan, empty cicada shells, or utsusemi, signified transience, as the cicada only lives seven days above ground. Their appearance in Treasure Hunt・夏の宝石 and elsewhere remind us of the fleeting nature of all things.

The painting Double Belonging stands apart from the rest, with its outdoor landscape setting and stylized wood grain figures. The title references belonging to more than one religious tradition – Japan is one of the few cultures where a majority of the population identifies as being of two religions, Shinto and Buddhism – but also to the artist’s experience of being multiracial and multicultural, housing two identities in one body and continually finding balance. The painting takes the form of a wood carving from Fuji’s grandmother’s Buddhist altar, an antique touchstone of the family home, pieces of which now live with the artist in California. The original scene’s group of monks have been replaced with Fuji’s characteristic female figures. The central figure holds up a small Kaga Hachiman Okiagari doll, a Shinto symbol native to the family’s hometown used for dispelling bad omens. This painting encapsulates Fuji’s desire to salvage pieces of old Japan by inviting them into the present and creating a hybrid world of her own.

Maya Fuji (b. 1988 Kanazawa, Japan) is a self taught artist who shifted careers midway through her MBA program to pursue her passion in visual arts and painting. Fuji immigrated to Berkeley, CA at an early age, and spent her early years spending time back and forth between Kanazawa and Berkeley. She currently lives and works out of San Francisco.

Fuji has had solo exhibitions at SWIM Gallery, SF (2022) and YOD Gallery, Osaka (2023). Recent group exhibitions include New Image Art, LA (2022), Glass Rice, SF (2022, 2023), Hashimoto Contemporary, SF & LA (2023), Residency Art, LA (2023), Good Mother Gallery, Oakland & LA (2021-2023), The Hole, NY (2023), and Root Division, SF (2023). Fuji’s work has been featured in publications such as New American Paintings, Friend Of The Artist, Artmaze Mag, Metal Magazine, It’s Nice That, and Immigrantly Podcast. She was the winner of the Innovative Grant, was a finalist for the Foundwork Artist Prize, was nominated for the SF MOMA SECA Award in 2023. She was the recipient of the SFAC Artists Grant and was an artist in residence at the Wassaic Projects in 2024.

Selected Works

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969 Chung King Road
January 18 - MARCH 29, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: january 18, 5-8pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is proud to present LA Te Quiero - a group exhibition of gallery artists engaging with the LA landscape. Anchored by Patrick Martinez’s prescient recent series of paintings titled City on Fire, the exhibition engages the urban landscape of LA, its people, history, beauty and vulnerability. Flanking Patrick Martinez’s City on Fire paintings are two landscape paintings by Danie Cansino, each depicting elements of the East LA landscape captured at sunset. Elmer Guevara’s portraits of memory, specifically family memories of life growing up in South Central Los Angeles border Erick Medel’s thread paintings depicting scenes from contemporary Boyle Heights. Further animating the sense of the people of the city are Shizu Saldamando’s loving portraits of LA creatives Waylon Allison and Gabriela Ruiz. Luke Butler’s Location paintings depict period landscapes of Los Angeles taken from old television programs and adjoin Manuel López’s Hockney-esque portrait of the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Ozzie Juarez’s Te Quiero piece executed on paper mounted to fabricated metal gate is itself an emblem of the city and its resilience.

• Luke Butler’s work is a continuing investigation into the peculiar reality of popular culture. Inherently disposable, it is all but inseparable from our lives and is a genuine point of connection with other people. Luke’s work borrows its universal language and bends it toward subjectivity- to anxiety, masculinity, mortality, and a lifelong fascination with the figures that tell the stories.

Luke Butler (b.1971, San Francisco, CA) has an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA from The Cooper Union. His work is in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum, San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley Art Museum; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AK; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; The FLAG Art Foundation, NY; Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; and Crystal Bridges Museum, among others. His next solo show, "Color Pictures," will be at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, November 2nd- December 7th, 2024. Butler lives and works in San Francisco. He is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.  and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.

• Danie Cansino (b. 1986) is an artist and educator living and working in Los Angeles. Danie Cansino’s work manifests in bold chiaroscuro oil paintings and vividly rendered ballpoint drawings on loose-leaf paper, mounted to panel. The subject territory of her drawings and paintings originates from herself, her family members and close friends, and the geography of their shared surroundings - their homes, their neighborhoods, their city. The geographies of the work all stand in evidence of long-standing inhabitation by generations of Cansino’s people as they grow up, move forward, and pass on. Cansino describes her work as a love letter to her family, city, and culture, and a remembrance of the suffrage of the Chicanx and Latinx people of Los Angeles.

Cansino completed her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Southern California, and is an Adjunct Professor of USC Roski School of Art and Design. Cansino's work has been featured in ArtForum, Artillery, and ArtNews magazine. Her work resides in the collections of the Rubell Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, AltaMed, in addition to numerous private collections. She has exhibited in the Rubell museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, Muzeo museum, Vincent Price museum, UCLA, AMOCA, UTA Artists Space, Felix Art Fair, Human Resources Gallery, The Mistake Room, USC Roski, Tlaloc studios and Charlie James Gallery. Danie Cansino is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.

• Elmer Guevara (b.1990) was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. Guevara’s upbringing took place in the South Central neighborhood. In the 1980s, his parents fled a war-torn El Salvador finding refuge in the City of Angels. Along with South Central’s vibrant energy and the culture his parents brought with them, he became inspired to reflect on his upbringing and the hybridity of cultures along with the struggles his parents experienced with leaving and adapting to city dwelling. He often constructs narratives by sampling family photos from his youth, reframing compositions that form dialogue about identity and concepts of inter-generational trauma. Furthermore, he depicts observations from his own and neighboring immigrant families and surrounding environment. Reflecting on his adolescence and into his teenage years, he met with friends, commuting throughout the city on public transit and becoming obsessed with exploring the city’s crevices. This obsession later opened an appreciation for painting and an education in the arts.

In 2017, Guevara received a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Cal State University Long Beach and in 2022 an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College in New York City. Elmer’s work has been exhibited domestically and internationally at M&B Gallery, F2T Gallery, Residency Art Gallery, Lyles and King, and Barbati Gallery among others.

• Ozzie Juarez (b. 1991, Compton, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist who uses the realms of painting and sculpture to honor and revitalize ancient and recent cultural artifacts, languages, and histories. Inspired by the techniques, collaborations, ambitions, and ephemeral qualities of unsanctioned public art, Juarez incorporates excerpts of paintings he observes across the LA landscape into his own work. His ongoing interest in the construction of shared experiences and identities can be equally attributed to time spent as a scenic painter specializing in physical simulation at Disneyland. The omnipresence of American cartoon culture—with its roots in racial stereotypes and its exoticization of global cultures—weaves itself effortlessly into Juarez’s motifs.

Juarez earned his BFA from the University of California Berkeley. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, England, Paris, Miami, and Mexico City and has been featured in publications including Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz magazine, Artillery Magazine, Purple Magazine, Yahoo News, LAist, BBC News and El Economista. Juarez is a pillar of the local arts community and in 2020 he founded TLALOC Studios, an artist-run community gallery and studio building in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles. TLALOC evolves with its members, providing a space that encourages and promotes the possibility of a sustainable life as an artist, or as Juarez says, “a lifestyle worth living.”

• Manuel López’s (b.1983, East Los Angeles, CA) drawings and paintings are informed by his immediate surroundings. Each piece is a careful examination of elements found around his environment: books, records, boxes, houseplants, various elements from his home, his neighborhood, and studio. López relies on observation, memories, materiality, touch, and presence to evoke a feeling of familiarity in the compositions. Manuel López grew up in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. He attended East Los Angeles College, transferred to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where he earned his BFA in painting and drawing. He has exhibited in institutions, galleries, and museums internationally and nationwide including Crocker Art Museum, Atkinson Gallery at Santa Barbara City College, Baik Gallery - Seoul, Vincent Price Art Museum, Charlie James Gallery, and Self Help Graphics among others. He lives and works in East Los Angeles and is represented by Charlie James Gallery.

• Patrick Martinez (b. 1980, Pasadena, CA) earned his BFA with honors from Art Center College of Design in 2005. His work has been exhibited domestically and internationally in Los Angeles, Mexico City, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami, New York, Seoul, and the Netherlands, at venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian NMAAHC, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Vincent Price Art Museum, the Museum of Latin American Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Rollins Art Museum, the California African American Museum, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and El Museo del Barrio, among others.

Patrick’s work resides in the permanent collections of The Broad, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA), Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Rubell Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the California African American Museum, the Autry Museum of the American West, the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Tucson Museum of Art, the Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, the University of North Dakota Permanent Collection, the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, the Crocker Art Museum, the Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University, the Manetti-Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, the Rollins Museum of Art, and the Museum of Latin American Art, among others.

Patrick was awarded a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, FL. In the fall of 2021 Patrick was the subject of a solo museum exhibition at the Tucson Museum of Art entitled Look What You Created. In 2022, Patrick was awarded a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Patrick’s suite of ten neon pieces purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art was a yearlong exhibition installed on the Kenneth C. Griffin Hall in the entrance of the Museum. Patrick Martinez’s “Ghost Land” exhibition was on view at the ICA San Francisco through January 2024.  Through April 2024, Patrick’s work was shown at The Broad in Los Angeles as part of the exhibition “Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog)”. Patrick’s solo exhibition at the Dallas Contemporary Museum “Histories” was recently on view through January 2025.

Patrick lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.

• Los Angeles-based artist Erick Medel (b. 1992, Puebla, Mexico) creates intimate portraits of immigrant life using a sewing machine and thread much like one would use a paintbrush and oils. His canvas is deep blue heavyweight denim, which provides a dark ground that sets off the brightly colored threads that are his chosen medium. Medel draws inspiration from the vibrant Boyle Heights neighborhood outside of his studio, capturing street festivals, sidewalk scenes, and quiet moments in works that tenderly celebrate the joys of a thriving immigrant community.

Medel began working with textiles while completing his MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. This grew into an interest in soft sculpture that eventually became “thread paintings'' executed on heavy, dark denim stretched over a frame. Using a sewing machine as a drawing tool, he creates stitches that act like brushstrokes: quick staccato stitches emanate energy and movement, soft tender stitches follow the contours of a rose or even evoke the hazy spray of baby’s breath in a floral bouquet. Threads of different hues commingle on the surface, mixing visually rather than physically to create deft shading and texture. The resulting work appears soft when viewed from a distance, but up close it vibrates with expressive visual energy.

Medel moved to the United States from Mexico as a teenager, and he positions his work in the context of the wider history of immigrant labor. Denim provides a sturdy substrate to hold the weight of the built-up threads, but it also comes with its own context. It is Americana, both utilitarian and high fashion, but at its core is a fabric designed to protect the working class. This includes Medel’s father, a gardener, whose denim protected him from thorns. Medel’s floral compositions draw from the rich history of still life, but also serve as portraits of someone’s labor, honoring the street sellers and neighborhood florists whose hustle produces such beauty.

Medel elevates everyday moments large and small – a child holding the hand of her parent as they walk down the street, an arrangement from the local florist, couples dancing to sidewalk Banda music – snapshots of life that could easily be lost to time. Medel’s work beautifully conveys the joys as well as the hardships that together cohere into a vibrant portrait both personal and universal.

• Shizu Saldamando’s work depicts American social spaces through portraiture. Her work celebrates peers, friends, and loved ones through paintings and drawings that honor the brief moments of connection that occur throughout daily life. Shizu was born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission District and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from UCLA School of Arts and Architecture and her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts. 

Solo exhibitions include LA Intersections, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA; Shizu Saldamando, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; To Return, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; When You Sleep: A Survey of Shizu Saldamando, Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; All Tomorrow’s Parties, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA. Selected group exhibitions include: Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 at MOCA Los Angeles, Phantom Sightings at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Trans-Pacific Borderlands, part of the Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA; We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles, an official collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale; Drawing the Line at Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA and The High Art of Riding Low at the Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, CA. 

Saldamando’s work resides in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, Princeton University Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California,The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Mexican Art, Fidelity Collection, Cleveland Clinic Collection, and numerous other public and private collections. Saldamando lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Charlie James Gallery.

Selected Works

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969 Chung King Road
January 18 - February 22, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: january 18, 5-8pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Lisa Edelstein: DANCE ME TO THE END OF THE WORLD, an exhibition of new watercolor paintings and the artist’s first at the gallery. Edelstein mines her own family history in works that transform vintage photographs into compositions that acutely capture the color and texture of a particular moment in time. The images are candid, the figures largely unposed and caught off-guard, implying action on either side of the frozen moment depicted. Edelstein’s interest in storytelling arises across the various avenues of her artistic practice, including painting, writing, and acting. The title of the exhibition references the Leonard Cohen classic whose instrumentation evokes traditional Jewish klezmer music. The song shares a cultural pride and dark sweet sadness with Edelstein’s paintings.

Edelstein’s interest in storytelling arises across the various avenues of her artistic practice, including painting, writing, and acting. The story that weaves throughout Dance Me to the End of the World is the artist’s own, her compositions populated by cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents in various domestic settings. The cumulative effect gives a sense of a boisterous and interconnected family enjoying the fruits of mid-century American success. Yet the paintings also convey a more universal sense of family — the figures feel familiar and known, almost intrusively personal yet widely relatable. Edelstein captures the complex, perennial dynamics between family and friends and of subjecting oneself to the camera’s gaze.

Dance Me to the End of the World gives a distinct sense of Edelstein’s suburban New Jersey childhood, full of 1970s interiors and intergenerational gatherings. The work is strongly rooted in Jewish memory and identity at a moment when both are politically precarious. Edelstein proudly claims her own heritage by leaning into the symbols of Jewishness, such as the shiny braided challah on the celebratory table in Rites. This work also emphasizes the photographic roots of the material in its square format and emphatically candid staging.

In the largest painting in the exhibition, Twister, a group of young teens play the iconic game, all lined up and awaiting the next spin. The bold plaids and stripes of their clothing set against the strong grain of the wood-paneled walls firmly locate this scene in the 1970s, perhaps in the family’s finished basement. The figures engage with the game yet each maintains the distinct interiority that blossoms in early adulthood. Edelstein’s watercolor method produces rich, saturated tones that seem to hold light within the color – the rosy cheeks of the figures reflect the same glow that bounces off the lacquered wood paneling.

Edelstein’s paintings are deeply rooted in the Jewish diasporic experience of growing up within a multigenerational family whose elders fled violence and discrimination to find success in the new world. The lush surroundings of these paintings – designed interiors, new cars, dance lessons – signal a flourishing made possible by this new start in America, while also firmly rejecting the deprivations of wartime Europe that hover in the recent past. This immigrant success story suffuses the paintings, from the proud stance of the couple in Day Trip to the beach vacation in Cruising.

The paintings maintain the feel of a snapshot throughout, mimicking the scale and shape of the scrapbook down to the square polaroid and oval-cut portrait. Edelstein’s watercolor medium perfectly suits the soft lines and haze of memory that characterize old photographs. Moments gain new meaning in translation, as details reveal themselves through close observation and magnification. These works transport the viewer to a different time, and are filled with tenderness towards the jumble of personalities and physical spaces that bring a family to life.  

LISA EDELSTEIN (b. 1966, Boston, MA) attended NYU Tisch School of the Arts before leaving to work as an actress, writer and filmmaker, eventually expanding her practice to painting. Her artwork has been exhibited with Anat Ebgi Gallery, Charlie James Gallery, and Gavlak Gallery and her art practice has been profiled in Forbes Magazine. Edelstein's practice is contemplative and reflective, intimate, personal and extremely rigorous. Through the lens of both the female and Jewish gaze, she draws you in, welcoming you into her family while also holding a mirror up to your own.

Selected Works

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969 Chung King Road
December 14, 2024 - january 11, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: december 14, 5-8pm

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
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Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Entropy, a two-person exhibition of works by Nancy Buchanan and Martha Rosler. Paul McCarthy’s “Black and White Video Tapes III, Basement Tapes” will be on view concurrently with Entropy at our 969 Chung King Road location from December 14, 2024 through January 11, 2025.

Buchanan and Rosler both work across several mediums yet maintain political engagement at the core of their practice, utilizing video, photography, sculpture, painting, and performance to highlight injustice and inequality throughout their bodies of work. The two artists connected in California in the early 1970s, recognizing in one another a distinct multidisciplinary approach to political artmaking and commitment to feminism. The exhibition includes works from two of Rosler’s major series – The Rewards of Money and Off the Shelf – alongside collage works, paintings, and drawings by Buchanan. In these works, both Buchanan and Rosler probe the decaying center of late-stage capitalism and the failed promise of the American dream.

Buchanan’s works in the exhibition speak to the current political moment by exploring the idea of home as something aspirational but also ephemeral. A continuation of her longtime exploration of inequality, Buchanan’s works reveal an America that promotes idealized luxury dream spaces in glossy magazines while at the same time funding tools of war capable of reducing whole cities to rubble. In Buchanan’s paintings and drawings, things fall apart or are blown apart, and we are often complicit. Whether a building has been the brought down by arson, neglect, or American-made artillery, Buchanan bears witness to its demise. Elsewhere, a suite of collages probes the consumerist impulse that ultimately leads to such chaotic inequality. 

Buchanan’s Confusion collages build intricate and opulent imaginary spaces out of collaged imagery drawn from travel, architecture, and design magazines. Beautiful interiors and striking vistas invite the viewer to untangle Buchanan’s spatial puzzles as they draw the eye energetically across the composition. The glossy magazines from which these images are sourced offer escapist content that often sparks envy, their beauty emphasizing through contrast the banality of daily life. Buchanan further complicates the images with small details that hint at something darker beneath the surface: a mushroom cloud rises within the confines of a traffic sign, an advertisement touts “customizable shooting ranges.” These inconsistencies hint at a rot that lies just beneath these polished surfaces, something explored further in a collaborative work made with Ever Velasquez. Confusion #5 considers the consequences of modern excess on the natural world, in which the by-products of human advancement displace and disturb a landscape that long predates us.

As a counterpoint to the opulence of the collages, Buchanan’s paintings of derelict buildings capture the entropic process of architectural decay. These ruined structures come from photographs of actual places that have been neglected or destroyed, and are the product of the artist’s fascination with collapsing houses. The paintings question the idea of shelter: who gets to have it and who gets to keep it? Buchanan captures the process of collapse, wherein man-made, orderly structures devolve into something wild and chaotic that is simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. The gradually collapsing houses serve as a quiet parallel to the calamitous destruction happening in Gaza. Buchanan draws from news images in compositions that emphasize the scale of the chaos, jumbled piles of ruined architecture standing in for a much greater human loss. These works attempt to process the unimaginable, the product of a simultaneous desire to both look away and bear witness. 

The exhibition includes four works from Rosler’s series of photomontages begun in the mid-1980s and resumed in 2022, on the theme "the rewards of money," drawn from an advertising series that forms the works' backdrop. Like other of Rosler's works, it responds to the celebration of naked, rapacious greed. In the work shown here from c. 1985, a yuppy couple glories in their beautifully appointed, art-filled loft while outside their picture window, drab brick apartment buildings are in the process of demolition – a salient feature of the gentrifying wave in Reagan years. In the three works from the present decade, drones and even an advanced military aircraft invade high-bourgeois homes, cottages, and gardens. Outside the window of one high-rise, a refugee camp is visible amidst bombed-out buildings while a woman in a white corset-topped bridal gown lurks behind the couch. In another, the image of a gardening family is dominated by a cemetery, with open graves, for Yemeni children killed in war. As with Buchanan’s Confusion collages, The Rewards of Money highlight the stark inequalities of American life and allude to its destructive global reach, as in Rosler's well-known series House Beautiful Bringing the War Home, antiwar photomontages from c. 1967-72, relating to Vietnam, and 2004 and 2008, in response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Rosler’s Off the Shelf series (2008-2018) was instituted during the height of the second Iraq War and was later revisited in 2018. The twelve images from this series feature a number of mostly non-fiction books from the artist’s library, ranging from political history and theory to gardening to contemporary incarnations of imperial power and the consequences of the War on Terror. Several of the series relate to utopian visions of social life and art, seen through the lens of activism, urbanism, science fiction, and even—with a wink—mushroom gardening.  The Off the Shelf series is Rosler's only fully digital work and relates to the traveling Martha Rosler Library of over 7,000 decidedly real books, which toured seven museum and gallery venues in the Unites States and Western Europe in the mid-2000s.  Rosler's arrangement of the book spines is not dissimilar to concrete poetry. Each work in Off the Shelf constitutes a two-dimensional geometric abstraction while directing attention to analysis, theorization, activism, and celebration. 

Included in the exhibition is Faith Full, a 2008 video sculpture by Buchanan made in collaboration with the artist Carolyn Potter, with whom she has collaborated since 1988. Nearly every surface of this six-room miniature Victorian home contains religious iconography and ephemera from around the world. This visual accretion reflects the confusion of the collages, yet here the disparate elements happily coexist under one roof. Video of Maryam Kashani playing one of Biber’s Rosary Sonatas is projected onto a tiny screen within the house. Faith Full offers a hopeful alternative to the sectarianism of contemporary geopolitics, yet an undercurrent of anxiety hovers in the background even here.

Beginning with her participation as a founding member of F Space Gallery in Costa Mesa, Nancy Buchanan has been involved in numerous artists’ groups including The Los Angeles Woman’s Building and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); she has also acted as curator for several exhibitions and projects. Her work has been seen domestically and internationally and she is the recipient of four National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist grants, a COLA grant, and a Rockefeller Fellowship in New Media, which enabled her to complete Developing: The Idea of Home, an interactive CD-ROM, in 1999. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at MOMA, MOCA, the Centre Pompidou, the Getty Research Institute, and was included in four of the Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time exhibitions; in 2022, her work was included in the Carnegie International. 

In 2016, she organized a durational performance at UC Irvine’s xMPL Theater as the second event in The Art of Performance; from 1988-2012, she taught in the Film/Video School at CalArts. From 1988-1998, she worked with community activist Michael Zinzun on his cable access show Message to the Grassroots and as a member of Zinzun’s LA 435 Committee, she traveled to Namibia to produce a documentary about that country’s transition to independence from the Republic of South Africa.

She has shown with Charlie James Gallery since 2017. Buchanan lives and works in Los Angeles.

Martha Rosler is an artist whose work—in documentary photography and photomontage, video, performance, sculpture, and writing— centers on the public sphere and everyday life, particularly with respect to women. Recurring themes include food in its many roles and guises, urbanism and spaces of transit, and war and national security. She has initiated a number of events in the US and Europe that bridge diverse publics, including garage sales, pop-up libraries, and a long-standing collaborative project that explores homelessness, housing, and the built environment. Through her artistic practice, writing, and activism, she challenges the mechanisms of power and their normalization within imagery, narrative, and discourse. She has received numerous honors, including the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the College Art Association Distinguished Feminist Award, the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award, the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, the Spectrum International Prize in Photography, the Guggenheim Museum Lifetime Achievement Award, the Asher B. Durand Award, the Lichtwark Prize, and four doctorates Honoris Causa.

Rosler lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, whose decades of gentrification have often figured in her work.

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