September 13 - October 25, 2025

Veteran Los Angeles artist Phyllis Green identifies her recent series of modestly scaled, hand-painted ceramic sculptures—five of which are presented here in this small, sharply focused exhibition—as “self portraits.” These unsettlingly realistic and thus powerfully effective artworks are not to be confused with “selfies,” Green adamantly insists in an artist’s statement fittingly titled, “A Self Portrait is Not a Selfie,” a position she goes on to argue in greater detail:

The term “selfie” – coined in 2002 – captures a fleeting, smartphone image for instant online sharing. By contrast, artists have created self-portraits for centuries. Demanding time, reflection, and intention, the self-portrait can record the passage of years, chart technical growth, or transform identity through costume or disguise. Self-portraiture figured prominently in the feminist persona work of the ‘60s and ‘70s, offering an artist’s vision of how she wished to be seen.

September 13 - October 25, 2025

It can be easy to forget the physicality of painting, especially today. Not just that paintings are material things (usually), but that they’re a physical kind of communication. I can say the phrase “paintings communicate physically,” but it’s another thing to stand in front of an artist’s work, quiet down the verbal parts of my mind, and listen with the intuition of my body. Digital worlds increasingly shape how we communicate and make meaning today. They encourage us to prioritize verbal, symbolic ways of thinking, at a loss to our embodied intuition. This distinction is becoming more and more significant as developments in AI lead us to question what, if anything, differentiates organic and artificial ways of knowing. 

In All Systems Fail, Alex Heilbron presents six large scale paintings born from the confluence of our physical and digital realities. Working from images found online, she enlarges and crops pictures of resonant things like leaves, faces, and flowers, obsessively burrowing into them at a pixelated level, using her intuition to find an underlying structure. She then meticulously rounds, adjusts, and modifies the borders of these forms, edge by edge, to produce a vector file that can be read by a vinyl cutter. Once she’s assembled a collective group of structures, she prints them and lays their vinyl embodiments over the canvas. She then pours and brushes paint over these digitally native stencils to build up a complex epidermal surface, before removing the vinyl like a used band-aid. The outcome is painstakingly handmade yet delimited by digital systems. 

July 19 - August 30, 2025

Collaboration is a defining feature in the work of Ulysses Jenkins. It goes back to his own early street murals (necessarily collaborative), as well as to his efforts with Judy Baca and with the historically important if insufficiently remembered Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad, active in the 1970s; it also goes back to his collaborations with Los Angeles Black arts movement titans including Nenga Sengudi, Maren Hassinger and David Hammons and to his work with the important Mexican-American artists’ collective ASCO.

May 17 - June 28, 2025

In this new body of work, Estrada deepens his long-standing engagement with abstraction, using it to explore formal and emotional terrain marked by both pleasure and its opposite. His paintings reflect the undercurrents of existential anxiety that define the present moment—sentiments echoed in the philosophy of the video game Assassin’s Creed, from which the exhibition takes its title: Everything is possible … nothing is true. For Estrada, this phrase suggests a worldview shaped by uncertainty, chance, contradiction, and ambiguity.

April 5 - May 10, 2025

In her first one-person exhibition at as-is, Erica Vincenzi presents a body of work defined by a compelling interplay between clarity and ambiguity, presence and obscurity. Her paintings, lusciously painted small and medium-sized oil on linen artworks, transform everyday images—flowers, landscapes, figures—into evocative snapshots that resist easy interpretation. Though often based on her own photographs, her compositions do not simply reproduce reality; instead, they invite viewers into liminal spaces where meaning is both suggested and withheld.

April 5 - May 10, 2025

"Rear lit" may be an apt metaphor for the five artworks by Rochele Gomez now on view as it describes both their particular manner of presentation as well as the wistful, retrospective attitude adopted by the artist as she addresses aspects of her own past. Each artwork consists of a single medium-sized color photographic transparency mounted in a white metal box and lit from the rear. And each photo depicts a different home the artist and her family occupied as they moved in and around Los Angeles in the years of her childhood and adolescence.

February 1 - March 15, 2025

Karen Carson is not averse to gimmicks. (In the best sense of that contested term). Starting with her “Zipper Pieces” from 1972–large, wall-mounted fabric panels in variable configurations controlled by gravity and the adjustment of industrial  strength zippers—and at various points since, Carson has found novel ways to add material complexity to the traditional painting genre in an ongoing effort to both critique and enrich it.

February 1 - March 15, 2025

Although Steven Steinman’s new paintings are correctly identified as what they are—paintings—this artist has long been associated with drawing (broadly defined), with various forms of non-representational mark-making extending right up to the edge of asemic writing. And so while Steinman’s resolutely abstract paintings deploy paint material and color across a stretched fabric ground pretty much as expected, their continued loyalty to the most radical tropes of avant-garde drawing—Rorschach blots and automatic writing, among others—are inescapably obvious.

November 9 - December 21, 2024

Like a generation of Southern California artists before them, William Camargo, Jackie Castillo and Julie Shafer operate at the intersection of art, politics and photography. But unlike their predecessors—the 1970s era San Diego photo-conceptualists spring to mind—this younger cohort proceeds with a different and perhaps more contemporary understanding of these three key terms.

William Camargo sometimes situates his “own brown body,” as he puts it, in the center of a surveillance economy now operating at a scale that could scarcely have been imagined a generation ago; this action and others like it resulting in a series of lens-based artworks so charming as to effectively disarm their malign implications. Jackie Castillo widens the category of “the political” to include the volatile Southern California real estate economy from which her own often large scale and immersive photo constructions extract a darkly ominous beauty. And Julie Shafer’s notably straight, cool and documentary images of “transportation,” so to speak, mask an explosive subtext that forces a long overdue reconsideration of this quintessentially Southern California theme.

Together, these three early-career artists provide a timely reminder that the political and the aesthetic are not necessarily antagonistic elements—the one coming inevitably at the expense of the other—but can be sometimes, as here, locked in a tender embrace.

September 7 - October 12, 2024

Katy Crowe identifies as an abstract painter. But her version of abstraction, while stubbornly uncompromising, is not allergic to outside references. Indeed, the title of this show, “Lunar Shift,” suggests planetary objects (far away) just as the title of her previous show at this gallery, “A Wrinkle in the Macula” suggested eyeballs (really big and close up).

Whether her titles offer genuine insight into the origin of the circular forms that often figure in her paintings or operate instead as playful misdirection could be beside the point. For whatever their relation to the outside world, Crowe’s powerfully affective artworks proceed according to an “inside” logic that is entirely indifferent to language, relying instead on modes of communication coded deeply in the process of painting itself.

September 7 - October 12, 2024

It is argued that “the dialectic of order and chaos” structures all poetic expression; sometimes tilted toward order, other times toward chaos, but always held together in a tense balance. If so, there can be few more reliable symbols of order (understood here as “domestic tranquility”) than the standard American upholstered couch, and few symbols of chaos more familiar (at least in the art context) than the rivulets and pools of splashed and poured paint associated with Abstract Expressionism.

Starting around 1990, the young Los Angeles artist Carter Potter brought together these two metaphor-loaded elements in a body of artworks hovering between sculpture and painting and perhaps something else. These artworks begin as couches which the artist strips down to partially expose their frames and then (sometimes) saturates with gallons of multi-colored house paint. All to powerful effect.

June 29 - August 24, 2024

The five women in this exhibition are linked by a number of shared commitments. These include but are not limited to their mutual interest in feminism, photography, storytelling and by a resourceful do-it-yourself approach to presenting their own ideas made necessary by the indifference if not active hostility that greeted the work of most young women artists in 1970’s Los Angeles. The exhibition at as-is.la coincides with a show by the same name and including the same five artists at Ortuzar Projects in New York. Taken together, the rich and diverse array of artworks presented in the two iterations of “Five Women Artists in 1970s Los Angeles” powerfully and effectively illustrate the political, social and aesthetic ethos of that time and that place.

May 18 – June 22, 2024

As the title suggests, Needle in the Hay is about looking – an act of searching deeply: for simple enjoyment or for ‘that accident which pricks me’. Same reasons that poets wrote: for the pleasure of arranging words on a page, when authentic and corporeal, “looking” and “making” operate in the same plane for artists. The exhibition features visual artists predominantly from Los Angeles areas in different generations with diverse backgrounds and disciplines. Here the notion of art as riddles, games or vessel-for-concept is in the rear view mirror and viewers are left to trust their own senses to “look” and to discover these “messy realities”. The collection of work is a humble survey of this reciprocal relationship in recent practices.

April 6 – May 11, 2024

“This body of work,” the artist explains, “is a study of location that has developed over the past ten years. The title of this exhibition is derived from the geographical name of this space, a looping trail set in Northern California overlooking the ocean.” What the resulting artwork offers, Karsen continues, is “a suggestion of landscape as body, as gold necklace, as abstract marker of dimension, as a palpable sense of a certain softness, as a relationship, as a questioning of where the line exists, as a trace that becomes faint, finding it and losing it again.”

April 6 – May 11, 2024

Once known for making small, lovable, abstract paintings—scaled thus to perhaps maximize their nearly irresistible charm—Brian Sharp, in and around 2016, produced a body of somewhat larger, nearly human-sized images. Impressive in a different way, these were more ambivalent than what had come before, less generous, more demanding of the viewer; offering a tantalizing reminder of the old pleasures with one hand while snatching it away with the other and leaving a different, unexpected reward in its place.

Ten of Sharp’s thoughtful, provocative abstract paintings were presented in a memorable 2017 exhibition in the basement gallery of the short-lived but highly influential exhibition space 356 Mission, and at least one of these, along with some contemporaneous artworks, make a welcome return appearance here in “Brian Sharp,” the artist’s second show at as-is.la

February 24 – March 30, 2024

To understand a work of art, three questions might be asked of the artist: Where does it come from? How does it work? What does it mean? So when presented with these questions about the works on view in her new show “Takako Yamaguchi: Eight Artworks 2009 / 2021,” the artist has, happily, answers for all three:

Where does it come from?
In 2009 Yamaguchi began a series of photorealistic paintings executed in oil on canvas. The paintings derived from photographs commissioned from Matthew Brandt of a nude model posed to re-enact, however loosely, images figuring prominently in the history of modernist photography. Yamaguchi’s paintings were completed in 2010 and exhibited at the end of that year.

February 24 – March 30, 2024

Las Vegas in the early 1970’s provided the young artist Paul Tzanetopoulos—as it did a number of older and more prominent artists, writers and architects—that rare and almost magical combination of “right place and right time.” Indeed, when architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown were busy studying the Las Vegas strip for their groundbreaking book “Learning from Las Vegas” (1972) and when artists Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria and James Turrell were flying in and out of Las Vegas in search of sites in the surrounding deserts for their own wildly ambitious art projects, Tzanetopoulos was at work on a series of equally inventive if still little known artworks sited both inside and outside of this uniquely important city he then called home. “Paul Tzanetopoulos: Las Vegas 1972-1975” presents a selection of these vintage Las Vegas artworks together here for the first time.

January 6-February 17, 2024

The words “dream” and “work,” roots of the Freudian term “dreamwork,” would appear to tug in opposite directions. Whereas “dream” promises the free play of imagination unencumbered by responsibilities, “work” suggests, well, the opposite. Nancy Youdelman cheerfully accepts the creative challenge of reconciling these opposed forces as she does here in an always charming if sometimes unsettling body of artworks that date back to the early 1970’s and forward to the present day.

January 6-February 17, 2024

The underlying source material here comes from vintage modern design publications, thus the title “Significant Properties.” Some photographic images—a Richard Neutra designed desert house, for instance—can be recognized as such. Most however are far more obscure and further disguised by a process of digital collage before emerging from the printer to be stretched and then overpainted with sometimes brightly colored accents applied by hand.

November 18-December 23, 2023

Tip of the iceberg.

This is the thought that pops to mind when considering the recent paintings of veteran Los Angeles artist Gerard Brane (b. 1947, Latrobe PA); paintings which, to follow the analogy, are as charmingly simple on their face as they are complex (and just a bit dangerous) beneath the surface. 

Each of the seventeen smallish (30 x 24”) oil on canvas paintings on view features the image of a single vase. Though easily identified as such, the vase-idea is transformed by the artist into an always beautiful and consistently inventive symbol rather than offering a plausible representation of an actual thing. Indeed, it quickly becomes apparent that these are works of the human imagination and that there are no crates filled with still life props gathering dust somewhere in the artist’s studio.