Over the past two decades, Engman has dedicated his art to understanding how images deceive the eye and the human need to make sense of visual perception. Engman’s photography, at first glance, appears normal, yet, under careful examination, viewers become aware of the optical illusion and begin to question the constructed image. Engman’s twenty-year practice is grounded in research and conceptual thought. He documents remnants of labor and the juxtaposition of human material and vast landscape through sculpture and photography.

"Luis De Jesus Los Angeles began The Armory Show with a bang. With a compelling booth of newly created paintings by artists June Edmonds, Evita Tezeno, Vian Sora, Laura Krifka, and Nicolas Grenier, the gallery appeared to have one of the most visited booths at the fair. Within minutes of the opening, the gallery had sold work by Sora, Edmonds, and Tezeno."

"This makes an upcoming exhibition at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum at Pepperdine University in Malibu (an area well acquainted with fire) particularly poignant. “To Bough and to Bend,” a group show that takes the tree as its binding theme, opens at the museum later this month. Included in the exhibition is an image by Ken Gonzales-Day, a Los Angeles artist who has long tracked the history of Mexican American lynchings in the West, a history that leads him to the trees on which these murderous actions took place."

Pacifico Silano is known for sourcing archival images of gay pornography, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s, to interrogate white masculinity and American clichés through the lens of queer desire. He creates his work by photographing, rather than scanning, the archival photographs he has collected. Silano often layers them physically on top of each other, sometimes repeating the process with several magazines, and then takes a picture of the final layout. He makes further edits to those images by cropping or scaling them to show the pixelated grain, paper fibers, rough edges, or a detail of the magazine spine.

Jonathan VanDyke’s opulent sewn paintings fuse geometric pattern and expressive gesture. His works emerge through complex and prolonged processes of accumulating, mark-making, and piecing, often taking over a year to conceive and construct. Gathered from his family, friends, and companions, the fabrics that make up his paintings are stained and marked by way of techniques he first devised through long-term collaborations with performers from the NYC queer art community.

"It had everything in it, those shoes," said Huynh. "It's beautiful. It's strong. I wondered, 'Who walked in those shoes? Who were these women?' Leather was so symbolic of skin, of transforming suffering and scarring. The beautiful patterns and details of flora and flowers — I think flowers are very symbolic of women and fertility and also like an offering of apologies to the mothers."

The work consists of a slender disc of corten steel laid flat on the ground that bears the outlines of roses and a pair of praying hands. At night, it is illuminated from below. A pair of low benches offer a space for contemplation, and a low, curved wall features texts inspired by the women’s experiences: “If you speak English, they treat you one way,” reads one inscription. “If you don’t speak English, they treat you another way.”

"I want the art to be impactful and meaningful and create a deep experience for contemplation for viewers," said artist Phung Huynh. "The material is made of metal to symbolize the mother's strength, and I want this to last forever."

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to present a virtual talk between New York artist Liz Collins and art historian Lex Morgan Lancaster. Liz Collins is a multi-media artist whose practice converges at the intersection of textile and fiber arts, painting, installation, and design. Lex Morgan Lancaster is a scholar, professor, and curator who focuses on queer, feminist, trans, and anti-racist visual and theoretical contributions to the field of contemporary art.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to present “Lavi Daniel and Kim MacConnel in Conversation,” an artists' talk held in conjunction with Daniel's current solo exhibition, The Fruits of an Enigma.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to participate in Dialogues | Galleries X Galleries, hosted by Galerie Lelong featuring Luis De Jesus, Ivy N. Jones, and Mary Sabbatino; Kibum Kim and Friedrich Petzel; Diego Singh and Donald Johnson Montenegro. This summer, three New York-based galleries have invited galleries from other locales to present their artists' works in these spaces, enabling exposure to a new audience independent of an art fair. Hear from gallery leadership as they discuss the genesis and reception of their collaborations, positing how future joint endeavors might grow.

"A new series of intimately scaled pastel on paper scenes investigating the dreamlike logic of a young mind reaching for order among the big world’s mysteries is currently on view at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. These are paired with examples of Daniel’s large-scale, supremely saturated pattern studies — the better to catch through-lines in his inventive palette and intuitive compositional motifs, even between narrative and non-figurative works."

"Drawing a parallel between Iraq and subduction zones as sites of collision, Sora’s works ruminate on the forces that feed the chaos and instability of the country. Echoing the way in which earthen matter is recycled post-collision, Sora contends that society, too, engages in cyclical processes of regeneration, rebirth, and replenishment."

"Three fine solo shows of paintings offer personal perspectives as unique as the artists who created them: Laura Krifka, Evita Tezeno, and Nancy Evans.Tezeno’s work is a delightful, vibrant mixed-media swirl of collage and acrylic. 'My Life, My Story' is reminiscent of a quilt, a layered narrative of family life in which the textured mediums also convey the stories. Krifka’s 'Still Point,' is a beautiful tribute to light, the human body, and the human heart. With domestic settings framing lustrous images, her stunningly accomplished work pulls at the heart and reaches the soul. Nancy Evans focuses on a celestial landscape rather than a human one in 'Moonshadow.'"

"Tezeno creates scenes of everyday life that have a timeless quality. They could be images of now, or from the past. While representational, they have a folk art quality so they appear simple, yet complex simultaneously. The works are composites filled with an array of different materials. Whoever these figures may be, they round out Tezeno’s story and illustrate a vital community."

"In Fleurs du mal, Evans moves from American Modernism to a post-apocalyptic version of American Regionalism, unsettling, ravishing and surreal.  Within its potent symbolism, many American myths collide.  Evans infuses Fleurs du mal with a poetic sense of ruin and devastation, but also with the possibility of renewal."

Expanding on her ongoing architectural interventions inspired by her native Puerto Rico’s built environment, Edra Soto's newly commissioned sculpture Casa-Isla | House-Island considers the idiosyncratic architecture and designs of lower- and middle-class homes, redeploying those elements in architectural representations. The horizontal shapes floating on the water allude to the topography of the island of Puerto Rico and a notion of the house as a vessel. In this sense, the work becomes a reflection on states of isolation and the idea of homes as topographical spaces that contain private histories.

The National Portrait Gallery’s triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition celebrates excellence in the art of portraiture. As the realization of a gift made by Virginia Outwin Boochever to the Smithsonian, both the competition and this exhibition demonstrate the power of one individual to make a transformative impact. The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today presents 42 portraits selected through an open call that garnered more than 2,700 entries from artists working across the United States and Puerto Rico. Karetzky's painting Toast, 2019 is currently on view in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery for The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today exhibition through February 26, 2023.

"Occupying the opposite pole of painting are the socially engaged works of Karla Diaz at the Los Angeles gallery Luis De Jesus (Booth 5.03). Diaz’s deep, color-saturated canvases tell personal stories of migration from Mexico to the United States, as well as preserve folklore from her heritage."

"Several paintings subtly capture sunrise or sunset, the fading light visible in the painting’s background. Sink or Swim pictures a dim and banal kitchen sink that looks out to a lavish private beach. The fantasy always remains at a distance, trumped by the real. Everything But depicts a similar kitchen sink set into an unremarkable Formica countertop, but rather than peer out over a landscape, the sink looks out into a mirror that reflects the entire scene back at us, giving the viewer the uncanny ability to see what would be behind us in the painted scene."

Here’s a shortlist of recommended booths: global powerhouse Perrotin; iconic-to-cool NYC dealers Kasmin and Karma; European bastions of important discourse Hales Gallery, London, and Kerlin Gallery, in from Dublin; and L.A. outposts of cool Anat Ebgi, Louis Stern Fine Arts, Night Gallery, Luis De Jesus, and Various Small Fires (L.A., Seoul), which also unveils a permanent Dallas space timed to the opening of the fair. (We’ll be catching up with VSF’s Esther Kim Varet in the coming weeks for an in-depth profile.)

“'I love to capture the strength and vulnerability of young people in Cuba,' he adds. Inspiration, then, can spawn from the smallest of interactions to the more allusive, like when an artist expresses themselves through their mediums, 'especially when an audience is tuned in to them'. It’s this energy between people that Gabriel seems to be most intrigued by."

“This body of work is really meant to honor the invaluable work that female astronomers contributed to their field," Halloran said. "Without these discoveries we would be nowhere near where we are now in terms of being able to measure and understand the universe.”