Moonshadow brings together the artist’s series of Moon paintings, painted between 2014 and 2020, for the first time. In a departure from her abstract practice, and a long career that encompasses performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, and sound elements, Evans’ cosmic paintings take inspiration from the sublime forces of nature which the artist has experienced throughout the course of her life in California, from her upbringing in California’s expansive and fertile Central Valley, to the raw and rugged Pacific Ocean coastline, and the high desert landscapes of Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley.

Land and Image: Chris Engman is a twenty-year survey of the artist’s work spanning from the early 2000s to 2022. After years of documenting records of actions, elaborate processes, landscapes, installations, and sculptures, Engman has become a master of Trompe-l'œil (or deceiving the eye), an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create an optical illusion. Engman's photography, at first glance, appears normal, but when given a second look, viewers can catch on to the delusion and begin to question the perceived image. 

Double Horizon is an immersive three-screen video installation that envelopes the viewer in artist Lia Halloran’s portrait of Los Angeles. The video footage was shot from cameras mounted to a plane piloted by Halloran as the artist was learning to fly. The flipped and mirrored footage presents the city and surrounding natural areas as kaleidoscopic abstractions, reflecting the artist's experience of her home city altered by the new scale and perspective offered by her flight experiences. 

Mana Contemporary proudly presents Borderlands, the new commission of a large-scale site-specific wall drawing by artist Hugo Crosthwaite for the exhibition Land of the Free. Over the course of two weeks, Crosthwaite will improvise and create a new composition that explores the notions of migration, refugees, and borders. The galleries will be open during this period, and visitors are welcome to witness Crosthwaite’s creative process as he paints on the gallery walls. At the end of the exhibition, following the artist’s directions, the wall drawing will be painted over, resembling the transient conditions of borderlands. 

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."

The gallery is pleased to announce that Ken Gonzales-Day will be giving a lecture at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado with guest faculty member Benjamin Timpson. This free in person event will take place on Sunday, June 12 from 7–8 PM. Registration required.

"Artist Jackie Milad is motivated to memorialize her Honduran and Egyptian heritage as she considers the importance of authorship and dissemination of history. “JACKIE MILAD: Birth” consists of four large scale works that combine painting, drawing and collage on hand-dyed canvas, making visual references to creation myths of Ancient Egypt and Mayan civilization. Via “disparate” imagery, Milad contemplates her own mixed-cultural upbringing as well as the complexity of history-making."

Equally lovely are the gilded, fantastical images of Harris’ A Season in the Wilderness. Infused with light and a sense of magic, Harris shapes boldly hued visuals myths both mysterious and captivating. With gold leaf elements that mirror that of Byzantine icons, Greenfield’s “A Survey, 2001-2021″ creates powerful paintings that subvert negative stereotypes about Black people and culture. Like Bey and Harris, a fierceness in palette matches passion for his subjects, serving as a framework for a message of pride, hope, achievement and sacrifice.

"What makes Gonzales-Day so special is his recognition of how the utilities of an archivist and historian go hand in hand with those of a visual artist. The importance and impact of his work in contemporary social justice movements beyond the art world cannot be understated. His academic and artistic investigations come together beautifully in “Another Land to” shed light on racialized legacies that we should all continue to confront and dismantle."

"Valenzuela is philosophical about what it means to be a photographer and a Latin American artist living in Los Angeles. While the surreal quality of his mental landscapes is rooted in his cultural background, the dystopian sci-fi quality of his fantasies of the future is very L.A. - even if no one really understands what that means - as yet. This fusion gives Valenzuez’s old-style black-and-white photographs of strange machinery an almost retro-futuristic quality. These are images we can return to over and over again, rather like an aesthetic feedback loop that recalls the lost ideals of modernism in late-stage capitalism."

"Especially illuminating is the article devoted to the personal collection of Ken Gonzales-Day. An artist who has long engaged photography and the history of California in his work (and who currently has a show on view at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles). Gonzales-Day has spent years gathering vernacular images of Latinos in Southern California in the period that spans the 1850s to the 1950s. California seems only to exist in the U.S. public imagination after becoming a state in 1850. Gonzales-Day’s collection reveals who was here when the U.S. military rolled in."

"This was an era of dispossession, displacement, and diaspora for Mexican America and also a century marked by violence, deportation, and large-scale erasure that sought to disappear Latinx people from history. It's an era when Laxtinx people were 'always on the edge of erasure,' as Gonzales-Day puts it, though the photographic archive he's collected promises to keep us from oblivion."

"Lia Halloran traverses through mechanisms of experimentation in order to document motion of matter. As an interdisciplinary artist, Halloran examines the interconnectivity of scientistic cultures and the performance of light. Halloran recently presented Your Body is a Space That Sees at LAX Terminal 1, as well as a solo exhibition, The Sun Burns My Eyes Like Moons at Luis De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles. In this interview the artist deep dives into the creation of cyanotypes, her Dark Skate series, and the influences of mythology and science on her practice."

“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.”