Archives for September 2025

Holly Wong embraces her personal traumas as creative engines that now motivate her prolific production. It’s all carried out in her home, much of it laid out in fragments and finalized on her living-room carpet.

Matt Kleberg plays with formalist and post-formalist ideas about the history of painting. The intimate scale of Nicasio Fernandez’ paintings contributes to their power of seduction, as does their moody tenebrism.

How lamely ironic is it to be reminded that Margaret Kilgallen’s tag was Meta? There it is, in red hand-painted script applied to a small wooden plaque beneath the serif foot of the K in “KOOK” in her 2001 (re)installation of “Main Drag.”

Sheila Ghidini presents medium-scaled works on paper and a wall-mounted sculpture, each exploring the formal properties of the circle and the square.

Chelsea Ryoko Wong installs five large paintings in a pastel-walled environment — including a brick red carpet — rinsed with pink, yellow, blue and purple neon light that she associates with Chinatown décor.

“The Sky Below” offers a counterpoint to the dystopian landscapes so often imagined in the genre — worlds shaped largely by male fantasies of conquest, control, and escape.

“Routed West: Twentieth Century African American Quilts in California” picks up Jacob Lawrence’s epic “Migration Series” narrative by shifting the spotlight to the West Coast, where a second wave of migrants found work during World War II.

The phrase (in Latin) from which “As Above, So Below” is derived, ut supra, ut infra, is used these days in legal documents to cite quotations elsewhere in the text. But the older, more germaine, meaning was an assertion that the earthly and heavenly worlds are united.

“A Roadmap to Stardust” plays on the kind of archeological romance that finds new knowledge in forlorn forms, even if that new knowledge is speculative rather than actual.