La Beast Gallery presents
CHIMERA
Opening celebrations: Saturday, May 6th, 5-9pm
Exhibition duration: May 6 - June 10, 2023
Gallery hours: Thursday-Saturday, 12-6pm, or by appointment
Address: la BEAST gallery 831 Cypress Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90065
Contact: info@labeastgallery.com | +1 213 705 4696
LA Beast gallery is pleased to present CHIMERA, an exhibition of ten artists exploring the power of illusion, fable, and belief.
Curated by gallery co-founder Roxana Eslamieh, CHIMERA balances a range of media and motifs in a ritualistic excavation of the legends that shaped us.
The exhibition features mystical paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by Maria Bang Espersen, Helia Chitsazan, Hea-Mi Kim, Shizuka Kusayanagi, Nathaniel Kyung Smith, Amy MacKay, Michael Norton, Saxon JJ Quinn, Amy Silver, and Se Oh. The artists are connected by a mutual inquiry into intricate webs of folklore and the ways it manifests in everyday life. Fantasy becomes entangled with reality when the ephemera of their devoted practices align, exposing the vast skeletal structure of humankind’s most profound stories.
CHIMERA is inspired by Persian folktales told to Roxana by her late grandmother. Beautiful and bizarre, the space is arranged with these surreal narratives in mind. The eternally loose threads of legend act as shepherds through space and time. Viewers can almost grasp the heart of one tale before becoming lost in another. Despite the commotion, serenity prevails. CHIMERA traverses geographies and cultures to summon epic heroes and beasts within a contemporary context. Interweaving their own personal lore, the artists of CHIMERA flip the tapestry of life to bask in the beauty of its chaos. The curator expresses the universal sanctity of myth, “...the artist’s hand is guided by an almost invisible history—as fundamental as genetic code passed down from generation to generation.”