Zoe Walsh: Gathering

Debuting on ICA LA's 7th street facade is a commissioned, site-specific mural by artist **Zoe Walsh** (b. 1989, Washington D.C.; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA). As a painter, Walsh refuses and expands the bounds of their chosen medium. They disrupt the containers of canvas and paint; bend figure and ground; entwine deep research and embodied practice. Their process includes digital modeling, meticulous hand-weeded stencils, and screen printing—all of which coalesce into dreamy scenes of silhouetted bodies in nature and in pleasure. Gardens, parks, and urban landscapes appear throughout Walsh's paintings as sites for queer intimacy and possibility, reclaimed in the face of systemic erasure. In composing their montages, Walsh combines material from queer archives, topographic maps, and other found images with photographs of their own community staged in their garden. Refracted through Walsh's prismatic hand, these references—once stamped in time—become emergent visions of queer and trans connection. Oscillating between vibrancy and concealment, Walsh's work confounds legibility, inviting ways of seeing that shift, shimmer, and unfold. Their forthcoming mural will formally and conceptually expand upon these lines of inquiry, focusing in particular on the ecologies of Los Angeles.