Greg Ito: To Give and Take

_To Give and Take_ is a new solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based, Bay Area–trained artist Greg Ito that explores cycles of sacrifice, inheritance, and renewal through personal narrative and collective memory. Drawing inspiration from _The Giving Tree_ by Shel Silverstein, Ito traces how the story's meaning shifts over time: from a childhood story of generosity into a meditation on the emotional and physical exchanges that shape generations. Driven by his own recent experience of becoming a father, Ito creates work dedicated to the future, exploring what we leave behind for the next generation. The exhibition features new paintings, sculptures, and a video installation alongside previous works, rendered in Ito's signature graphic style. Using flat exterior house paint with meticulous precision, he builds layered, surreal scenes that move between domestic interiors and shifting environmental landscapes where time feels compressed and overlapping. Within these environments, carefully constructed paintings function as symbolic windows, inviting us to consider our relationship to climate change, resilience, and what we carry. Central to the work are key moments drawn from _The Giving Tree_: the tree offering its apples, branches, and trunk to support the boy through different stages of life, only to be reduced to a stump in old age. In the story's final moment, the boy, now an old man, returns seeking rest, and the remaining stump offers itself one last time as a place to sit. For Ito, this conclusion embodies both the beauty and brutality of generational sacrifice, the quiet reality that each generation gives parts of itself so the next may continue forward. The exhibition moves through stages of growth, harvest, depletion, and renewal. Trees recur as metaphors for ancestry, shelter, labor, and survival. Branches extend and fracture, structures erode and rebuild, and figures move through moments of tenderness, absence, and transformation. These symbolic gestures reflect not only personal family dynamics, but also collective histories shaped by resilience and endurance. Underlying the work is a reflection on Japanese American incarceration during World War II and the sacrifices endured by prior ancestors who were forced to rebuild lives, identities, and homes under impossible circumstances. That history becomes a framework for considering how the struggles, labor, and care of those who came before us become embedded within the foundations of our everyday lives. _To Give and Take_ asks: What do we take from the world, and what do we give back in return? What does life offer us, and what does it ask us to surrender? The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on how they participate in the world today, what values they pass on, the burdens they carry, and what they choose to nourish for future generations. It considers what remains after time strips things down to their essence, serving as a reminder that the future is shaped by what we choose to plant, sustain, and care for in the present. Curated by Zoë Latzer, Curator and Director of Public Programs.