Present Figures – curated by Laura Malone

Present Figures brings together five California painters whose works exist within the figurative language of portraiture, simultaneously expanding and disrupting it. Centered around themes of intimacy, boundaries, and embodied emotion, each artist takes an individual approach to media, scale, and the capacity of the human form to be both a site of identity and a vessel of metaphor. Engaging in profound considerations of what it is to be human—our physicality, sense of self, relationships, consciousness, and creativity, these artists invite us to engage with these shifting, eternal questions and reflect on our own experiences—be they practical, peaceful, disturbing, humorous, fragmented, spiritual, or otherworldly. As individuals, choices that begin with who and what to portray later manifest in stylistic and material communiquès that boldly and poetically reveal themselves to the world. Collectively, the psychologically charged spectrum of the group reminds us of the myriad ways our sentience can be narrated. Like Anais Nin said, "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."