Barbara Strasen’s work seeks to make sense of the inexplicable - she is looking for ways to depict the disordered world in which we find ourselves.  What Could Possibly Go Wrong (1987), is part of Strasen’s portraits created through images of different facets of the person she is describing.  This spectacular work, featuring hand painted cutout flames around the border, is a tour de force of technical skill, color, and dark wit.  The painting is also highly prescient of today's complicated times - the fires in Los Angeles, the current political climate, environmental issues, and social unrest.

Strasen’s layering process combines disparate images to create visual harmonies and reveal congruence and commonality between them. The work exists on a razor’s edge – balancing smart and humorous, mundane and highbrow, witty and poignant.  We live in a state of contradictory emotions and experiences, and these paintings make visual the complexities of modern life.

Ana Medina’s paintings are an homage to the contemporary moment. In the current era of bottomless digital photo albums and lives lived publicly on social media, a new generation has been made to feel that they have to make every moment iconic - that their life needs to be bigger, better, and more beautiful than everyone else’s and shared online for all to see.

Medina’s paintings are the antidote - they are genre scenes depicting the world around the artist - paintings of her family and her friends as they go about their daily lives. These paintings are about capturing the joy of the most mundane moments and memorializing it in oil. Based on snapshots she takes, the paintings capture a split second that might otherwise disappear into the depths of our phone photo albums. The time consuming process of painting allows Medina to spend time recreating, and in a sense prolonging, the moments she chooses in stark contrast to how quickly we consume and discard digital memories today.

Kevin Yaun’s canvases blur the line between abstraction and representation. They play with color fields and architecture, geometry and landscape. They center the viewer in an ambiguous location: are we inside looking out? Are we outside looking in?

And yet these paintings are not portraits or specific narratives - they invite the viewer into the conversation. Figures wait patiently - often alone but seemingly not lonely - they are pensive, considering. Yaun cites the likes of Rothko and Diebenkorn as influencing his work and one can see a lineage. And yet Yaun’s work is for and of this moment. This moment where home can be far away for a plethora of reasons (economic unattainability, increasingly transient lifestyles) - where home is what we create in each moment.

Carla Falb’s subject matter is light and motion from rollercoasters and fireworks. Using what would have been throw-away out-of-focus images taken while riding coasters, Falb creates meticulous oil paintings of the light flares and motion blurs captured on film. The paintings are Falb’s means of sharing the exhilaration of a moment in time and are about escaping our day-to-day reality to experience altered states of consciousness.

To paint this work, it is necessary to experience the rush, the feel. Shall we call it the sublime? The power of gravity? The excitement mixed with fear as we near the top of the incline. People either love or loathe rollercoasters but they are deeply tied to the idea of escapism - the adrenaline, the rush, the moment.

 Christine Rasmusen’s paintings in oil on panel are meditations on the mundane.  The stark compositions are exquisitely elegant in their sweeping lines, highly detailed rendering, and subtle tones.

One can trace a lineage to the likes of Agnes Martin and Donald Judd in these paintings. Rasmussen has taken the precepts of Minimalism (often monochromatic and focused on the purity of geometry, line, and color) and brought it into the contemporary era. The freeway becomes to Rasmussen what the box became to Donald Judd - the core form of the work to be explored in all its iterations in the search for that transcendent moment. One can draw parallels between Rasmussen’s handling of color and light and that of Agnes Martin’s in her distillation of the desert landscape.  Rasmussen’s quietly evocative oil paintings of in-between spaces are contemplations on our inner lives that use the visual vocabulary of the constructed world to find these moments.

Bryan Ida’s work is a visually stunning tour de force incorporating elegant patterns, delicate marking-making overlaying intricate under-structures, and ranging from subtle nuanced colors to intense jewel-tones.  Uniting the different bodies of work is a desire to capture a moment - sometimes it is the experience of a place, sometimes of a thought, sometimes an emotion. 

Ida explores the complicated relationships that are human existence and what it means to live in the world.  He is visually exploring concepts such as time and memory, the experience of physical spaces, and the deeply fracturing social/political/environmental issues that exist in society.  The paintings embody wonder and beauty and yet their messages are nuanced and complicated. There is a depth to the work physically in Ida’s layering process that reflects the multi-faceted depth of the human experience.