Antigone highlights the idea of choice in choicelessness, focusing on how the decisions artists make, inform and effect the choices and aesthetic conventions that follow. Antigone also reveals the visible and invisible interconnectedness of people, places and things. 

Marthe Aponte, Lorraine Bubar, Barbara Kolo, Lilah Lutes, Victoria May, Blue McRight, Lena Moross and Joan Wulf work with diverse materials: paper, paint, tape, textiles, wood and fire, that represents the aesthetic dynamism of Los Angeles: Their narratives describe landscape as well as internal, emotional environments such as love and longing. People experience these phenomena in multiple ways, and the works in Antigone reverberate with the correlations that bind the artists as women and storytellers with agency to the manifold ways their choices stimulate responses.

All over the world, women do the work of creating, sustaining and retaining cultural knowledge and communities. Telling, Making, Doing: Women’s Work highlights Los Angeles-based artists Susan Feldman, Karen Hampton, Veronica De Jesus, Raksha Parekh, Monica Nouwens, Charla Puryear, Diane Silver, and Carla Weber who use aesthetic compositions in two and three dimensions to tell these stories. 

Stories are pieces of memories, language and feeling stitched together. The artists in Telling, Making, Doing use stories as a framework for the material investigations and vice versa, creating a closed, but not hermetic paradigm for their practices. These artists are doing women’s work of remembering, codifying and reinterpreting the telling of identity, of materiality and of aesthetics.

COLLAPse featuring Rodney McMillian, Rosalyn Myles, Miguel Osuna, Jenny Hager, Charles Dickson, April Banks, Joe Davidson, Ana Rodriguez and Roy Thurston. Continuing Quotidian’s mission to highlight uniquely California visual literacy, COLLAPse looks at the ways artists articulate moments of impact, absorption and consolidation of materials, stories and aesthetics.

Serpentine Fire featured some of LA’s standard bearers in iconoclasm who push boundaries, developing new techniques, modalities and aesthetics. Serpentine Fire, based on the song of the same name by Earth, Wind & Fire, captures a group of artists who have radical art practices , much like the band’s early music. Mel Edwards, Henry Taylor, Ed Love, Todd Gray, Kori Newkirk, Umar Rashid, Lyndon Barrois, Glen Wilson and Duane Paul use divergent media to create visually rich language born from life in LA.

Lisa Bartleson’s Kindred is a large-scale installation that explores healing in and by community. Using the Japanese tradition of kintsugias an exercise of restoration, Kindred employs a visual discursive practice to examine the cracks caused by physical and/or emotional suffering, and the communal foundations of memory and recovery that filter, shift and support identity. 

Kindred’s power as an aesthetic statement is enhanced through the visual narrative of people’s relationship to signifying objects as well as the sound of a baby’s heartbeat in the womb. Bartleson layers the experience with her own heartbeat, reminding us that we are all built from material, memory, and a universal cycle of life. The goal of the installation is to visualize healing, growth and community through an abstracted art practice. It is not intended as a treatise on abject beauty that questions order and meaning, but as edification of the beauty of seeing into ourselves, then relating that allegorically to art and community at large.

Quotidian and artist Joe Lewis held The Inflated Tear: Erasures Past and Present People, Places and Things - A performance for Drums, Teeter Totter, Sign Language, Trumpet and Music Box created by Joe Lewis. The event wrangled in many artful faces alongside a special appearance by artist Betye Saar.

Curator jill moniz organizes "WOMAN | WOMAN" with artists Victoria May and Lisa Diane Wedgeworth whose explorations of light, texture, and surface push the boundaries of hard edge. With opposite but not oppositional practices, these artists work in and at the boundaries of method, materiality, and meaning.

Los Angeles plays a significant role in “WOMAN | WOMAN” as a place for difference to comingle and coexist. Just as there are diverse communities, these artists shape and sharpen their perspectives to hard edge by layering on and integrating varying visual modalities. In LA, these expanding traditions create the aesthetic and social fabric from which May and Wedgeworth draw continued inspiration.

Four Women: Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Veda B Kaya, Kyungmi Shin and Charisse Pearlina Weston. Inspired by Nina Simone’s song, Four Women examines how Los Angeles provides the space for aesthetic and intellectual exploration for artists from diverse backgrounds working in different media. These artists investigate art and architecture, unpacking the weight of space and place on form and meaning.

Return chronicles movement and defines home. Artist Miguel Osuna returned to Los Angeles after a three-month residency at Art1307 in Naples, Italy. There he was inspired by the history of that ancient city, by its light and its spaces that offered him time to dive into the culture as well as time to reflect on his own. 

A native of Mazatlán, Mexico, Osuna saw similarities between that city on the ocean and Naples on the sea, under the shadow of Vesuvius, that allowed him to consider new perspectives on his abstract color fields. He continued his investigation of the line and gesture in Naples while incorporating a visual language of the continuum- the distance and immediate past, as well as by an insatiable desire to find innovative approaches to manifest his creativity. 

This momentum returns Osuna to LA with new ways of seeing space and place. Return presents examples of the work that earned Miguel Osuna his Italian residency, in addition to new work informed by his residency and Continuum, his culminating exhibition at the Villa di Donato in Naples that confirmed on both sides of the Atlantic that he is an artist to watch. Return also includes a hint of where he may be going now that he is back in his own studio.

Holding Up 1/2 the Sky held at Roberts Projects investigates how the dimensionality of sculpture lends itself to feminine thought, particularly as it manifests in the intersectionality of aesthetics, narrative and meaning. The exhibition brings together women artists whose abstract sculptures operate in call and response to Saar’s installation Something Blue, which was on view in a neighboring exhibition space.

Echiko Ohira, Karen Hampton, Mika Cho, Blue McRight, Kyungmi Shin, Victoria May, Chenhung Chen, Lisa Bartleson, Adrienne DeVine, Maria Larsson, Rebecaa Niederlander, Cole James, Camilla Taylor and Alexis Slickelman employ wood, clay, wire, glass, sound, fabric, paper and other matter to delve into the ways which materiality and divine energies converge. 

Extent began as an exhibition about negative space in sculptural form. Who my mother and I, Francine Kelly, director emeritus of Featherstone Center for the Arts, came to California to start Quotidian, we were investigating commonalities of our aesthetics. With out shared interest in richly tactile, self-referential forms, we focused on Peter Shelton’s foundational work.

When my mother and I conceived of Extent we wanted to highlight how Shelton’s work made space for other investigations of juxtaposing signifying forms, bringing together my friends from the community of Los Angeles based artists: Blue Mcright, Lisa Bartleson, Joe Davidson, Duane Paul, Nike Schroeder and Lisa Soto, whose sculptures weighed objects with formal and narrative relationships to volume.