OCHI is pleased to present Visual Snow, a two-person exhibition of new works by Omaha-based artist Casey Callahan and New York-based artist Jack Ryan. This will be the inaugural presentation at OCHI’s new Melrose Hill gallery location. Visual Snow will be on view at 605 N. Western Avenue in Los Angeles, California from September 13 through October 25, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 13 from 5 – 9 PM.
Visual snow syndrome is a neurological condition characterized by persistent perceptual aberrations in the form of tiny, shimmering dots across a subject’s field of vision. While the exact cause is unknown, research suggests it may be related to increased excitability in the visual cortex. It is theorized that VSS is a strategy of neurological resistance, generating optical information in response to stress or sensual deprivation.
Casey Callahan creates meticulous hanging sculptures, glimmering strands composed of thousands of crystal beads. These nearly imperceptible works float in and out of sight, reorienting viewers’ understanding of space and architecture. Their complex explorations of color and light induce a slower sense of time. Each strand stands alone but in dynamic relation to the whole field – they speak to one another through color and syncopated visual rhythms.
By painting the floor white, Callahan uses the whole space as a blank canvas. It is a field of emergence for her sculptures, a stage for their color to be revealed. Always installed in conversation with the site of their presentation, the strands activate the idiosyncrasies of the gallery’s ceiling. Hovering just above the ground, the works appear to fall like stray light from cracks in the wooden ceiling. One final gesture, a field recording of a Midwestern nightscape, floats through the gallery. The sound of cicadas at night, their murmurings like tiny bells tolling on an infinite plane, draws the whole space into harmony.
Jack Ryan paints atomized street scenes of contemporary urban life. Working in a Neo-Impressionist manner, Ryan’s paintings draw attention to the phenomenology of sight itself, rather than the concrete reality of any singular environment. It is this broad spectrum opticality that affords his work a certain hallucinatory quality, an image disintegrating before our eyes. Ryan draws our attention to the periphery, decentering our gaze and softening focus.
In this exhibition, Ryan presents four cityscapes. Flurried brushstrokes abstract these scenes, transforming them into sundrenched fields of color and light. Viewed in the round, the paintings capture a strange kind of movement: the horizon falls out of view, as if captured through the lens of a falling camera. This perspective shift, communicated through slight composition shifts between paintings, evokes the wandering gaze of a pedestrian navigating a vacant city at sunrise.
Coming from nearly opposite environments (Nebraska and New York City) both artists find connection through a more sensual engagement with their surroundings. It is apropos that their synthesis of nature and urbanity finds a home in the landscape of Los Angeles, a city bathed in perpetual sunlight. Moved by the ways that wonder emanates from within the ordinary, they cultivate a space of quiet reverie and respite from the world outside.