Opening Reception: 5 – 8 PM
New gallery location: 461 N Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA
DON’T LOOK Projects is pleased to present “Synnecrosis,” Ophelia Arc’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at the gallery’s 461 North Western Avenue location. Arc’s work offers an unsettling but necessary encounter with our deepest inherited wounds. Arc’s practice—encompassing visceral crochet sculptures conceived as exoskeletons of memory and trauma—operates within the charged territory where inheritance, psychoanalytic structures, and the brutal intimacy of family intersect.
Drawing on Robert C. Lane’s concept of the spider mother and Freudian theories of arachnophobia, the exhibition interrogates the ways motherhood becomes mythologized, reduced to archetypes that obscure its contradictory, entangled realities. The spider motif carries a particular charge in maternal discourse. Lane’s seminal paper, “Anorexia, Masochism, Self-Mutilation, and Autoerotism: the Spider Mother,” looks at how society often tries to fit mothers into reductive categories. This pattern simplifies the complex ideas surrounding womanhood itself.
On view January 10th – February 28th, 2026, at DON’T LOOK Projects, 461 N. Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA.
