River Styx, curated by Brandy Carstens and Sara Lee Hantman, brings together a range of artists whose work is concerned with the interior and emotive forces of landscape that are spiritual, mythological, and metamorphic. Featured in the show include artists such as Etel Adnan, Kelly Akashi, Theodora Allen, Jean-Marie Appriou, Dan Herschlein, Heidi Lau, Mark Laver, Erica Mao, Elsa Munoz, Salvo, Gretta Solie, Frank Walter, Joseph E. Yoakum and Coco Young.

Landscapes are gardens and graves—mythical psychological portals, slippery thresholds made of cosmic sap and soil shaped by personal and collective consciousness, sublime geological sites erupting with metamorphic magmatism. The human psyche can be traced in the shadows and the light, in the trees that hum a romantic rhyme that the forest dances to with a cadence of life and death. Landscapes are haunted in ways that are not always immaterial, and ghosts are not invisible floating entities but written in land and flesh; as theorist Karen Barad notes, hauntings are “an ineliminable feature of existing material conditions.” In these haunted landscapes, loss and absence exist as a marked presence where memories, histories, and geopolitics linger like ghosts etched in earth.

The exhibition’s title, River Styx, references Hesiod’s Theogony and the river that flows between earth and the afterlife. Like a portal within a portal, the walls and vistas of the gallery also tell a magical mythological tale as the space is the former home and studio of artist Jorge Pardo. Upon entering the gallery, viewers must pass through Pardo’s whimsical and intricate tile walkway, a glittering threshold that invites you into its dream. 

Sea View
Private residence in Mount Washington
Los Angeles, 90065
*address disclosed upon appointment confirmation
On view through February 25, 2023