September 13 - October 25, 2025

Veteran Los Angeles artist Phyllis Green identifies her recent series of modestly scaled, hand-painted ceramic sculptures—five of which are presented here in this small, sharply focused exhibition—as “self portraits.” These unsettlingly realistic and thus powerfully effective artworks are not to be confused with “selfies,” Green adamantly insists in an artist’s statement fittingly titled, “A Self Portrait is Not a Selfie,” a position she goes on to argue in greater detail:

The term “selfie” – coined in 2002 – captures a fleeting, smartphone image for instant online sharing. By contrast, artists have created self-portraits for centuries. Demanding time, reflection, and intention, the self-portrait can record the passage of years, chart technical growth, or transform identity through costume or disguise. Self-portraiture figured prominently in the feminist persona work of the ‘60s and ‘70s, offering an artist’s vision of how she wished to be seen.

September 13 - October 25, 2025

It can be easy to forget the physicality of painting, especially today. Not just that paintings are material things (usually), but that they’re a physical kind of communication. I can say the phrase “paintings communicate physically,” but it’s another thing to stand in front of an artist’s work, quiet down the verbal parts of my mind, and listen with the intuition of my body. Digital worlds increasingly shape how we communicate and make meaning today. They encourage us to prioritize verbal, symbolic ways of thinking, at a loss to our embodied intuition. This distinction is becoming more and more significant as developments in AI lead us to question what, if anything, differentiates organic and artificial ways of knowing. 

In All Systems Fail, Alex Heilbron presents six large scale paintings born from the confluence of our physical and digital realities. Working from images found online, she enlarges and crops pictures of resonant things like leaves, faces, and flowers, obsessively burrowing into them at a pixelated level, using her intuition to find an underlying structure. She then meticulously rounds, adjusts, and modifies the borders of these forms, edge by edge, to produce a vector file that can be read by a vinyl cutter. Once she’s assembled a collective group of structures, she prints them and lays their vinyl embodiments over the canvas. She then pours and brushes paint over these digitally native stencils to build up a complex epidermal surface, before removing the vinyl like a used band-aid. The outcome is painstakingly handmade yet delimited by digital systems.