Gallery 16 is pleased to present Blast Off from Earth!!, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles based artist Maysha Mohamedi. This is the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view through March 29, 2019, with an opening reception on Friday, February 1st from 6 to 9pm.

Inspired by ideas of departure, evacuation, family, wonder, inheritance, fate and the ways in which we have rendered uninhabitable this earth that we inherited, Blast Off from Earth!! is an exhibition of eight paintings that will accompany humankind as they depart from Earth in the year

The paintings commemorate the global relocation effort to a new human colony on extrasolar planet Kepler-442b. Created in hues of sea blue, earth green, and glacier white, they serve to honor the once-virile surface of an expiring planet.

Mohamedi's idiosyncratic gestural language and mark-making techniques are inspired by a very open-ended and unrestrained use of materials. From beach tar that she collects on the beaches of Santa Barbara to tubes of Middle Eastern paint imported from her mother country of Iran, Mohamedi is open to anything that comes into her world. Using long, hand-made, sticks to create large-scale calligraphic swoops and broken off bits of graphite to draw jagged marks that are hard pressed onto raw canvas, the artist is constantly inventing ways of achieving different types of marks. Ultimately, the marks Mohamedi makes and leaves behind invent worlds about our world that are simultaneously abstract and narrative. The resulting surfaces of her paintings are patterned and expansive, like "a farewell message created from overlaying the plumes of exhaust from the final spacecraft, the Space Shuttle Helus, with the diminishing lines of civilization below."

Maysha Mohamedi is an Iranian-American painter who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her studio is located in the Fashion District in Downtown LA. She has exhibited widely in New York and Los Angeles, including exhibitions at The Lodge, The Hole, The Pit and Lowell Ryan Projects. She is also a founding member of the Los Angeles art collective, The Binder. Mohamedi is the recipient of several award and residences, ranging from a National Science Foundation Fellowship in Tokyo, to an AICAD New York Studio Residency. Her work has been profiled in the LA Times, The Huffington Post, SF Arts Quarterly and The Conversation Art Podcast.