Swelter

Good Mother Gallery Los Angeles is pleased to announce 'Swelter', our summer group exhibition featuring works from 14 emerging artists.

The essence of summer lies in the subtle, yet profound, shift it brings to our lives. A time when nostalgia merges with the present, awakening a unique blend of freedom, youthful exuberance, and boundless possibilities. This summer-themed art show aims to capture the understated enchantment of the season, evoking memories of long days spent basking in the sun, exploring uncharted territories, and embracing life's simple pleasures.

Join this ode to summer, where art transcends time, and together, we rediscover the magic that lies within those fleeting, sun-drenched moments.

Featured artists:

Eli Kauffman, Hunter Harvey, Meegan Barnes, Fay Sanders, Sally Jerome, Jack Kenna, Zac Hoffman, Jeff Rubio, Dustin Brown, Virginia Broersma, Lisa Rock, Luke Van H, Devin Liston and Jonah Elijah.

Jonah Elijah, a third ward Houston, Texas native, uses memory to reference happenings based on his upbringing. His narratives explore concepts of identity through portraiture, language and mass media. He engages with these concepts from the past through material such as tennis shoes, televisions and found objects. Recalling these happenings which can also be a metaphor for his use of found objects, Elijah depicts Black life and his experience by questioning economic structure and illustrating the bliss of Blackness.

Eli Kauffman grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, but is currently based out of Providence, Rhode Island. They recently graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA. Though primarily interested in painting, Kauffman is also known to explore printmaking, textiles, and ceramics. The work depicts interpersonal relationships, sourced through a combination of photos and film stills. The reference imagery highlights the disparity between personal experiences of friends and family, and coming of age television that Kauffman grew up on.Saturated color creates melodrama and tension, revealing emotional urgency in every action. The figures have grown to be life size, creating a physical relationship to the viewer. In some of the works, figures return the gaze of the audience, as if they are waiting to have their photo taken. Kauffman aims to convince the audience that they could step into the work and be a part of the events depicted on the canvas.

Hunter Harvey (born 1989 in Peoria, Illinois) earned his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2012) and his MFA from the University of Chicago (2015). He currently lives and works in downtown Los Angeles.

Meegan Barnes is a Los Angeles based painter and ceramic artist. She’s constantly inspired by her fellow Angelenos and the vibrancy of the city itself– from downtown LA where her studio is, to an art opening in Hollywood to a late night taco truck. There is an anthropological aspect to her work in that she documents poignant moments which are quintessentially LA, yet through her own personal lens by infusing unique color and style. Her work reveals a passion and compassion for her subjects as well as the public or personal space we find them in.

Fay Sanders says: "I am afigurative painter with a focus on portraiture. In my current series, I paint women in sports. By reappropriating Christian religious imagery and motifs from the Soviet avant garde, as well as footage from the Olympics, I conjure a world of all-women athletics, one both recognizable and inaccessible, full of inside jokes and insularity. In my paintings, this world is a utopia. I’m fascinated by the way the athlete’s body becomes a tribute to its sport, a machine built for one purpose. I play with proportion, emphasizing parts of the body that the athlete herself has emphasized through training. Beyond my figural stylizations, I render landscape elements in bizarre ways and accentuate unnatural tones. Just as these athletes radiate dedication to sport, I hope my paintings indicate my love of this medium. Painting, after all, like sports, is a serious form of play.

Sally Jerome is a painter living and working in New York City. She paints seen and imagined tableaus often in urban environments that reflect the human condition. She received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and her work has been exhibited at a variety of galleries and institutions including SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Art on Paper NYC, the Bronx River art Center, Flux Factory, Sens Gallery in Hong Kong and most recently, Primary Projects in Miami, Florida.

Jack Kenna (b. 1994 in Durango, CO, USA) is a visual artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY. His work often depicts or directly incorporates found images, objects, and text amongst highly considered and unconventional compositions looking at impermanence, perception, sexuality, and everyday life with humor and playfulness. His most recent solo exhibition, How Slowly Time Passes, How Quickly Things Change, was at Equinox Gallery in Vancouver (2023). Jack holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Loser Angeles is a visual artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Using a variety of mediums, Loser Angeles’ work features common subjects and characters spontaneously throughout his works which explore and emphasize what he describes as “the oddness of the ordinary.

Jeff Rubio, a Philadelphia-based Pratt Institute alum, creates ceramic works that are rooted in queerness, nostalgia, and joy. Drawing from their childhood experiences and Filipino heritage, Rubio seeks to construct imaginative worlds that offer fresh perspectives on traditional craft and production processes. Rubio's work often comprises smaller elements, allowing them to engage in the act of play by sketching in 3D and creating compositions even after the ceramic pieces are fully fired.

Dustin Brown paints the difficult scenes we see when we trawl the depths of our memory. Through the subtle aesthetic of milky gradients and pastel objects, Brown references moments of tough transition in the making of identity. Each painting comes to terms with life by making something positive out of it. Recurring symbols in his work include a yellow flower, human appendages, and brown boots. Each with only four limbs, fingers, toes, or petals, the artist draws life in each object related to one another. Dustin Brown’s painting is an exploration of the human’s hunt for purpose and the obstacles that make us question our desire. In his exploration Dustin labels the ups and downs of a person finding their way with hi signature florid markers. Dustin Brown currently lives and works in Charlotte, North Carolina and has recently exhibited in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Beirut.

Virginia Broersma is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work focuses on the representation of bodies at leisure with a nod to Southern California. Her engagement with the art community involves curating, writing, collaborative projects, public art, and organizing support for artists along with her studio practice.

Lisa Rock is an artist born in Massachusetts who lives and works in Oakland. She received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include: Overgrowth at Johansson Projects in Oakland in 2022, Monterey Museum of Art's Currents gallery in 2018, and Merge Visible at NIAD Art Center in Richmond, CA in 2017. Rock was an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center in 2013 and an artist in residence at the Black Rock Desert NCA (AIR) program summer of 2022.

Luke van H (b. 1995) grew up in London, Ontario, graduated from Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2019, and lives and works in Toronto. In the last five years, Van H has crafted a unique visual vocabulary of garden imagery to explore the idea of a virtual garden- a place where anything can happen. The integration and separation of technology from everyday life and nature is an ongoing interest in Van H’s work.

Devin Liston (born 1983) is a Los Angeles multi-media artist who focuses mostly on oil painting and muralism. Liston’s career started in collective art teams including Cyrcle and Devngosha and at the end of 2014 he began working solo. His current work is centered around utilitarian objects in sports and carpentry, using these objects to create a language of exploring existence, meaning, and everyday life. He has done murals around the world and his personal work has been shown in Los Angeles, Iceland, Hong Kong, New York, Australia, Seattle, Munich, Bayreuth, Atlanta, and Mississippi.