Matt McCormick & Brendan Lynch
Enter And Exit Through The Same Gate
April 5 2025- May 10 2025
Matt McCormick’s work operates at the intersection of cultural memory and material presence, distilling the residue of the American West into a highly personal yet broadly resonant visual language. Engaging with painting, drawing, and mixed media, McCormick’s practice navigates the tension between historic mythologies and contemporary detritus, where cowboys, highways, and Hollywood dreams dissolve into the textures of lived experience.
His work resists nostalgia, instead treating the American landscape as both a subject and a surface—one marked by erasure, reinvention, and cyclical decay. Fragments of signage, silhouettes of riders, and expanses of negative space suggest an inheritance in flux, a past that refuses to settle. Rather than reconstructing lost narratives, McCormick’s compositions act as palimpsests, where the West exists less as a fixed location and more as a shifting psychological terrain.
Brendan Lynch (b. 1985, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles)was a founding member of the infulential New York based arts organization The Still House Group from 2007-2015. Having grown up in Los Angeles, Lynch’s youth was a kaleidoscope of graffiti, animation, and the visual media that surrounds the city. Conflating high and low cultural aesthetics, Lynch uses a variety of mediums, styles, and gestures to explore the different ways you can interact with a painted surface. His deep understanding and connection to the evolution of painting gives way to his manipulation of these works in their truest forms. Lynch has excuted a number of exhibitions outside of the traditional white cube, using spaces such as bedrooms, cemeteries, and a chicken coop. Expanding his interest in playing with context to shift meaning. But always about painting.
Mia Scarpa
To Star
February 16 2025- March 22 2025
Scarpa’s cultivated visual language encapsulates the logic of the tile mosaic with a digital-folk sensibility. She grew up in Middleton, Massachusetts, and Barnstead, New Hampshire, and currently lives in Los Angeles. Her work explores the relational distinction between "fine art" and crafts and the inherent hierarchical relation between the two. Inspired by clutter, humor, toys, music, TV, nature, found objects, and other seemingly unconnected elements, her practice remains deeply material-based.
Scarpa is concerned with refraction. One triptych in particular illustrates an eagle, a loon, and a bat, marked by decorative lines that align when the works are joined. She builds upon her work through fragmentation, subdividing the canvas with stars, hearts, squares, and rectangles. This allows her to tile reference-shards together, creating layered paintings that draw the viewer in. Her piece Back Outside features a star at its center, composed of individually placed glass beads, emphasizing shape and form. Surrounding the star are scaled stills: a hand symbol, a digitalized meadow, a wolf captured by a night camera, a pair of eyes, and a woman singing into a mic. Scarpa’s preferred form of fragmentation is further emphasized through a juxtaposition of airbrush and oil paint.
A circular table painted by the artist stands in the center of the gallery, while walls are painted a deep green to immerse viewers in Scarpa’s world. Her practice extends beyond traditional painting into handmade necklaces and driftwood paintings that adorn the space. Scarpa’s work carries a sense of knowability—its references are recognizable, fostering a connection that invites deeper exploration. Her creations exist in conversation with one another, conjuring both the ephemeral and the deeply personal, resulting in a universe full of color and humor.
Text composed by:Tamara Itzel
