Ocularia: Group show of young Californian artits

"Ocularia: Group show of young Californian artits"

from Saturday, May 31, 2025 to Saturday, June 14, 2025

Galerie XII Los Angeles

Olivia Bangham, Jessica Lee, Lola Libbi-Bleser, Audrey Schmidt, Eleanor Schiltz, Ethan Tague Drawing upon a term found across medieval texts and magical treatises describing crystal lenses, shimmering gems, and charmed mirrors as intermediaries between the physical eye and the metaphysical world, Ocularia examines intuitive artistic practice as gazing through an enchanted lens, alchemizing lived experience into illuminating imagery—transmuting lead into gold. The works on view in Ocularia are each a mirror through which the respective artist’s earthly experiences are refracted, revealing tableaus of stars, animals, spirits, and selves: surreal, primal, andarchetypal iconography born from intuitive processing. Through this figurative imagery, Ocularia asserts that peering through the lens not only provides otherwise inaccessible insight into individually lived experience, but allows for the crystallizationof its fleeting emotional complexities and existential implications through the production of a static, immortal image. The parallel line drawn between artistic and alchemical practice thereby bleeds and merges, contending that the practices of magic and art are not exclusive, but both equal demonstrations of harnessing intuitive power to transmute the intangible into substance.