The photographs selected for this show encompass states of reflection, cleansing, re-setting, and the emergence of new thoughts, feelings, and visions. Bodies in nature, daily routines, and still lifes invite the viewer to look inward and out. Subjects absorb the world around them, and the images are layered with discovery and transformation.
The inspiration for the show came after I left a relationship I’d been in for many years to restart and find myself again. Since doing this, I feel awake and as though I’m in a different body. I’m seeing and realizing things I didn’t know were possible. I’m clearing space for new memories, open to all that awaits.
Many thanks to Matthew James-Wilson, Emily Yacina, and Heavy Manners Library for the opportunity and support, and to the artists for their beautiful work.
-Lily Spitz
About the Artists:
Edwin Arzeta lives and works in Los Angeles. Edwin’s practice is rooted in the idea that the gesture of preserving objects and moments can distend a viewer’s experience of recollection, longing, and empathy, thereby implicating one’s subjective instinct.
Chloe Hamilton is a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles. Her work explores how ordinary objects can be transformed into something both mundane and otherworldly, as if plucked from a dream. She received a B.A. in Art from UCLA in 2014 and is currently based in Melbourne, Australia, working as a photography editor.
Graham Holoch, born in 1991, is an artist based out of San Francisco, CA. His work utilizes humor and wit to relate the intensities and mundanities of life. He is a founder of Eggy Press, an artist-focused, small press curatorial group. He is the primary caretaker of Ripley, a very talented chantilly-tiffany (cat). She has been featured in campaigns by numerous pet lifestyle brands and is totally available for more modeling opportunities.
Walker Olesen is an artist from Los Angeles. He studied photography at UCLA and Yale. He is interested in dance, water, and the ecology of the everyday.
Aaron Peters received a bachelor’s in Art from UCLA in 2016 and an MFA at the Ohio State University in 2022. Peters has received the Global Arts + Humanities Society of Fellows Grant from The Ohio State University, and has two upcoming shows, one at ROYGBIV in Columbus and another at Urban Glass in New York. He currently resides in Columbus, Ohio. Peters’ work utilizes many processes of art, design, and craft to consider our varying relationships to the built environment and objects. He employs a homemade process of working with materials, objects, and spaces, to allow for meaning to be accessible and providing space for curiosity and discovery. Aaron is maintaining a project for others in his community that values and re-imagines the right to repair and re-use, conservation, and forms of sustainability.
Leah Rom (b. 1991, Buffalo, NY) is a Los Angeles-based photographer whose work explores the enchantment and unreality of the everyday. She received her B.A. in Art from UCLA in 2013.
Lily Spitz (b. 1992, San Francisco, CA) is a photographer based in Los Angeles. She graduated from UCLA with a B.A. in Art in 2014. She sees her photographs as pages in a visual diary and is drawn to the way light and shadow play with spaces and bodies. Lily is also the creator and curator of 24h Zine, an archive of photographs collected from Instagram stories.
Orr Swissa-Amran (b. 1995) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in New York. Orr graduated with a B.A. in Art from UCLA. Her work attempts to investigate historic illegitimacies through uniquely fragmented pathologies. Referencing both the affectionate acidity of feminine subjecthood and the literal accidie of human experience, these principles are engaged through the work’s medium.
