The project suspended, unsited at FOYER-LA offers a respite from habitual perception generating a held moment of the incidental, the transitory, the peripheral— in space, in time, in awareness. In the fantastical work of Jessica Goehring, Megan Walch, and Nathan See fields of color energy weave together illusionistic, tech-originated, and intuitively constructed space.

Jessica Goehring’s holographic paintings of layered text messages, photos, A.I. generated images, and social media memes under organza screens activate a vibrant organic space where bold colors within constructed patterns pulse, shift, and ripple. The uncertain scale, relevance, and origin of the imagery subtly shift the viewer's awareness. Goehring describes her work as, “molded by a fascination with society’s personal technologies and the way they shape a person’s vision. The works are ultimately about perception and how an individual creates and interprets this visual environment.” 

Megan Walch’s paintings of wildly colored empty skies, UFOs, glowing strawberry moons, floating asteroids, and black holes use the medium’s inherent dialectic of fluidity and viscosity to channel the malleability of form, time, and space. Walch describes her process as performative: “When painting wet-on-wet there is a window of time in which to work with the fluid medium. In this moment you either capture or kill the image: you can infuse it with light and luminosity or make a dull muddy mess. This painting process allows for the unknown and indeterminate to enter the work, and here it literally invades as flying saucers.”

Nathan See’s intuitive forms create assemblages that curve and careen in the void, eliciting movement, color, and an implicit humor. The insertion of domestic instruments (knives, chains, etc.) are a key to his practice of interjecting a critical, often implied violent human interaction. The disruptive aspect juxtaposed with formal elements invoke form and function or form and disfunction where function is emotional rather than physical pragmatism. For this sculpture, See has recycled the wood from FOYER-LA’s previous three installations. The price of his piece is equivalent to the original material costs, reimbursing the project space and conveying a barter exchange.

The artists’ related explorations of light and materiality capture a moment in which, as Robert Irwin describes in Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, “Time and space seem to blend in the continuum of your presence.” This instant without bearing Goehring describes poetically—

I’m blindly in sync to you

Instinctually physical, hot, always on

Slamming and dissipating

I’m a beehive of longing

Artists: Jessica Goehring Nathan See Megan Walch