WORKS

In the mottled light of early summer, a new collaboration emerges: May Barruel, owner and director of the Portland art gallery Nationale, will present a curated selection of paintings by Portland- and Los Angeles-based artists at La Loma Projects’ airy Annex space. Aiming to facilitate fruitful conversations between artists, curators, and collectors in the two cities, A Place Between will unveil fresh works by new Los Angeles dweller Shiela Laufer, Los Angeles-based artist Sherise Lee, and Portlanders Anya Roberts-Toney and Amy Bay.

Shiela Laufer's warm compositions envision a secret garden imbued with an inner light. Swirled patterns, evoking nautilus shells or Vitruvian scrolls, become wrought-iron gates tangled with floral forms. Inspired by the rural motifs of her childhood, Laufer conjures spiraling spacial poems referencing Pennsylvania Dutch folk art and hex signs, which have adorned barns and prompted curious superstitions for centuries. Her layered mark-making shimmers along a decorative yet talismanic line, as though Hilma af Klint or Agnes Pelton dropped by a roadside flower stand.

Anya Roberts-Toney's jewel-toned oil paintings feel perfectly in place near Laufer’s dreamy compositions and represent a move toward more abstracted, spiritual reckonings. Roberts-Toney’s romantic sensibility is pensive here; faceless feminine figures ruminate near heliotrope pools and gaze toward surreal skies. While Roberts-Toney’s spirit- like forms have oſten found moments of revelry and ritual, they seem to pause in these paintings, perhaps reflecting on themes that are front of mind for the artist—motherhood, longing, new life, and eventual death—or envisioning aquatic portals of connection amid darker nights of the soul.

Sherise Lee’s oil paintings also pour forth from an intense period of caretaking and loss. Lee opts to process the pain of the material world with time-bending visions: What if her ancestors could explore karst topographies, dark and chalky with gypsum? What if souls could transmute in beachside caves, or amid the Superbloom? What waves of generational solace might ripple or surge there? As a first-generation Asian American, Lee’s thick, sumptuous landscapes play with Western constructs to engage with her own lineage, compelling the invisible forth and visualizing healing.

Amy Bay's enduring interest in floral painting as a radical act develops further as she translates swollen petals and protruberant blooms on handmade paper, creating impulse-driven compositions that evolve over long periods. On canvas, Bay explores forms of patterned and symmetrical wallpaper-making. Emphasizing wallpaper’s role as a casual observer of our interiority, Bay also hints at its relationship to notions of feminine hysteria, à la Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, in a range of electrified and desaturated hues. Dodging art history’s typical association of flowers with frivolity, Bay centers a decorative, domestic, and luxuriant aesthetic; floral forms erupt from each painting’s entire frame. The results assert their place firmly within the traditionally male oil painting canon, and speak to themes found throughout the show—liminality, death, ornamentation, care, and dreaming.

In A Place Between, Laufer, Roberts-Toney, Lee, and Bay expand their visions to explore juicy concepts of liminality, heritage, and transformation. The exhibition’s works form a spiritual arc between Portland and Los Angeles yet remain grounded, buzzing with sense-driven elements like a summer garden teeming with life.