Opening Reception: Friday, October 31st, 6-8pm
Art often feels encrypted to the uninitiated. A cipher—a system of writing or recording information meant to conceal meaning—provides an apt metaphor for how art communicates. Insight into an artist’s intent can offer a point of entry, yet there is no systemized code to unlock meaning. Each viewer brings their own subjectivity, colored by experience, bias, and imagination, to the act of interpretation. Great art poses questions, but it rarely provides answers. Artists Amir H. Fallah and Willie Stewart are both masters of visual encryption. Neither employ artifice nor malice; rather, their work operates through concealment and revelation, layering codes, histories, and symbols that invite active engagement and inquiry. What is this image saying? And, more broadly, what is art about in our time?
Fallah and Stewart are remarkably generous in providing a vast lexicon for interpretation. Their works offer clues and fragments—recognizable motifs, familiar faces, and cultural signifiers—woven into dense visual fields. These moments of recognition become part of an ongoing dialogue, forming sentences, paragraphs, and novellas of new meaning. Each composition rewards careful attention, foregrounding the act of seeking as a central mode of engagement. In Willie Stewart’s Another Bucolic Player’s Warm but Unnoticed Soliloquy (2022) a domestic fireplace becomes stage and sculpture. As an installation constructed from canvas-wrapped panels, the work oscillates between representation and objecthood. A still life of flowers rests atop a meticulously built mantel, while the hearth below glows with stylized, painted embers. Stewart transforms this symbol of comfort and domesticity into a puzzle composed of memory, labor, and the performed nature of home life. His attention to craft and material echoes his sustained interest in vernacular architecture and the layered narratives embedded within Americana. In Amir H. Fallah’s They Will Say a Collection of Untruths (2022), a silhouetted human profile anchors the kaleidoscopic field among swirling gradients, piano keys, folkloric figures, celestial symbols, with an obscured but declarative text “THEY WILL SAY.” Fallah orchestrates these disparate elements into a rhythmic composition, the use of repetition and ornament drawing from Persian art while reflecting the logic of digital collage. The result is a complex meditation on how truth and identity are constructed—and distorted—through collective memory and inherited imagery.
Both Fallah and Stewart owe a good part of their contemporary practice to the legacy of Pop Art, though their aims are distinctly personal and politically charged. While early Pop was often regarded as apolitical, concerned primarily with consumer culture and the aesthetics of mass media, artists like James Rosenquist extended its vocabulary toward critique—exploring connections between power, wealth, and war. His works challenged viewers to question the ideological machinery behind images, a sensibility that resonates strongly with the strategies of Fallah and Stewart. Two works by James Rosenquist are presented in dialogue here: one commemorating the birth of the United States (1976) and another confronting the resurgence of racism tied to American authoritarianism in the early 2000s. Together, Rosenquist, Fallah, and Stewart trace a lineage of visual subversion in which coded imagery becomes a tool for interrogating collective memory, cultural identity, and the politics of perception. In bringing together these distinct yet dialogic practices, the exhibition underscores how images operate as both mirrors and masks—reflecting our cultural realities while concealing the mechanisms that shape them.
Amir H. Fallah (b. 1979, Tehran, Iran) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Fallah has exhibited extensively in exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Selected solo exhibitions include The Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, AZ; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings SD; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland OR; San Diego ICA; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland KS; Center of International Contemporary Art, Vancouver, Canada; Nazarian / Curcio, Los Angeles, CA; and Denny Dimin Gallery, New York and Hong Kong. Fallah was awarded the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship (2020), the Artadia Award (2020), the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago (2019), and the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2015). He received his BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Fallah is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami; Deste Foundation For Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; McEvoy Foundation For The Arts, San Francisco; Nerman Museum, Kansas City; SMART Museum of Art at the University of Chicago; Davis Museum, Massachusetts; The Microsoft Collection, Washington; Plattsburg State Art Museum, New York; Cerritos College Public Art Collection, California; Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture; Schneider Museum of Art, Oregon; Crocker Art Museum, California; Pitzer College Permanent Collection, California; Lonsford Collection, Purdue University, Indiana; Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College, North Carolina; Miguel Angel Capriles Collection, Caracas, Venezuela; Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Florida; and Salsali Private Museum, Dubai, UAE.
Willie Stewart (b. 1982, Gallatin, USA) lives and works in New Haven, CT. He received his MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2018, and a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2016. His work has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at Morgan Presents, New York (2022); Morán Morán, Los Angeles, CA (2023, 2019); Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2023, 2021); and Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, with Brent Stewart (2017). Stewart completed residencies at Pioneer Works (2016), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014).
Stewart is in the permanent collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Park House, Dallas, TX; Beth Rudin DeWoody's Bunker, West Palm Beach, FL; J.P. Morgan Chase Collection, New York, NY; Soho House, Nashville, TN; The Majudia Collection, Arsenal Contemporary, Montreal, Canada; and Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, Latvia.
