Stitious

Michael Bala, Nancy Lupo, Grant Mooney, Gozié Ojini, Hirsch Perlman, Jennifer West

The gallery presents the group exhibition Stitious, featuring a wide array of artists who explore various themes through diverse media. The exhibition showcases both established and emerging talents, inviting viewers to engage with contemporary artworks that challenge and inspire. Stitious offers an insight into the current landscape of contemporary art, encouraging discourse and appreciation among art enthusiasts.

Michael Bala (b. 1994, Maui, HI) is a Los Angeles based sculptor whose work engages the poetic tension between utility and ornament. Employing salvaged architectural fragments, everyday debris, and found structural elements, Bala assembles sculptural reliefs and installations that reframe functional materials into poetic artifacts. His practice investigates how objects lose their original purpose and become expressive forms of narrative and sensory tone.

His pieces often play with visual misdirection, pennies protruding from wood like carved geometry, bicycle horns turned into wry wall sconces, balustrades serving as ritual thresholds, highlighting how societal cast-offs can become poetic relics when reimagined.

Bala recently had a solo exhibition at Overduin and Co., Los Angeles and has been included in group exhibitions at Castle, Los Angeles, Et al., San Francisco, House of Seiko, San Francisco, Theta, New York. He received his BFA from UCLA.

Nancy Lupo (b. 1983, Flagstaff, AZ) is a Berlin based artist known for her nuanced, materially rich sculptures and site-responsive installations. Working across objects, public interventions, and spatial compositions, Lupo explores the frictions between consumption, shared space, embodiment, and language. Her practice often employs familiar yet overlooked materials—school glue, aluminum, nail polish, toilet paper—recontextualized in ways that disrupt habitual associations and provoke subtle shifts in perception.

Lupo’s works are deeply attuned to the architectures and temporalities they inhabit. Thresholds, sidewalks, and liminal zones become sites of quiet resistance and speculative encounter. Her sculptures, often infused with understated humor and poetics, challenge normative ideas of utility, temporality, and social behavior within public and semi-public space.

Lupo has exhibited widely at institutions including the Kunstverein Schwerin, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Hammer Museum, and the Swiss Institute in New York. Her work is held in the collections of LACMA, The Modern, Ft. Worth, and the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2011 and her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2007.

Grant Mooney (b. 1990, Seattle, WA) is a New York based artist whose sculptural practice engages the interstitial space between abstraction, material specificity, and architectural intervention. Working at the intersection of foundational metalsmithing and cultural theory, Mooney constructs installations that are responsive to the conditions of their sites—often occupying overlooked or transitional zones such as floors, ceilings, or passageways.

His practice is reinforced by a sustained engagement with issues of difference, affect, and care. Through calibrated gestures and material intelligence, His work elicits quiet but charged forms of presence, challenging viewers to consider how physical and perceptual thresholds shape our understanding of bodies in space.

Mooney’s work was included in Whitney Biennial 2024 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and has been featured in solo exhibitions at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis, Progetto, Lecce, Italy, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, NY, Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Berlin, Kunstverein Braunschweig, as part of the SECA Art Awards at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, the ICA, Los Angeles, Yale Union, Portland, Stadtgalerie Bern, SculptureCenter, New York, Fondation D’entreprise Ricard, Paris, Kunst-Werke Berlin, White Flag Project Library, St. Louis, and Futura Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, among others.

Gozié Ojini (b. 1995, Los Angeles) is a New Haven, CT based sculptor and installation artist whose practice centers on the transformation of found and mass-produced objects. Most notably, his “Passages” series, rescues decommissioned pianos and reworks them into freestanding sculptural forms that probe themes of memory, labor, materiality, and silence.

His work engages deeply with the poetics of disembodied labor, exploring how physical gesture and material residue carry intangible histories and social resonance. Drawing on a layered personal and cultural genealogy, including proximity to Black music traditions and diasporic narratives, Ojini’s sculptures act as both vessel and archive.

He was recently included in Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. He has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York, NY and In Lieu, Los Angeles, CA. He has been included in various group exhibitions at Et Al, San Francisco, CA, Kiang Malingue, New York, NY, and Shadow Falls, Purling, NY. He holds an MFA from Yale University's Sculpture Program, a BA from the School of Art and Architecture at UCLA and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, ME.

Hirsch Perlman (b. 1960, Pasadena, CA) is a Los Angeles based artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, photography, and video. Known for his materially inventive and conceptually layered work, Perlman often reconfigures common materials— into anthropomorphic forms and visual riddles that explore memory, transformation, and the slippage between image and object.

Whether through his tactile, altered gelatin-silver prints (Day series) or abstract sculptural arrangements, Perlman treats the studio as a site of experimentation—a space where chance, labor, and precision intersect. His work channels poetics, logic, and absurdity, reflecting on how narrative and structure emerge from the overlooked or fragmentary.

Perlman’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennale, and the Serpentine Gallery, and is held in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is a Professor of Sculpture in the Department of Art at UCLA.

Jennifer West (b. Topanga, CA) is a Los Angeles based artist whose work spans film, sculpture, installation, performance, and artist books, exploring the collapse between analog and digital image cultures. For over two decades, she has altered 16, 35 and 70mm film celluloid with materials ranging from skateboard wheels to lithium-rich water, staging cinema as a shared, unstable site of memory and transformation. Rooted in media archaeology and materiality, her practice highlights the poetic residues and afterlife of obsolete technologies.

Her recent projects include commissions for Frieze Projects Los Angeles (2023) and the LIAF Biennial (2022), with past major presentations at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, ICA London, The High Line, Seattle Art Museum, Tramway Glasgow, and Yuz Museum, Shanghai. She has exhibited widely at institutions such as the Pompidou, Whitney Museum, Museo d’Arte di Nuoro, White Columns, CAPC Bordeaux, ZKM Germany, Transmission Glasgow and more and is represented in numerous public collections, including LACMA, MOCA, Saatchi Collection London, Kadist Foundation (Paris/San Francisco), Thoma Foundation, the Getty Museum, the Hammer Museum and Rubell Collection.

Her 2022 monograph Media Archaeology (Radius Books) surveys a career invested in transforming media into lived, textured experience, what she terms the “Analogital.” In 2025–26, is a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. She received an MFA from Art Center College of Design and a BA with film and video emphasis from the Evergreen State College and is a Professor of Practice at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design.