Touchpoints

Amiee Byrne

Hartwick Hanson

Meg Jorgenson

Michael Laed

Lauren Miranda

Lola Gallery is pleased to present Touchpoints, a group show featuring the work of five Los Angeles based artists.

Touchpoints is a celebration of human connection in art and community. Developed during this critical moment when the pervasive nature of AI is being presented to us as the inevitable conclusion of art, design, and culture as we know it, Lola Gallery is choosing to rallying around the human process in art and design. Art and design that is often functional and always inspiring. And platforming the humans who make our community vibrant.

Each artist featured in Touchpoints has their own entirely singular practice in disparate mediums, but the common thread through them all is an undeniable mastery of their chosen materials and an exceptionally hands on approach to transforming those materials into objects that encourage us all to slow down and experience the works as they change our perceptions of the visual and physical spaces they inhabit. The experiences are often unexpected. They play with materials, shapes, and patterns in ways that surprise and delight. They capitalize on their irregularities, or their celebration of natural forms, or their performance of material versus reality. The materials are all drawn from the natural world and several artists have a specific interest in re-purposed and salvaged materials.

Touchpoints is an opportunity for genuine human connections. We celebrate each of the featured artists and their body of work and we look forward to sharing it with the Los Angeles Design Week/end community and beyond.

Meg Jorgenson (b. 1988, San Francisco, CA) is a self-taught visual artist based in Los Angeles whose meditative works explore the congruence between natural figuration and poetic abstraction. Her paintings develop through an intuitive process of layering, repetition, and material response, allowing a sense of light to move through the work and create an atmospheric presence that feels suspended within the surface. This collection of bundle-dyed works, featured at Lola Gallery, explores controlled spontaneity through a slow, accumulative process.

Michael Laed (b. 1994, Los Angeles) is a Los Angeles based multidisciplinary artist working primarily in sculptural lighting and hand-built objects. His practice brings together ceramics, wood, glass, metal, and salvaged materials through an intuitive process of experimentation and construction. Light is central to Laed’s work, developed in direct relationship to form, surface, and material. His broader sculptural practice similarly incorporates found and repurposed elements, allowing their existing qualities to inform new forms. Across his work, Laed maintains the irregularity and immediacy of the handmade while moving freely between sculpture and function.

Lauren Miranda (b. 1988, Anaheim, CA) is a Mexican-American fiber artist with an emphasis on basketry and stone weaving. Experimentation and curiosity surrounding manipulation of the materials is what guides her most. The cadence of weaving acting as a means of processing, self care and communication; offering up an alternate vocabulary. She resides and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Amiee Byrne (b. 1980, Australia) is a Los Angeles based ceramic sculptural artist, working primarily with clay. Through an initial ideation, she employs humour and unique hand building processes to create viscerally life-like representations of everyday objects. Inspired by trompe l’œil art, Byrne’s work inherently reconsiders realism and brings forth a sense of wonderment. She makes useful items useless and this concept in itself has become a fulcrum of her artist identity.

Hartwick Hanson (b. 1987, Vancouver) is a Canadian born sculptor and woodworker now based between Big Sur and Los Angeles. He works primarily with wood sourced from salvage yards of the central coast of California. He is interested in primitive figurative forms, ecotones, and the entropic effects of time and weather on lumber.