Four Artists, Four Worlds: Excavations in Form, Image, and Memory at Blum
At Blum in Los Angeles, four concurrent solo exhibitions—by Sarah Rosalena, Adam Silverman, Tomoo Gokita, and Wilhelm Sasnal—together create a sprawling meditation on material, time, and image. Though each artist occupies a distinct aesthetic and conceptual space, their works form a kind of quiet chorus. They unearth the personal, the political, and the planetary, each rooted in a site-specific and culturally entangled practice.
Wilhelm Sasnal: AAAsphalt
In the main gallery space, Wilhelm Sasnal’s AAAsphalt distills black into a field of meaning. These new paintings—monochromatic renderings of roads, tires, ropes, and ruins—begin as sketches and snapshots taken during the artist’s bike rides across Southern California. But the subject is not the road; it’s the psychic residue asphalt leaves behind.
Sasnal, a Polish artist, weaves together memory, politics, and place through the surface of paint. His use of matte black speaks to petrochemical infrastructure—its weight, its toxicity, its global reach—and evokes both Polish black earth and American sprawl. "Black" becomes a gap, a hole, a refusal. These are anti-monuments: quiet paintings about friction, distance, and the psychological flatness of endless roads.
What seems mundane—a segment of rope, a parked car, the length of a tire—is painted with such intensity it veers toward abstraction. The rope, painted black and strung across a white canvas, suggests both a horizon and a wound. Sasnal's language recalls the grayscale severity of Ad Reinhardt, but with the cinematic ambiguity of Antonioni. His surfaces are not immersive; they are interruptions. “A foreigner or stranger to a place is something you can choose,” he said during the walkthrough, capturing a central tension in his work: the act of painting as a negotiation between distance and belonging.
Sarah Rosalena: Unending Spiral
In Unending Spiral, Sarah Rosalena brings together indigenous weaving traditions, speculative cosmology, and anti-colonial futurity. Her textiles—digitally generated, handwoven, and algorithmically disrupted—carry within them ancient math, contemporary resistance, and the shimmer of the stars.
Rosalena, who is of Wixárika descent, explores the tension between hand and machine, earth and outer space. Her materials—walnut-dyed fibers, onion skins, NASA-sourced images—form visual languages that have been passed down, glitched, and grown. Spirals, often drawn from astronomical patterns, suggest systems that are unending, generative, and deeply grounded in cosmological knowledge. They defy the linearity of settler time, imagining a world where craft isn’t merely preserved but evolves—defiantly, politically—into something new.
There is deep joy in these works, but also resistance. The artist calls attention to the “extraction of resources,” to AI’s aesthetic flattening, to the violent severing of cultural lineage. In Rosalena’s vision, weaving becomes a form of insurgent technology—one that reconnects us to both soil and sky, the inherited and the possible.
Tomoo Gokita: NAKED
Tomoo Gokita’s NAKED is full of contradictions: playful and grotesque, sensual and absurd. His figures—often nude, sometimes masked, always distorted—reference mass media, Japanese pulp magazines, and surrealist figuration. But they aren’t pornographic, and they aren’t innocent. They confront us with the visual codes we’ve inherited and ask: What do we see when we look at others?
The paintings now take on a fleshy palette, a shift from his early black-and-white abstractions. Yet even in color, they remain ghostly—half-decided, half-erased. Eyes are smeared. Limbs blur into voids. Gokita seems less concerned with depicting bodies than with disrupting their legibility. His repetition of visual motifs—borders, limbs, blanked-out faces—suggests a quiet refusal to resolve, to conform, to explain.
Cultural taboos are ever-present, particularly around nudity and representation in Japan. “He didn’t even decide on it at first,” someone noted during the walkthrough. The paintings, it seems, arise from accident, discomfort, and a desire to make viewers laugh—and then pause.
Adam Silverman: LACMA Seeds and Weeds
In LACMA Seeds and Weeds, Adam Silverman literally builds his ceramics from the ruins of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Over five years, he collected tar, rust, clay, and dust from the site of LACMA’s demolition and folded them into his glazes and forms. His vessels bubble and scar like they’ve emerged from deep underground—half-geological, half-cultural.
A former architect, Silverman treats these pots as architecture in miniature: vessels that hold the site’s history in their skin. He studied LACMA’s archives, examined its objects, and then made his own—burned, glazed, cracked, and blow-fired while still hot. The ceramics bear the trace of Los Angeles itself: its crushed concrete, its crushed dreams, its simultaneous collapse and rebirth.
During the walkthrough, Silverman described the ceramics as “part of the history of LA.” They aren’t nostalgic. They’re post-archival—alive with contradiction. Objects that hold both decay and possibility.
Shared Topographies: A Constellation of Practices
Together, these four exhibitions trace overlapping terrains of disruption and reimagination:
Material as Memory: Rosalena and Silverman make work that is literally built from the land, its debris, its signals, its damage. Their practices are grounded but forward-looking—challenging us to think about who and what survives the archive.
Image as Interruption: Sasnal and Gokita break the illusion of looking. Whether through visual dead ends or faceless figures, both artists remind us of the politics embedded in the act of seeing—and not seeing.
Site, Identity, Resistance: Across all four shows, the idea of place—who claims it, who moves through it, and who is allowed to belong—echoes and refracts. From Southern California to Poland, from softcore archives to cosmological textiles, each artist engages a different axis of cultural memory and embodied resistance.
The result is a multivalent experience—a series of intersecting gestures that ask us to consider what it means to make art out of ruins, screens, spirals, and scars.
Exhibition Details:
Location: Blum Gallery, 2727 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90034
Dates: May 30 – August 16, 2025
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Website: blum-gallery.com