Diana Lozano’s hand-sculpted works commingle botanical imitations, scandent vines and tufts of leaves, with a vernacular of ornamental accessories and jewelry. Drawing from cultural memory, these biomorphic sculptures combine the incidental elegance of nameplates and charm bracelets with an innate knowledge of horticultural forms, inherited from her parents, both botanists. These embellished chimeras offer visual narratives into performative gender—posing accesorization as both constructed and found in nature, while considering the scope of personal history, trauma, and popular culture. Eroding delineation between botanical and fabricated objecthood, earrings, flowers, charms hang suspended from ropes and hooks; forming elevated canopies of verdant scale that extend into anthropomorphized identity, desire and performance.

Marisa Takal’s brightly abstracted paintings externalize a fraught relationship to time and work. Notations of clocks, calendars, and grids surveil productivity; imagery that is loomed over by post-election dread and proliferating anxieties in a capitalist landscape. Assuaged with neurotic interruptions, flourishes of paint — bodily, organic, imperfect — halt the demarcation of time. Disruption is further punctuated by humor: self-deprecation and irony smile out in the face of a pig. These abstracted systems relay active struggle—a haphazard construction of rigidity that exposes Takal’s defiance, frustration and joy as she
navigates banal fantasy.