The Trophy Room LA is thrilled to present “Pattern Recognition,” a group exhibition curated by Ali Smith featuring paintings and sculptures from Eight Los Angeles-based artists: Joshua Aster, Sydney Croskery, Nikki Lewis, Kevin Lucey, Brittany Mojo, Lester Monzon, Emily Silver, and Ali Smith. The exhibition runs from July 27 to August 31, 2024, and there will be an opening reception on Saturday, July 27, from 5 to 9 p.m. Please join the artists and gallery in celebration.

Joshua Aster Born in Brooklyn in 1976, Joshua Aster is a Los Angeles-based artist and abstract painter who received his MFA from UCLA in 2007. Composed of memories of place, patterns, and current events, his egg oil tempera paintings feature triangular grids that obscure specificity. He has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including solo exhibitions at Gattopardo, Cuesta College, Southwestern College, Edward Cella Art, Karl Hutter Fine Art, Carl Berg Gallery, and LAXART. His work has been featured in the LA Weekly and The Los Angeles Times. He was awarded a MacDowell Residency in September 2014. He is also a founding member of the artist collective OJO and has presented work at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles and LACE in Hollywood, CA.

Sydney Croskery is an artist born and living in Los Angeles, making paintings that are both materially and conceptually rigorous. With a process involving detailed action painting coinciding with writings, Croskery uses abstraction as means to make sense of our political, emotional, overwhelming and hilarious aspects of life. Title and essay for the paintings connect the personal to the societal to our moment in time, creating a visual record for the complexity of contemporary life.

Croskery has presented solo shows at Craig Krull Gallery, boxoProjects, and Citrus College Art Gallery. She has participated in group exhibitions at Over the Influence, Monte Vista Projects, Baik Art, Central Park Gallery, Charlie James Gallery, The Fellows of Contemporary Art, The Bakersfield Museum, The Torrance Art Museum, and The Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Nikki Lewis is a professional potter and educator living in Los Angeles's foothills. She received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA from UCLA. Her wheel-thrown and handbuilt earthenware vessels have been widely exhibited.

Throughout my life, I’ve had great luck living in physically wild and beautiful places. My work has evolved to reflect a fascination with my surroundings. I reside in the mountainous area of Altadena, outside of Los Angeles proper. My backyard is a canyon with a large stream that swells from the snowpack from the San Gabriel mountain range. The abundant wildlife and flora in the vicinity inspires my current clay work. Coupled with a longstanding love affair with drawing and painting, I choose to carve and paint the indigenous creatures of my neighborhood into the most natural of materials, clay.

Kevin Lucey’s abstract paintings are composed of hundreds, sometimes thousands of tiny painted dots and dashes that accumulate to form geometric fields of color. Handwritten letters, aged photos, and other physical memory markers create a landscape of shapes and borders for pointillist color marks to flow in, around, and on top of. Lucey’s paintings operate like quilts or puzzles; many small pieces make up the whole. These pieces are cut, torn, and then fastened together by carefully placed painted marks.

Lucey works with the rhythm of the breath, repetition, human error, and the limitations of a body trying to replicate the same mark over and over– building, stacking, and burying the material beneath. Like the power of the breath, this meditative method of art-making examines present thoughts and lingering memories– challenging how we perceive and respond to what was, is, and can be.

Brittany Mojo was born and raised in Northeast NJ. She received her BFA in Ceramics from California State University, Long Beach, and her MFA from UCLA in 2016.

Interested in time and labor, Mojo investigates the histories of gendered work through the manipulation of material. Using traditional processes, Mojo negotiates the utility of service and its relationship to women's work. Positing these processes as valid through their magnification ultimately questions certain value systems, while aiming to reconstruct rigid material hierarchies and gendered processes.

Lester Monzon received his BFA from Art Center College of Design. He has been exhibiting his work since 2000. His work has been exhibited at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, in addition to shows in San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Lester lives and works in Pasadena, CA.

I’ve always been intrigued by perfection, and yet I have perfected failure in life. Embracing the pathetic lows in life can be a lovely comedic folly. Therefore, I try to let failure and perfection play off of one another in my work. Much like the ever changing landscape of the industrial part of Los Angeles I used to live in, my paintings reflect the ebb and flow of rules, rebellion, order, disorder and perfection and failure

Ali Smith, born 1976, lives and works in Long Beach, CA. Since earning her MFA in Drawing and Painting at California State University, Long Beach in 2003, Smith has exhibited her work widely. Known for her large-scale, multi-layered canvases, she has had numerous solo exhibitions in the US, including at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles, Freight and Volume Gallery in New York City, as well as a recent collaborative exhibition at Vanderbilt University with musical composer Michael Alec Rose in 2020.

Included in the article on “45 painters under 45” by Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times, Smith has work in numerous private collections in the United States and abroad, and has been reviewed in the LA Times, the Boston Globe, Art Us, artillery, Art Week, Timeout New York, Beautiful Decay, and the OC Weekly, among others. Upcoming shows include a large-scale painting in a group show at the Long Beach Museum of Art and a solo show at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, FL.

Emily Silver’s work commingles the vast array of life’s experiences which are amplified through textures, colors, and layered methods of creating. My pieces invade the playful spaces found in contradictions, reflecting the awkwardness and complexity of life’s adult moments.

Felting and weaving are the most intricate and exciting media I have found to dive headfirst into the wreckage of my own personal narrative, refracting the various bits of bad TV and Lisa Frank, to composite personal and cultural traumas, to hoarding (individual and systemic), heartache, breakups, body issues, and virtual personae. I incorporate both digital and analog, using everything from animation to textiles; it is here that I embrace opposition and celebrate the marriage of disappointment in play and the embarrassment of the 'girly', elevating a conversation of what these spaces hold. 

As an artist, I grapple with holding all of these elements simultaneously. The work vibrates in an opulent state and demands of its audience to consume excess. It showcases the inconsequential and un/monumental with reference to hoarding, while staging its sacredness and sadness; it uses the profane as a means to communicate, and mourning as a form of understanding the human condition.

To inquire about any of the artwork in this exhibition, please email info@thetrophyroomla.com