Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Ground Work (Field Revision) organized by Los Angeles-based curator and Executive Director of The Cultivist, Joey Lico. The exhibition brings together twelve artists whose practices consider how the earth is held, shaped, remembered, and reimagined. Rather than depicting landscape, the artists work within its materiality. Dust, pigment, metal, and glass function not as metaphors, but as witnesses. Through sculpture, photography, painting, and installation, the exhibition examines how material and psychological terrains shape one another, and how acts of construction, resistance, and renewal emerge from the strata of lived experience.
THE BUILT AND THE BURIED
Works by Adrián S. Bará, Sam Moyer, Leslie Hewitt, and Caleb Hahne Quintana address architectures, both literal and internal, through which memory and meaning take form.
Adrián S. Bará uses industrial and ephemeral materials to sculpt tension between structure and fragility, form and failure.
Hear Adrián S. Bará discuss his work below.
Sam Moyer’s concrete-encased photographs collapse infrastructure and image into a single object. Moyer's concrete-encased photograph collapse infrastructure and image into a single object, delving into the ever changing sea walls that border Gardiners Bay on Long Island. These structures, initially erected to protect the shoreline from the relentless tides, have gradually been shaped by the ocean, morphing into unique sculptures that highlight the interplay between human creation and nature's forces.
Leslie Hewitt distills memory into spatial grammar, structuring stillness with photographic and sculptural restraint.
Caleb Hahne Quintana’s atmospheric paintings trace displacement across emotional terrain, where figures dissolve into fields of color and distance.
Caleb Hahne Quintana discusses his work in the exhibition below.
RESIDUAL FIELDS
Working across photography, assemblage, and material abstraction, Sofía Fernández Díaz, Marcel Duchamp, Jose de Jesus Rodriguez, Harold Mendez, and Dionne Lee question what lingers and remains.
Sofía Fernández Díaz builds sculptural forms that balance between permanence and collapse, articulating presence through pressure. Díaz uses industrial and ephemeral materials to sculpt tension between structure and fragility, form and failure.
Marcel Duchamp’s inclusion reveals early fault lines in the language of material residue and abstraction.
Jose de Jesus Rodriguez merges sand, lime, and pigment into vibrating geometries that feel simultaneously built and breathing.
Harold Mendez’s oxidized surfaces, water-worn wood, and stained textiles function as quiet excavations—objects that mourn disappearance while dignifying what remains. Mendez’s works hold the imprint of migration, labor, and layered memory. Drawing from Latin American histories and cultural inheritance, his practice is a quiet excavation—tracing resilience across geography and time.
Hear Harold Mendez discuss his work below.
GEOLOGIES OF TIME
Geologies of Time brings together artists who treat the earth as an active archive, where material carries the weight of deep time, human intervention, and cultural memory. Through processes of accumulation, erosion, and repair, these works collapse geological and historical timelines, revealing transformation as both a record of damage and a site of continuity.
Julian Charrière exposes the sediment of human ambition, rendering planetary transformation through obsidian, heliography, and industrial remnants that glisten with both ruin and renewal. Charrière’s sculpture confronts the ruins of industrial progress and the sublime collapse of nature, holding spectacle and decay in uneasy balance.
Athena LaTocha presses ash, soil, and industrial residue into sweeping works that collapse geological, historical, and personal timelines, transforming the landscape into surface and scar.
Nobuhito Nishigawara recomposes fractured rock into sculptural acts of repair, in which gold-glazed seams carry ancestral memory and geological persistence forward. Nishigawara’s ceramic sculptures, ancestral forms and contemporary abstraction collide, collapsing generations into gesture and glaze.
Nobuhito Nishigawara discusses his work in the exhibition below.
Across these distinct practices, Ground Work (Field Revision) asks what it means to inhabit a ground—natural or constructed—that is continually shifting. The exhibition proposes that every surface holds the politics of its making, and that the materials closest to the earth’s memory, dust, stone, metal, pigment, are also the ones through which artists articulate resilience, rupture, and renewal.
For inquiries, please email Thomas Kelly at Thomas@seankellyla.com
For media inquiries, please email Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com