Culver, Los Angeles
Group Exhibition
Humans, Animals, Hungry Ghosts
Le MaximumLizette Hernandez, Gwen Hollingsworth, Michelle Kim, Ji Lee, Kenix Liang, Cameron Masters Le Maximum is pleased to present Humans, Animals, Hungry Ghosts, a group exhibition curated by Gwen Hollingsworth featuring works by six artists. Humans, Animals, Hungry Ghosts is an exploration of the intersections between the sacred and what we see and experience on the material, human plane. While many religions dichotomize the sacred and the profane, other belief systems eschew this binary along with separations of the natural and supernatural. Buddhist cosmology, for instance, identifies six realms of existence within the cycle of reincarnation: gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hells. Each realm is contained in its own karmic level, yet they all engage with one another, and nothing separates the experience of each realm. The sacred is not divorced from mundane human experience, but rather fully intertwined as a hierophanic manifestation. Whereas organized religions mediate our experience of the sacred, the artists in this exhibition seek out the numinous within the everyday. Holding a ritualistic approach to artmaking, they venture into the mundane and come out the other side with a glimpse of the absolute: Lizette Hernandez, Gwen Hollingsworth, and Ji Lee blur the lines of abstraction and figuration while imbuing their materials with ritual significance; Kenix Liang and Michelle Kim invest landscape with physical transformation and perceptual inversion; Cameron Masters invokes daily practices of ablution and renewal. By highlighting moments of transcendence within the banality of the everyday, these artists reorient our perception towards reimagined hierarchies of experience and being.