Acts of Service

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Acts of Service, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Los Angeles artist Danie Cansino. The works in this exhibition explore two great forces that have shaped the lives of the figures who populate them: military service and mass incarceration. Cansino’s lavish paintings employ 18th-century Baroque techniques to create lush, dramatically-lit canvases that feel like they have risen out of the dark haze of long-lost memory. Drawing from a vast archive of family stories and photographs, Cansino’s portraits of family members in uniform and the loved ones who surrounded them embody the intergenerational layers of pride, love, and loss that characterize this particularly American striving for a better future. With this new body of work, her most personal to date, Cansino grapples with the realities of the mid-twentieth century American dream, the promise of which is never simply fulfilled. Generations of the artist’s Chicano family have turned to military service as a way to reach for security and success, and, when that fails, to more extra-legal means of making ends meet. The figures that populate these portraits present an array of human emotion: they are proud and scared, hesitant and eager, closeted and joyfully themselves. This is most poignantly rendered in Love Always, Eddie, which includes both a formal military portrait and the tender message found on the photograph’s verso. The message, its script a looping reference to Cansino’s own practice as a tattoo artist, questions the meaning of freedom and what is relinquished in its name, its deep reluctance mastered only by its heavy sense of resignation. Cansino renders her subjects tenderly, each work opening a shadowed window into history that complicates the stories it holds, inviting empathy for choices made in the name of duty. Danie Cansino (b. 1986) is an artist and educator living and working in Los Angeles. Cansino completed her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Southern California, and is an Adjunct Professor of USC Roski School of Art and Design. Cansino's work has been featured in ArtForum, Artillery, and ArtNews magazine. Her work resides in the collections of the Rubell Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, AltaMed, in addition to numerous private collections. She has exhibited in the Rubell Museum, MFA Houston, Long Beach Museum of Art, Muzeo Museum, Vincent Price Museum, UCLA, AMOCA, UTA Artists Space, Felix Art Fair, Human Resources Gallery, The Mistake Room, USC Roski, Tlaloc studios and Charlie James Gallery. Her work is currently on view in “Frida: The Making of an Icon” at the MFA Houston, before traveling to the Tate Modern in Fall 2026. Danie Cansino is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.

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