Nothing's True Forever: Jon Pylypchuk and Reinhart Revilla Selvik
Nothing’s True Forever, a two-person exhibition featuring the multidisciplinary practices of Jon Pylypchuk and Reinhart Revilla Selvik, is an exploration of the embodied architectures around memory (individual and collective), loss, and the collapsing into identity.
Memory is beyond the individual — when bodies and consciousness are entangled into the fabric of a city and each other — memory moves through the passenger, through things, a magnetism of unfinished feeling, a shared ache that demands witness. In this exhibition, Pylypchuk and Selvik’s works build a landscape where individual memories, reworked and coalesced, are entangled in playful relationships of witnessing.
There are events that arrive too soon to be felt, and so they live on, not in time, but in the trembling between moments–that slippery space between the action of daily consciousness. With the paradox of loss (of a person, place, or thing), meaning remains (in the shadow of what was) even when that thing is absent. The past leans forward, pressing against the present, an imprint pressed into the surface.
In Selvik’s practice, the memory returns with its own agency, an insistence that resists translation. Built and discovered as an accumulation of embodied gestures on the surface of the painting, remembrance and allegory take shape into a recognizable architecture, often dramatic scores of lived reality. Power dynamics and tender memories are conveyed within active relationships at the intersection of the individual and community. His multi-disciplinary process remains grounded in site-specific explorations of urban landscapes, especially those rooted in peripheral perspectives. The tension between the vast scale of a city can exist within the soft space of a mind. What happens when a place of memory no longer exists in a physical location?
When nothing is lost, everything is transformed. This building phrase consoles in the context of mourning and grief in Pylypchuk’s work. What disappears from our plane only shifts form, energy, and presence. Memory is the medium of that transformation contained within the physical boundaries of simple materials (a purse, a bowling ball, buckets, polyurethane foam, etc.) that Pylypchuk assembles into choreographies of figuration. Jon suggests a moment where loss continues to be woven into the fabric of becoming, echoing, and haunting yet ever watching the story unfold. Often, his characters draw upon the animal world to explore the frailty of human existence and social relationships, in this case everyday objects are anthropomorphized trusting their existence among ours.
Pylypchuk and Selvik's works encode the visual and psychological imprints of the modern metropolis—its fleeting moments, its persistent echoes — present and pervasive, while sometimes ignored. Nothing’s True Forever, interfolds the essence of each artist's practice, manifesting the signature of consciousness into the humorous, livable, and ultimately tangible.
Reinhart Revilla Selvik (b. 1987, Long Beach, CA) works in sculpture, painting, and site-specific installation. Based in Los Angeles, his projects center on interrelationships between memory and architecture, along with lived experiences that inform and distort individual perceptions of the world. Exploring the subtle boundaries of change in the cityscape and the traces that remain, Reinhart’s works surface the residues of volatility that are invisible and ever-present.
Reinhart attended the Haystack Open Studio Residency in Maine in 2025. He has recently exhibited at Baryo HiFi, Phase Gallery, Floating Gallery, San Diego Art Institute, Eastside International, Actual Size, Mesa College, CAC Gallery, and Long Beach City College. His works are in the permanent collections of the City of San Diego, Clinicomp Intl., and the Haudenschild Foundation. He has painted murals and graffiti art in Canada, Mexico, United States, and Europe over the last twenty-five years. In 2023, Reinhart was the lead artist and curator of Periphery, a large-scale, site-specific collaboration of murals on the UC San Diego’s Visual Arts facilities, and he was commissioned by Haudenschild Garage for the immersive installation Without Action Fractured Faces in La Jolla, California. He was awarded the prestigious Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Art Award and received a dual BA in Communication and Visual Arts at UC San Diego, and his MFA at UC Irvine.
Jon Pylypchuk (b. 1972, Winnipeg, Canada) studied at the University of Manitoba School of Art, where he co-founded the collective known as the Royal Art Lodge in 1996 with fellow artists Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Drue Langlois and Adrian Williams. Its members were mostly graduates from the University of Manitoba, Canada who were united in their outsider status and who liked to break the unwritten rules of artistic production. They sent childlike drawings to the National Gallery of Canada, suggesting they exhibit them, and held all-night drawing sessions. In 1998 he moved to Los Angeles, where he is currently based.
Pylypchuk is a multidisciplinary artist who works in painting, sculpture, installation and video. Working with simple materials (fake fur, wood, fabric, sheet metal, beer cans, electric light bulbs, polyurethane foam, etc.), Pylypchuk reinterprets the collage and bricolage practices derived from Art Brut. Often his ‘creatures’ draw upon the animal world to explore the frailty of human existence and social relationships. Pylypchuk’s characters often seem to have lost their way, appearing in a wounded condition, harmed by either themselves or by others. They combine a hearty dose of cynicism and anger at the unfairness of it all with a wicked sense of survivalist humor.
He has exhibited in New York, Düsseldorf, Münster, London, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Paris, San Francisco, Miami, Tokyo, Montreal, Seoul, Guadalajara and St. Petersburg. His works are in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Saatchi Collection, London; MONA Museum, Berriedale, Tazmania; the Stedelijik Museum, Ghent, Pompidou Paris, Macam Lisbon, and the Whitney Museum, New York.