Ground Work: Curated by Joey Lico

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles is delighted to present Ground Work, a group exhibition organized by Los Angeles-based curator and Executive Director of The Cultivist, Joey Lico. The exhibition brings together fifteen artists whose works respond to the material, psychic, and political dimensions of landscape. Anchored by Duchamp’s seminal photograph Dust Breeding, 1920, Ground Work considers the trace as a radical gesture, foregrounding atmosphere, residue, and the weight of absence over pictorial representation. As Lico states, the artists “gather materials touched by time—ashes, dust, silence, memory—and offer us not declarations, but traces. This is not a show about landscape. It is about what it means to inhabit one.”

Ground Work unfolds through three thematic undercurrents: Traces of Passage, Spatial Resistance, andTemporal Compression. Taken on the surface of Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass, Dust Breedingcaptures the entropy of material, the residue, and accumulation as a slow representation of time. It offers a conceptual and historical aperture for the exhibition, introducing the idea that what we leave behind can speak louder than what we make. Through photography, sculpture, installation, and painting, the artists in Ground Work echo this ethos, turning away from direct depiction to instead engage with memory, pressure, and transformation.

Artists addressing the theme of Traces of Passage consider terrain as archive and absence as narrative. Harold 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. Dionne Lee’s silver gelatin prints layer fragility and resistance, weaving diasporic placemaking into fractured geographies. Caleb Hahne Quintana paints atmospheric portraits suspended between memory and departure, while Athena LaTocha embeds earth, ash, and ink into her monumental abstractions, transforming the landscape into surface and scar. Cauleen Smith’s poetic photo-based works and sculptural interventions meditate on grief, resistance, and speculative care.

Several artists demonstrate Spatial Resistance as they negotiate constraint and collapse in their work. Adrián S. Bará and Sofía Fernández Díaz use industrial and ephemeral materials to sculpt tension between structure and fragility, form and failure. Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s installations transform the space through sculptural systems of sound and textiles, creating a conceptual architecture imbued with spatial perception. Phaan Howng’s saturated post-landscape sculputres are rooted in speculative survival and ecological resistance. Maggie West’s immersive underwater projection, lush with color and endangered marine life, offers a crescendo of visual rupture and sensory immersion.

Temporal Compression folds into form in the work of Rodrigo Valenzuela, whose staged photographs of collapse interrogate labor, construction, and failure. Leslie Hewitt’s conceptual rigor lends gravitas to stillness, with photo-sculptural works that compress personal and historical time. Jose de Jesus Rodriguezuses fragile materials—fresco, lime, wire—to evoke the vulnerability of built environments. Julian Charrière’s sculpture confronts the ruins of industrial progress and the sublime collapse of nature, holding spectacle and decay in uneasy balance. In Nobuhito Nishigawara’s ceramic sculptures, ancestral forms and contemporary abstraction collide, collapsing generations into gesture and glaze.

Together, these artists approach the landscape not as image but as site of erasure and endurance, collapse and continuity. They negotiate with the ground, registering its silences and tensions, refusing to resolve it into a view. Ground Work is an excavation of what lingers: the poetic residue of time, labor, and memory pressed into form.