Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to host a conversation between artist Shanna Waddell and writer and curator Marie Heilich on October 24th.

This group of new paintings, ceramic vessels, and collage works brings to life a third chapter of Waddell’s imagined feminist utopia, Sheness Society, focusing on the gardens and living quarters of its inhabitants. Waddell’s lush compositions draw upon her artistic influences and explore the home and the garden as sites where observation, imagination, and the history of painting converge.

Waddell first began envisioning Sheness Society in 2022, painting vivid scenes in which its female occupants commune peacefully with nature and each other – they garden, harvest flowers, paint, braid hair, make clothing, and relish in the verdant landscape. Members of this collective are identified only by the shared name Sheness rather than being individuated. Waddell herself embodies this collective identity as she works: Sheness paints a still life of a carefully laid kitchen table, a summer garden, or a home in the woods. This conceptual exercise brings into focus the vibrant details and romantic sensibility of Waddell’s world building and integrates her own perception and visual language with that of her imagined artist commune.

Waddell’s newest suite of paintings brim with art historical references to impressionism, symbolism, art nouveau, and to the Japanese prints that profoundly influenced late 19th and early 20th century Western painting. Drawing from a range of sources, Waddell assembles domestic spaces and abundant gardens that nod to works by Bonnard, Matisse, Kuniyasa, and artists involved in the Arts and Crafts movement, weaving these references together with observations of her own horticultural endeavors. Many of the vignettes linger in thresholds between interior and exterior, softening the boundaries between the domestic space and the landscape. In a painting titled Sheness Arranges Black and Gold Amongst Freud’s Studio, a young woman shrouded in a black gown is seen in profile seated in a space resembling Lucian Freud’s studio, with its balcony view into the surrounding garden. The composition borrows from James McNeill Whistler’s renowned portrait of his mother and includes a painted rendition of Lucian Freud’s work Painter’s Garden resting on an easel. Waddell situates herself within a lineage of artists who turned toward the garden as a site of perception, intimacy, and painterly experimentation. The work Painter’s Garden of Sheness Society references the mountains in the South of France as painted by Bonnard, as well as Waddell’s plein air studies of her own garden.

Within this body of work, historical paintings are not simply quoted or reproduced; they are folded into the present, transformed through the act of painting, and placed in dialogue with contemporary ways of seeing. Like a quilt, each painting becomes a form of compositional accumulation in which historical references, contemporary imagery, and painterly invention are brought together through a logic of patchwork and collage. The resulting works offer an encounter with a world that transcends the sum of its parts, where past and present, individual and collective, real and imagined are seamlessly entwined.