Saturation Points

Saturation Points

August 25 - October 9, 2025

Reception on Saturday, September 6, 2025, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.

An exhibition featuring works by Luz Carabaño, Sid M. Duenas, Sheng Lor, Barbara T. Smith '53, and Lisa Williamson.

We have all experienced moments of total visual saturation—when we reach the absolute limits of what our perception can absorb. These five contemporary Los Angeles-based artists take on color, and its deliberate absence, to move toward each work's intended saturation point. Sometimes this appears as vibrant intensity, other times as restraint, but each work pushes toward its own inevitable limit. Through monochromatic and chromatic manipulation of color saturation, these artists move artistic processes toward a philosophical investigation of perception's boundaries.

Luz Carabaño suggests that optimal effect can arise from subtle restraint. In libro de sombras, 2025, an accordion fold book of color pencil drawings, Carbaño’s organic marks shift between muted earthen tones and lush pastel color. Shown alongside two modest, irregularly shaped paintings, cuadriculada and en cuatro, both 2024, Carabaño explores the soft tension between washes of color, line, surface, and composition. The artist’s intimate, observational approach suggests that saturation can be achieved through quiet assertion — that less can be more.

In T.O.F. Mouth Star with Spiral Intrusion, 2025, Sid M. Dueñas imbues a horizontal composition in black with a pattern of white dots and warm-toned triangular shapes that expand and collapse into star clusters — transforming negative space into cosmic depth. The artist’s use of violet to render tropical foliage in his collaged two-channel video, Eyes of Kiya, Three Helpers, Anineng Purple, 2025, shows how unexpected color choices and image experimentation can create a link between the earthly and the ethereal. Drawing from the recent death of his father and their time together in Saipan, Dueñas maps the resonances of personal biography and geography.

Sheng Lor begins with soft violet but quickly shifts toward warm pinks and oranges as interior becomes exterior in Loom 3, 2025. In this work and the artist’s drawing and textile works, Untitled (Red Aura), 2025, and Reversal Alopecia Areata, 2021, respectively, Lor's accumulation of repetitive woven lines — of thread, of hair, of pencil — use abstraction as a tool to express new chromatic and dimensional spaces. The exploration of pattern and material encompasses drawing, sculpture, and textiles, providing a method for distilling both individual and collective traumas and triumphs.

In 1966, Barbara T. Smith, a pioneer of early feminist and performance art, rented a 914 Xerox machine and began to produce a massive collection of Xerox books and prints from her home — often using family photographs, found objects, poetry, and her own body to express the intense intimacies of daily life. In her triptych, A (Set of 3), 1966, Smith transitions bright orange to light green and soft blue, repeating the letter "A" in both caps and lowercase to articulate playful speech patterns and tonal variety. Minimalist Theory (Set of 29), 1966-67, was printed at a local shop using the 813 Xerox machine. It is a sequential black and white grid in which the image of a closely cropped face, that of her son Rick, fades to obscurity through successive Xerox printing.

Lisa Williamson calibrates deep black against warm white in Groover, 2024, a relief sculpture comprised of a pattern of stereo-like knobs that allow viewers to theoretically dial saturation up or down. In her set of three Poem sculptures, all 2019, Williamson invents an oscillating color system in which bands of color alternate and wrap around incremental lengths of round bar. Situated directly on the floor, these works evoke a resonant composition within each form and in relation to one another — creating a score that is physical, directional, and chromatically charged.

Throughout this exhibition, points of saturation serve as reference coordinates for each artist's negotiation with perception's boundaries. Their works pose questions about what it takes to reach the limits of representation, iteration, visibility, and ethereality and how pushing these boundaries might open us to infinite possibility. These artists aren't just making aesthetic choices—they're conducting experiments about the nature of perception and reality. Through their investigations of saturation, they ask us to reconsider not just what we see, but how we see—and what exists beyond the edges of our visual comprehension.