The Tie That Binds
The Tie That Binds gathers four Southern California artists—Max Presneill, Georgina Reskala, Andre Woodward, and Kaye Freeman—whose practices illuminate the layers of chaos and connectivity that underlie the energy field of urban life. Borrowing its title from an 18th-century hymn in which togetherness is deemed essential and sacred, the exhibition invokes the powerful bonds between people and place, history and memory, and the natural and built environments. Across their dynamic, operatic, prismatic, fractal, intuitive, material-rich, labor-intensive work, these artists reveal the city not as a static backdrop but as a living organism—a layered terrain of entanglements where individual stories, cultural histories, and ecological forces converge.
Parallax #4 (big red one), 2022, oil, acrylic, spray paint, plastic tape, sticker, metal ornament on canvas, 94” x 113”
Max Presneill’s imposing, multi-layered paintings merge abstraction, collage, photo-transfer, and subcultural iconography—skulls, stickers, badges, graffiti and the scars of its erasure—charting visual and architectural intersections of semiotics and collective memory. Mapping the existential dialogue of urban ephemera on canvas, Presneill’s theatrical, densely worked paintings unfurl as palimpsests of the city’s visual culture. Exploding as compositions that read like archaeological sites of intimate, hieroglyphic tagging emboldening the artist’s restless hand, his recombinative mixed media process becomes a meditation on the way identity and community accrue their meanings over time through repetition and erasure.
Untitled #2025042, 2025, photograph on linen, 40" x 42"
Photographer Georgina Reskala employs unconventional material techniques with her prints—such as folding, reprinting, sewing, and erasing—to destabilize familiar scenes. As she excavates eroded landscapes and the shifting narratives they invoke, these techniques materialize the fragility and fluidity of both place and the memory of it—especially within urban spaces which are so prone to nonstop razing and rebuilding. With pronounced call-backs to the early photographic avant-garde, her work engages in a classical mode of aesthetic rebellion—inserting the disruptively emotional energies of the subconscious mind into an ostensibly documentarian practice. Her photographs hover between oneirism and artifact, as by physically, viscerally intervening in the picture plane, she enacts and embodies the mutable slip between presence and loss—haunted by the knowledge that no history remains fixed.
Don’t Come Down, 2015, concrete, steel, ficus, enamel, wire, 48” x 60” x 36”
Andre Woodward casts Southern California tree forms in concrete, forging sculptural hybrids that fuse organic silhouettes with industrial materials. These works speak to the paradox of cityscapes—environments molded by nature yet dominated by human construction—echoing how urban memory holds, distorts, or represses traces of the natural world. These mesmerizing, impossible-seeming objects crystallize the uneasy truce between the organic and the manufactured, performing the fragile persistence of nature as it asserts itself against the pressures of urban encroachment. This work embodies the paradox at the root of contemporary life—the desire to contain and control the natural world even as we cheer on its stubborn seepage back in through the cracks.
The Emperor's Twit, 2017, oil paint, oil stick, and graphite on canvas, 78” x 10”
Kaye Freeman works with oil, pencil, graphite, mixed media, film, and performance (as one half of the avant-garde multiplatform duo Hibiscus TV with artist Amy Kaps) all the better to explore transformation and symbiosis as they manifest in the personal self and the collective, psychical environment. Her vibrant abstractions and meditative processes—rooted in Eastern calligraphic traditions—mirror the city’s energetic flux and deep interdependencies. Freeman’s channeling of the energy of the city into gestural cartographies feels both spontaneous and deeply intentional. Her view sweeps across the rooftops of downtown, westward toward the sea, and this kaleidoscopic web of concrete and celestial canopy is often quite literal, even as her work exists equally on a more ethereal, even cosmic plane. Freeman’s work in the studio, alone and in collaboration, on the interdisciplinary stage and screen, is always animated by transformation and a faith in the capacity of color, line, and motion to articulate the flux of interior and exterior experience.
—Shana Nys Dambrot
Art/Space 114 Writer in Residence
