Holding Pattern, on view through February 28, is a liminal space shaped by discomfort, disorientation, and redirection. Blah Blah Gallery’s third juried exhibition brings together fifteen artists curated by director Megan Galardi, with guest jurors Shannon Maldonado and Libby Rosa. The show statement frames the exhibition through repetition, delay, and internal logic: gestures recur and accumulate until effort stays visible and form resists resolution. Below is a selection of works that most clearly follow the show’s framework of suspension.
Upon entering the small gallery, eyes lock with Anna Correll’s Happy Mother’s Day with Tongue, a charcoal-and-oil-pastel painting. Two hands hold what appears to be a large card–or a magazine–over another figure’s face. The eyes and mouth are drawn on the paper; a hidden figure’s tongue pushes through a hole; the top edge reads “Mother’s.” The imagery feels like a memory or a dream, but not one that’s approachable to an outsider looking in. Ambiguously loud, the painting's lack of context becomes the point.
On the floor, Rachel Hsu’s Love, If We Can Stand It, a participatory work made out of black and white river stones and concrete, invites guests to step on the art, but shoes must be removed. The surface composes the Chinese character 忍 (to endure, bear, tolerate, or restrain), built from 刃 (blade) and 心 (heart). The work asks: how do we dispel numbness and better sink into the weight of our living? Hsu redirects attention from looking to bearing weight.
Sydney Vize’s two wax-covered board pieces feel like nostalgic mourning. Grief’s discomfort knocks. Inherited handkerchief is a light mustard yellow, the size of an actual handkerchief, with three small rectangular woven beads preserved in wax. It’s giving embalming fluid meets a handmade love letter. Unpleasant analogy is a muted red work with wax layered over a rectangle cross-stitch pattern. It simultaneously reads as a patch, wound dressing, and pixel-grid. Two dark stitches in parallel read like a stutter, or a censored word.
Noorann Matties’s Passenger Feet Curtain is meticulous: a three-foot-wide wall hanging made of pony beads that refuses full legibility. An image seemingly banal is made holy through the precious labor of the artist’s handiwork. It appears to be a film negative, noted because of the legibility of the exposure number in the bottom corner. Within the beaded photograph, an abstract figure’s legs lounge on a car dashboard overlooking a blue sliver and perhaps some city ruins–or a suburban neighborhood–who can tell. The figure’s wearing ochre pants with presumably cozy wool socks; it seems to be a sunny day. The beads behave like pixels–something we’re all too familiar with–but the beads are beads. Its lack of visual clarity and the gentle sway that comes from a wall hanging suspended in the air feel fresh.
A few other anchoring works include Humphrey’s Field [convergence ritual] by Ariana Martinez, a very quiet artwork, which nearly blends in with the white wall. Made of embossed cotton paper, its restraint creates tension of its own: it summons slower looking. Among algorithmic overstimulation and scroll slop, a quiet piece feels loud. Similarly, the two sketches by Rebecca Arp, Shape Study and Color Study (Blossom), mirror this invitation.
Natessa Amin’s three small square acrylic and paint medium artworks hypnotize: In Between Breath, The Veil is Thin, and Threshold. Like three mystic sisters, the works are clearly related, each carrying her own temperament and role. They harmonize like sirens—come closer—offering brightness without comfort and a sense of passage without arrival. Pattern and repetition are not treated as decoration, but as an opening, a portal.
The most arresting work in the show, Memories Don’t Leave Like People Do, by Aimee Koran, immediately reads: a house charred from a destructive fire–collapsed, blackened, stuck in the moment after catastrophe. Fire is the most literal forced redirection. Though technically a melted dollhouse, the sculpture evoked familiar news footage of fire-scorched architectural remains in all too many places once loved. As someone who recently fled Los Angeles due to its climate instability and housing crisis, the piece was deafening. Yet, the work’s chrome plating makes it glossy and uncomfortably seductive, like staring into the flames of a fire; transfixed, one can’t easily look away.