CHIMERA'D

CHIMERA’D

August 2 - August 31, 2025

The chimera, a multi-headed creature found in Greek myth, is an actively shifting framework of looking. Aspects of the chimera can be found in nearly everything. Isolate certain details, examine histories and origins of seemingly “singular” objects and concepts, place a thing in a new context or relationship, you can impart in it a sense of transition, ironic interdependency, and hybridity. Two or more seemingly unrelated bodies sheathed in a seamless skin: justice and mercy, capitalistic spirituality, democratically electing a figurehead upon whom is bestowed almost divine rights, inanimate matter conjoined to create replicator molecules of various sorts, capable of resource competition. Then there is the abstract definition: a generally elusive impossibility, or enigma. 

This exhibition addresses the chimera as an action. To chimera (or chimerize), suggests the coming together of disparate things to create a new unity. But the action could be less physically comprehensible, metaphors of mashup, or stitching, in which the new third thing incorporates yet somehow transcends the character of its constituents, without entirely masking their presence. By invoking action, the chimera’d thing is situated in time, suggesting change, producing forensic qualities that can then be chased backwards, or speculated forwards. 

Chimeras, mythological or analogical, live lives stemming from their original enmeshment and beyond and backwards. The paradox is the search for an origin point, only to find that the reverse is true: chimeras don’t extend into the past towards an originator, but bifurcate into dendritic deep time. This coupled action, moving backwards to genealogical origin, and an expansive family tree, is a chimera unto itself. Language, ideas, myth, elusive and ultimately subjective truths, couple action with action, in conceptual opposition, the relevance of which depends on the framework in which you are looking, and your purposes in doing so. Look to the future, and perplexity abounds. 

At the center of this extensive action is the chimera’d present, a focal point between imbricated, expanding infinites.

-Reuben Merringer

About the Artists:

Gabrielle Jennings is a Los Angeles artist, writer, and educator whose work mines our collective unconscious from the autobiographical, to cultural mirrors (eg. AI, television/film), to the heartbreak of climate change. Jennings works across media, currently producing 'slow-gifs.' Her work has most recently appeared at The Wolford House and Now Instant Image Hall in Los Angeles, and online at Writers’ Kingston Online #29 and 7x7la. Her poetry has been published in Cordella, Olney Magazine, Fence and Terror House. Jennings is Associate Chair of the MFA Art program at ArtCenter College of Design, and conceived of and edited Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, for University of California Press—a groundbreaking volume of diverse essays centered around the question of abstraction in moving image arts.

Won Ju Lim is a Korean American artist whose multimedia practice is grounded in the interactions of sculpture and architecture. It revolves around the play of real and fictional spaces in the construction of memory, longing, and fantasy, drawing upon both empirical and imaginary constructs that we rely on to move between multiple scales of interiority and exteriority. The conceptual and formal elements in her work draw from sources ranging from Baroque architecture, the urban landscape to the domestic space.

Sid M. Duenas (b. Saipan, lives and works in the Los Angeles area). Duenas has had solo exhibitions at The Wolford House, Pilele Projects, Mandujano Cell. His works have been exhibited at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles, Material Art Fair in Mexico City, Mexico, Converso in Milan, Italy, ‘Ae Kai Cultural Lab/Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Honolulu, Hawai’i, LAXART in Los Angeles, Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California. Duenas’ work and poetry have appeared in Artforum, Storyboard Journal (University of Guam), Small World Mfg., and Absolute Humidity.

Coffee Kang is a visual artist based in Los Angeles, primarily working with photo, video, installation, and performance. Coming from a photographer’s background, she embodies ephemera in her works within site-responsive art and alternative gallery spaces, actively exploring the theme of temporality and narratives of impermanence while attempting to see and seek between liminal spaces. Kang holds a BA in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong (2016), and an MFA in Photo and Media from California Institute of the Arts (2018). Her works have been showcased at The Box, Last Projects, MAK Center, Launch LA, A Room to Create, LA Artcore, and LACE. She and her projects have received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, City of Pasadena, Mike Kelly Foundation for the Arts, California Humanities, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Kang was an artist in residence at Pilotenkueche and Eastside International in 2019, and Level Ground in 2021, and is currently an Armed with Camera fellow at Visual Communications. 

Ren Ebel is an artist and writer from Southern California. He now lives in Paris. 

Kaya & Blank is an artist duo based in Los Angeles, California. Since its formation in 2019, the duo has participated in institutional exhibitions and international festivals such as Athens Photo Festival (GR), Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE), CEAAC Strasbourg (FR), Lishui Art Museum (CN), Contemporary at Blue Star (USA), PHOTO 2024 in Melbourne (AUS), Fondazione MAST Bologna (IT), and Kunsthalle Basel (CH) among others. As artists in residence at The Internet Archive, they created a poetic glimpse into the empty headquarters of the institution during the fall of 2020. In 2022 the duo developed a method to grow photographs from living algae during a residency at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester. Their series “Second Nature” about cell towers disguised as trees and palms in Southern California has won numerous awards and gained international recognition after having been published as a monograph by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg in 2022.

Benjamin Weissman’s most recent exhibition, Cognitive Surge: Coach Stage, occurred at The Pit in 2024 with Paul McCarthy. He is a writer of short fiction, plays, and criticism, His most recent book of stories is Headless. He teaches Advanced Drawing at UCLA and is a Senior Lecturer at Otis College of Art & Design.

Ruoyi Shi is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Drawing inspiration from ancient tales and rituals intertwined with language, habits, and societal norms, she blends humor and fiction to construct poetic narratives. In her works, Ruoyi invents figures, tools, myths, and memories, viewing them as fragments she collects to build an alternative reality. Her practice explores the intersection between nature and artificial existence, as well as the notion of truth and its fabrication.

Gabriel Madan (b. 1993, Miami, FL) is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from ArtCenter College of Art and Design (2020) and BFA in Printmaking from the University of Miami (2015). Recent solo exhibitions include My Soul is Full of Barking Dogs, Gattopardo, Los Angeles, CA, (2024); The Afterparty, Baik Art, Seoul, South Korea (2023); Bad Sisters, Monti8, Latina, Italy (2023); Severance, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles and New York (2023); ça va aller, Red Baron Pizza, Hesperia (curated by Aram Moshayedi and Shahryar Nashat) (2022); Dogs Who Are Poets and Movie Stars, Gattopardo, Los Angeles (2021); and Sana Sana, Artcenter College of Design, Pasadena (2020). Additionally, his work has been included in group presentations at Shed Projects, Cleveland, OH (2024); Gattopardo, Los Angeles (2024); Baik Art, Seoul, Korea (2022); Gattopardo, Los Angeles (2022); Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles (2021) and Artcenter, Los Angeles (2020). Screenings of his work have been presented via Magic Rectangles (2021); Renaissance Society (2020); and Los Angeles Nomadic Division (2020). His work resides in the collection of the Hammer Museum.

Alexa Almany (b. 1993, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from ArtCenter College of Art and Design (Pasadena, CA, 2019) and her undergraduate degree from Hampshire College (Amherst, MA, 2016). Recent exhibitions have included The Warmth of the Day Leaves Shadows on the Ground (Gattopardo 2024); A Room of One’s Own? (QuorumQuorum, 2023); Air Kiss (Gattopardo, 2022); The All Else (QuorumQuorum for OPAF, 2021); Everything I want to say to the world right now (Meridian Exhibitions, 2020); The Day That Dawns for You, Will Also Dawn for Me (Jessica Dillon x Scranch, 2020); Tin Flats Experimental Flea (Tin Flats, 2019); Going Clear (ArtCenter DTLA, 2019); Good for the Jews (ArtCenter College of Art and Design, 2019) Mediated Translations (ArtCenter, 2018). She has published two artist books, a pocket watch with a floral back piece (2021) and Unattributable Nods (2021).

Lena Daly (b.1986) holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a MFA from The University of Southern California. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions at Balice Hertling, Paris, FR; Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco, CA; The New Wright Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and Garten Studio, Berlin, Germany. Daly currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Curators:

Li Zeng is an artist and playwright from Henan province, China, where her family has cultivated rice for decades. As a first-generation immigrant to the US, her work confronts the long history of migration struggles, and examines how that past shapes the body and language as a singular, inseparable terrain—often in dialogue with poverty, fluidity, and poetics. 

Reuben Merringer is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and educator whose work contends with both the collision and symbiosis of language and image. His ongoing body of visual work threads process-based explorations of materials, often resulting from natural phenomena and historical references to language. He is editing his first novel.