Islands in the Air

Karla Kelsey

But listen to me, O Islands in the air, I have made even of your biology—a lily.
—Mina Loy, Islands in the Air

Cheremoya sits within a three-mile radius of the City of Angels’ Griffith Observatory and Forest Lawn Cemetery—sites that channel energies essential to the iconoclastic writer, artist, and designer Mina Loy’s lifelong engagement with the celestial and the terrestrial. Under her Stellatric signs, the gallery has become an island of contemporary fissionscape debris, internal blooms, rose hips, architectural fragments, wreck sites, and moons.

The phrase islands in the air draws the exhibition’s conceptual perimeter while evoking the essence of Loy’s multi-faceted literary and artistic practice. It is the title of one of her fugitive autobiographical novels that describes coming to be an artist. In it, she depicts her first artwork: a sculpture of her baby sister as a feeding bottle and made from a needle wrapped with thread to form a little tough white belly. In the 1950s, approximately the same time as she worked on her novel, Loy gathered trash from where she lived on the Bowery and transformed it into mixed-media collages that mirrored her literary practice of salvaging meaning from social wreckage. From tin cans, mop heads, rags, and other detritus, portraits of her neighbors emerged. She called this series refusées, combining refugees with the French refuser(to refuse), refuse (waste), and refuge (harbor). 

Born in a London suburb in 1882, Loy built a remarkable creative life despite her oppressive Victorian upbringing, continual economic precarity, and immigration as part of the wave of refugees fleeing fascism in Europe. She persisted, created, and thrived within ongoing ruin wrought by systems that nearly a century later show no signs of abating.

The works assembled here echo Loy’s creative defiance. Bridget Hamel’s submerged body, a graphite map seeped in images of US nuclear submarine wreckage sites, has been gently severed. Once separated, the image can only continue when a third panel is placed between the two halves. Naoki Sutter-Shudo’s Corridor offers arcaded space as both idea and structure, which the body-mind converses with but is not defined by. In translating Carl Andre’s monumental “Philemon” from prison letter to Philomène’s empowered love, Sutter-Shudo reveals Io’s name in a process that extracts, as Loy once wrote of Gertude Stein, a radium of the word. Vanesa Gingold’s aerial forms began in the garden, pulling the deckle through the milky vat of pulp until producing a paper skin stretched across bamboo supports. The swallowtail-spirit of her work thrives on invasive wild Anise with its tiny silk sling holding the chrysalis to the branch. In Imogen Brent’s Rear Site (Nest), steel has found its form as a headband or intergalactic headphones anchored to an iron sight devoted to the precision aim of a weapon while tuning in to the celestial song of bowerbirds as they build their towering nests from shimmering plastic straws colored the same blues and oranges once found in flowers. Madelyn Kellum’s weathered fresco fragments reveals a dreamlike community intertwined with architectural spaces via muted earth tones, swathes of pink, and blue accents that might have been found in Loy’s palette. We enter these composites to find creatures, human and animal, beveling with lattices. Like Loy, Kenneth Winterschladen refuses to allow us to forget the materiality of the image even as we are absorbed in the fan form’s support of a lily, a mantle, a moon. Across the cartouche, red planets transmigrate over pearl skies. Layered opacities stutter open the eye as lilies breathe into the room

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lust

          — — — Stellactric signs

                    —Mina Loy, “Lunar Baedecker”
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Imogen Brent (b. 1999 in Sydney, Australia; lives and works in New York) received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2021. Solo and two-person exhibitions: Parent Company, with Max Popov, New York (2025); Kaleidoscope Gallery, with Max Popov, Brooklyn (2024); Pratt Institute, Brooklyn (2021). Group exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); Mery Gates, curated by Collin Clarke, Brooklyn (2025); Pop Up Gallery, curated by Klara Vertes, Queens, NY (2024); Harsh Collective, curated by Etta Harshaw, Brooklyn (2024); Intima, curated by Brianna Griffin, Brooklyn (2023).

Vanesa Gingold (b. Ukiah, CA; lives and works in Oakland, CA) received her BA in Art and Psychology from UC Davis in 2007 and her MFA from UC Santa Barbara in 2016.  Selected solo & two-person exhibitions: /(room), San Francisco (2023); Painting & Sculpture Outpost, Marysville, CA (2019); Space 151, San Francisco (2017); Open Mind Art Space, Los Angeles (2017); Red Barn Project Space, Santa Barbara (2016); Glass Box Gallery, Santa Barbara (2015); Artists’s Television Access, San Francisco (2012); SFAC Art in Storefronts, San Francisco (2011). Selected group exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); Et. Al co-organized with Bibeau Krueger, San Francisco (2024); PØST, Los Angeles (2018); NOH/WAVE, Los Angeles (2017); The Atrium, Santa Barbara (2014); Raymond Gallery, Pasadena (2014); Alter Space, San Francisco (2013).

Bridget Hamel (b. 2000 in Richmond, Virginia; lives and works in Philadelphia) received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and was an Artist-in-Residence at Yale Norfolk School of Art in 2023. Selected solo & two-person exhibitions: Rumpus Room, St. Louis, MO (2024); Material Room, Richmond (2024); Light Harvesting Complex, Vantaa, Finland (2023); The Anderson Gallery, Richmond (2019). Selected group exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); Yale Norfolk School of Art, Norfolk, CT (2023); Dovetail, London (2022); The Garden, Chicago (2022).

Madelyn Kellum (b. 2002 in Florida; lives and works in New York) received her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, in 2024. Solo & two-person exhibitions: Hyacinth Gallery, New York (forthcoming, 2025); KB, with Danka Latorre, Brooklyn (2025). Selected group exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); Paul Kasmin, New York (2025); PYMK, Brooklyn (2025); Sitting Room, New York (2024); Preachers Valley, New York (2024); All Street, New York (2024); Kino Der Toten, Brooklyn (2024); Campus, New York (2024); Mountain View Mausoleum, Altadena (2024); Landmark Art Space, New York (2024); Quarters Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Queens Botanical Gardens, Queens (2023); Ideal Glass Studios, New York (2022).

Naoki Sutter-Shudo (b. 1990 in Paris; lives and works in Los Angeles) gained his arts education from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, in 2016 and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, from 2009-16. Selected solo exhibitions: Crèvecoeur, Paris (2025, 2021); Keijiban, Kanazawa, Japan (2024); Derosia, New York (2024, 2021, 2017); Gaga & Reena Spaulings, Los Angeles (2024); XYZ Collective, Tokyo (2022, 2019); Alienze, Vienna (2022); The Vanity, Los Angeles (2022); Crèvecoeur, Marseille (2019); Jessica Silverman, San Francisco (2016); Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Los Angeles (2016). Selected group exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); La Salle de bains, Lyon (2025); Musée Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Grasse (2025); Institut Français de Tokyo, Tokyo (2024); Gene’s Dispensary, Los Angeles (2024); Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles (2023); Derosia, New York (2022); Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2022); Alienze, Vienna (2022); Espace Arlaud, Lausanne (2021); Crèvecoeur, Paris (2020); Commercial Street, Provincetown (2020); From the Desk of Lucy Bull, Los Angeles (2020); von ammon co., Washington, D.C. (2019); Le Plateau, Frac Île-de-France, Paris (2019); Franz Kaka, Toronto (2019); Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles (2018). His work is included in the permanent collections of MAMCO Geneva and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Kenneth Winterschladen (b. 1993 in Washington, D.C.; lives and works in London) received his BA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, in 2015, and his MA in Painting from Royal College of Art, London, in 2020. Solo exhibitions: Pumice Raft, Toronto (2025); South Parade, London (2022). Selected group exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); The Artist Room, London (2025); Depa Archive, curated by Pieter-Jan de Paepe, Ghent (2024); The Shop at Sadie Coles, London (2022); 184 Frankln Street, curated by Daisy Sanchez, New York (2022); Recent Activity, Birmingham, UK (2022); ArtWorks Project Space, London (2019); Royal College of Art, London (2019); Spillway Collective, Philadelphia (2017); Icebox, Philadelphia (2017); Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia.