Creature Comforts
| 02.20.2026 - 03.28.2026 | 12:00
Artists: Julie Buffalohead, Bryan Christiansen, Rachel Denny, Johnny DeFeo, El Gato Chimney, Hacer, Angelica Raquel, and Christian Ruiz Berman.
'Creature Comforts' brings together animal-based works by artists represented by Visions West Contemporary, exploring how animals function as companions, symbols, messengers, and mirrors for human experience. Across painting, sculpture, and mixed media, the exhibition considers the emotional and psychological roles animals play in our lives, not only as sources of care, protection, and familiarity, but also as sites of projection, myth, humor, and unease. Here, animals appear as stand-ins for personal histories, cultural memory, survival, play, and transformation, occupying a space that is at once intimate and symbolic. Rather than approaching animals as purely natural subjects, the artists in 'Creature Comforts' treat them as complex narrative devices, figures through which tenderness, tension, power, and vulnerability are negotiated. Some works draw from folklore, storytelling, and spiritual traditions; others lean into contemporary life, using animals to reflect social dynamics, identity, and emotional states. Together, these works invite viewers to consider why animals remain such enduring and flexible forms for meaning-making, and how comfort itself can be layered, conditional, and deeply human.
Thresholds
| 04.03.2026 - 05.08.2026 | 10:30am
Artists: Robin McCauley
Thresholds is a body of paintings that explores quiet moments of suspension, spaces where something has just happened or is about to. In these interiors, birds appear within restrained architectural settings: against walls, beside partially opened doors, beneath curtains, or standing in fields of angled light. The rooms are spare and deliberate. The palette is muted. I am interested in constructed stillness, not emptiness, but a held moment charged with potential. These spaces function less as literal environments and more as psychological containers. Light moves across plaster. A door remains slightly ajar. A shadow extends beyond the body that casts it. The compositions suggest narrative without resolving it. My background in photography, particularly an ongoing interest in minimal architectural imagery, informs the structure of these paintings. Rather than building scenes around symbolic objects, I am increasingly drawn to the tension created by space itself: by what is revealed, what is withheld, and what exists just outside the frame. Birds serve as quiet witnesses within these environments. They are not allegorical stand-ins so much as presences: alert, grounded, and aware. Their placement within these interiors creates a subtle friction between the natural and the constructed, the animate and the still. Thresholds reflects an ongoing shift in my work toward greater restraint, spatial tension, and psychological atmosphere. These paintings occupy the space between narrative and silence, inviting the viewer to linger in the moment just before something changes.