It has been a wonderful experience seeing my painting, Three Scenes After Midnight, installed as part of the Santa Monica Art Museum’s exhibit “Local,” a dynamic survey of artists rooted in Los Angeles.
My piece engages with the city’s mythic underbelly, drawing on a Raymond Chandler–like lens of noir mystery and drama. Los Angeles, long bathed in Hollywood’s golden glow, is also a city of contradictions—where glamour and danger share the same streetlight. Three Scenes After Midnight presents three fractured vignettes in dialogue: a woman bathed in cinematic light, a lone figure watching from the shadows, and a car poised between descent and flight. The backdrop of neon-pink city lights and looming palms gives the sense of a dream unraveling—or perhaps the moment before a secret is revealed.
Each scene is both intimate and theatrical, hinting at stories withheld, much like the city itself. Figures glance downward or sideways, as if caught in a frame of unfinished film. The car becomes a vehicle of suspense, suspended in time, its passengers anonymous silhouettes. These disparate moments converge in a collage of mood and atmosphere, a meditation on how Los Angeles reveals its truths obliquely, through fragments, shadows, and suggestion.
The show runs through the end of the month, with the possibility of an extension.
