Lawndale Art Center will present the opening reception for Jean Shon: "in a word" in th Cecily E. Horton Gallery, Ariel Wood: "rest, raze, cullect" in the John M O’Quinn Gallery, and Roslyn M. Dupré: "The daily devotional" in the Stairwell.

"in a word" explores traces of loss through the re-generation of ephemera from Shon's family archive. Through sourced images and text, she examines rupture/reconstruction, origin/reproduction, and legibility/illegibility as methods of erasure and revelation. This body of work is a dialogue that evolves despite the lack of a living presence; rather, that presence is found and transformed through memories, ideas, oral stories, and conversation.

Wood's "rest, raze, cullect" brings together three bodies of work, interconnected, and interrelated, yet each inspired by a particular infrastructural situ. Transplanting them together here showcases material shifts over time and conceptual throughlines. Utility boxes on the corners of streets become cage-like shower stalls and water towers. Water main access pipes stretch upwards like pillars and lamp posts. Ceramic pipes and vessels rest in their steel holds, face and connect the walls, or drop in blue, acrylic suspension from the ceiling. These ceramic pipes are lifted off the ground on specifically fabricated black platforms; a nod to the unique floor-to-wall relationship of the John M. O’Quinn gallery.

"The daily devotional" is the latest installment of Dupré’s ongoing experimentations with fiber technique, language, and ritual. An assemblage of photographs and intimate sewn works, the exhibition explores the artist’s reactions to text, to forms of language, and to traditional fiber work. The project initially began as a reaction to the unusual circumstances of the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown and continues as a growing record and investigation of repetition and permutation.