Heavy Metal - A Group Exhibition curated by Nancy Meyer

Revisiting and challenging historically dominant narratives in large-scale sculpture, this group exhibition engages with the legacy of formalism and theatricality while exploring abstraction, colonialism, memory, nature, objecthood, and site. Through diverse practices, the artists bring both material sensitivity and conceptual depth, reimagining the relationships among body, object, and environment. Together, they propose new sculptural languages that honor and unsettle the conventions of the past, emphasizing gesture, process, and scale.

Heavy Metal implies both emotional and physical weight, and the exhibition expands beyond an initial focus on metal to propose renewed ways of thinking about form, space, and relation. The exhibition builds an emotional world through a lexicon of symbols, materials, and historical references. Resilience and strength surface alongside impermeability and ephemerality, drawing inspiration from the natural world as both site and subject. Ranging across materials from metal and ceramics to fabric, cast media, glass, and found objects, the works in Heavy Metal oscillate between monumental scale and intimacy and are grounded in feminist and materially conscious perspectives.

Heavy Metal features works by an intergenerational slate of artists, including Kelly Akashi, Miya Ando, Barbara Berk, Amy Bessone, Tanya Brodsky, Beatriz Cortez, Claire Chambless, Alika Cooper, Paige Emery, Katie Grinnan, Ting Ying Han, Andrea Hidalgo, Kelly Lamb, Abigail Lucien, Fay Ray, Brie Ruais, Carolyn Salas, Davina Semo, Kelly Wall, and Lisa Williamson.

Heavy Metal is curated by Nancy Meyer, LAMAG curator, with research and administrative support by Zandra Sweeney, OXY InternLA 2025.

Public programming includes an Artist Talks series, live movement-based performances by Barbara Berk and an interactive installation by Paige Emery that invites participatory engagement.

Ivan Bridges: Infinite Game

Ivan Bridges (b. 1984, Portland, OR) explores the psychological resonance of concealed memories, translating internal drives into expressive, revelatory gestures. Using loose, delicate strokes in watercolor, and oil, on paper and raw canvas, Bridges traces his psyche, addressing themes of desire, fear, and control. By limiting himself to the fewest possible marks, he evokes visceral emotional responses and transforms cerebral impulses into immediate, tactile experiences. Through this restrained approach, he invites a deeply felt engagement from the viewer.

Through loose, delicate strokes and a disciplined economy of marks, Bridges addresses themes of desire, fear, and control. Reflecting on his practice, he notes, “I really identify with Duchamp when he says that all of art making is an urge... I see it fundamentally as an obsessive urge, something I’ve never been able to quit, so it seems to put it in its place as urge.”

Ivan Bridges: Infinite Game is curated by Nancy Meyer, LAMAG curator, with research and administrative support by Zandra Sweeney, OXY InternLA 2025.

Rachel Bridges: I'm Not Your Filipina

Rachel Bridges (b. 1982, San Francisco, CA) is a first-generation Filipino American artist based in Los Angeles. Her work conjures historical narratives of struggle and resistance, drawing from familial roots and ancestral spirituality to explore the emotional and cultural reverberations of colonialism across the Filipino diaspora. Bridges revives the heritages of her matrilineal line, addressing gaps in family histories fractured by generations of conflict.

The exhibition title, I’m Not Your Filipina, riffs on I Am Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck and based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House. For LAMAG’s presentation, Bridges includes three paintings from her White Out series: Illuminated by the Subtle Bleeding Light, Sampaguita, and Who Lick a Rare Heart?. These works confront identity, memory, and the enduring effects of colonial histories through processes of hiding, exposing, and unfolding within painting.

Rachel Bridges: I’m Not Your Filipina is curated by Nancy Meyer, LAMAG curator, with research and administrative support by Zandra Sweeney, OXY InternLA 2025.

The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery is located within Barnsdall Park at 4800 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027.

Parking here is limited. LAMAG recommends rideshare, carpooling and/or public transportation. The nearest Metro stop is the Vermont/Sunset station on the B line. Metro buses 754, 780, 217, and 180 all stop within one block of Barnsdall Park.

Visit the museum's official website at https://lamag.org/.