Ground Work
Curated by Joey Lico
Adrian Bara, Julian Charrière, Sofía Fernández Díaz, Leslie Hewitt, Phaan Howng, Athena
LaTocha, Dionne Lee, Harold Mendez, Nobuhito Nishigawara, Caleb Hahne Quintana, Jose
de Jesus Rodriguez, Cauleen Smith, Rodrigo Valenzuela, and Maggie West
 

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles
July 17 - August 30, 2025

 

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles is delighted to present Ground Work, a group exhibition organized by Los Angeles-based curator and Executive Director of The Cultivist, Joey Lico. The exhibition brings together fifteen artists whose works respond to the material, psychic, and political dimensions of landscape. Anchored by Duchamp’s seminal photograph Dust Breeding, 1920, Ground Work considers the trace as a radical gesture, foregrounding atmosphere, residue, and the weight of absence over pictorial representation. As Lico states, the artists “gather materials touched by time—ashes, dust, silence, memory—and offer us not declarations, but traces. This is not a show about landscape. It is about what it means to inhabit one.”
 

Ground Work unfolds through three thematic undercurrents: Traces of Passage, Spatial Resistance, and Temporal Compression. Taken on the surface of Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass, Dust Breeding captures the entropy of material, the residue, and accumulation as a slow representation of time. It offers a conceptual and historical aperture for the exhibition, introducing the idea that what we leave behind can speak louder than what we make. Through photography, sculpture, installation, and painting, the artists in Ground Work echo this ethos, turning away from direct depiction to instead engage with memory, pressure, and transformation.