... before the dawn
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Opening reception: Friday, September 11, 5-8 PM
Featured artists: Lita Albuquerque, Lisa Beck, Christopher Robin Duncan, Lia Halloran, David Huffman, Gary Lang, Charles Long, Jonathan Ryan, and Penelope Umbrico.
… before the dawn is curated with the assistance of gallery artist Whitney Bedford and Aandrea Stang, Director of the University Art Gallery at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
Survey exhibition … before the dawn brings together an intergenerational group of nine artists whom explore the enduring artistic, psychological and philosophical pull of the moon and the nocturnal sky. Sharing formal and existential curiosities, the participating artists engage the night as both a site of observation and imagination, where scientific inquiry, mythology, memory, and lived experience converge.
… before the dawn considers the conceptual landscape suspended between our earthly vantage point and the celestial body that has long shaped humanity's understanding of time, nature, and the cosmos. Simultaneously familiar and unknowable, the moon occupies a singular place within our collective imagination, serving as both a scientific frontier and a symbol of longing, transformation, and transcendence. The exhibition embraces these overlapping perspectives, inviting viewers to reflect on the profound relationship between the terrestrial and the celestial, the measurable and the mysterious.
At a moment when ecological instability, political uncertainty, and technological acceleration have intensified awareness of our own vulnerability, … before the dawn asks what it means to look beyond ourselves. The exhibition encourages a shift away from an anthropocentric worldview—one that positions humanity as the center of existence—towards an understanding of our place within interconnected cosmic systems. Against the turbulence of everyday life, the night sky offers a rare encounter with scale, permanence, and perspective.
The artists in … before the dawn extend a centuries-long artistic lineage that has found inspiration in the night sky, while offering a contemporary sensibility to this timeless subject. Working across painting, sculpture, photography, and interdisciplinary practices, each artist constructs a deeply personal relationship with the moon as image, object, metaphor, and presence. Together, their works collapse the vastness of the cosmos into intimate encounters, transforming an ancient celestial constant into a moment in time that embraces an individual’s ability to reflect on perception, belonging, wonder, and the fragile conditions of life on Earth.
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Lisa Beck
Night and Day I, 2025Acrylic paint and ink on un-stretched canvas
63 x 46 inches -
Lisa Beck
Day One, 2025Acrylic and oil paint on canvas
48 x 24 x 24 inches -
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Lisa Beck
Whole Hole, 2024Acrylic paint and mylar on wood panels
16 x 12 x 12 inches -
Lita Albuquerque
Trajectory through the Moon, 1995Mixed media with acrylic and gold leaf on paper
22.5 x 30 inches -
Lita Albuquerque is often associated with the Light and Space and Land Art movements, offering a visceral explication of scientific phenomena scaled to the human form. Across sculpture, poetry, painting, multi-media performance, and often through site-specific interventions, she searches for meaning in the scientific, as if translating its apathy into empathy. As mortal, physical beings, Albuquerque’s work challenges the viewer to see infinity and eternality through the lexicon of space and form.
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Jonathan Ryan, a painter, uses abstraction as a catalyst for imagination. Evolving from material explorations of simplistic forms, Ryan’s compositions have begun to adopt landscape and architectural forms. Inspired by archaic building design, industrial forms, and perspectival movement, the dream-like paintings sit in an inspiring liminal space between reality and fantasy, abstraction and representation, and material and form.
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Charles Long
Moon Candy, 2006pigment and fortified gypsum
39 x 43 x 2 -
Sculptor Charles Long studies materials and modernist forms and ideals in conjunction with historical and contemporary references. The works capture an essence of culture, delivered through the material to the viewer’s perception. In many ways, the medium is the vessel to connect the inner to the outer.
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David Huffman’s paintings use material, symbol, and affective qualities to explore identity, memory and the Black diasporic experience. As an extension, his futurist paintings explore narratives of liberation through space exploration. With a painterly hand, the work adopts a collage effect that underscores the potentiality embedded in the process.
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David Huffman
Ancestors of the Ascending Self, 2025Acrylic gouache and collage on Yupo
84 x 60 inches; 88 x 64 x 3 inches framed -
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Creating paintings and sculptures of concentric lines and circles, Gary Lang’s intuitive process looks effortless to the eye. The colors beside one another, though static, seem to pulse and react to the eye. The viewer is unable to define rings easily, wherein the blurring effect enters into the unknown and the realm of the intangible.
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Penelope Umbrico
Everyone's Photo, Any License (654 of 1,146,034 Full Moons on Flickr November 2015), 2015Ink jet prints on archival rag paper
104 x 324 inches -
Penelope Umbrico propagates everyday images from social media, digital photobanks, and websites through enlightening framing, installation, and contexts. On display, the work reflects on individual and collective image-consumption. Umbrico draws attention to how images and technology work across global and cultural scales.
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Christopher Robin Duncan fuses material and space, studying the sun and moon as well as time and the tides as these elements befall themselves on fabric, canvas, wall, and more. Fabrics are left out, vulnerable to natural forces, then artistically arranged, cut, sewn, painted, or simply displayed. Taking the concept of the residual, these works document in ways that align with photography, curated by the artist in the painterly realm.
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Christopher Robin Duncan
Seasons- One Year- 12 Symbols, 2023Sun, time, paint, marker and thread on fabric
19.5 x 20.5 inches -
Christopher Robin Duncan
12 Symbols (Blue), 2024Sun, time, paint and thread on fabric
30 x 28 x 1 inches -
Christopher Robin Duncan
Quilted Sky (Moon), 2025Sun, time, paint, thread and porcelain on fabric
60 x 48 inches -
Christopher Robin Duncan
Quilted Moon, 2026Sun, time, paint and thread on fabric
15 x 16 inches -
Christopher Robin Duncan
Cymbal/ Symbol, 2023bronze
13.5 diameter x 2 inches -
Christopher Robin Duncan
Starburst (Ghost Stitch), 2026Sun, time, paint and thread on fabric
10 x 14 inches
