Both artists probe the threshold between abstraction and representation, interior and exterior, material and light.
Rhett Baruch Gallery is thrilled to announce Shell Game, a two-person exhibition that brings together the lighting works of Liz Oliver and oil paintings by Laura Vahlberg. Two artists whose practices, though materially and functionally distinct, share a deep engagement with perception, surface, and the quiet reordering of the visible world. Both artists probe the threshold between abstraction and representation, interior and exterior, material and light.
The exhibition inaugurates Rhett Baruch Gallery: The Apartment, a new invitational exhibition space situated in a 1920 Spanish-style apartment in the heart of Little Bangladesh, Los Angeles. This domestic setting, rich with historical texture and architectural intimacy, offers a site-specific resonance with the works helping to create an environment where light, atmosphere, and material presence become part of the viewing experience.
Liz Oliver, a California-based textile artist, draws from the traditional Japanese art of Shibori, which she reimagines as a sculptural and dimensional practice. By folding, pleating, and dyeing cloth, Oliver transforms flat canvases into dynamic, three-dimensional forms that reference natural patterning, ancient drapery, and architectural detail. Her recent lighting series, Alexandra, engages with Hellenistic sculpture and mythological figures, particularly Nike of Samothrace, as a means to explore feminine strength, movement, and transcendence. Symbols such as wings, shells, and flowing water recur throughout the work as metaphors for transformation, shelter, and grace. This show marks the debut of Oliver’s first lighting collection, an expansion of her long-standing Shibori practice. These illuminated textile forms create a dialogue between sculpture and function, casting complex shadows and shifting the sensory field of the space. Light becomes both material and metaphor, deepening the connection between memory, perception, and structure.
Laura Vahlberg, based in Roanoke, Virginia, works from direct observation by painting everyday landscapes and scenes on site, yet her paintings quickly evolve into formally abstract compositions. Beginning with a democratic approach to form, Vahlberg treats every element in the visual field as equal: a wall, a shadow, a piece of sky. Color, shape, and tonal relationships guide the evolution of each piece, allowing narrative to emerge only secondarily, if at all. Her restricted palette and broad, atmospheric handling create paintings that are less about depiction than about perception itself and about how we process, filter, and reassemble the visible world. The gallery is introducing a new series of her paintings titled Stuffies, which depict innocent, recognizable, and somewhat humorous images of various stuffed animals. This body of work expands on her previous domesticated interior paintings, continuing her exploration of intimate, everyday spaces while shifting focus to objects of comfort and nostalgia. Though more overtly figurative, the Stuffies series maintains her intuitive, perceptual approach by blending familiarity with abstraction and inviting viewers to consider the emotional resonance of childhood icons through a refined, formal lens.
Shell Game signals the perceptual ambiguity that underlies both practices. For Oliver, the shell is literal, a recurring form and symbolic: a structure of beauty and resilience. For Vahlberg, the shell becomes a metaphor for the visual surface: deceptive, shifting, subject to reorganization.Both artists subtly disrupt the viewer’s expectations, asking us to look longer, and to consider how meaning is shaped not just by what we see, but by how we see.