Golden Bird: Aura Kuperberg, Emily Silver, Kelly Brumfield-Woods, Megan Riera, Minna Philips & Zeal Harris

Edward Cella Art & Architecture present a group exhibition entitled Golden Bird and features new and recent work by six women artists and includes Aura Kuperberg, Emily Silver, Kelly Brumfield-Woods, Megan Riera, Minna Philips, and Zeal Harris. Organized and curated by Carmen Acosta, Creative Director at SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park, the exhibition is presented in collaboration with Inglewood Open Studios and aims to celebrate the artistic contributions of an exceptional group of women who are living or working in Inglewood, California today.

Seeking to both engage the local communities of Inglewood and highlight the growing presence of this artist community to wider audiences across Southern California; the exhibition also amplifies and directly supports the ongoing efforts of Inglewood Open Studios (IOS) to foster and build a diverse, inclusive, and resilient community through the arts and artists. A portion of the sales of artwork sold during the exhibition will be donated to IOS to expand their year-round calendar of programs and events in the Inglewood community.

A Golden Bird is said to possess magical powers and a radiant brilliance. It serves as a symbol of transformation, resilience, and the boundless possibilities that come from embracing one's true self. In the words of the curator Carmen Acosta, "Our intention is to create an inclusive and dynamic event that encourage women in our community, and I believe that their unique artistic styles, perspectives, and creative voices greatly enrich our community." The exhibition features a range of painting and sculpture modalities and offers both material and formal contrast yet searches for intuitive connections between the six artists presented.

The medium and larger format ceramic and mixed media sculptures of Aura Kuperberg draw deeply from her long-standing professional experiences in therapeutic social work. Looking for visual expression of the transcendence and resilience of the human experience in the face of trauma, suffering and the longing for connection to one another, Kuperberg translates these complex emotions into the physicality of her materials and concentration of the figurative forms that are emotive and impassioned.

Inspired by the space between the comic and the tragic, what is real and what is fictitious, and what can simultaneously exist and be at odds in the life of an event or virtual space, Emily Silver creates playful and colorful handmade weaving, paintings, and digital media works that often defy classification. Recognizing the collapse of virtual and physical, much of the artist's work ends up animated, sometimes before a painting starts, midway or afterwards. Embracing and shifting between reality and our immersive social media landscape Silver animates and celebrates our human vulnerabilities.

Informed by long standing interests in architecture, spatial perception and color theory, Kelly Brumfield-Woods creates shimmering hard-edge, geometric paintings and uses heavy flake glitter to encrust the surface of her work which activate in ambient light and in response to the viewers' movement and position. Playful and colorful, her work inverts the material and conceptual 'high art' connotations of the Light and Space movement traditions.

Close observation drives figurative painter and-printmaker Megan Riera in her documentation of the people and environment she encounters. Working between the traditions of landscape, still life and portraiture, Riera endeavors to reflect and convey each of her subject's unique character, mood, and sensibility by adapting her painting styles that can range from more highly rendered to other times more abstracted and subjective.

Minna Philips draws from her experiences with liminality, in between identities, and the transient realities of an Indian born working and living in Los Angeles. Deeply influenced by childhood experiences with the Modernist architecture of Chandigarh, Philips often creates works that rely on the study of shadows and multi-dimensional spaces and by extension explores the changing images we perceive and project around us. Her practice relies on process as a driving factor for continuity and openness which allows an exploration of various interconnected systems across sculpture made of different materials and graphite drawings on paper.

Storytelling is central to the work and practice of artist and arts educator Zeal Harris. Her colorful mixed media paintings on paper use both figurative and symbolic visual traditions document and depict the layered and intersectional complexities of the lives of African Americans and often are inspired by humorous or poignant experiences in her daily life or her community's history. Mixing past, present, and future, her non-linear visual narratives seek to inform, inspire, and entertain.

Golden Bird represents a new collaboration between the Inglewood based Artist in Residency program Himalaya Club, Edward Cella Gallery, Inglewood Open Studios, the artists, and curators in the surround community and seeks to foster greater cooperation among and visibility for these various cultural stakeholders.