FREEZE
Lauren Goldenberg Longoria, Alberto Lule, Khadijah Silva, Liz Stringer, Joshua Thomen, and Devin Wilson
February 22 - March 22, 2025
Opening: Saturday, February 22, 6-9 PM
Phase Gallery is pleased to present Freeze, a group exhibition featuring Lauren Goldenberg Longoria, Alberto Lule, Khadijah Silva, Liz Stringer, Joshua Thomen, and Devin Wilson, all of whom are members of the UC Irvine MFA class of 2024.
A playful nod to the city’s season of art fairs, Freeze marks a moment of suspension, capturing energy at the threshold of transformation. It suggests a range of connotations, simultaneously a materialist action chronicling petrified energy, a command ordered from a position of power, or a recollection of preserved memory. The works in this exhibition are invested in a variety of material and conceptual concerns while interlocked by experiences shared at a specific moment in time and place. Freeze is a capsule of a poetic mindset and the desire for connection.
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Exhibiting Artists:
Lauren Goldenberg Longoria’s works are vulnerable meditations of material, memory, and time. Rooted in a spirit of cannibalizing, she considers how her papermaking process simultaneously relates to the body, nostalgic objects in her grandmother’s home, and the compulsive desire to squeeze what’s oozing. The compact paper works are sympathetic to eachother in how they scaffold, disguise, and unearth.
www.laurengoldenberglongoria.com
Alberto Lule uses readymades, mixed media installations, video, performances, and tools used by agencies of authority to examine and critique the prison industrial complex in the United States, particularly the California carceral state. Using his own experiences, he aims to tie the prison industrial complex to other American political issues such as immigration, homelessness, drug addiction, and mental health. Lule creates artworks that explore institutional roles as gatekeepers of knowledge, authorities of culture, administrators of discipline, and punishment.
Khadijah Silva is an interdisciplinary artist working with photography, painting, video, and installations. Silva’s practice examines the relationality of displacement, stolen histories, and mythologies of Blackness. She contemplates the body and its image from aesthetic and epistemic vantage points, using opacity as a means to articulate the nuanced complexity of identity, theories of belief, and systemic structures. Silva’s artworks and explorations, calls to attention how humanity lives entirely on the imposition of a narrative and holds on to "ideas" in which we have learned to freeze phantasmagoria and mythologies as systems of belief and reality.
www.instagram.com/khadijah.silva
Liz Stringer is a multidisciplinary artist based in Long Beach, CA, exploring themes of embodiment and corporeality through drawing, sculpture, and installation. Her practice is rooted in science fiction, biopolitics, and feminist theory, delving into the intersections of physicality and metaphysical narratives. With dual bachelor’s degrees from UC San Diego (BFA & BS) and an MFA from UC Irvine, Stringer is interested in exploring societal constructs and inviting contemplation on vulnerability, collectivity, metamorphosis, and resilience. Amplifying moments of body horror, existentialism, and the grotesque within the work Stringer aims to mediate the complete and inescapable dependence upon the body, its pain and pleasures, and the anxiety over its vulnerability.
Joshua Thomen makes objects to wonder about freedom, attraction, and power.
Devin Wilson is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and digital fabricator based in Southern California. In 2024, they earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where they served as a pedagogical scholar with the Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation. Devin is the recipient of the 2024–2025 Digital Residency at California State University, Long Beach. Through the creation of a fictional corporation, IN-TECHS, Devin's practice explores the intersections of capitalism, pop culture, and technology. Set in a dystopia near-future, IN-TECHS exaggerates real-world anxieties about corporate dominance, combining urban legends, conspiracy theories, and paranormal occurrences with the omnipresence of branded consumerism.
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