At its core, Symbiosis is about what happens when control is loosened and something else is allowed to take shape.
Los Angeles, CA — TAG Gallery presents Symbiosis, a collaborative exhibition by abstract painter Sharon Cannon and photographer Don Saban, on view June 17 through July 10, 2026. An opening reception will be held June 20 from 5–8 PM, with an artist talk on June 27 from 2–4 PM.
Symbiosis is built on exchange, interruption, and discovery.
Two artists, two mediums, one evolving collaboration—painting and photography move back and forth, layered, altered, and re-seen until a new image emerges. Cannon and Saban are not illustrating one another’s work; they are responding to it.
Each piece begins without a fixed outcome. What starts in one medium shifts into another, arriving at a point where neither the photograph nor the painting fully stands alone. The work is less about process than about what remains: images that hold memory, place, and perception as unstable and open-ended.
Rather than separating painting and photography, Symbiosis allows them to overlap and dissolve into something shared. Traces of revision remain visible—painted surfaces, photographic fragments, erased passages, and layered histories held together in a single image.
The result is work that feels both constructed and discovered: images that resist a single reading and reward close looking. Up close, the physicality matters—the surface, the interruptions, the evidence of decisions made and changed. They hold multiple moments at once: a captured image, a painted gesture, a revision that changes everything that came before it.
“We stop when the image feels complete, not when it is explained.” That idea defines the exhibition.
Symbiosis is not about blending mediums, but about creating a sustained visual dialogue where neither artist fully disappears and neither medium remains unchanged.
Cannon came to painting later in life, and that sense of urgency still shows. Her process is physical and intuitive: layering, removing, letting earlier moments stay visible. She’s less interested in a clean finish than in what builds over time, what survives each round of change. As she describes it, the painting has to “speak” before it’s done.
Saban brings a long history in photography, with roots in both fine art and institutional work. His images carry that clarity and discipline, but in this collaboration, they’re opened up, interrupted, altered, and sometimes pushed into something less certain. The authority of the photograph loosens. It becomes another surface to work through.
Event Venue
TAG Gallery, Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, USA, United States
USD 0.00
