About this Event
Opening Reception: September 26, 2026, 6–9 PM
On View: September 26–October 24, 2026
Mash Gallery, 812 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90069
Mash Gallery presents The Shape of Elsewhere, a group exhibition featuring Rachel Berkowitz, Mark Engel, David Gordon, John Grande, Haleh Mashian, Mike O’Guinn, Brigitte Puschmann, and Itaewon.
Moving across painting, collage, abstraction, figuration, street art, and fused glass, the Shape of Elsewhere enters a world where the recognizable becomes expansive. Familiar forms carry the sensation of another time or place. Bodies, landscapes, architecture, natural elements, and cultural imagery become starting points for experiences shaped by imagination and transformation.
Rooted in the early twentieth-century Surrealist movement's interest in the unconscious and the liberation of imagination from rational constraints, the element of the surreal within The Shape of Elsewhere emerges as a fluid mode of perception. Familiar forms move beyond their expected contexts and reorganize through altered scale, layered space, and surprising material relationships. The surreal functions as a way for each artist to make the familiar feel open to possibility.
The exhibition’s shared structure becomes clearest when the same visual idea passes from one work to another. A flower appears half-submerged in atmosphere and returns elsewhere with almost photographic clarity. The subject remains recognizable, yet its role changes from memory to image to object. This visual tension creates the exhibition’s central rhythm. Forms emerge and recede. Surfaces hold traces of movement. Solid elements appear to float, dissolve, or shift.
The works also share a fantastical quality that emerges through composition. Layered realities and unexpected relationships give the exhibition its sense of wonder. Each work begins within the visible world and opens a passage toward something more elusive.
Light also moves through the exhibition in different forms. Some paintings create luminosity through color, allowing a surface to suggest an internal glow. The fused-glass sculptures hold and redirect actual light, changing as the viewer moves around them. Together, these works turn light into a connective material.
“Elsewhere” emerges the instant a recognizable form moves just beyond where memory expects it to stop, dissolving into gesture, fracturing into geometry, or accumulating through layers until it becomes something new. Within this heightened state of perception, the familiar feels both distant and intimately known, while imagination becomes a way of seeing more deeply.
Although each artist arrives through a distinct process and medium, the exhibition reveals a common pursuit. Every composition establishes a world with its own internal logic. Some are ordered and architectural; others are fluid and atmospheric. Together, they all create a continuous movement between form and freedom, clarity and mystery. These echoes and contrasts allow The Shape of Elsewhere to unfold as one continuous conversation, giving the exhibition the feeling of a world that is continually remembering and reinventing itself.
ABOUT MASH GALLERY
Founded in 2018 by artist and curator Haleh Mashian, Mash Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in West Hollywood dedicated to presenting emerging, mid-career, and established artists from around the world. Through thematic exhibitions that bring diverse practices into visual and conceptual dialogue, the gallery creates an environment where contemporary art, design, material experimentation, and human experience intersect.
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MASH Gallery, 812 North La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, United States
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