May the Ground Seethe
Shizu Saldamando
May the Ground Seethe
961 Chung King Road
november 8 - december 13, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: november 8, 5-8pm
SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present May the Ground Seethe, a solo exhibition of painting and sculpture by Los Angeles artist Shizu Saldamando. Saldamando’s intimate portraits distill figures from context, focusing on the body as the site of political struggle and communal joy. The title of the exhibition borrows a lyric from the song “MML” by Dorian Wood, whose portrait is a centerpiece of the show. Wood’s lyrics describe a collective movement built on love and rage, one that Saldamando takes up in this body of work. By spotlighting figures within her community who embody resistance to the prevailing currents of division and hate, Saldamando offers an alternative path of joyful, beautiful revolution.
Saldamando works on raw wood panel and incorporates mixed media collage into her paintings. The compositions often take into account the natural grain of the wood supports, most dramatically here in the portrait of Narsiso Martinez, where shades of green paint delicately follow the woodgrain, evoking a rolling landscape. Martinez is framed by gnarled fruiting tees executed in paint and enhanced with washi paper collage, nodding to both the artist’s Japanese heritage and the subject’s history in farm labor and his artistic focus on the dignity and rights of the often undocumented people who make up the agricultural labor force. The composition is framed at the corners in delicate gold leaf, lending the picture an almost baroque sensibility.
For Saldamando, materials are extremely important as signifiers of history and carriers of memory. Her wood panels nod to the beautifully crafted woods of Japanese design, but also to the small wooden sculptures made by the artist’s grandfather while he was interned with other Japanese-Americans during the second World War. The panel rejects the often heroically masculine twentieth century art history of painting on canvas. Instead of beginning with a blank canvas, Saldamando works with wood as a readymade, inviting its natural individuality into the work. Pigment fuses with support to create soft, nuanced surfaces that lend themselves to the delicacies of skin. Saldamando also often works with washi paper, collaging it into painted compositions or building delicate sculptural elements from patterned paper – as with several small paper flower sculptures in the exhibition – incorporating a rich history of craft production into the work.
Each painting pays homage to its subject, honoring their artistic spirit through detail and embellishment. Dorian Wood shines in a hot pink dress over intricate black lace, their defiant energy feathering around their body in ethereal bits of collaged silver and pink. Kindred spirit and fellow fine and tattoo artist Tamara Santibañez confidently wears a brick wall on her sweatshirt, a nod to her deeply-researched work on the brick as a symbol of resistance and power. The punk rocker and community organizer Marin is captured at local festival, Dyke Day LA - relaxed, joyful, present. The largest work in the exhibition finds counterculture photographer Louis Jacinto and his partner Kene Rosa in their living room, surrounded by Louis’ artwork and cushioned in striking patterns, a nod to Kene’s history in the fashion industry.
Each portrait, at its most basic level, counteracts the erasure of marginalized people by simply asserting their existence. But more importantly, Saldamando captures the spirit of resilience and confidence that true resistance requires. Her cast of characters together provide a portrait of the artist’s community. Each portrait captures and celebrates the specific details that people use to construct their personhood. The portraits also serve as memorials, uplifting and honoring the work of creating a joyful and revolutionary existence amid interlocking systemic oppressions. Each work keenly sees its subject and celebrates their contributions to the community, a vital project in this moment of widespread erasure and uncertainty. Just as Wood sings in “MML,” this body of work seeks to be “a mouthpiece of love, rising rising rising” in collective power and rage. These seeds have the power to rise from the ground and grow into a movement of community and care that builds upon foundations laid by histories of queer resistance, labor organizing, and environmental justice. Saldamando transforms legacies of prejudice and exclusion into odes to resilience and flourishing.
Shizu Saldamando’s work depicts American social spaces through portraiture. Her work celebrates peers, friends, and loved ones through paintings and drawings that honor the brief moments of connection that occur throughout daily life. Shizu was born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission District and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from UCLA School of Arts and Architecture and her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts.
Solo exhibitions include Momento, Pasadena City College Art Galleries, LA Intersections, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA; Shizu Saldamando, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; To Return, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; When You Sleep: A Survey of Shizu Saldamando, Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; All Tomorrow’s Parties, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA. Selected group exhibitions include: Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA), Phantom Sightings at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Trans-Pacific Borderlands, part of the Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA; We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles, an official collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale; Drawing the Line at Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA and The High Art of Riding Low at the Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, CA.
Saldamando’s work resides in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA), the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, Princeton University Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museu, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Fidelity Collection, the Cleveland Clinic Collection, and numerous other public and private collections. Saldamando lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Charlie James Gallery.
