DAYLIGHT

December 14, 2024 through January 11, 2025

Hope. It is that ever-constant feeling of anticipation and yearning for something specific to occur. Hope is a powerful driver of how we navigate many aspects of our lives: friendships, careers, health, well-being, money, happiness, and love just to name a few. Hope informs the ways in which we shape the world around us. Creating spaces and situations; dressing for success or attention; and imagining how life can be made better in the hopes of shaping our environments. The ultimate outcome of hope is the pleasure that follows from an achieved desire. Each day we wake up brings renewed promise that joy will be found.

We need hope, now more than ever. And, Bermudez Projects’ new group show, Daylight explores how artists create worlds — real, imagined, or something in between — in order to bring us a brighter, more hopeful future. Through richly-hued, color-forward paintings, prints, and illustrations, the exhibition highlights how creative environments inform our sensibilities and, in turn shape our outlook on life.

Featuring works by Gay Summer Rick, Josh Cabello, Jessie Mahon, and newcomer April Miller, Daylight is a salve for our senses and our souls; a brilliant serotonin boost as we anxiously await the dark winter that looms. Lush gardens, sunlit skies, sun-drenched cityscapes, and dreamlike imaginings all come together, creating a space of joy. From the whimsical to the bold; and the sensual to the surreal, each artwork transports viewers to the hyper-saturated worlds of its creators.

There is a quiet vibration and unexpected beauty in Gay Summer Rick’s palette knife paintings of the “commonplace elements” she sees in the urban coastal environment. Rick says, “My work describes this in an atmospheric and dreamlike, yet familiar, manner. Through my paintings, join me where the city meets the sea – driving on a busy city street with neon signs, taillights and road signage in front of us, and a glowing sunset in the distance, or, on a misty beach just off the bike path, a lifeguard tower on the sand, waves crashing on the shore, a surfer in the distance.” Standing before each work, the magnificence of the California sunrise, sunset and coastal clime is immediately felt.

Focusing on creating queer sanctuaries, Josh Cabello paints moody, imagined gardens conjuring a world where anyone who enters can be still, commune with oneself, and be engulfed by nature. Taking from a variety of histories, Cabello’s paintings are inspired by Greco-Roman frescoes, Italian Renaissance works, and queer art haus films. Each painting is a portal for viewers to step into the human interior.

“I connect both real and implied queer lineages from antiquity to the present. These works draw on queer traditions of play and excess, mingle with themes of intimacy and delicacy, and work to decenter hypersexuality and masculinity within the modern queer experience,” says Cabello. “By aesthetically and thematically linking art history and queer theory, I’m ultimately asserting queerness’ endurance and belonging in history, even if it has not always been visible to the naked eye.”
Inspired by the wonder and allure of the sky, April Miller’s print series explores the dynamic nature of the heavens and our relationship to it. The brightness of daybreak; the warm glow of dawn; and the coolness of a spring morning are each considerations of the inspirational aspect of the vast sky, and how it can guide our moods.

Miller describes the motivation for this series, as “the breath of the clouds feels cool on the skin; birds chirping and leaves rustling; early mornings invigorating the soul. As it peeks over the horizon, the embrace of the sun warms the crisp morning air. Clouds swirl and transform as I lay on the grass.”

Jessie Mahon’s work embodies the space between memory, reality, and imagination. Influenced by the vividness of early 90s and 00s animation and video games, along with an acute familiarity with being a new kid throughout her upbringing, her work captures an ever-evolving and inclusive depiction of ‘self.’ Her colored pencil drawings invite viewers to look beyond the circumstances of everyday life, engaging with the complexities of human experience that observation alone cannot fully capture.

Her series, “The World Will Still Absorb You” asks us to look closely at human touch. Each drawing includes at least one element from the natural world that’s been manipulated into something manufactured for public ease, utility, pleasure, or consumption. Mahon says, “In developing this series, I found myself wondering at what point does creation become destruction? At what point does care become neglect? Where exactly is the threshold designating what’s necessary for our survival and what isn’t? Is it different for everyone? ‘The World Will Still Absorb You’ is less of a threat and more of a hope. Regardless of what we build, where we are, what we do in our lifetimes, there is always the possibility to begin – again and again.”

Each and every day brings a choice for hope and renewal. A choice for how we want to live, the spaces we choose to create, and how we want to show up for ourselves and others in the world. Daylight is a reminder, a beacon that a joyful future is possible. First, we must have hope, and then take action.

About the Artists

Gay Summer Rick (American) creates atmospheric scenes that reveal an unexpected beauty in commonplace elements within the urban coastal landscape. Sparsely populated, leaning toward abstraction, her paintings capture the energy and movement of the observable world, describing the quiet vibration of life where the city meets the sea. Guided by a deep commitment to sustainability, Rick employs innovative techniques to minimize her environmental impact. She applies pure oil paint using only palette knives and treats the paint architectonically, layering, carving, and accumulating it, but never discarding. In this way, she completely avoids toxic solvents and prevents material waste.

Originally from New York, Gay Summer Rick earned her BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and her MA from the University of Puget Sound. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the US, Europe, and Japan. She is a member of Oil Painters of America, California Art Club, and Malibu Art Association. Her paintings have been featured in American Art Collector Magazine, HYPERALLERGIC, Huffington Post, ARTNOWLA, Artillery Magazine, Chronicle Luxembourg, Malibu Magazine, and others, and in several books and exhibition catalogs. She is a Center for Creative Innovation grant recipient, and a Kipaipai Fellow. Rick’s art and practice are the subject of short documentary films including “Iconic LA and the Urban Coast”, and “Follow the Sun” sponsored by a grant from the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, California. Her paintings are in corporate and private collections around the world. A resident of Southern California for over 25 years, Rick maintains studios in Inglewood and Malibu.

Josh Cabello’s (American, b. 1997) paintings of lush, imagined gardens serve as havens to anyone who enters. Often uncharted, incomprehensible, and sometimes filled with tumult, these fragile spaces must be navigated with patience and care. Produced with a soft color palette, these otherworldly idylls emanate with an ethereal glow reinforcing the delicate nature of the subject matter.

Cabello received a BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 2019. He has exhibited at venues including Lauren Powell Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Art Share LA, Los Angeles, CA; SoLA Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; the Cohen Gallery, Providence, RI; and Rare Cafe, Los Angeles, CA. He most recently was selected to curate and exhibit in a group show at Fellows of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, as a 2022 Curator’s Lab Recipient.

Jessie Mahon (American) has always felt creative and somewhat unconventional, weaving between the visual and performing arts. Growing up in the American Midwest—Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan— then spending high school years in Texas and Louisiana, Mahon earned her BFA in Theater from the University of Oklahoma. For six years, Mahon was a freelance Scenic Artist for Broadway, Off-Broadway, television, and film. Now in Los Angeles, Mahon works full-time in visual art, illustration, installation, and design, heavily drawing on her background in storytelling to inform her work.

Her debut group exhibition was held at Rockefeller Center, sparking collaborations with gallerists, curators, editors, and art directors across the U.S. and Canada. She has also joined residencies at creative institutions in Virginia, New York, and central Portugal. Notable collaborations have ranged from designing a book cover for Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group and creating a community-driven installation for the ACLU / NYCLU to having her work featured on Netflix, HBO, and Hulu in projects like Euphoria, Better Things, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!, and The Sex Lives of College Girls. She has also designed and painted murals for Madison Wells Media and Ars Nova, and her artwork has been published in a zine and an art book through Booooooom. She is an artist ambassador for the NYCLU (third year in a row).

April Miller (American, b. 2001) is a multimedia artist working primarily in digital illustration. Exploring the relationship of loneliness within social spaces, she creates imagined environs – urban and natural – to understand the extent to which we connect with others. Inspired by public and private settings, Miller executes her work from the perspective of those longing and searching for true connections. Often utilizing vivid colors, the artist evokes a sense of irresistible melancholy and anemoia in her work.

A native Angeleno who studied art from an early age, Miller earned her A.B in Art from Lafayette College (2023), and is currently developing work as a studio artist. Daylight is the artist’s debut group exhibition.