Sydneé Bethel | Lauren Gidwitz | Monica Srivastava | Yuzhe Yan
Exhibition Dates: March 22 - May 3, 2025
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to present Dimensions of Intimacy, a group exhibition curated by artist Lavaughan Jenkins. The exhibition features four artists, each exploring themes of portals, gateways, and avenues into other realms; private spaces that offer an otherworldly sense of safety or introspection. Dimensions of Intimacy showcases both abstraction as a method of exploring the deepest parts of oneself, and representational work that nods to idealized feminine interiors. Through these rituals of introspection and creative worldbuilding, the artists construct alternate and utopic realms within their artworks.
On Lauren Gidwitz’s canvases, a variety of unexpected materials form a topographic quality from which scenes of charged interiors and visual tensions emerge. Gidwitz uses the work to explore notions of home, illusions of safety, consumption, as well as sexual and emotional power dynamics. Her painting sanctum, a first person encounter with an implied space of intimacy - a bathroom scene - places the viewer at the center of the work. The bathtub is filled, yet no figure is present in the composition - the viewer has no choice but to infer the events to follow, the ritualistic movements of shedding clothing to step foot first into the warmth of the water, to become the bather, suddenly embedded within Gidwitz’s scene.
Monica Srivastava’s oil on canvas paintings are porous spaces - not quite interiors or exteriors, but spaces that exist in between, something both seen and unseen. The visual consonance of pattern and color reference ancient Mughal architecture and latticed screens, a nod to the artist’s identity as the child of Indian immigrants. The figure, often a self-portrait, dances the line of concealing and revealing, always enveloped in these screens but never overtaken. Within the spatial constraints of the canvas, Srivastava builds realms that represent a feminized plurality of self and being.
Sydneé Bethel's Los Angeles studio, February 2025
In her paintings, Sydneé Bethel builds upon the use of pattern and color to explore her own emotion and sense of self within the work. Rooted in the process, her canvases become sites of self-discovery. “I’m an old soul,” Bethel said on a recent studio visit, “and I try to include those past senses of self, that knowledge beyond this singular life to my paintings.” Guided by a synesthetic response to music, the resulting works become portraits of energy – either self-portraits or constructed queer love stories that manifest as abstract paintings. The resulting works yield abstract, interdimensional realities filled with color and hieroglyphic mark making.
Yuzhe Yan’s tufted works are a vehicle for storytelling as a sequential throughline. Yan builds elaborate backstories of beings that break confines of gender and species, showcasing the infinite possibilities of bodily transformation. In Yan’s invented world of Purlieu, fantastical inhabitants delight in their freedom and diversity. The distant planet is unlike earth - dreamlike, vibrant, accepting and utopian. Yan’s writing flows with a painterly quality, bestowing kindness upon its subjects and using the written word to conjure a picturesque visual description of this idealized world.
The exhibition provides a personal look into the minds of each artist, allowing the viewer to travel to alternate realms of possibility, acceptance, and intimacy.
About the Artists
Sydneé Bethel is a self-taught abstract artist born and raised in Pasadena, CA. Her works are a unique mix of recycled materials, metallic colors, and unique etching patterns. She paints from a highly emotional, intuitive place and draws inspiration from her heritage and life experiences. Bethel most recently collaborated with Pressed Juice.
Lauren Gidwitz [American, b. 1983 Chicago, IL] is an artist working in oil painting and mixed media. Gidwitz's work has been exhibited and collected throughout the U.S., Europe, and Australia; including the public collections of Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City and the Creative Arts Council at Brown University. Gidwitz was a resident of Byrdcliffe Artist Residency, BigCI in the Wollemi National Park, Australia, the Arctic Circle Expedition in Svalbard, Norway, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Alfred and Trafford Klots Program in Léhon, France. Gidwitz has been a visiting critic at Tufts University, Maryland Institute College of Art and Brown University, and is an adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Gidwitz received an MFA in Painting and Drawing, from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Gidwitz lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Monica Srivastava (b.1997) is an oil painter exploring themes of identity, family and
relationships, and diaspora. Having grown up in an Indian household, she became aware of the intersections of culture at a young age. After a transformational three week long trip to India in 2018, her experience of these intersections gained new clarity and began to emerge more intentionally in her work. She uses textile and fibers as symbols for identity, culture, family and relationships by exploring what it means to be connected, to be part of the “fabric” of something. She references Indian architecture as a way of questioning spaces of belonging. She is in constant pursuit of the world of the beautiful, bringing together vibrant colors and details patterning. By making this work, she is staking her own territory and carving out a space for her existence within a South Asian, Indian-American experience.
In 2019, she graduated with honors from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a BFA in painting. In 2023, she graduated with distinction from Pratt Institute’s MFA program. She was the recipient of the Beverly Hallum Fellowship, departmental honors from MassArt, the Pratt Circle award, and the Excellence in Academic Achievement Award from Pratt Institute. Most recently, she has been published in Hyperallergic, I Like Y our Work Podcast, and Canvas Rebel. Her work has been shown at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, dodomu gallery, and the Brooklyn Museum.
Yuzhe Yan (Ashley), born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, is an interdisciplinary artist currently living and working in Los Angeles. Having lived in various countries, she holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the China Academy of Art and she is expected to graduate with a Master of Fine Arts degree from ArtCenter College of Design in Spring 2025. Her work has been exhibited in galleries across Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Taiwan’s 121 ArtSpace, as well as in Los Angeles at The Box Gallery and 4C Gallery. She has also participated in the Kaohsiung Art Fair in Taiwan.
Yuzhe’s artistic practice revolves around the concept of “body transformation”, treating the body as an open, limitless site of transformation—one that becomes a stage for the coexistence, deconstruction, and reconfiguration of gender and species. The figures she creates exist in a constant state of metamorphosis, shifting between inanimate objects, fantastical hybrid beings, and fictional creatures, all emerging from the subconscious.
Through immersive environments, Yuzhe explores themes of power, identity, and bodily control under capitalism. In her constructed worlds, the environment remains conscious while the characters become unconscious puppets, inverting traditional perceptual hierarchies. She conceptualizes this space as purlieu, a term historically referring to areas beyond legal jurisdiction, where marginalized genders and species transcend binary constraints. By intertwining her interest in hybrid beings with the visual language of body deformation, Yuzhe exposes the complexities of identity, representation, and transformation.
About the curator
Lavaughan Jenkins was born in 1976 in Pensacola, Florida, and lives and works in Boston. He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2005. In 2019, Jenkins was awarded the James and Audrey Foster Prize by the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston. In 2016, he was named Emerging Artist of the year at Kingston Gallery in Boston, MA, Jenkins is a recipient of the 2015 Blanche E. Colman Award and in 2002 received the Rob Moore Grant in Painting. He has exhibited his work most recently at venues such as Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston), The Painting Center (NY), Suffolk University Gallery (Boston), and Oasis Gallery (Beijing). His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. He is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles.
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