Coagula Curatorial (Los Angeles) is pleased to present "Nowhere is Home", a group exhibit that explores a reductivist practice on both abstraction & representation. Curated by Mike Vegas Dommermuth.

Jose Bellver makes paintings from disparate materials that refer to the desert landscape, and in particular, Death Valley. His reductive, geometric abstractions combine traditional oil paints, wax encaustic, glitter, roofing tar and objects he finds in the desert and these works play with our ideas of light and reflection and the ways we perceive the world around us.

Max Hendler works with simple materials found in lumber yards. Slices of mass produced plywood joined together into what almost looks like a landscape; gridded tiny round mirrors embedded into concrete attached to panel. The works seem simple, yet provoke the viewer about what we are willing to think of as art.

Claire Keith makes realist still life paintings of abstract objects. Traditional oil paintings of vases, glasses, and ceramics composed in front of patterns play with the "abstract" and the "real".

Don Spicer is a landscape painter who makes un-real landscapes. The works in pencil, gouache, and watercolor are places that you think you know, but don't really exist. Much like a child's memories of a magical place, abstract and playful, they ask the viewer to enter a different world, where colors and shapes might mean something or nothing at all.

Bill Lane is formalist painter who makes reductivist compositions based on memories of architecture and light. He paints in oils, acrylics and watercolors on different types of wood and paper. The images are composed geometrically, playing with transparency, light and color. At first they appear to be simple, flat compositions. Upon further inspection, one can see that the pieces are three-dimensional, with parts offset, pulled forward, and pushed back from the picture plane in ways that redefine the glossy, flat, and transparent painting on top.

Tom Castelazo makes work out of the non-traditional material used to make screen doors. He paints and layers the screens to create pieces that challenge our perceptions of color and light. They are a delicate contradiction of solidity and transparency, changing with light and movement.

Mike Vegas Dommermuth uses the language of graffiti to create abstract paintings, hand-cutting paper stencils and layering spray painted patterns onto canvas . As the stencils disintegrate, alterations dictate the finalized imagery. Cut out shapes become lines locked in a positive/negative dance: the push-pull of layered patterns form secondary images.