OCHI is pleased to present The Best Machines Are Made of Sunshine, a two-person exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artists Molly Larkey and Caitlin Lonegan. The exhibition brings together Larkey's floor sculptures and Lonegan's oil paintings in the first joint presentation of their practices. The Best Machines Are Made of Sunshine will be on view at OCHI, located at 605 N. Western Avenue in Los Angeles, California, from July 11 through August 22, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 11 from 6:00 – 8:00 PM.

The exhibition takes its title from Donna Haraway's 1985 essay "A Cyborg Manifesto," which argues for a feminism grounded in hybridity and the productive entanglement of the human with the non-human. Haraway's cyborg refuses categorization: it is neither purely organic nor purely mechanical, neither one thing nor another. Larkey and Lonegan share a related sensibility, making work that resists fixed reading and rewards sustained attention. Across both practices, form is revealed through light falling across a surface, through the slow accumulation of color, through an encounter that shifts with the viewer's position and the passage of time.

Larkey's sculptures, each titled Cyborg, are slender vertical forms constructed from steel, stucco, and acrylic paint. Ranging from just over three feet to nearly ten feet tall, they stand in a room the way figures do: individually distinct but collectively present. A single form might read as body, fossil, architectural fragment, totem, machine, or geometric structure, and none of these readings cancels the others. Made by welding together chunks of broken-down metal tubing, then coating the resulting structure with stucco and sanding it until the original material is unrecognizable, the Cyborg is a figure that embodies contradiction: fragmented and whole, chaotic and well-reasoned, apocalyptic and utopian. The surfaces evoke clay, rock or even bone. They carry material memory without referencing a single origin. These are not stable forms but evolving conditions: shapes in flux, where embodiment itself is a shifting state and multiple meanings emerge at once.

Lonegan contributes three paintings to the exhibition, one large-scale, two intimate, that together demonstrate the range her practice holds within a single sustained inquiry. Working slowly, she moves each canvas between wall and floor over months, responding to shifting light in the studio and building surfaces from layered color and gesture. The works carry a quality of accumulated time where washes and impasto coexist, metallic pigments shift with the viewer's movement, and the eye finds its way through the surface less by composition than by pull. At the root of this is the same empirical impulse that drove the Impressionists — a commitment to recording light as it actually behaves, unstable and time-bound. Lonegan pursues that project from her studio, with paint itself as the instrument of record.

Together, the works in The Best Machines Are Made of Sunshine propose the encounter itself as generative. These are not objects that declare a fixed identity. They reveal themselves over time.

Molly Larkey (b. 1971, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist and writer whose practice spans painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, and social projects. Working in steel, fabric, and ceramics, they explore language, abstraction, and the instability of meaning through formal investigations of color, shape, and gesture in conversation with philosophical and social inquiry. Larkey earned an MFA from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ and a BA from Columbia University in New York, NY. Their work has been exhibited at venues including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art , MOMA PS1 and the Drawing Center in New York, The Saatchi Gallery in London, and Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville, AR, as well as O-Town House, Commonwealth and Council, Human Resources, OCHI, and Luis de Jesus in Los Angeles, and Dutton Gallery and PS122 Gallery in New York. Larkey lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Caitlin Lonegan (b. 1982, Long Island, NY) is a painter whose work explores the fugitive nature of optical phenomena, translating elusive experiences of light and space into oil paintings and drawings layered with enigmatic color and gesture. She received a BA from Yale University in Art and Applied Physics (2005) and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (2010). Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Broadway Gallery in New York; Vito Schnabel Gallery in New York and St Moritz; Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder in Vienna; Susanne Vielmetter and ACME in Los Angeles; and OCHI in Sun Valley, ID. Lonegan's work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, and Sammlung Goetz, among others. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.