OCHI is pleased to present Beginning of a Poem, an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Hannah Tishkoff. This marks Tishkoff's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Beginning of a Poem will be on view at OCHI, located at 605 N Western Ave in Los Angeles, California, from April 11 through May 23, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 11, from 5:00–8:00 PM.

________________________________________________________________________

Language is still warm from the hand. Ideas have not yet settled into place. The alphabet sits somewhere between image and speech: a set of shapes learned before they are fully understood, a shared structure we pass through, memorize, and misunderstand. A person, like a word, might not be who they are, but where they have been placed. Borrowing its title from Paul Klee, for whom a “beginning” marked a generative threshold where instruction, intuition, and belief coexist before resolving into form, the works operate as starting points, visual propositions that remain open.

Instructional forms derived from education, design, and measurement loop and repeat alongside gestures of doubt. Some structures are followed carefully while others loosen or collapse. Bodies appear as diagrams rather than portraits, positioned within systems rather than placed at their center. Tables, axes, color bands, counting dots. A diagram may begin as a rule and end as a question. What emerges is not self-expression exactly, but legibility: how a life becomes written into systems and form, and what resists being written down. A beginning is less a moment in time than a living condition—a willingness to surrender to a particular structure, follow it for a while, and see where it leads.

Reading and looking live side by side, gliding across the surface between what is seen and what is said, like the scattered stars of that feeling before it has been given a name. What appears is not a confession but an orientation: a life positioned, measured, held in relation. The exhibition remains within this threshold state, where systems are tested rather than finalized, and ideas remain in motion. It asks a simple question: how does one move, choose, or feel inside structures that claim to organize experience? And what parts of the self remain uncounted?

One must begin, and then keep beginning.

— Hannah Tishkoff