Ochi Projects is pleased to present group exhibition Heads or Tails. The exhibition is featured in our Online Viewing Room from May 27 – June 17, 2020, and includes works by Tahnee Lonsdale, Lydia Maria Pfeffer and Hana Ward. The exhibition expands upon Ochi Projects’ presentation at the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA)’s FAIR. Built in partnership with Artlogic. FAIR is a new art fair initiative designed to be entirely online, function cooperatively, and act as a benefit for NADA’s community of galleries, nonprofits and artists.

Heads or Tails annunciates the indefinite parameters of figuration; lured into the dreamlike, even mythological, expanse of bodies ungirded, the viewer can count on nothing other than the unpredictability of form in motion. Suspended, warped, teased and pulled around the edges of tables, expounding on alternative gravities, the works defy realism with finesse. With wickedly alluring profundity, each painting pointedly untethers the viewer from paradigmatic relationality: femininity without masculinity, expression without expectation, heads without bodies, succulence without beauty.

Tahnee Lonsdale’s work reflects on her experience of being a woman, the male gaze, and how the gender watermarks of our familial experiences influence our future relationships. Lonsdale holds a BA from the Byam Shaw School of Art in London. Since graduating in 2007, she has been short-listed for both the Dazed and Confused Emerging Artist Award and “100 Painters of Tomorrow.” Her work has been exhibited widely in her native Britain, as well as in the United States at venues such as the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Ana, CA. Lonsdale currently lives and works in Los Angeles. 

Lydia Maria Pfeffer is an artist who currently works and lives in Los Angeles. She was born and raised in Austria. Pfeffer’s work focuses on the psychological interpretations of cultural symbolism, rites, rituals and escapism as revelation. Her attraction to anthropomorphism, symbolism and personification can be traced back to early childhood years, where she fell in love with fables, fairy tales and mythology. One of Pfeffer’s strongest influence is Jung's idea of the ‘collective unconscious’. With strong female leads and protagonists, Pfeffer re-imagines and re-shapes existing stories from history and literature and weaves them into her own contemporary tales. Pfeffer is a SAIC alumna and has exhibited in Los Angeles, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Miami, Chicago, Sun-Valley.  

Hana Ward is a painter and ceramicist from Los Angeles, California. Ward's paintings often touch on themes of liberation, memory, history and diaspora. Through her landscape paintings, Ward documents focal, yet disappearing parts of her native city while her graphic portraits pay praise to unsung heroes of our collective legacy. Her work has been described as, "sometimes sad, sometimes funny but always intriguingly equivocal” by ArtNews. Ward’s recent solo exhibitions include “what was there all along” at Ochi Projects in Los Angeles, and “sing about me” (2019) at Harun Gallery in Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include “Mutual Friends” (2020) in Oakland, California, “Giant Robot Post-It Show (2019) and “Animating the Archives” (2017) in Los Angeles. Hana Ward earned a B.A. in Education from Brown University in 2011 where she worked as a Graphic Designer for their Third World Center.