Good Mother Gallery is pleased to present Lizardscapes, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Andrew Durgin-Barnes.
Known for his earlier depictions of the city’s neglected corners and fractured neighborhoods, Durgin-Barnes now shifts his focus outward. In this new body of work, he captures the quiet presence of nature within the vast urban sprawl of Los Angeles through the immediacy of plein-air painting. Setting up his easel on sidewalks, hillsides, and roadside clearings, the artist commits to focused 2.5-hour painting sessions, responding in real time to light, atmosphere, and the subtle visual rhythms of the environment.
Rooted in the tradition of California plein air painting, Lizardscapes offers a meditative counterpoint to the city’s relentless pace. Durgin-Barnes reclaims small pockets of wilderness including shrub-lined medians, sun-bleached lots, fragments of sky framed by power lines, and elevates them into luminous, contemplative compositions. These works reveal the living tension between constructed space and organic form, asking viewers to slow down and reimagine the natural world as it exists within and against the built environment.
Accompanying the paintings is a video component documenting the artist’s plein-air process. These intimate vignettes provide insight into the conditions of each site, grounding the works not only in gesture and paint, but in lived experience. With Lizardscapes, Durgin-Barnes continues his larger investigation of place, perception, and overlooked beauty, offering a uniquely grounded and personal reflection of Los Angeles.
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 7th from 6pm-8pm
On View: June 7th-27th, 2025
Location: 5103 W. Adams Blvd. Los Angeles
For more information or to request a digital catalog of available works, please email info@goodmothergallery.com
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Exhibition Text by Jordan Seth Silver, MRes, MPhil:
Los Angeles exists as a world worlding. That is to say, a blending of the boundary between subject and environment. There is, at once, the physical geographical space, and on top of that, the increasingly sophisticated artifice of economics, communication, and inhabitation that we have built over time; our human “world”. From the first irrigation and infrastructure, the creation of these worlds necessarily effaced and supplanted what existed before, until such time as these spaces were entirely unrecognizable as anything other than the names of cities and towns we know them by today.
Los Angeles, as a world, can be defined in any number of ways. From a global economic perspective, perhaps uniquely the world that produces other artificial worlds for mass entertainment as its primary industry. From a national perspective, maybe the place of popular mythology, where stars are born and dreams come true; or conversely, a hotbed of dangerous beliefs and transgressive behaviour that clash with conservative patriotism. As a world unto itself, it is undoubtedly the most variegated of all; experiences of daily life entirely unique to each community and each respective individual within those communities. At every level from the macro to the micro, each personal version is an equally valid experience to the worlded artifice, “Los Angeles”
Worlds are defined in terms of consciousness. They are essentially places we build for our consciousnesses to call home and reflect upon themselves. Yet, therein also establishes the limitation of such worlds: they only contain what we purposefully build into them, and they end where we do. Even a behemoth like Los Angeles is not actually all-encompassing of the land it has been set upon. Within all of the highways and attractions there are innumerable pockets of nothing - untended to cracks, places where the long claws of an ever encroaching plurality of commercial use and high-end real estate haven’t yet reached. In short, places we just don’t relate to, the unworlded. This is where we find the plein air painter in the year 2025.
Just as the Impressionists once joined an emergent bourgeois leisure class on their weekend sojourns out of Paris to escape the oppressive doldrums of urbanity and ended up finding a new painterly technique in nature, so too does Andrew Durgin-Barnes create something unique by following their path outside of the worlded city. To be sure, the unworlded places Andrew has endeavored to capture in these pictures are all still unmistakably Los Angeles. If not the downtown skyline itself, tentatively taking shape on the distant horizon through a smog of delicately layered creams and greys, then the vivid royal hue of the sky intercut with thin ribbons of white cloud and the kaleidoscopic diffusion of green and brown vegetation on the rolling hills it’s set against. But knowing where these places are and being able to locate them are two different things, and the palpable yet elusive familiarity of these landscapes is actually what throws their uncanniness into sharp relief against our understanding of the worlded Los Angeles.
From the deserts to the mountains to the beaches, Andrew puts us in landscapes that we inhabitants of LA feel like we know, and yet upon deeper reflection, come to the troubling realization that we do not. If brought to one of these scenes blindfolded, who would know where they were? Who could easily find their way back? Who still would stay there and begin life anew from that place? Likely nobody. It is both a testament to the vastness of this world LA, but also a reminder that we have not conquered everything yet, and likely never will. Each picture is a document of an unworlded place right in our midst, a postcard from the demarcation line of where the comforts of our collective home end and we are back lost in nature. In these pictures, mostly devoid of any sign of our existence, and so seemingly empty as a consequence of our absence, we are encouraged to confront the reality of our own fleeting presence.
Obviously, these paintings contain multitudes. More species of plant than could be named, atmospheres, minerals, whole ecologies of interspecies and environmental relations, etc. All working in concert to lend subject to these beautiful landscapes through which Andrew’s mastery of color and light create a painted Realism so supple and acute as to be reminiscent of Courbet. The spectator cannot help but imagine themself standing there. And yet, because these are unworlded places, our inability to relate to them as home makes them feel remote, and our experience imagining ourselves there somewhat uneasy and uncomfortable. Even the pictures that contain elements of ourselves within them; landscaping, telephone towers, the Los Angeles River embankments, actually only serve to intensify this sensation of solitude. Why isn’t anybody else here? Where have they all gone?
There is a funny notion of being thrilled and excited, if not a little afraid at such reminders of our own insignificance. Immanuel Kant called it the Sublime. For him it was the experience of natural phenomena so large and powerful it was impossible to fully apprehend their totality at once with his senses, like the starry night sky or a wild lightning storm. Although it makes us feel small and insignificant to contemplate our stature against something like the cosmos, we still enjoy doing it for some reason. Andrew’s pictures of unworlded places similarly conjure these bizarre, contradictory sensations, though perhaps in an even more robust way than what Kant was experiencing. For a city like Los Angeles that is so thoroughly worlded, even the smallest pinhole of light through its screen, the most contained view of what exists beyond, are enough to easily eclipse the gentle thrill of pondering the power of natural forces and move to previewing, if not foretelling of, what this place will actually look like when we are eventually and inevitably no longer here.
There is actually something comforting about the idea of temporarily leaving this world when it becomes unbearable and then being able to return when we again feel like we are ready to face its challenges. These pictures are revelatory in that they show us it's possible. Not just an outside looking in perspective, but one as seen from a world away. We know very well this vast network of varied landscapes can’t be far from throngs of humanity and towering buildings and yet they appear as if we’ve never been or were there a century ago and have long since moved on. The unworlded is still out there. Implicit in all of this is the realization that all of the drama and anxieties of quotidian existence we suffer under only really endure within this world we’ve made for ourselves. Beyond that there are no judgments or identities, just serene indifference. Andrew here invites us to think past the worlded artifice we keep ourselves in and to contemplate its continuation without our being there. It is the sublime brought to its final conclusion, the furthest extent to which we can diminish our own significance. The ultimate thrill.
