Rebellious spirits are revealed in If Only You Knew: Messages Through Abstraction as Johnson remaps through large acrylic color-blocked grids, Ghanbarzadeh redraws, repeats and stitches her own non-Westernized Persian-centric idiom and Vélez and Laster paint layered illusory nature scenes to pass messages.
Distinctive and distinguished in their own right, the four artists’ non-representational aesthetics sway between structured, precise, gestural and loosely defined visual transcriptions. Yet, commonly, they all draw on the tension of uncertainty and completion, challenging the notion of internal satisfaction tied to complicity with identifiable or familiar form.