Ode to the Moon: If the Body is a Tide, Art is Emergence: Group show featuring David McDonald, Nancy Ivanhoe, Deborah Lynn Irmas, and Tia Xia
Does your body remember the time it was once a mountain?
Does your skin remember when it was once water?
Before you had a name, before you knew yourself as separate, do you still carry the memory of floating in the dark, warm ocean of the womb, where your first rhythms were shaped by another body’s tides?
... were you not already tide, mineral, breath, and light?
Ziran (自然), is often translated as nature or naturalness, spontaneity... or literally, “self-so”. Instead of perceiving nature as static, Ziran refers to the way forms arise through their relations with other forms, unfolding according to their own tendencies while remaining inseparable from the larger field of existence. Contemporary theories of emergence—both a physics and philosophy concept—similarly understand consciousness, ecosystems, and cultural identities not as isolated entities but as dynamic patterns arising from interaction.
Ode to the Moon is the second chapter of an ongoing inquiry into embodied cosmologies, following Ritual to the Sun: If Body is a Map and Art is a Portal (a poco art, 2025).
The moon shines with borrowed light and moves the tides from afar.
Skin, too, is a tidal surface: a porous membrane where light meets matter, perception meets environment, and the intimate encounters the cosmic.
Bringing together works by Tia Xia, Nancy Ivanhoe, David McDonald, and Deborah Lynn Irmas, Ode to the Moon imagines the exhibition itself as a perceptual field shaped by memories, atmospheres, and forces both visible and unseen. Through geometric structures, chromatic atmospheres, material experimentation, and spatial interventions, the artists invite viewers to encounter shifting relationships between self and world, interior and exterior, microscopic and cosmic.
This understanding finds a resonance with choreographer Martha Graham's conception of the body as the house of breath. For Graham, movement unfolded through rhythms of contraction and release. Her choreography approached the body as an ecology of breath through which unseen forces become perceptible. In this sense, the body appears as a living ecology, never self-contained but always becoming with the world, “self-so-ing”.
Working across different cultural, material, and perceptual traditions, the four artists resist fixed forms and identities, and instead attend to processes of transformation. Through geometry, light, gesture, and material experimentation, their works propose abstraction as a living ecology in which matter, memory, and perception continually shape one another.
Rather than invoking biological essentialism, the exhibition expands this notion of generativity into a broader inquiry. What does it mean to originate? How do forms emerge from an unseen interior? How do bodies, landscapes, memories, and cosmologies continuously give rise to one another?
About the Artists
Tia Xia is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, and installation. Raised amid the lush landscapes of Southwest China and shaped by experiences of migration and cultural translation, she approaches nature as both metaphor and experiential field. Her gestural abstractions gather, diffuse, churn, and flow, allowing color and brushstroke to behave like living systems in continuous transformation. She received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design and her work has been exhibited throughout Southern California and collected internationally.
Nancy Ivanhoe is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice operates at the intersection of sculpture and modern dance. Drawing upon her dance training and inspiration by Martha Graham, she manipulates painted industrial metal screen into transparent, undulating forms that shift with movement and changing light. Influenced by California's Light and Space movement, her sculptures occupy a liminal territory between boundary and portal, transforming light, shadow, and perception into embodied experiences of rhythm and breath.
Deborah Lynn Irmas is a Los Angeles-based visual artist whose practice is informed by her bicultural upbringing and her early immersion in textiles, yarn, and sewing materials through her Salvadoran mother. Working across painting and sculptural assemblage, she creates geometric abstractions that merge tactile materiality with luminous color. Her work has been exhibited in California and included in permanent collection of the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA).
David McDonald is a Los Angeles-based artist whose paintings and sculptures are united by an enduring commitment to process and material experimentation. Working with sand, pigment, and subtle textural accumulations, he creates luminous surfaces that evoke atmospheric phenomena and states of quiet contemplation. Influenced by the meditative abstractions of Agnes Martin and the perceptual investigations of California's Light and Space tradition, his works cultivate an experience of delight, stillness, and expanded awareness.
