We are living in a timeline engineered to distract you.
Chaos is not accidental. Fear is not organic. Negativity is curated, amplified, recycled, and sold back to us daily. The algorithm thrives on collapse. The system prefers spectators, not creators.
And yet—art persists.
At the 31st annual LA Art Show, the longest-running art fair in Los Angeles, one truth became unavoidable: creation is not decoration. It is survival. Under the direction of producer Kassandra Voyagis, the fair hosted over 90 galleries from 25 countries, reaffirming Los Angeles as a global nerve center for cultural resistance, imagination, and future-building.
Art is not a luxury.
Art is how we remember who we are.
WE ARE CREATORS IN A WORLD THAT TELLS US CREATION DOESN’T MATTER
The greatest lie of this era is that art is “extra.” That creativity is indulgent. That productivity must be stripped of beauty. That humor is frivolous. That color is childish. That feeling deeply is weakness.
But creation is our original function.
We are not meant to consume endlessly—we are meant to express, transform, reimagine. To make something where nothing existed. To turn emotion into form. To turn chaos into meaning. To turn pain into color.
Art is resistance.
Art is memory.
Art is freedom.
And the LA Art Show—despite the noise of the world—proved that creation is still alive, defiant, and necessary.
LUMINANCE, IMPACT, AND TRANSMUTATION
2RT Gallery (San Francisco) — Dry’s Liminal Series
One of the most resonant encounters came from 2RT Gallery, a San Francisco-based gallery dedicated to contemporary experimentation and conceptual rigor. We met creative director Dry, who spoke on their Liminal Series—a body of work centered on thresholds, transitions, and states of becoming.
Liminality is where transformation happens. Between identities. Between timelines. Between what was and what could be.
Dry’s work doesn’t ask for certainty—it asks for presence. In a world obsessed with absolutes, the Liminal Series honors ambiguity as fertile ground. It is art that understands that nothing meaningful is born fully formed. Everything passes through uncertainty first.
This is where creation lives.
TURNING DESTRUCTION INTO LIGHT
Laurent Marthaler Contemporary (Switzerland)
Laurent Marthaler Contemporary, making its LA Art Show debut, delivered one of the fair’s most powerful statements on transformation through material and concept.
Simon Berger — Glass as Controlled Impact
Berger is a contemporary glass artist whose process involves meticulously striking glass with a hammer, turning fractures into radiant compositions. Instead of shattering meaning, he reveals it. Cracks become conduits for light. Violence becomes precision. Damage becomes clarity.
In a society that teaches us to fear breaking, Berger’s work reminds us that impact can be intentional—and that beauty can emerge from force when guided by consciousness.
Daniel Cherbuin — Pioneer of Video Art
Also shown were works by Daniel Cherbuin, a pioneer in video art whose practice expanded the language of time-based media. His work helped define video as a legitimate fine-art medium—long before screens ruled our lives.
Cherbuin’s legacy reminds us: technology is not the enemy. Unconscious use is. Art teaches us how to engage tools with intention.
Daniel Allen Cohen — This Is Addictive
Cohen’s groundbreaking series This Is Addictive reimagines societal vices—greed, consumption, obsession—as elements in a periodic table, exposing addiction as a system, not a personal failure.
It is satire with teeth. Critique with humor. A reminder that laughter can be weaponized against control.
Cohen doesn’t shame—he exposes. And exposure is the first step toward liberation.
FRAGILITY IS FORM, FRAGILITY IS POWER
Larisa Safaryanat — Wood Symphony Gallery
In the midst of monumental painting and monumental ideas, one of the most quietly radical presences at the LA Art Show came from Larisa Safaryanat, represented by Wood Symphony Gallery in Los Angeles. Safaryanat’s work with eggshells — one of the most fragile natural forms — transforms fragility into substance and metaphor. Instead of shying away from risk, she embraces it: each shell becomes a canvas for exploring renewal, rebirth, vulnerability, and resilience. What appears delicate is in fact intensely crafted, employing meticulous layering of color, texture, and motion to evoke the cyclical essence of life itself. Where others might see breakability, Safaryanat invites us to feel deeply — allowing tenderness to be as forceful as steel, and reminding us that creation is not always loud to be profound. In her hands, the eggshell becomes material and message alike: the beautiful balance of fragility and strength we carry within our own creative impulses.
COUTURE AS SCULPTURE, METAL AS SKIN
Natalia Fedner — Designer, Engineer, Futurist
Art doesn’t stop at the wall.
We also met Natalia Fedner, a Los Angeles-based designer whose patented stretch-metal couture is redefining fashion as wearable architecture. Her garments—handmade in LA—have been worn by countless celebrities, but they are far more than red-carpet statements.
Fedner’s work challenges the separation between body and structure, softness and strength. Metal moves. Armor becomes sensual. Constraint becomes fluid.
This is fashion as future language.
A GLOBAL CONVERSATION, NOT A MARKETPLACE
Returning to its January roots, the 2026 LA Art Show opened with the largest Opening Night in its history, hosted by Sasha Pieterse, benefiting the American Heart Association, and attended by figures including Patrick Schwarzenegger, Abby Champion, Jane Seymour, and Caitlin O’Connor.
The fair highlighted the intersection of art and music, with works by Paul Simonon of The Clash and Chris Rivers, presented by Pontone Gallery (UK). Actress January Jones acquired multiple works—proof that collecting is also participation.
From Epicentrum Art Gallery (Poland) showcasing works on paper by masters like Picasso and Dalí, to Provident Fine Art (Palm Beach) selling Sylvester Stallone’s Cobra for $850,000, the spectrum was vast.
But value here wasn’t just financial.
CREATION ACROSS AGES, BORDERS, AND IDENTITIES
From Art of Contemporary Africa, presenting bronze sculptures by Samuel Allerton and paintings by Ayanda Mabulu and Dr. Esther Mahlangu, to nine-year-old Liha Park selling intuitive paintings at Venus Gallery, the message was clear:
Creation has no age limit.
No single language.
No correct origin.
We are all spiritual beings having a human experience.
Galleries like Fabrik Projects, Rehs Gallery, Coral Gallery, Bert Green Fine Art, and Corridor Contemporary reinforced art’s power to hold vulnerability, gender exploration, migration, and memory—through artists like Grey James, Roberto Vivo, Yigal Ozeri, and Evin Champeny.
The debut of the Latin American Pavilion, curated by Marisa Caichiolo, and exhibitions like OFF SCRIPT and DIVERSEartLA centered immigrant voices, ancestral memory, and identity as living, evolving forces.
Art doesn’t erase difference.
It gives it form.
MAKE ART. USE COLOR. LAUGH LOUDER.
Color is not aesthetic—it’s energetic.
Humor is not escapism—it’s subversion.
Creation is not optional—it’s how you stay free.
In a timeline obsessed with despair, choosing to create is radical. Making flawed, beautiful, honest work is an act of refusal. A refusal to be flattened. A refusal to be programmed. A refusal to surrender your imagination.
You are not here to perfect yourself.
You are here to express yourself.
So make art.
Then make it again.
Use color.
Use humor.
Use your hands.
Use your voice.
Art is not the distraction.
Art is the exit.
— NARCISSIST