FELIX FAIR 2025
Room 1224
The Hollywood Roosevelt
February 19 - February 23, 2025
Adam Stamp
Ireland Wisdom
Jacob Fenton
Jools Rothblatt
Rogan Gregory
Samala Meza
Taylor Marie Prendergast
Carlye Packer is pleased to present new works by Adam Stamp, Ireland Wisdom, Jacob Fenton, Jools Rothblatt, Rogan Gregory, Samala Meza, and Taylor Marie Prendergast at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, opening Wednesday, February 19 and running through February 23, 2025 in Room 1224.
ADAM STAMP (b. 1985, Pittsburgh, PA) is an Aries Sun, Pisces Moon, Capricorn Rising. He is currently based in London. Stamp's work fluctuates between the comedic and the disastrous - a reflection on loneliness and coping mechanisms in our contemporary moment.
Stamp's multi-media practice is deeply personal, exploring ideas of use/abuse, the intersection of queerness with toxic masculinity, failure, aspiration, and falling. Through sculpture, drawing, texts, and curation, Stamp aims to make work that is moving, moody, humorous, and accessible, with an emphasis on and awareness of being social.
His work is currently on display at the Aspen Museum of Art, Aspen, CO. Stamp has exhibited at Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Real Pain, Los Angeles, CA; Lomex, New York, NY; Indipendenza, Rome, IT; O-Town House, Los Angeles, CA; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY; and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Los Angeles, CA. Stamp’s work has been featured in publications such as L’Officiel, MOUSSE, Modern Luxury, Flash Art, Artforum, Curate LA, and Modern Luxury.
IRELAND WISDOM (b. 1996, Los Angeles, CA) was trained classically at the rigorous painting atelier at the Florence Academy of Art, which included three years of painting live models,7am-9pm daily, critiqued for technique and quality of mimicry. Wisdom has religiously continued in the tradition of live mode painting. For Wisdom, we exist in the imagination of history, a collusion of time – we are in the 21st century and yet we have thousands of years of painting behind us. Painting becomes about putting it all together, imbuing old values, ancient iconography and style, with newness, creating a landscape in which all time periods could be found and new value systems formed.
Wisdom has had solo exhibitions at Carlye Packer Los Angeles, CA; The Bowlish House, Somerset, UK; The Breeder Gallery, Athens, Greece; and Kontemporary Residency, Seoul, Korea. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Felix Art Fair, Los Angeles, CA; Maison Lune, Los Angeles, CA; Eastern Projects, Los Angeles, CA; and KIAF Art Fair, Seoul, Korea.
Carlye Packer will present a solo exhibition of Wisdom’s work in the fall of 2025.
JACOB FENTON (b. 1999, Los Angeles, CA) is a Los Angeles-based painter whose work explores memory and the constructed self in the accelerating age of instantaneous media. Fenton often utilizes the basic mechanisms of the iPhone as a format of critiquing posttruth reality and the devolving intergenerational dissonant relationship to identity (especially for those born and raised on the internet). His work tests the common ways of seeing through technology that inform our perception of self and environment; and is particularly interested in making work that bridges the physical and digital dimensions of: the global citizen, persona, psychogeography, archive, and spectacle, and each of these themes’ real-world effects of isolation, paradox, pseudoomniscience, and hyper-individuality.
In making work about a personal relationship to non-human ways of seeing and representing human experience Fenton is drawn to topics, actions, or processes that incite a humane sense of thrill, or awe. The common ways of seeing, be it the iPhone, the 24 hour news cycle, or the Hollywood machine, are subverted in Fenton’s paintings. The sensory confusion and conditioning in Fenton’s paintings is perhaps from the exact juncture from where we can situate the work within a particular historic and social age.
Carlye Packer presented the first major first solo exhibition of Fenton’s work in the fall of 2024. This is his second year exhibiting at Felix Art Fair. Fenton will present a new body of work at Josh Lilley Gallery, London, UK in March 2025.
JOOLS ROTHBLATT (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA) is a Los Angeles-based painter. Rothblatt’s subjects are typically found inside bars, family restaurant decor, faded commercial signs, stuff from around the neighborhoods she grew up in especially. The figures and protagonists of the paintings flail and combine in minimal, murky environments of predominantly red and green. The distance between the viewer and what's depicted is emphasized in imprecision and balanced out in a kind of tragic comedy. In the film Three Women, Shelley Duvall's character makes a point to write in her diary every day "even if not much happened anyway” and there is something similar happening in Rothblatt’s paintings, capturing the tragic comedy of our day-to-day life. Inspired by artists such as Chaim Soutine, Lee Lozano, Philip Guston, and Otto Dix, Rothblatt’s paintings display a notable vitality, dynamism, and persistence in their scrutiny of socialized gender or body politics, and energetically critiqued norms of respectability and behavioral customs. Carlye Packer presented the first major solo exhibition of Rothblatt’s work in January of 2024. This is the artist’s second time presenting at Felix Fair.
ROGAN GREGORY (b.1972) is a Los Angeles-based sculptor. For his most recent body of work, “Character Studies,” Gregory has been transforming iconography into fragmented figurative sculptures, some of which are embedded within the space of rough-hewn vessels. Exploring terrain where artifice becomes artifact, these works, at once familiar and abstract, they interrogate the endurance and fragility of contemporary consumer culture. Derailing the trend toward technological determinism, Gregory brings this world of detritus into a post-apocalyptic realm, imagining a future where these enduring characters are excavated as ancient ruins, dusted with a patina of time and neglect. With this approach, Gregory works within a rich tradition of Los Angeles artists, including Paul McCarthy and Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, who utilize pop imagery to subvert the everyday symbols of American culture.
Gregory’s work involves designing a process whereby the stoneware forms purposefully deform and distort in the kiln and are reassembled. Incorporating materials like bone, scales, nails, feathers, and claws, he infuses his ceramics with a dual sense of decay and resilience, blending gestalt objecthood with abundant organic life.
Gregory’s recent sculptures form a compelling counterpart to his celebrated design work, revealing a dialectical relationship between the two practices. His smooth, biomorphic designs—primarily lighting fixtures and furniture—embody an organic futurism, inspired by the biology of form and time honored materiality. In contrast, his new sculptures exist within an anachronistic dystopia. This interplay allows Gregory to examine the dualities of creation and destruction, refinement and disintegration.
SAMALA MEZA (b. 1996, Santa Rosa, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Meza combines a formal interest in geometric abstraction with an emotional fixation on the female form. Influenced by the graphic sensibilities of artists like Herbert Bayer and Erberto Carboni, Meza returns to the color field with criticality. In her paintings, women are collaged together out of soft, hazy patches of paint, the figure becomes a pattern or outline for the artist’s hand to explore. Their apparent visual minimalism invokes advertisements, which rely on the suggestion of sex through color and composition to sell products. Contesting the political neutrality of modernism, Meza gestures towards the legacy of Helen Frankenthaler, and Mark Rothko, in her pursuit of images that can bear witness to the complexity and fragmentation of female experience.
Meza’s work is currently on display at The Hole, Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been exhibited at the Saloon, Santa Cruz, CA; Bolsky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Aero Salon, Los Angeles, CA; New Low, Los Angeles, CA; KIAF, Seoul, Korea; and a three-person exhibition with Frances Stark at Carlye Packer, Los Angeles. Meza will have a solo exhibition at Sidecar (Night Gallery), Los Angeles, CA in the spring of 2025.
TAYLOR MARIE PRENDERGAST (b. 1990, San Diego, CA) is a Los Angeles-based painter and performance artist. Prendergast uses feelings of attraction and repulsion to create paradoxical dramas that overwhelm and welcome the viewer into a tender chaos. The idea of a “hellish sublime” is in some ways a reflection of the thorny, hectic world we live in—one that promises an illusion of security and happiness amid the fog of terror and chaos. For Prendergast, the most important creative works contain something that instigates conflict, either with the viewer or within the work itself.
Prendergast is mostly known for her monochromatic palette, vigorous gesture, and direct depictions of her subjects. Her work explores themes of peril (both domestic and psychological), and often provokes a complex response.
Since 2018, Prendergast has exhibited paintings and drawings in solo and group exhibitions with LVL3, Chicago, IL; Diane Rosenstein, Los Angeles, CA; Carlye Packer, Los Angeles, CA; Half Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Half Gallery, New York, NY. She has collaborated with artists such as Jason Al-Taan, Nick Harwood, SOPHIE, Eli Linnetz, and David LaChapell.