Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Sour Orange, Sam Michell’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, and her debut with the gallery. Based in Mérida, Mexico, Michell presents a series of horizontally oriented paintings on paper alongside a single, larger-scale canvas. This work is a deeply personal yet formally disciplined investigation into corporeal memory and emotional proximity. Rooted in the traditions of figurative painting yet persistently in dialogue with abstraction, Michell’s compositions emerge from an intimate engagement with the body—as form, as recollection, as a metaphor—creating space for reflection on gesture, presence, and the subtle tensions between inner experience and visual expression. The exhibition unfolds through a nuanced chromatic arc, beginning with the sharp acidity of orange and gradually descending into the dense quietude of viridian green, with ochre recurring as a grounding emotional register. The horizontal orientation of the works on paper lend a cinematic rhythm, evoking suspended moments and fragmentary recollections. These paintings possess a raw immediacy that is both gestural and deliberate, hovering between meditation and unfinished narrative. Michell distills vulnerability and movement through fragmentation: a foot curled inward, an elbow extending outward, a pelvis hinted at more by its absence than its contour. The central canvas amplifies this language, presenting a reclining figure stretched across a couch-like form—part domestic furniture, part psychoanalytic symbol. The posture is uneasy yet intimate, a site of both exposure and quiet introspection. Michell’s work is shaped not by linear narrative but by atmosphere—a sensorial and psychological space constructed through restrained mark-making and a finely attuned relationship to color, line, and space. Her engagement with the history of painting is felt as resonance rather than reference; tradition is not meant to be quoted nor imitated but carried forward as tension, weight, and embodied continuity. These works resist closure, embracing ambiguity and the elusive, tactile nature of memory. They suggest that remembrance is not solely an act of the mind, but one of the body—a process of retrieving what has been physically held, emotionally absorbed, and silently endured. Sam Michell (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Mérida, Mexico. Her practice constructs poetic visual languages that engage both spatial and emotional dimensions, navigating themes of memory, transformation, and perception. Through a range of media, Michell explores the fluid interplay between internal experience and external environments. She received her formal training at the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, and the Escuela Superior de Artes Visuales, Mérida, Mexico. Michell’s work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions across Mexico, the United States, and abroad including Maison Céleste, Mexico City, Mexico; Miguel Carrera, Mexico City, Mexico; Lux Perpetua Art Centre, Mérida, Mexico; The Collective at Highline Galleries, New York, NY; Museo de la Ciudad, Mérida, Mexico; Galería Shelf, Mexico City, Mexico; Centro Cultural La Cúpula, Mérida, Mexico; and the VI Bienal de Artes Visuales de Yucatán, Mérida, Mexico. Additionally, she has participated in residencies including Almost Perfect in Tokyo, Japan, and Universos Inexplorados in San Gimignano, Italy. ____ Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Unspoken Pleasures of the New Frontier, the first solo exhibition by New Jersey-based, self-taught artist Marisa Regante (1980). In this suite of nine small-scale intricate oil paintings, Regante interlaces surrealism, personal symbolism, and retro Americana into rich, cinematic tableaux. Sourcing imagery from vintage magazines such as National Geographic, Playboy, and Arizona Highways, she reconfigures fragments of the past into dreamlike scenes that examine rituals of domesticity, desire, and escapism. Equal parts reverie and social mirror, these works traverse a world both intimate and uncanny. Regante develops her compositions through analog collage—cutting and reassembling visual ephemera until a composition intuitively takes shape. From these paper fragments, she builds each oil painting layer by layer, rendering her subjects with a quiet precision that balances the surreal with the sincere. In Tupperwave Abode, a 1950s Tupperware party unfolds in a floral-drenched living room, overseen by a giant cuttlefish, transforming a scene of domestic ritual into something mythic and absurd. In Once Twice Three Times a Lady, Regante reimagines imagery from a 1970s porn film, creating a layered portrayal of pleasure, detachment, and repetition. A moment of sexual intimacy becomes fragmented—arms elongate, bodies echo, slipping into abstraction. Through her “fragmenting” technique, she evokes motion, time distortion, and the glitch-like duplicity of pornographic fantasy. The title Unspoken Pleasures of the New Frontier suggests a psychological and symbolic terrain: a place where the past is not merely remembered but reimagined. Nature appears throughout the exhibition not as a passive backdrop but as a living, transformative presence. Mountain ranges, fields of flowers, and forest interiors hint at spaces of personal renewal, echoing the artist’s relationship to the natural world. Though Regante’s compositions are filled with depictions of the past, her treatment of them is neither ironic nor sentimental. Instead, she positions these elements within new, layered mythologies—ones that speak to longing and the strange beauty of reinvention. What makes Regante’s work especially compelling is her ability to create resonance through contrast—between the meticulous and the intuitive, the fantastical and the mundane. With no formal training, she approaches painting as both a craft and a form of visual poetics, allowing instinct and emotion to lead. Her debut exhibition introduces a singular voice: one that transforms the residue of another era into a quietly radical, self-authored world.