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Cameron Cameron 
Ryan Flores
Ursula Scheuer
Pallavi Sen
Touching Grass

ON VIEW
NOVEMBER 21 — JANUARY 3, 2025
IZZY LEE is delighted to present Touching Grass, an exhibition featuring four artists who explore human relationships with non-human life and the natural world, opening November 21. In sculpture by Cameron Cameron, ceramics by Ryan Flores, paintings on silk by Benedict Scheuer, and wax pastel drawings by Pallavi Sen, non-human life emerges as teacher, metaphor, and source of personal and cultural meaning. Through distinct approaches, these artists conjure the natural world as a dynamic ground for relation and knowledge—one that invites acts of attention, creativity, and care.

Los Angeles-based ceramicist Ryan Flores translates flora encountered on his walks through the city into intricately detailed ceramic forms. Raised in Southern California, Flores draws on plants and produce that carry both personal and cultural significance—fruits and vegetables found at vendor stands that dot the city’s sidewalks, or cacti discovered on hiking trails. His works conjure a simultaneous sense of abundance and decay: much of the plant life depicted is mottled with spots of rot. Evoking the vanitas tradition of painting made famous by the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age, Flores uses these visual signs of perishing as metaphor for the impermanence of each living thing.

In new drawings, Pallavi Sen examines ecology—the interconnectedness of living things—via her gardening practice. The garden for Sen is an aesthetic pursuit, a site of care, and a space where relationships between nature and culture unfold. Living and teaching at Williams College in the Berkshires of Northwestern Massachusetts, the artist cultivates meadows and gardens featuring plants that also thrive in Bombay and New Delhi, recalling the flora her mother once tended on their apartment terraces. Sen’s drawings depict moments from her most recent garden on campus—the viewer gets a glimpse into a dream-like night scene of corn stalks, the back of a woman’s patterned jacket enveloped by verdancy, and a tomato harvest, as the artist conjures a sense of softness and human care necessary to build and care for a garden.

Columbus, OH-based Ursula Scheuer also takes up the site of the garden in their paintings on silk. Scheuer’s works are in active dialogue with living material: if weather permits, the artist paints outside, next to the garden they tend at their home studio. The two paintings on view, Flower and Summer, are an exploration of natural patterns witnessed in plants seen in their garden. Using a new technique of painting and dyeing, the flow of color seen in Summer evokes an organic process, where time and gravity allows drips and dye bleeds that ultimately dictate the final composition. Scheuer mirrors their natural rhythms of breathing through brushwork—each stroke of pigment is tied to an inhale and an exhale, the final pattern a sort of visual score for their own breath. As the artist undergoes their own gender transition, the garden becomes teacher—a living metaphor for constant flux and transformation, and a source of creativity and wisdom.

Sculptor Cameron Cameron works with discarded materials from her studio and the streets of Los Angeles, reclaiming and remaking them with a slowness and care rarely given to such remnants. The arms of Cameron’s chandelier, Sharp Flame, —created from a found object gifted by a friend—have been transformed into branch-like forms. Their thorn-covered surfaces are coated in a vivid blue enamel, achieved through layers of car paint, and host tiny metal ants that the artist meticulously sculpts by hand. Cameron refers to these small creatures as “my delicates…non-domesticated creatures whose lives intersect most intimately with our own: spiders in the shower, ants at the picnic table, hornets in the corner of the porch,” positioning them as agents that complicate boundaries between the domestic and the wild. Functional clocks like Windmill are composed of studio scraps of foam, shaped via a slow, meditative process of molding and sanding. Their sky-blue, cloud-like resin surfaces evoke the atmosphere itself, grounding Cameron’s practice within a shared material and ecological context.

Across all four practices, nature is explored not as an abstract or distant ideal, but as a site of everyday mutualism and multi-species cohabitation. 

ARTIST PAGES




Installation view, Touching Grass, IZZY LEE, Los Angeles, CA. November 21 – January 3, 2025. 
Images courtesy Josh Schaedel.