Emblematic Representation

Richard Heller Gallery Los Angeles · Westside

Exhibition on view: Aug 2, 2025 - Aug 30, 2025

"Emblematic Representation" brings together Corey Arnold, Sabrina Bockler, Sofia Bjurström, David Jien, Nieves González, Ada Bond and Sean Norvet in works that act as symbols beyond their literal appearance. A stormy Bering Sea photograph, a Botticelli-inspired allegory and ghostly charcoal dancers sit beside cryptic, dreamlike paintings. Together they explore how images carry ideas, emotions and cultural meaning.

Ada Bond

Ada Bond is a painter and an obsessive collector of moments, memories and images sourced from the dark crevices of both the internet and her mind. Working in oil on canvas, she creates intrinsically cryptic pieces designed to keep more secrets than they divulge.

Sofia Bjurström

Sofia Bjurström is a Stockholm-based artist known for evocative charcoal drawings of dance, movement and performance. Through blurred figures and the interplay of light and shadow, her work captures the fragile, distorting nature of memory and the passage of time. Her 2025 exhibition Shadows of Glass at Richard Heller Gallery marked her US solo debut.

Corey Arnold

Corey Arnold (b. 1976, Vista, California) is a Portland, Oregon-based fine art photographer whose work examines our relationship with the natural world, including animals, food production and environmental issues. Since 2002 he has photographed his life at sea as a Bering Sea crab fisherman and captaining a salmon boat in Alaska, and he explores commercial fisheries worldwide in his ongoing project Fish-Work.

David Jien

David Jien (b. 1981, Los Angeles) is a Los Angeles-based artist known for intensely detailed colored pencil and graphite drawings that chronicle an allegorical, sci-fi epic of humans, anthropomorphic beings and reptilian overlords. Drawing on science fiction, Henry Darger, Nintendo, Chinese scroll paintings and graffiti, he received a BFA in Illustration from Art Center College of Design in 2009.