Corey Helford Gallery at Twenty
- artandcakela
- 11 minutes ago
- 7 min read
By Julie Faith
There is something strange about returning to a place you once knew well after being away for a long time. You recognize the architecture before you recognize what the years have done to you. As I passed through the gate at Corey Helford Gallery, crossed the lot, and headed up the stairs, I felt ridiculously, wonderfully giddy. Kid-in-a-candy-store giddy. I have been away from the gallery and much of the Los Angeles art world, but somewhere between the gate and the stairs, I seemed to slip into a time warp.
I walked through the front doors and into the foyer. I turned toward the main gallery. The wall in front of me announced Corey Helford Gallery's twentieth anniversary exhibition. But for a split second, that wasn't what I saw.
I saw D*Face.
More specifically, I saw his 2011 exhibition Going Nowhere Fast and the skeleton couple in the black vintage car that seemed to come tearing straight through that same wall. I could see it so clearly that it felt less like remembering and more like being transported. The current anniversary exhibition had barely begun for me, and already the gallery itself was merging the past twenty years into a single moment. That would happen more than once.
Corey Helford Gallery is celebrating its twentieth anniversary in two editions this year. The August Edition opened August 8 and runs through September 12, with the anniversary exhibition in the Main Gallery, 20 Years of CHG: A Dive Into the Archive in Gallery 2, and separate solo exhibitions by Molly Devlin and Ornélie sharing Gallery 3. The September Edition opens September 19 and runs through October 24.
I started in the Main Gallery, where the first thing I noticed was how easily my eye slipped back into its old rhythm. Look. Move closer. Step back. Photograph. Keep moving. There were artists I knew immediately and others who were completely new to me.
HUSH's Static Bloom produced an affectionate internal greeting: Ohhhh… hi there, Honey. HUSH is one of my earliest art loves. His work is recognizable in the best possible way. I did not need him to surprise me in that moment. Seeing his visual language again felt like running into an old crush.
A little later I came to Shepard Fairey's OP-Art Icon (Green Gradient) (2023), and had almost the opposite reaction. I recognized the visual language immediately, but instead of settling into that recognition, I found myself wanting the familiarity to lead somewhere new. That reaction stayed with me after the show. Fairey and HUSH are artists I admire equally, so why did one feel completely satisfying while another left me wanting more?
I don't think the answer is in the quality of either piece. It was in me. HUSH gave me the pleasure of recognition. Fairey made me notice that familiarity alone is not always enough.
For a second my brain invented a completely unsupported story in which someone had simply grabbed a piece from the studio archive and said, "Send this to CHG." I have absolutely no idea how the work was selected, but that little story told me something useful about my own expectations. Familiarity is not neutral. We bring our own history with an artist, actual or perceived, into the room with us. And after all, this is Corey Helford's twentieth anniversary, not Fairey's.
But Main Gallery did not exist only as a reunion. Some of the work that held me longest was by artists I didn't know at all. Graphic figures, ornate constructions, a pair of girls emerging dimensionally from a wooded surface, a woman partly obscured by a leaf. These were pieces without any personal history attached to them. I could simply meet them where they were.
There were smaller discoveries too. Handiedan's Amo in Blue initially caught my attention because its blue-and-white imagery reminded me of the porcelain dishes my grandmother left me. Then I read the materials, moved closer, and started finding the construction inside the image. Wait — that's a postage stamp?! I already liked the piece. Discovering the layers simply gave me more reasons to keep looking.
Faith XLVII stopped me for a different reason. I know her through work that feels almost entirely unlike Solar Logos II. This was a 180-degree turn from the Faith XLVII I remembered, and maybe, without realizing it, exactly what I had been hoping to find: something familiar enough to recognize, but new enough to make me look again.
I stopped and read the materials. Horse-racing betting sheets. Gold leaf. Acrylic. Pencil crayon. Crayon?! And suddenly, my mind was somewhere else for a second: Faith XLVII in a dimly lit room, maybe with a few people around a table, sketching across the betting sheets and letting the piece take shape from whatever was within reach. I have no idea if that's how it happened. But for me, the magic of art has always been in the making, and Faith XLVII's crayon conjured this delightful, albeit imagined, journey as if it had actually happened.
Then I entered Gallery 2.
And there it was. Herakut. If HUSH had been a fond "hello, honey," Herakut was something else entirely. Ohhhh, there they are. Then I saw the year: 2019. Wait. I was there! I was AT that show! That may have been the moment the full weight of a twenty-year retrospective finally landed for me. 20 Years of CHG: A Dive Into the Archive is exactly that: an archive of the gallery's first twenty years. Familiarity belongs there. I thought I was looking for something new. Instead, revisiting the old was the reward.
But seeing their work again did more than just remind me that I liked Herakut. It reminded me of being in that same room for that very show. I remembered watching Hera move through the space. I remembered how that back wall became the art, a deliberately unfinished installation that made the room itself feel activated. Their paintings became vignettes, part of the storytelling language that is so distinctly Herakut. Suddenly I wasn't looking at somebody else's gallery history. It was mine. I was there.
Maybe that is one of the gifts of a long-running gallery like Corey Helford. At some point the archive stops belonging only to the institution. Pieces of it belong to the memories of the people who kept walking through the doors.
Gallery 3 changed the temperature entirely. I accidentally entered through what was effectively the exit, so I encountered Ornélie's Midnight Bloom before Molly Devlin's The Hollow. Whether that was the intended sequence or not, the order mattered to me.
Ornélie's hand-painted polymer-clay sculptures were exquisite. I don't care for scary imagery, and these landed somewhere in the territory of gorgeous horror. Flowers and organic forms emerge from bodies. Skin opens. Mouths become sites of transformation. Wounds and scars coexist with extraordinary delicacy. I was fascinated by them and more than a little haunted.
But then, Molly Devlin. Her paintings gave me space and a soft place to land after Ornélie's beautiful unease. Delicately rendered, they offered nature, animals, feathers, fine lines, and softness. Paint instead of clay. I could feel myself recalibrating in response.
That contrast made me notice something I already knew: the placement of the work matters. I am free to move through the rooms however I choose, but the exhibition is laid out in a particular way. Maybe the rhythm I felt between Ornélie and Devlin was intentional. Maybe some of it was mine. Either way, once I noticed the possibility of a path through the work, I could feel it precisely because I had reversed it.
And then there was the show I almost missed: the people. Not because they distracted me from the art. They didn't. During the opening, my attention was overwhelmingly on the work. It was only afterward, looking through my photographs and replaying the night, that I realized there had effectively been more than just the advertised exhibition happening: three rooms of art, and a crowd that had become its own visual experience. Kelly green from head to toe. Creamy crochet lace. Leather, sparkle, boots, jewelry. A woman in an enormous orange hat who appeared so completely assembled that for a moment she became her own composition. Beautiful people collages.
Ginger Chen, whose porcelain and underglaze sculpture Hug was one of the first works I photographed that night, approached me with the kind of opening-night joy that seemed almost impossible to contain. She gave me one of her stickers, and a few minutes later I caught her photographing her own piece. It was a sweet moment and my favorite artist interaction of the night.
In hindsight, I wish I had stopped moving. I wish I had planted myself on one of the large circular couches in Main Gallery for just fifteen more minutes and simply watched. Opening nights have their own traffic rules. Look, move, make space, let someone else get close. Nobody told me to hurry. The pressure was largely self-imposed. But I moved through the exhibition in glimpses. A glimpse can be meaningful. It can also be incomplete.
When I left CHG that night, I had mixed feelings, but not in the way I expected. Familiarity had been both comforting and complicated. And underneath all of that was the strangest sensation of returning to an old neighborhood. Not somewhere I had ever lived, but somewhere I once knew by heart.
A twentieth-anniversary exhibition almost begs you to take stock. What changed? What didn't? What endured? What evolved? But an opening night offers only one way of seeing a show. I already want to go back. Not to prove that my first impressions were right, or to settle what has or hasn't changed. I'm simply curious what happens when I walk through those rooms again without the momentum of opening night carrying me forward. What will I notice when I sit down? Which work will grow on me? Which won't? What did I miss completely? Maybe the experience changes. Maybe it doesn't. Regardless, it seems worth finding out.
Corey Helford Gallery: 20th Anniversary Exhibition 571 South Anderson Street, Los Angeles, CA 90033 On view: August 8–September 12, 2026 coreyhelforgallery.com | (310) 287-2340
All photography by Julie Faith
Corey Helford Gallery Exterior, 20th Anniversary Opening Night, Gallery Crowd, Corey Helford Gallery 20th Anniversary Luke Chueh, Commercialized (Sculpture), Artist Discussion, Corey Helford Gallery 20th Anniversary Opening Night Crowd, Corey Helford Gallery 20th Anniversary Ginger Chen, Hug, Artist Interaction, Corey Helford Gallery 20th Anniversary Opening Night, Couple Photographing, Corey Helford Gallery 20th Anniversary Kazuki Takamatsu — A Girl Who Lives In Someone's Memories. 06, 2026, mixed media on canvas, 13" x 9" Nohamen — Red Scooter, 2026, Acrylic on cardboard, metal & wood, 41.5" x 59" x 28" Tom Bagshaw — (You're) Finally Here, 2026, digital painting on cotton rag on board, 20" x 15" Sienna Hong — The Weight of Air, 2026, Acrylic on raw canvas, 38” x 29.75" Ornélie — The Feast, 2026, Hand-painted polymer clay, 16.25” x 10" x 10" SHAG (Josh Agle) — Pink Elephant #11, 2013, Acrylic on wood, 18.25” x 23.5" Ornélie — Deliverance, 2026, Hand-painted polymer clay, 10.5” x 7.25" x 7.25" Ornélie — Deliverance (detail), 2026, Hand-painted polymer clay, 10.5” x 7.25" x 7.25" Richard Ahnert — Cookie Dough, 2025, Oil on canvas, 20” x 16" Ornélie — Aliénor, 2026, Hand-painted polymer clay and gold leaf, 10.75” x 10" x 10" Molly Devlin — Flight of the Fall, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 24” x 30" Molly Devlin — Fern Echoes, 2026, Acrylic on deep cradled canvas, 24” x 24" Luke Chueh — Commercialized (Sculpture), 2026, Shopping cart & hand painted sculpture, 46 x 23 x 39 Kiseok Kim — Plastic with Flower Glasses, 2026, Oil on canvas, 24” x 24" Lo Chan-Peng — The Boy Who Remained Still for a Hundred Years (detail), 2026, O/c, silver, 12 x 16 Li Shanmei — Silent Conversation, 2026, Oil on canvas, 20.5” x 20.75" Jim McKenzie — Carly Crow the Scarecrow Girl, 2026, Mixed media sculpture, 49" x 26" x 21" Jillian Evelyn — Always With Me, 2026, Acrylic on wood, 24” x 20" HUSH — Static Bloom, 2026, Acrylic, screen print, spray paint & ink on canvas, 44” x 28" HUSH — Static Bloom (detail), 2026, Acrylic, screen print, spray paint & ink on canvas, 44” x 28" Faith XLVII — Solar Logos II, 2026 Horse racing betting sheets, and m/m on wood, 25.5” x 15" Faith XLVII — Solar Logos II (detail), 2026, Betting sheets, and m/m on wood, 25.5” x 15" Ginger Chen — Hug, 2026, Porcelain, underglaze, 11.75” x 8" x 8" Chishi Morimura — Ibuku, 2026, Acrylic, shell powder, cheesecloth on wood, 17” x 7.5" Calvin Ma — Keep It Rockin’, 2026, Ceramic, glaze, gold luster, acrylic, 11.5” x 8.5" x 8" Caia Koopman — We're All Connected, 2016, Oil on linen, 8” x 10" Buff Monster — Quirkle, 2026, Acrylic and spray paint on die-cut wood, 13.5” x 14.5" Brandi Milne — Little Puppy, 2017, Acrylic & gouache on cradled wood panel, 16” x 20" Caia Koopman — All I Need
