As a painter, Zoe Walsh (b. 1989, Washington, DC; lives and works in Los Angeles) refuses and expands the bounds of their chosen medium, disrupting the conventions of canvas and paint; bending figure and ground; entwining deep research and embodied practice. Walsh engages a range of disciplines with curiosity and care, from trans visual studies to urban planning to poetry. Their technical process includes digital modeling, meticulous hand-weeded stencils, and screen printing—all of which coalesce into dreamy scenes of silhouetted bodies in nature and in pleasure. For Gathering, the artist’s largest-scale work to date, Walsh adapts their visual language to fill ICA LA’s 7th Street facade, bringing together images from across time and place to produce a speculative montage that is both inviting and elusive. 

Transfigured images of gardens, parks, and other landscapes are central to Walsh’s work, positioned as sites for queer and trans connection. Gathering combines topographic maps of L.A., historic and contemporary ecologies of the northeast banks of the Los Angeles River, and computer-generated renderings of flora and fauna, layered with Walsh's own memory and lived experience. Though made anonymous in Gathering, the figures seen throughout are lifted from two sources. Through a process of “archival cruising” (a methodology developed and enacted by many queer historiographers, writers, and activists), Walsh collects resonant details from photographs by gay filmmaker and activist Pat Rocco, who directed and depicted public acts of intimacy in 1960s and 1970s Los Angeles. In intergenerational conversation with Rocco’s project, the artist also includes selections from photoshoots of friends in rest and repose, staged in Walsh’s own garden. 

Light shimmers in Gathering, reflected and diffused through visible planes of color and texture that intersect the composition. These forms act as mirrors and windows, interrupting continuity and reorienting our perspective. Walsh’s work confounds legibility, oscillates between vibrancy and concealment, and offers ways of seeing that shift and unfold. Moving fluidly between the referential and the imagined, Gathering points to cycles of sacrifice and survival, erasure and emergence, while approaching what theorist Jose Esteban Muñoz terms “a then and there” rooted in radical desire and possibility.

Zoe Walsh: Gathering is organized by Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle, Curatorial Associate with support from Nina Fandino Schmidt, Getty Marrow Curatorial Intern