Encounter
LAS Contemporary is pleased to announce the online exhibition, Encounter.
This exhibition gathers artists who explore the moments where presence and absence meet, where memory, trace, and object converge. An encounter, after all, is not only a meeting but a shift: of perception, of identity, of what is visible and what lingers unseen. Through photography, works on paper, and assemblage, these artists investigate the subtle dynamics of human connection and the imprints left behind in the spaces we inhabit.
LAS is honored to collaborate with the following artists:
Holly Knox Rhame
Jada Harris
Andy Mattern
Claudio Cecchetti
To encounter is to come upon something that alters us: a presence, an absence, a memory, or a trace. This exhibition gathers works that dwell in those thresholds, where the familiar gives way to something unexpected, intimate, or haunting.
Holly Knox Rhame uses a symbolic couple at the center of her layered, fractured compositions to stage encounters between selves and others, tracing how interactions shape identity and relational dynamics. Jada Harris turns to objects, in this case thrifted chairs, to stand in for human presence, their emptiness and pairing reflecting intimacy, distance, and time. Claudio Cecchetti traces the marks left behind in domestic spaces, where absence is as palpable as presence, revealing love, loss, and the persistence of memory. Andy Mattern brings forward spectral images hidden in photographs, ghostly imprints that remind us of photography’s power to outlive us, to reproduce in secret, and to return with uncanny force.
Together, these works ask us to linger in spaces of encounter and recognition, where what remains, whether image, object, or trace, becomes the site of transformation.
This piece was one of the first small scale works I made after a period of trying to work as large as possible. I really liked the idea of chairs and furniture as people, the way that they imply a human presence, and began to collect chairs that reminded me of certain experiences. Chairs by themselves imply that something is missing, like you from me and also me from myself after we first met. I thrifted these chairs after a break up and looked at them for a long time in my living room, not sure where to place them in my apartment. After a while I began to see them as a pair and thought “this is us”. We are together and apart, empty and waiting, in the wrong place at the wrong time. - Jada Harris
Jada Harris. Lovers, Acrylic on panel. 18 x 24 inches
Holly Knox Rhame. The Couple Embracing at the Sea, 2025 Wash, oil stick, colored pencil, mirror paper, collage,fire, iron oxide, graphite, charcoal on paper. 60 x 82 inches.
Holly Knox Rhame. Kiss, 2023 Oil stick, fire, wash, chalk, conte, crayon, graphite on paper. 120 x 123 inches
These images, produced over the last couple years, represent the development of the couple as a symbol. For me the couple symbolizes the horizon of the impossible and to push it forward is to evolve and develop one's ability to see and embrace the other as well as oneself. Love, in this case romantic love, is a type of knowledge that is cultivated over a lifetime and grounds our understanding of what it means to be together. The evolution of the symbol grounds this understanding in the capacity to grow. This growth is rooted in a material fracture suggesting that this possibility is centered in a perpetual breaking apart of the self. The fracturing of the couple creates an experimental space in which individuation and development are at the foreground of the experience. Recuperating what is cast out of the couple and the individuals comprising it becomes a methodology for pushing the symbol forward and through reordering the elements composing the fracture, the real that undergirds the symbol at play is also shifting. This shifting actualizes the movement of the impossible into the actual. The pataphysical geometry that organizes the real in question takes its cues from Deleuze's baroque aesthetics of the fold. I consider the practice as a whole to be an assemblage rooted in perpetual becoming. - Holly Knox Rhame
Claudio Cecchetti. Me and Susannah, oil on linen, 56.75 x 38 inches
Claudio Cecchetti. The Aftermath 2023, graphite and charcoal on paper mounted on panel, 43.125 x 29.125 inches
These pieces are part of “What we left behind” an ongoing project about the traces
people leave in their shared environments.
Events that changed a single or more lives,
seen as the presences of the people who are no longer there.
The environments speak anytime this loss occurs,
revealing to us that the absence of someone can be as real as their presence.
Our absence is a part of us, just as our shadows are part of our bodies.
This particular works captures the image of how my table and my bed looked after
the last night I spent with my ex; the woman I thought would be my life partner, the
only woman I ever loved so deeply.
It was when I came back home and saw the traces of our last dinner and the shapes
of our bodies still imprinted on the bed that I realized it would never happen again.
What was left was not only pain, but also the need to hold onto the trace of
something too important to vanish unseen. - Claudio Cecchetti
Andy Mattern. Ghost No. 102. Platinum Print. 10 x 8 inches
Andy Mattern. Ghost No. 96. Platinum Print. 16 ½ x 13 ⅝ inches
Hiding on the backs of some long-forgotten photographs are “ghost” images, accidental traces of other pictures left pressed up against the surface. Often barely visible but on occasion startlingly clear, these apparitions are the result of a chemical reaction caused by platinum photographs. Under certain conditions — the right platinum print stacked with the right paper for decades — a mirror image will appear. With each imprint, I like to imagine that the medium itself issues a reminder that photography has power beyond our control.
I was amazed to stumble upon this new type of picture, and have now spent several years ghost hunting. As a conceptual gesture, I rephotograph and reanimate them as hand-coated platinum prints. This process returns the portraits to their original material and offers them yet another chance to reproduce. I am drawn to their mysterious qualities — where the ghosts happen to land on the page, how they merge with graphics and text, the layering of multiple "exposures" — and I am captivated by the idea that, while no one is looking, the photographs are reproducing themselves. - Andy Mattern