Zoe Walsh: Night Fields

 

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Zoe Walsh’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery and first in New York, Night Fields, which opens to the public on Thursday, November 13, 2025, with an artist’s reception from 6-8 PM.

 

Zoe Walsh’s (b. 1989, Washington, D.C.) paintings traverse digital and physical processes, engaging the slippages between mediums to imagine outdoor spaces charged with desire, memory, and transformation. These works recompose the act of looking itself, unsettling hierarchies of medium, identity, and embodiment. Informed by queer photographic history, cinematic montage, and experimental screen printing, Walsh’s paintings resist resolution in favor of flux: between surface and depth, presence and absence, becoming and being.

 

Walsh foregrounds the tensions between photography, virtual space, and painting to propose a visual language that is synthetic and sensuous at once. Their compositions begin in 3D-modeled environments—constructed outdoor scenes populated by archival and staged figures—which are then reconfigured through layered silkscreen and painting processes. The resulting images shimmer with dissonant cues and, through their multiple exposures, material misalignments, and dissolving contours, coalesce into surfaces that feel both intimate and estranged. These are not landscapes in the traditional sense, but temporal and affective fields that hold space for indeterminacy.

 

The figures that appear throughout the work are drawn from two divergent but interconnected sources. One is a body of archival photographs by gay filmmaker Pat Rocco (1934-2018), who directed and captured public acts of intimacy in 1960s and 70s Los Angeles. Rocco’s images, which are now housed at Los Angeles’ ONE Institute, countered the city’s systematic erasure of gay public life. As historian Whitney Strub notes, “Reconfigured as a site of gay desire and play, Griffith Park is claimed by Rocco’s camera as part of the gay world that refuses to maintain its assigned invisibility.”[1] Other figures are sourced from staged images made collaboratively with Walsh’s spouse, Isabel Osgood-Roach, who both photographs and appears in the scenes alongside Walsh and friends. These shoots unfold in a private garden, a foil to the public park, which is imbued with generations of queer life. The land was owned by Bill Bailey, who lived there with his partner, Roy Dennis Brown. When Brown died of AIDS in 1991, a kumquat tree was planted at the rear of the house, and his ashes were spread beneath it. The tree now bears fruit, as do the mature fruit trees cared for by Brown, which are referenced in the paintings. At its front, the garden is obscured from the street by a fence covered in thick ivy. Yet once inside, a view opens through trees and power lines, across the LA River and freeways, to the parks—Griffith and Elysian—where Rocco staged his shoots.

 

Walsh’s engagement with the archive is speculative, staging a porous relationship between past and present, self and other. By combining Rocco’s imagery with their own, Walsh constructs new relational constellations. Identification becomes a generative, transformative act—one embedded in the textures and techniques of image-making itself.

 

The digital dimension of Walsh’s practice begins in Blender, a 3D modeling software the artist repurposes to construct unstable, illusionistic environments. These virtual landscapes are assembled from synthetic data and appropriated 3D models: chain-link fences, overgrown foliage, street lamps, and fragments of urban infrastructure. Navigating these environments like a player in a crude video game, Walsh positions hundreds of virtual cameras to capture oblique angles and floating points of view, a type of vision unbound by gravity or bodily limitation. These scenes are then deconstructed and montaged in Blender and Photoshop, borrowing cinematic strategies of sequencing, cutting, and repetition. The resulting compositions refuse spatial coherence and unfold nonlinearly—overlapping and polyphonic.

 

Walsh remaps these digital scenes onto canvas through hundreds of layered, hand-pulled silkscreen prints, followed by stenciled applications of paint using brushes, squeegees, and spatulas. Misalignments, stencil bleeds, and transparent veils of pigment bear the tactile evidence of the artist’s hand. This results in a surface that holds subtle relief; light slips through translucent layers; paint builds up topographically; errors become compositional structures. This choreography of layering and pressure renders the surface a record of movement and revision, allowing the paintings to hold complexity without closure.

 

The figural silhouettes present in the compositions are at once elusive and insistent, functioning as generative thresholds that are specific in outline, yet indeterminate in meaning. They invite narrative interpretation, only to reroute attention toward surface, material, and affect. Through their recurrence, a visual language of doubling, shadowing, and mutual witnessing emerges.

 

In a series of iterative, intimately scaled paintings on view in Night Fields, Walsh assembles fragments that play on the exhibition’s animating tension between illusionistic depth and accumulative paint. Here, subjects recognizable in other work are restaged and recombined to create unique paintings which, through recurring referents, participate in a network of meaning-making across multiple panels. The less integrated color spaces of these pieces, in which the discrete chromatic registers of Walsh’s palette are foregrounded, conjure a sense of unsettled space. Stabilizing architectural elements are suggested rather than definitively rendered, and forms waver between appearing grounded within a space and hovering at the threshold of the painting’s surface.

 

This tension in legibility extends into the color space of the exhibition. Deep and dusky hues mediated by shifting registers of twilight and artificial light conjure a perceptual in-between. Light reveals as much as it withholds, shimmering, spilling, and refracting rather than strictly illuminating. Walsh’s palette follows the logic of CMYK printing, as the artist weaves together layered applications of phthalo blue, quinacridone magenta, hansa yellow light, and burnt umber—a translation from screen-based additive color to pigment-based material. The paintings operate in this liminal register, where vision becomes haptic and uncertain, and the eye does not dispassionately observe an image, but instead is entangled within it.

 

Night Fields crescendos in a sweeping triptych titled Shimmer across thresholds—Walsh’s largest work to date. The composition pivots on two embracing figures, seen centrally in the left panel and reflected, multiplied, and enlarged across the right. The sequence arcs from the radiance of sunset, through the hush of twilight, into a coolly abstracted night, charting a gradual dissolution of figuration into atmosphere. The stillness of the central panel—its silhouetted figures held in provisional repose—registers less as stability than suspension, a pause between movements. The seams between the panels echo the vertical and horizontal “zips” formed by nearly abutting screen prints, subtle junctures that reveal how the images throughout the show are sutured together. These interstitial sites record the pressure and residue of touch, grounding the pictorial fiction within a physical register. In this way, Shimmer across thresholds holds together its dual modes of encounter—the imagined and the material—as mutually constitutive forms of presence.

 

By challenging Cartesian dualisms that separate mind from body, image from matter, and self from world, Walsh’s practice engages trans subjectivity as a mode of form. As theorist Susan Stryker accounts, trans becoming is not reducible to legal or surgical transition, but begins in the “shimmering across thresholds” between imagination and embodiment.[2] In this sense, these works are not images of identity, but charged terrains in which trans world-making, like painting, is enacted through layering, revision, and contingency. Walsh’s weaving of queer photographic history, experimental image-making, and digital montage looks beyond reimagination of the self to propose a medium in flux. Painting is offered not as a stable category, but as a porous, multi-voiced conjunction in which becoming—like vision—is never complete.

 

Zoe Walsh has mounted solo and two-person exhibitions at M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Pieter Performance Space, Los Angeles, CA; and Fondation des États-Unis, Paris, France, among others. Walsh's work has been featured in group exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Peppers Art Gallery, Redlands, CA; Usdan Gallery, Bennington, VT; La Maison des Arts, Malakoff, France; Abrons Art Center, New York, NY, and UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA. In 2019, the artist was a nominee for the Emerging Artist Grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and received the Al Held Foundation Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, Italy. In 2024, Walsh was awarded a residency at Fountainhead in Miami. Zoe Walsh earned their BA from Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA; and their MFA from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT. Walsh was born in Washington, D.C., and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.