Carlye Packer is proud to present This Grass is Green, Los Angeles-based artist Samala Meza’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Opening Friday, May 23rd from 6 to 8 pm, This Grass is Green will be on view through Saturday, June 28th, at Sidecar, 2034 Imperial St, Los Angeles, CA 90021.
Meza’s new body of work presents color field paintings that approach femininity as a formal code—flattened, stylized, and distributed across the surface. Using softly-rendered shapes and carefully repeated visual motifs, Meza creates a language of erotic abstraction: diagrams that suggest exposure without revealing, that invite desire without naming.
The works recall a visual economy pulled from logos, advertisements, and public signage. Centralized voids and concentric forms nod to targets or icons, while their softened edges resist legibility. Here, abstraction does not obscure—it heightens. These are not portraits of women, but patterns about looking. The body appears not as figure, but as schema.
While rooted in formal painting, Meza’s practice draws from a broader inquiry into the spatial politics of visibility, as articulated by Paul B. Preciado in Pornotopia: “Pornographic architecture does not hide; it exposes. It does not protect; it offers itself. It does not represent; it reproduces.”
Operating within that conceptual weather, Meza’s compositions do not depict so much as they circulate. Their softness is intentional, and strategic. It marks a boundary—between pleasure and performance, between desire and its staging. The works sit in the seductive space between critique and compulsion — they are satirical without irony, academic without insistence. Pleasure is taken seriously, and softness is a kind of strategy.
