One of the highlights of Daniela García Hamilton: Amanecer / Atardecer (Sunrise / Sunset) at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles is the embodiment of absence. She is at her best when the works stitch into the canvas a sense of loss memories, letting the raw canvas take space and speak to the setting of the work. Hamilton combines embroidery and oil painting, often depicting what appears to be family photos and subtle hints of found photography, and there is this beautiful and almost painful conversation of what it means when we say cultural assimilation, or what the galleries calls "the inevitability of assimilation." That is where the empty space of the canvas comes to play, where she is either hinting at a future that is unwritten, a past that has been erased, or histories that have been forgotten. But the embroidery adds a weight, a grounding, something interwoven within the work, that anchors each memory. It means that not everything is gone forever. —Evan Pricco