In the work of Los Angeles-based painter Michelle Blade, memory, perception, and projections of the future meld into shimmering impressions of light and color.
Blade is currently staging her first solo show with Night Gallery, Los Angeles, “It’s About Time,” presenting a new body of work that invites viewers into her lambent creative world. Following on the heels of her recent solo at the Powerlong Museum in Shanghai, and her inclusion in the group exhibition “Superbloom” at Night Gallery, this newest show at once expands and hones the artist’s creative lines of inquiry.
Installation view of “Michelle Blade: It’s About Time” (2026). Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.
Southern California has proven a perennial source of inspiration for Blade, complemented by lived experiences, motherhood, and color in both a formal and expressive sense. Regularly using acrylic and ink on cotton poplin and a “wet-on-wet” technique allow her to achieve a distinct sense of depth and saturation, resulting in the figurative and representational elements of her compositions operating non-hierarchically with moments of abstraction.
For the body of work on view in “It’s About Time,” Blade began with a straightforward guideline, one that saw her focus entirely on still lifes and landscapes from in and around her home base at different hours of the day. The temporal facet of this endeavor positions the California light itself as a key, underpinning presence throughout the show, alluding to themes of change and the unending, unerring forward movement of time.
Michelle Blade, The Light in Your House is On (2026). Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.
The result of these creative parameters are canvases that at first glance appear as straightforward domestic scenes or natural landscapes, but through prolonged looking reveal a rather unsteady depiction of reality, one shaped by the artist’s own personal worldview, considerations of memory, and emotional connection to the subject matter.
Surveying the show, the idiosyncratic use of scale is perhaps the first indicator of the deeply individual, even psychological, slant to Blade’s paintings. You Changed When I Wasn’t Looking (2026) focuses on a fiery bouquet of tulips, but measuring in at 80-inches in height, they are rendered monumental both physically and metaphorically. Conversely, the comparatively intimate The Light in Your House Is On (2026) shows a street corner in the hazy purple-pink light of dawn or dusk, but with a perspective that is slightly warped, recalling a fisheye lens or perhaps the memory or perspective of a child.
Michelle Blade, The Second Time (2026). Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.
The distortions and shimmering light also reflect Blade’s process of taking photographs of her source material over the course of many months, which she then translated into sketches and then sketched again. The reality of the initial moment is transformed through practice, process, and memory. Working in the tradition of David Hockney, Charles Burchfield, the Impressionists, and others who took sharp focus on the ephemeral nature of reality, Blade’s work remains unstable, leaving room for the viewer to bring their own lived experiences and understandings of time and change to the work.
Michelle Blade, You Changed When I Wasn’t Looking (2026). Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.
“Michelle Blade: It’s About Time” is on view at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, through May 23, 2026.
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