MALIBU, CALIF.- The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University presents two fall exhibitions: Cameron Harvey: The Shape of Being and Loop, Hum, Wave.

CAMERON HARVEY: THE SHAPE OF BEING

For her first solo museum exhibition, Los Angeles-based artist Cameron Harvey shares a new body of work inspired by her walks in the Santa Monica Mountains surrounding the Pepperdine campus. Over the past few years, Harvey has developed a distinct idiom that involves painting two unstretched, shaped canvases side-by-side on the floor and then hanging them on the wall to form a single large-scale work. Each canvas is suffused with pigment, with recto and verso distinct in color and texture. Sometimes Harvey arranges the canvases so they touch in the middle or drape onto the floor, or she pins them so their edges curl forward, subtly revealing the back of the painting.

Harvey’s visceral approach to painting places her within a long lineage of artists employing poured pigment, including Lynda Benglis, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, and Morris Louis, as well as those who have broken away from the rectilinear canvas, such as Carmen Herrera, Ellsworth Kelly, and Frank Stella.

Speaking through the language of abstraction and the emotional force of color, Harvey’s paintings extend and expand her art-historical influences. Importantly, though, her work also points to the formal qualities of the human body, highlighting the body’s similarity to local flora and rock formations. With paintings and small-scale wall-mounted ceramics that employ a strong midline as a unifying element, Harvey’s work reveals the diversity and variability that exists within a repeated form, prompting us to reflect on the universal aspects of the human experience and our relationship to our environment.

LOOP, HUM, WAVE

The Weisman Museum is also pleased to present Loop, Hum, Wave, a group show about time and its movement in the material world, guest curated by Kira Maria Shewfelt. Drawing its title from scientific descriptions of time’s rippling movement in the cosmos, the exhibition examines the presence of time in the making of an object, with works in diverse media by Berfin Ataman, Gretchen Batcheller, Kathy Bates, Isabel Beavers, Richard Bott, Mariquita “Micki” Davis, John Emison, Yvette Gellis, Michael Kennedy Costa, Kate Parsons, Ty Pownall, Renée Reizman, Conrad Ruiz, Kira Maria Shewfelt, and Kim Truong. These 15 artists, all of whom currently teach or have recently taught in the Fine Arts Division at Pepperdine University, share a deep understanding of the space-time field in which their work operates and invite time’s expansive properties into their practice.

Loop, Hum, Wave asks us to consider time an essential and spiritual component of the creative process. The granular and metaphorical quality of sand in Ty Powell’s site-specific installation Double Fade (2024) recalls both the particulate nature of the universe and his own reflections on generational relations and impermanence, while the saturated and fragmented imagery in Gretchen Batcheller’s painting Simultaneous Implementation (2023) moves deftly between childhood memory and broader cultural context.

Renée Reizman’s quilt and accompanying zine The Nebraska Intranet (2017–2024) extend this dialogue around time to technology and remoteness, recording the direct impact of distance on strangers quilting together in rural parts of America. Mariquita “Micki” Davis approaches togetherness from a different vantage to create a shared ancestral portrait in her installation There is still life (2022), allowing all the senses to usher memory forward and combine multiple stories across time into one powerful image.

With a keen curiosity for time as subject and form, the works featured in Loop, Hum, Wave step outside the linear measurements of hours, days, and years, offering instead a more universal sense of longevity, concurrency, and deeply felt connectivity. Even those artists most interested in commemorating a single moment in their work intend to carry it forward into the future, engaging past and present while also looking ahead. These artworks are markers, interventions, memorials, revisions, portals, and metaphors, together expressing an existential curiosity about what time affords us.

“We are thrilled to have Cameron Harvey’s first solo museum exhibition and Loop, Hum, Wave, our first faculty exhibition in many years, on view concurrently this fall,” said Weisman Museum director Andrea Gyorody. “Although divergent in many ways, both exhibitions ask us to remember that we exist—and create art—in a much broader context, across space and time, than we may realize. It’s a powerful idea for anyone, but especially for college students who are in the crucible of figuring out who they are and what imprint they want to leave on the world.”

Cameron Harvey (b. 1977, So. Pomfret, Vermont) lives and works in Los Angeles. Harvey received her MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, in 2021; her BA in studio art from Wellesley College in 1999, and her postbaccalaureate certificate in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Harvey’s work has been included in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. She held a teaching assistantship in printmaking and painting at La Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy, in 2001, and most recently was an educator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and a volunteer yoga instructor with Prison Yoga + Meditation. Harvey has participated in artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Lijiang Studio, the Chicago Artists Coalition, and the Ucross Foundation.

Kira Maria Shewfelt is an artist based in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from New York University, MA in art history from the University of Southern California, and BA in comparative literature from Yale University. She currently teaches at Pepperdine University and has taught previously at NYU, as well as for local and international arts outreach programs including Proyecto Sitie, ArtWorxLA, Inner City Arts, and LAUSD’s Gifted and Talented program, and considers social reflection and impact part of her practice. Shewfelt has also curated alternative outdoor exhibitions and artistic reunions through a venture entitled alt.a.mira. Shewfelt’s painting takes influence from the literary genres of magical realism and romanticism, exploring physical-spiritual connections in her personal visual language. Her subjects portray intimate, athletic, and existential motifs, often set within the natural world. Recent exhibitions include the solo show The Yearlings with Make Room, piano, piano at Et Al, and The Angels with Baik Art Gallery and Noblesse Collection.