The Best Booths at Felix LA, from Denim Sculptures to Minimalist Assemblages

Denim is in at Nina Johnson’s booth. Spread across the cabana hotel room and patio are three soft sculptures by Upstate New York–based artist Christy Gast. Implicit in these disembodied legs is the sexuality and curvature of the body.  The only floor work of the three, La noche está estrellada (2025), is fabricated to be kneeling, with a disco-cover where the wearer’s waist should be. There’s an implied sexual innuendo to the fact that the sculpture is kneeling, even if the imagined person’s gender identity is unknown. Nearby is a wall-hung sculpture, Four Button Fly (2024), in which four pairs of jeans twist into each other—an orgy or a polycule perhaps. Gast made these jeans herself, using denim she treated with chemicals so she could press various flora onto them to give them an ethereal woodsy feel.

On the patio is Asses & Angels (2023) showing three twisting pairs of jeans with green bandanas sticking out of the back pockets. They’re smeared with what appears to be dirt stains but are hand painted gouache marks by the artist; it has a rough and tumble kind of vibe to it. Per the queer hanky code, the green handkerchief would signify a call for sex work; which pocket one wears it in would determine if you are seeking or offering sex work. That the bandana is draped (and coated in resin) and extends from one pocket to the other adds to the ambiguity.

Drawing from the history of Minimalism, Anneke Eussen uses pieces of glass to create abstract grids. Eussen relies on found objects, which she arranges and fragments into works that are both tender and spectral. For U-turn 06 (2024), Eussen has gathered pieces of glass from domestic spaces. The trace of their history seems to haunt this thrillingly cool work.

At La Beast’s booth, LA-based artist Chyrum Lambert has on view two abstract canvases that appear to be abstract paintings, but are actually collages of dozens of drawings on paper made using ink, pencil, dye, and acrylic. Lambert’s drawings are part of an intuitive daily practice that focus on creating marks rich with texture and color. Later, he will return to these to bring them altogether, cutting them out and layering them on top of each other to create swirling forms that resemble the lush greenery of Washington State, where he was raised, or the coolness of gemstones and minerals. He then grids these together to make an elegant final work.

At Murmurs is the bottom half of a cone-like hunk of metal. It’s meant to resemble the shape of an ultrasound, often the first image taken of a person. To this armature, New Haven–based artist Y. Malik Jalal adds various found images of Black American families, a page from Life magazine, a playing card, a rusted truss mending plate, a commissary token from a North Carolina prison, and the cut-outs of words “Tempo” and “Ultra” all against a velvet background. Elsewhere in the booth is a diptych of two found car mats to which he has embedded similar found images and overlaid with forged pieces of stainless steel in the shapes of a glittering star and a flower.

A massive (70-by-90 inches) purple c-print by David Benjamin Sherry showing an aerial view of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah hangs along one wall in Morán Morán’s booth. Shot using a large-format camera, the image shows an altered or alternative view of this landscape, one often thought of as rugged and uninhabited. Sherry is interested in destabilizing this romanticized, white-Western vision of these places, queering them with his use of vibrant photographic pastels along the way.

Part of his “American Monuments series” that he begun in 2017 shortly after the start of the first Trump presidential administration, this body of work seeks to reexamine the history of photography and our relationship to the land at a time when the Trump administration was lifting the protect status of numerous national parks to lease the land for different kinds of extractive processes. 

Bulgarian-born, London-based artist Preslav Kostov filters his experience of immigrating to the UK from Eastern Europe into his paintings, in which he layers and fragments multiple renderings of his body. There’s something almost unnatural to the way Kostov renders these fleshy limbs—a digital glitch perhaps, or even the double exposure of a camera lens. Kostov typically wipes his canvas during the painting process, giving the tableau a sleek, glossy finish; to this he later applies acetone, which gives it a crackled texture that is both unsettling and alluring.