Ariel Oakley
Quanta Qualia

January 10th - February 1st, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 10th, 7-10 pm

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Quanta Qualia, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist Ariel Oakley.

In Quanta Qualia, Oakley uses medieval religious iconography and medical imaging to blur the boundary between the sacred and scientific. Her interdisciplinary interplay is a form of science-art worlding, an epistemology of entangled participants in a collective ecological body.

A lit candle, quavering, stands in for time and the decreation of the artist. Small sculptures of found object assemblage, cast bronze, and bioplastic assert a visceral presence while evoking both reliquary and votive offering. Chimeric figures crowd the assembled paintings with anatomical, plant, and invertebrate elements such as antennae and coral. A golden halo crowns a figure resembling the Virgin Mary, whose torso is an inverted rendering of the cardiovascular system and whose face is bubbling with lichen. Working in acrylic and vinyl emulsion on canvas to produce these new icons, Oakley constructs sacred images of a collective future.

The works in Quanta Qualia envision an earthly Eden of the sensuous body. The living gestures of aliveness between the minute multitudes of sensuous bodies that make up each of our bodies. In giving subjective experience to the most minute units of matter Quanta Qualia rejects a heavenly answer to our mortal toil, whispering instead: what if? What if? What if? What if the body is the soul?

Ariel Oakley is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA in Studio Art at Maryland Institute College of Art, and her BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. She spends her days as a nurse in surgery at Keck Hospital of USC, where her passion for open-heart surgery continues to inform her art.