Beatriz Mejia Krumbein and Rebecca Waring-Crane - With This Body

Beatriz Mejia Krumbein | Rebecca Waring-Crane
With This Body

February 14th - March 8th, 2026

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Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present With This Body, a two-person exhibition by Rebecca Waring-Crane and Beatriz Mejia-Krumbein.

Waring-Crane’s sculptures merge the human form with domestic objects and natural elements, creating poignant meditations on identity, sacrifice, and belonging. A bronze-cast human arm replacing a chair leg evokes a maternal sacrifice to nurture the others, and upside down feet emerging from a tree form resembling our effort to contort ourselves to fit within familial and social structures. Waring-Crane’s works ultimately find poetry in the nuances of embodied transformation within the mundane objects.

Following a profound physical transformation after a stroke, Mejia-Krumbein’s textural wall pieces represent her artistic evolution from figurative social justice work to abstract explorations of material. Her compositions of sand and beach findings create topographical landscapes that echo the body’s vulnerability and resilience. These works map both physical terrain and internal landscapes of recovery, adaptation, and renewal.

Together, these artists reveal how the body—whether present, abstracted, or transformed—remains central to our understanding of place and identity. Their works speak to the ways we physically and metaphorically reshape ourselves and our environments, transforming limitation into possibility and fragmentation into wholeness. Through their distinct yet complementary practices, Waring-Crane and Mejia-Krumbein invite us to consider how we are simultaneously shaped by and shapers of the materials that constitute our lives.

Ariel Oakley - Quanta Qualia

Ariel Oakley
Quanta Qualia

January 10th - February 1st, 2026

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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?

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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.