Opening
Saturday, April 18
from 5–8PM

On View
April 18 – June 06 2026

Wednesday – Saturday
Noon – 5PM

Marta
3021 Rowena Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90039

Marta is pleased to announce Of Two Minds, an exhibition of new functional-sculptural work by Pasadena-based artist and designer Ryan Belli. The gallery’s first solo outing with Belli, following his inclusion in Under / Over (2020) and, most recently, From the Upper Valley in the Foothills (2025), the presentation employs memory as a (re-)structuring principle, examining its material and spiritual capacities to hold dual, often contradictory, truths, made manifest by the evocations of a single phrase: “I remember it differently.”

For Belli, materials are a mode of expression; the physical illustration of an idea and its implied double—the alternative, whether suspected, assumed, or desired, of a viewer’s contact with his work. Rendered in disparate mediums and across diverse functions—wood, metal, and textiles; seating, surfaces, cabinetry, and lighting—each of the artist’s formal choices allow shapes to take on new meaning. Lengths of brightly colored ribbon are sewn into light shades, composing the pliant fabric into firm compositions that subvert the need for rigorous internal supports, while hand-carved redwood and coastal live oak appear like sacks of grain: slouching yet stable, their rigidity reliant on the volume of their contents and predicated on the supple enclosure of burlap. With pointed detailing—are they ears? Horns?—these lightly figurative works, iconic in Belli’s tender treatment of wood, animate in partnership, extending a familiar camaraderie both mischievous and fundamentally optimistic—two creatures peeking over a fence to get a look at the activity on the other side.

Throughout the exhibition, hard materials appear soft and vice versa, a doubling effect that’s reflected, quite literally, in the artist’s conversing cast and polished aluminum mirrors, the bend in the latter creating a dual perspective whereby each visage appears within its own plane, not necessarily visible to the self but evident to the person next to you—shared but separate. Here, Belli draws out the nuances of collective versus individual memory; the subtle blurring and discrete insights that take shape within the primal relationships of artist and viewer, artist and family, artist and steward, each lens of perception an opportunity to explore the paradoxes of human experience; the cognitive dissonances woven into any given day. We look, as the Janus head does, in opposing directions at once.