FEVER Summer Group Show

Curated by Sofia Florimbi & Amélie Alexandre

JULY 11—AUGUST 23, 2026

FEVER (July 11-August 23, 2026) brings together eight contemporary artists at different stages in their careers working within a range of mediums–from cyanotype prints to hand-carved wood, charcoal studies to oil-painted canvases. At times hallucinatory and inflamed, the show conjures a range of emotional states. Tender, raw, ablaze with feeling, each piece evokes the artist’s relationship to the febrile. In Sylvia Plath’s Fever 103, she writes, “I think I am going up, / I think I may rise–”. Regarding fever as a state for artistic expansion, the show invites its artists to embody a mode of being that rises above the quotidian.

Angel Alvarado’s red-drenched cyanotypes foreground a swollen, lustful ache for a shadowy ideal. Luisa Coats’ drawings imply an uncanny yearning for another world, a desire to be taken away. Sensuous yet muscular, David Cortes’ wood-carved furniture walks a tenuous line between sculpture and design. Nick Gorham’s abstracted landscapes reach a fever pitch through complex color relationships and compressed forms. The photography from Tucker Kunzel uses tight framing to isolate its subjects, heightening a sense of desire and mania for connection. Larysa Myers uses a range of techniques to produce dream-like, ethereal meditations on relationship, both to the self and to the other. The hypnagogic charcoal drawings from Natalie Rain produce a psychic environment that spins the viewer into a kind of paralysis. Søren Wilde’s light sculpture ignites a reverie rooted in the complex form of organic material. These dynamic works each reflect an interpretation of the madness of sensuality, and the beauty captured outside of one’s bounds. FEVER becomes the gateway to alternate forms of knowledge.

FEVER will be on view at Separate Reality from July 11—August 23.

ANGEL ALVARADO

ANGEL ALVARADO (B. 1992, Los Angeles) is an LA-based artist working across photography, collage, and installation. Their work questions notions of gender, sexuality, and agency through the romance and abjection visible within queer desire. Situating their own Latinx queer experience at the center of their practice, they draw from an expansive archive culled from personal experience—images downloaded, scanned, printed, and decimated through culture; contemporary and historical artwork; gay male pornography and erotica; as well as both physical and mental detritus, among other sources. Alvarado received his BA in fine arts from University of California, Los Angeles in 2015. Fascinated by the work of Catherine Opie and Lari Pittman, and having studied under their tutelage, their practice extends the historical legacy laid down by these artistic mentors toward new realms. 

Alvarado held his first solo show at Human Resources in 2019,and has since been featured in exhibitions including at Arrullar, Koreatown, LA (2020), and at the Benefit Auction for the Vincent Price Art Museum (2025). Alvarado lives and works in Los Angeles. INSTAGRAM: @significant__mother

LUISA COATS

LUISA COATS (B. 1998, Santa Monica) is a Los Angeles-based artist working primarily in drawing and painting. Pulling from her own personal mythology, she explores landscapes both exterior and interior, guided by a feeling not dissimilar to navigating a dream. Working from memory and imagination, Coats is deeply inspired by religious experience, trance-like states, animism, and both the interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships between human beings, the natural world, and the supernatural. She received her BFA in Graphic Design from ArtCenter College of Design, Los Angeles in 2022. 

Recent exhibitions include Techno-Organic, Printed Matter Art Book Fair: Project Space, Los Angeles, CA (2026), Dreaming in the Basin, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Los Angeles, CA (2025), The Desired Effect, UCLA Little Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2024), Graphite XV: Almanac, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2024), Me and You and, Gallery SADE, Los Angeles, CA (2023), Printed Matter’s Los Angeles Art Book Fair, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, CA (2023), Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2023), Tummy Ache, St. Catherine Studio, Montreal, Quebec (2023), In Defense of Bogus, Galerie Cecile, Halifax, Nova Scotia (2023), and Law and Order, The Ranch, Casitas, CA (2022). Coats presently lives and works in Los Angeles. INSTAGRAM: @L.coats_

DAVID CORTES

DAVID CORTES (B. 1991, Los Angeles) considers woodworking an ongoing study of life, death, and renewal. With a background in photography, Cortes sees his present practice in sculpture and woodworking operating as a direct inverse: shifting from image-making toward direct interaction with material and form. While photography continues to inform on a structural plane, wood encourages a deeper engagement with the physical presence of the material itself. Cortes approaches wood not simply as a resource to be altered, but as a material with its own history, character, and inherent qualities. Working primarily with downed wood, along with salvaged and found materials, he is continually searching for pieces whose intrinsic features acknowledge life lived, transformation, and offer new possibilities. Through his practice, he is drawn to irregularity and exposed construction, welcoming the discoveries, variations, and unplanned results that emerge through the creative process. Honoring the handmade history of woodworking, traced in part to his Mexican heritage and family who first introduced him to carving, Cortes incorporates the organic outcomes into the work as elemental evidence of its natural form and character. Moving freely between art, craft, and design, Cortes develops his work through experimentation. Guided by curiosity, the act of finding, processing, and building with wood is as essential a part as the medium in question. Cortes lives and works in Los Angeles. INSTAGRAM: @construct_dmc

NICK GORHAM

NICK GORHAM (B. 1999, San Francisco) tends to landscape and abstract painting with parallel focus. Often seeking to fuse these two modes of expression, reaching into each respective tradition, Gorham employs the dualism of observational study and intuition to operate in complement, allowing one to inform the other. Through the connective ties of the two processes of observation and non-representation, his practice permits commonalities to emerge between being in nature and searching within the self. These points of touch and tension speak in unison to a wide breadth of sensory nodes, exploring perception across environmental and internal planes with quiet dexterity. Balancing color, form, and light in both their material and atmospheric forms, Gorham invokes a sense of subtle motion from within the forms, echoing the simple, organic hum of nature’s own circadian rhythm through the mnemotechny of paint. 

Gorham received a BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in 2023. Recent solo exhibitions include at Et Al. Gallery in San Francisco (2025), group shows with Chandler Gallery in Mill Valley (2025); the MarinMOCA Annex (2024); and the Steuben Gallery at the Pratt Institute (2023). His work has been featured in the SFChronicle, KQED, and Marin IJ. Gorham is based in San Francisco. INSTAGRAM: @nickgorham

TUCKER KUNZEL

TUCKER KUNZEL (B. 1992, San Francisco) first picked up a film camera in his teens, immediately producing a body of work he would develop in chapters as distinct series, each looking inward to the absurdity within. Transitioning to digital, Kunzel published his first book dedicated to the series ‘A Familiar Place,’ exploring his relationship with family, with a specific focus on the strange magic between himself and his twin brother. Earning his JD from the NYU School of Law in 2017, Kunzel took momentary distance from his photographic practice, to which he has just recently returned, unveiling a new series of images. 

Through photography, Kunzel develops worlds both staged and surreptitious to peer into the comfort and drama of the overly familiar. In each scene or series in which he works, the gravitational center remains the Absurde: the irony and bare humanity of it, and with which we engage with it. Leaning into its artistic heritage and lifting traditions of American painting and the German Avant-Garde, Kunzel tends to his photographs with both Californian and Renaissance vernacular. His careful treatment of light and space draws on the psycho-emotive power of chiaroscuro to generate images that are at once disarmingly human and rich with dramatic wit. Ever with a sincere and welcome gaze, Kunzel excavates the absurd depths of being human through the quiet delight of the camera's eye. All with love, and always with a laugh. INSTAGRAM: @venmoriche

LARYSA MYERS

LARYSA MYERS (B. Michigan) explores femininity and motherhood through abstract, cyclical forms. Her work reflects on memory, identity, and nature, using intuitive mark-making to create a dreamlike quality that invites introspection and emotional depth. Myers usually works from her imagination, influenced by memory, feelings, symbols and nature. Repetitive patterns and lines in mark are intended to create a slower, more reflective state. Self-educated in art history, Myers studied drawing and painting at Grand Central Academy and textile design at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, developing a love for and talent in classical drawing methods and pattern making. 

Recent group exhibitions include at Grimm Gallery, New York City (2026), Dinner Gallery, New York City (2024), Wilder Gallery, London (2024), Fortnight Institute, New York City (2023), Fortnight Institute Salon (2022), MePaintsMe.com (2022), Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, New York (2021), and Mother Gallery in Beacon, New York (2019). Her work has been featured in Maake Magazine, Southeast Review, and ArtMaze Mag. She is currently part of a group exhibition at Grimm Gallery, New York City through March 7, 2026.  INSTAGRAM: @larysamyers WEBSITE: https://www.larysamyers.com/

NATALIE RAIN

NATALIE RAIN (B. 2000, La Palma) Natalie Rain creates from the vibration point between natural forces and the corporeal quotidian. Rain developed her technical and artistic foundation through independent study in parallel with education at Laguna College of Art & Design and Otis College of Art & Design, under Luis Serrano’s tutelage. Believing this planet to be the one true artist, creating even without human audience for its beauty, Rain seeks to honor the spiritual through her practice. Working primarily with charcoal for its indexical and tactile sensitivity, Rain focuses on the intensity of ineffable forces such as wind, light, and atmosphere in conversation with the internal self. 

Deliberately retaining a loose, organic and elemental style, Rain approaches the vibrant relationship between humans and the natural world, unafraid of the tension introduced by modern culture or life experiences. Inviting a spiritual realism to the forefront, Rain’s work strips itself bare and encourages viewers to focus on their own relationship with the Earth. The artwork becomes a space through which to not just admire nature, but to feel our place within it. Based in Los Angeles, Rain creates in Highland Park. INSTAGRAM: @ natalierainxo WEBSITE: artistnatalierain.bigcartel.com

SØREN WILDE

SØREN WILDE (B. 1996, Los Angeles) is an artist deeply connected to the natural land and marine-scape. Born in Santa Barbara, Wilde received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and has since returned to his Californian roots. Through a deeply organic lens in tandem with wry and oft digital wit, Wilde’s engagement with earth, wind, and natural material spans across interior works to interventions in situ. His practice ranges from minimalist sculpture and vernacular furniture to material explorations, land art, and documentary work. Extending the traditions of Land Art, Wilde’s practice takes form across natural and urban environments alike, investigating tensions between tectonic plates in the same breath as technology. 

Recent publications include backcountry trails (2025), qad (2023; in collaboration with L. Coats), papercut (2022), and knots made in my pocket (2019). INSTAGRAM: @lost_2_c_ WEBSITE: sorenwilde.hotglue.me