Opening Reception
June 6, 2026 | 5pm – 10pm
Closing Reception
July 18, 2026 | 3pm – 6pm
Location
13612 S. Normandie Avenue
Gardena, CA 90249
GALLERY236 is pleased to announce their first solo show of emerging artist BJO. Her exhibition UNITY OF THE SISTERHOOD: Waking Up in My Sister’s Bones encompasses the artist’s recent works on canvas, figurative sculptures and multimedia.
BJO paints vibrant, colorful, dynamic canvases to depict women who are often gloomy, introspective and explorative. She explains that her paintings are meant to convey beauty and happiness but also pain, sadness and monstrousness.
In one extremely colorful painting, a bright orange and green plaid pattern with intersecting lines forms a backdrop for a female figure whose eyes express excitement and curiosity, her hair of bright green and red lines standing on end. It is a striking and powerful image.
BJO says she is expressing hurt that women feel, and tend to hang on to. The 25-year-old artist says she has been through “some hard, hard things in my life,” and because of an independent streak, has relied largely on herself to get through them. Additionally, she says, “I am constantly aware of other people, and I hold all of their pain as well as all of mine.” Some of her paintings show two women, one of them supporting the other emotionally through a painful experience.
But not all of her characters are suffering. One time a cat watched her while she was painting a canvas. So she made a painting to depict the nonverbal communication she felt with the feline. In the fanciful canvas, the cat has only two legs and a tail intertwines with the woman’s figure, metaphors for their similarities.
Although she presently has a tremendous commitment to art, BJO grew up in Portland, Oregon without exposure to fine art. She discovered it when she took a class in painting at a community college, “It became something I couldn’t not do anymore,” she says. “It was killing me not to be painting every day.” So she changed her major to art, then worked as an artist’s assistant for a year.
This is her first show outside of school. She hopes that when viewers see her paintings, they feel “joy and happiness, but also a little bit of sadness and a little bit of pain.”
