May 16 - June 27, 2026
May 23, 2026, Artist Talk: 3-4pm Opening Reception: 5-7pm
studio e is proud to present Orders of Nearness, an exhibition of new work by Emily Counts, Matt Jones, and Erin Milez. While each practice is distinctly accomplished, together they form a trio that swirls, pulls, and squishes time into moments that feel both protective and unsteady. Through approaches in painting and sculpture, the artists share a willingness to see the real as imagined, blending familiar forms with surreal distortions to soften and transform complex realities.
Erin Milez’s work locates this distortion within the rhythms of domestic life, where her stout figures move through cycles of daily repetitious maintenance. As Milez describes, “Their wide and strong bodies are workers’ bodies, recalling the workforce in Diego Rivera, Stanley Spencer, and WPA era works.” Like the bodies of the figures, the scenes in the paintings seem gently squished, layered into one another, as gestures of love and labor accumulate into a sense of parental devotion. This is especially evident in A Hop and A Skip, where butterflies float lightly as the viewer assumes the role of the parent peering over the fence for child dropoff. It’s almost as if Milez pressed pause on time, and we’re standing there in the painting. Imagining letting go of a child as they move into their school day, a feeling that reveals a transference of trust in protection and how care extends outward into conditions of uncertainty.
Across Milez’s practice, as well as in the work of Jones and Counts, attention to small ordinariness expands time and beings into something malleable and more emotionally charged: the warmth of picking a dandelion on a summer's day, the sun grazing squinting eyes while walking a child across the street. This sense of protection for the fragile, opens into the work of Emily Counts, whose ceramic figures read as talismans or protective guardians. Counts’ work, however, moves toward the mythological and shapeshifting, where her familiar figures and creatures bring a kind of delightful ferocity.
Adorned with gold luster her recurring visual language made up of spiders, fangs, moths, and flowers, blends a softness with strength. Symbols reappear, accumulating until creatures and figures become increasingly indistinguishable, like the human eyes found in Core Care Lion. In this piece and many others, details such as eyebrows and eyelashes introduce subtle human traits, suggesting a merging of species and identities into hybrid forms. A trait also seen in Milky Minty Bow Portrait, where the repeated presence of eyes and mouths in Counts’ work also suggests this multiplicity of coexistence, hinting that several beings inhabit a single body. In this way, the figures read like older selves, shaped by wisdom and survival. As if for every experience endured, the creature grows another means to see, another voice to articulate.
Through this hybridity, Counts constructs a world where figures and their embodiments of experience, once tender, give way to something unstable and generative. This instability is reinforced by repetition that connects the three artists’ practices. As eyes, gestures, and organic forms drift through Jones’ abstracted spaces, time swirls rather than progresses, making the present both an anchor and distortion point. Within this shared language, Matt Jones approaches painting as a space structured through repetition and contact rather than attempting to resolve a narrative. Eyes recur as sites of looking and reflection, while fingers press, pinch, and interrupt the surface. These gestures introduce a sense of tactile pressure that is both physical and perceptual, as seen in The Pinch. Together, meaning emerges through the relations between forms, inviting attention and investigation to a space where time compiles onto itself.
Across Orders of Nearness, soft lines, bright colors, and rounded characters lead viewers to reconsider the role of time. The result is a body of work that shifts between lightheartedness and emotional depth. Together, these works reconsider shared space as one where protection and vulnerability coexist, and where care is continually reshaped through the act of observing transformation.
- tom manzanarez