Night Gallery is thrilled to present It’s About Time, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Michelle Blade. It’s About Time marks Blade’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, following her inclusion in Superbloom and her recent solo exhibition at the Powerlong Museum in Shanghai.

It’s About Time began with a simple artistic constraint: Blade would paint still lifes and landscapes in and around her home in the Arroyo Seco, each from a different hour of the day, their subjects variously illuminated by the ever-shifting California light. Over the course of months, she photographed her inspirations: a bag of oranges on the countertop in morning light; her front yard’s sycamore reaching toward a starry, purple sky; her daughter reading on the couch before an open window; a golden sunset filtered through eucalyptus leaves, a rose bush, a mesh screen. From these photographs she sketched, her drawings growing more faithful to the quality of memory than to the images themselves. The final transformation happens on stretched poplin, where Blade works wet-on-wet, mixing color in real time and following intuition. Paint blooms across the fabric with its own will. Aspiring to fix a particular moment while surrendering to an unpredictable medium, she finds herself ceding to the present—not anchored in the past with her memories, nor reaching toward the future with her aspirations. As the works developed, so did Blade’s meditations on time:

Our practical agreement is that a day consists of twenty-four hours. Yet a single day is both everything and nothing. It contains arrival and disappearance, clarity and obscurity. It moves slowly, without permission or interest. Time is something we inherit and something we shape; it is one rotation of the Earth. Within it we share meals, read maddening headlines, make love, fall asleep. Invisible things also happen: temperatures rise as pollution gathers, a friendship deepens, a mood shifts. Nature moves on its own timelines beside ours. A dormant volcano decides to blow. The scale of time vacillates between immense and intimate. To attend to one day is to attend to all days—forgetting and remembering in a looping cycle, as we try our best to grasp pieces of its remnants.

-Michelle Blade, 2026

The work draws on a broad artistic lineage: the intimate domesticity of Louise Bourgeois, Joan Semmel, and Carrie Mae Weems; the atmospheric interiors of Vuillard; the perceptual investigations of the Impressionists; the luminous clarity of Hockney’s California paintings; and the mystical charge of Charles Burchfield. Like these predecessors, Blade is concerned with cycles, with light, with the tension between presence and disappearance. Any given moment can be met in a multitude of ways. Time, in this view, is the architecture that holds both emergence and loss—the only stable thing being that nothing stabilizes.

Memory, of course, is not time itself, though it operates through time as its medium. In recollection, the light might shine brighter, the pool might appear deeper, the tulips on the counter bloom more fully. To each moment we bring our history, our hopes, the sediment of past experience—imposing ourselves always onto life as it unfolds. Memory becomes canvas; our projections, the medium through which perception constructs. 

Painting does not stop any of it. But it is a place where one can stand inside the rotation for a moment. Where we might, however momentarily, gain pause.

Michelle Blade (b. 1981, Los Angeles) is a Los Angeles-based painter whose work examines time, memory, and the persistence of the natural world through intimate, autobiographical subjects. A third-generation Angeleno, Blade draws inspiration from Southern California landscapes, domestic interiors, and the everyday experiences of motherhood. Gardens, desert paths, domestic spaces, and interactions with her daughters serve as sites for exploring care, continuity, and the cyclical nature of life. Blade has presented solo exhibitions at Powerlong Museum, Shanghai; Asia Art Center, Beijing and Taipei; Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden; Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA; Wilding Cran, Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Marin MOCA, San Rafael, CA; Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, CA; Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK; Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands; K11 MUSEA, Shanghai, CH; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; and Rachel Uffner, New York, NY among others. Her work belongs in the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum, ICA Miami and the Powerlong Museum, Shanghai.