Ephemeral Traces: Time, Memory, Perception

Park House Houston opens the fall season with a group exhibition featuring works of contemporary art by Yifan Jiang, Cody Trepte and Johannes Wohnseifer, represented by Los Angeles/Dallas-based Meliksetian | Briggs. The artists’ shared exploration of ambiguity, memory, and the interplay between the tangible and elusive creates striking conceptual and visual relationships in contemporary art.
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The Artists
New York-based Yifan Jiang constructs psychological landscapes that mirror dreamlike structures, weaving personal experiences with philosophical inquiries into cultural memory and language, proposing new ways of seeing the world. In the painting Nap, Jiang creates a dreamlike seascape of a marching band traversing undulating waves as a tiny figure sleeps on a duck pedal boat.Emerging from the fluffy clouds, a cat sleeps peacefully in Travel Pillow. In contrast, Drive captures the dynamic sensation of speeding in a Lamborghini, rendered in an energetic, futuristic style.

Drawing from philosophy, physics, and astronomy, Texas born, Los Angeles based Cody Trepte explores the contradiction between chance, and time as fixed or predetermined. For instance, From Both Moments of Another features an algorithmically altered found image of a stone ruin, silkscreened with ink which shifts from black to magenta based on the viewer’s angle, lighting, and time of day, embodying the unfixed and conditional nature of perception and time. Trepte’s panel works, Again And Almost Always explore contradictions between random and fixed positions.

‍Johannes Wohnseifer investigates the construction of memory, how subjective perception makes time pass quickly or slowly in a world of shifting cultural values, drawing on consumer imagery and references from Cherry Coke, the Rolex “Daytona” and his friend and mentor Martin Kippenberger’s Capri paintings, to dreams, disco, the latest memes, word play, codes and riddles, all of which are synchronized, consolidated and fused into these works. By blending digital and analog processes, Wohnseifer, who is based in Cologne, Germany explores themes of memory, representation, and the intersection of technology and traditional art forms, creating works that oscillate between the familiar and the cryptic. Together, these artists offer profound reflections on the mutable nature of time and memory.

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Park House Houston is thrilled to welcome Hexton Gallery presenting the artist Liz Nielsen as our third rotating art show. Liz’s show A Place Like This will run through June, 2025.

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About Liz Nielsen

Liz Nielsen’s work resides on the border between photography and painting. Her fascinating process involves preparing different paper cutouts and rehearsing her movements before entering the darkroom. Then, she places the work on the photosensitive paper in complete darkness, following a preconceived choreography of rehearsed movements. Shining different colored lights over the material's surface, she imprints colors that are then developed with traditional chemicals. Her process is a contemporary interpretation of a primitive photographic technique that does not involve a camera, positioning her as a pioneer in this field. Her one-of-a-kind images are not mere representations but rather luminous manifestations of abstraction, where the physical process is as vital as the resulting work. Nielsen’s light paintings are charged with metaphors for human connection hidden within her shapes. While she works in the dark, there’s a moment of surrender. Much like in real life, we aim at a particular direction with an idea of what we might find, but results can be unpredictable. We learn how to anticipate and adjust, but an element of the unknown is always present. Trusting the process is part of the result.

The artist lives and works in Brooklyn and Newburgh, NY. She received an MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2004 and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002.

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Matt Murphy is a multi-disciplinary artist who embraces diverse and dynamic mediums including street performance, graphic design, sculpture and drawing. However, his core focus over the last six years has been painting—specifically landscapes. Inspired by the universality of ambient light, each painting is equal parts observed and manufactured, re-imagining optical effects from nature through his masterful hand-layering of paint. To Murphy, “They’re an expression of things I’ve seen, a further distillation of a moment or a place or a feeling.”

Sky High is his third solo show, composed of 14 paintings created

between 2022-2024. Improvisation and iteration are part of Murphy’s process, resulting in variations on themes and a visceral connectedness between works. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Matt lives and works in Los Angeles.

All of the works in the show are for sale.

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Nick Mele is a lifestyle, fashion and fine art photographer known for his whimsical take on American luxury and elegance. Nick’s passion lies in his love for fabulous interiors and the people who inhabit those spaces. His images have been said to evoke feelings of both old-world glamour and modern irreverence.

Over the last 10 years, Mele has become known for spinning tales of surreal characters in dreamlike domestic spaces. Documenting a lifestyle at once familiar yet fantastic, his imagery feels like a fanciful peek into life in the country's most luxurious resort towns. As viewers, we are offered a glimpse into a world, sometimes real and sometimes imagined, that is normally inaccessible to the public eye.

Nick Mele (b. 1982, Southampton, NY) received his BA and MBA from Georgetown University and is an alumnus of the International Center of Photography in New York. He began his career working under famed society photographer Patrick McMullan, before developing his own trademark style and body of work.

Like many current artists creating today, Mele has demurred from the traditional gallery route. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at some of the nations most exclusive private clubs, hotels and retail outlets; most notably being his recent takeover of the entire 7th floor of Bergdorf Goodman in New York. Mele’s photographs have been featured in a myriad of online and print publications including Town & Country, The New York Times, Avenue, Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, Vogue and Vanity Fair. His commercial clients include brands such as Ralph Lauren, Sam Edelman, J.McLaughlin and Lilly Pulitzer, as well as several high end hotels and interior designers. Mele’s first book, A Newport Summer, was published in May 2022 by Vendome Press. It was followed not long after by Palm Beach Living in February 2023 by Vendome Press.

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