peripheral view

Russell Crotty

Tim Ebner

Ned Evans

David Lloyd

Steve Schmidt

October 10 - November 25, 2026

Presented in conjunction with a solo exhibition by John van Hamersveld

Los Angeles, CA — Peripheral View brings together five artists—Russell Crotty, Tim Ebner, Ned Evans, David Lloyd, and Steve Schmidt—who share a connection to surfing, but whose work approaches that experience indirectly. Rather than depicting surfing as a sport, lifestyle, or recognizable subculture, each artist allows it to enter the work tangentially, as one influence among many. The diversity of their individual practices is central to the exhibition.

Russell Crotty’s longstanding fascination with astronomy and observation has produced works that look beyond the immediate landscape toward the night sky and the larger structures of the universe. His work reflects an impulse to look, map, record, and locate oneself within an environment far greater than the human scale.

Tim Ebner’s practice has always resisted a single stylistic identity. His work continually shifts between the figurative and the abstract, moving freely among painting, sculpture, image, and object. This willingness to change direction gives his work a sense of unpredictability and movement that parallels the constantly changing conditions of the ocean.

Ned Evans brings another perspective, informed by his engagement with abstraction and the legacy of Southern California Light and Space. Color, atmosphere, surface, and spatial perception become central concerns, connecting his work to an experience of landscape without necessarily depicting it directly.

David Lloyd’s paintings similarly resist easy categorization. His practice encompasses a wide range of pictorial and conceptual interests, moving between abstraction, landscape, imagined space, and fragments of recognizable imagery. The variety within his work reflects a painter continually testing different ways of constructing and experiencing an image.

For Steve Schmidt, process and material are fundamental. His interest in recycling, collage, and assemblage transforms found and repurposed elements into newly constructed forms. The work grows through accumulation and recombination, building an image or object from disparate parts rather than beginning with a predetermined whole.

The exhibition is presented alongside a solo exhibition by John van Hamersveld, whose long association with Southern California surf culture is inseparable from his history as an artist and designer. Yet van Hamersveld’s work, like that of the artists in Peripheral View, extends far beyond the category of “surf art.” His practice moves between abstraction, graphic language, popular culture, landscape, music, and the visual history of Southern California.

Together, the two exhibitions consider a subtle but important distinction: artists who surf rather than surf artists.

Surfing is present not necessarily as subject matter, but as experience—as a way of seeing and inhabiting the world. Time spent in the ocean produces an acute awareness of changing conditions, distance, repetition, balance, scale, rhythm, and the horizon. These sensibilities can become embedded in an artist’s work without ever producing an image of a wave or a surfer.

Seen together, the exhibitions propose surfing less as an iconography than as an underlying visual and physical consciousness. The connection remains at the periphery—sometimes visible, sometimes almost imperceptible—informing how these artists understand landscape, space, motion, material, and Southern California itself.