La Loma is pleased to present Lost Mind in the Tall Grass, an exhibition of large- and small-scale oil painting and collage by Los Angeles-based artist Skylar Hughes.

In his Eighth Duino Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “with all its eyes the natural world looks out into the Open.” For the Austrian poet, the Open was a state of pure, unbounded presence enjoyed by animals who inhabit the world without standing apart from it. Something of that openness gathers at the center of Skylar Hughes’s Red Cave (2026). Dense clusters of undulating dots, at once like flowing water and flaring flames, surround a central crimson field. The broad, unbroken plane throws the surrounding textures into stark relief, arresting their motion and forcing the viewer to reconcile the painting’s stable interior with its restless frame.

For Hughes, art-making is less an exercise in style than a mode of moment-to-moment being. He follows where the painting leads. The enduring compositions preserve that enigmatic call-and-response. The process is, in many ways, his subject: a cluster of small dots records sustained concentration, while a blurred daub retains the speed of the hand. While his previous exhibition relied on fleeting references to trees, ponds, lilies, light ticking across running water, the thirteen paintings here dissolve image into perception, sensation. Time itself becomes another material to represent and manipulate.

New Batik (2026), for instance, seems to hold several durations on a single plane. Strands of plum and indigo spots whip across patches of olive and cerulean that bleed from one into the other. Gray-blue stippling traverses the surface like veils of fine fog, softening the layers just beneath. Opacity and velocity register different time scales, from the immediacy of a moment to the drag of a year.

The intimate collages assemble discrete photographs of natural phenomena, drawing formal continuities between, say, a mountain ridgeline and the furrowed bark of a redwood tree. In New Torn Collage 11 (2022), a jagged tear running across the two central fragments mirrors both the vein in the gray rock face and the lightning bolt above. The torn edges belong at once to the collage and to the natural forms it contains; each part shapes and is shaped by the whole.

The exhibition’s title points to what might happen as one follows the painted marks through their changes of tone, texture, and pace. To lose one’s mind, in Hughes’s sense, is to loosen the critical consciousness that stands apart from experience and recover an awareness that’s grounded in the present—a condition Rilke might have called the “pure space into which flowers endlessly open.” - Tara Anne Dalbow