“Anyway, to Make a Long Story Short” - Tim Curry / “Too Late!” - Everybody

Feia presents A Mansion Has Many Rooms, a solo exhibition of new ceramic vessels and light sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Arnold. As the third presentation in The Feia Flat, the exhibition continues Feia’s interest in contemporary ceramics, exploring how the medium can serve to define space. In A Mansion Has Many Rooms, vessels, sculptures, and lamps spill out from the confines of the flat, crafting a story far larger than what the walls can hold.

The exhibition’s title comes from the song A Mansion Has Many Rooms by the instrumental post-rock band Grails, whose atmospheric compositions have long resonated with Arnold. The phrase also echoes a recurring dream from his childhood, in which he would find himself lost inside a vast mansion - perhaps, he suspects, a product of his childhood obsession with Clue (1985). In Arnold’s work, the mansion becomes a kind of imagined architecture - a place where disparate images, memories, stories, and associations can coexist.

Working in hand-built ceramics, Arnold creates illustrated large-scale vessels whose forms recall historical Grecian amphorae and kraters. Across their surfaces, painted images draw from nature, tarot, poetry, art history, and personal memory, moving between the chimerical and the lived. Rendered in glazes, slips, stains, and engobe, these images are transformed through reduction firing, a process by which oxygen is starved from a high-temperature gas-powered kiln, emerging as fragments of stories that shift between the recognizable and the imagined.

Rather than functioning as singular illustrations, Arnold’s images accumulate. In A Mansion Has Many Rooms, discrete scenes and figures appear alongside one another, creating unexpected relationships within each vessel and across the exhibition. The works invite viewers to piece together their own narratives, where one image leads to another and meaning remains open-ended.

Alongside the vessels, Arnold presents his towers, slender ceramic light sculptures topped with cast porcelain shades. Made with an array of glazes and in multiple scales, the repeated forms create a sense of rhythm while their shifting colors and proportions introduce variation. Originally inspired by the image of a finger touching the full moon, the series has evolved into increasingly intricate constructions of intertwined, web-like coils, recalling both fantastical structures and ancient architecture.

Together, the works in A Mansion Has Many Rooms form a world of connected images, objects, and associations - each vessel and tower offering another entrance, another fragment to collect, and another room to get lost in.