Four Corners: Cathy Akers, Danielle Klebes, Janet Loren Hill, and Kayla Mattes
“I’m in the corner” - Robyn
Feia is pleased to present Four Corners, a four-artist exhibition featuring Los Angeles-based artists Cathy Akers and Kayla Mattes alongside New York-based Danielle Klebes and Janet Loren Hill. Opening on July 18, the exhibition marks the second presentation at the gallery’s Los Angeles space, assembling a provisional world from the distinct visual vernaculars of its four artists. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of corners, the geography of the United States - including the kitschy tourist destination Four Corners - as well as familiar expressions such as “the dark corners of the internet” and “out of the corner of my eye,” the exhibition considers the corner as both a literal structure and perceptual threshold. From this starting point, each artist’s work develops its own internal world, which together form a composite environment within the gallery.
Cathy Akers's ceramic dioramas follow an imaginary society of horse-riding warrior women as they confront patriarchal systems and assert spaces for their own desires. After the Fray depicts the aftermath of the most recent battle, where the figures tend to wounds, assist one another, and rest. The work draws on Akers’s experiences as a mother and a woman, alongside 15 years of archival research into 1960s-era communes, and seminal feminist texts such as Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig. Danielle Klebes’s paintings also claim space amid patriarchal sovereignty. Combining real and invented objects, her works depict interiors that feel at once intimate and unsettled. Focusing on the tension between belonging and alienation, Klebes is particularly interested in borrowed spaces and how they relate to queer identity, stability, and questions of belonging in contemporary America.
Janet Loren Hill paints surreal figures that rehearse propaganda systems and the aesthetics of ideological control. In Four Corners, triangular pennants flutter with signs of unrest as Hammerheads move through the scenes - tugging at roots, torching seeds - caught between defiance and fatigue. Using historical propaganda posters and contemporary manipulative media in which state power leverages the aesthetics of nature to obscure coercion, Hill traces global histories where control wears the mask of care, including the Lebensborn program in Germany, Red Scare-era campaigns, QAnon’s infiltration of wellness spaces, and China’s One-Child Policy.
In a related act of translation Kayla Mattes produces handwoven tapestries that slow down fleeting moments from screen culture, merging digital references through an ancient process. For Four Corners, Mattes tackles ongoing political and societal instability in the United States by rendering redacted images from the Epstein files, internet memes, symbols, and text into woven form. Tapestry, used to document contemporary life and social conditions for millennia, becomes both medium and critique - a feminized and historically overlooked labor made visible. The works are analog, yet remain structurally tied to digital modes of perception.
Together, the four artists construct a shared yet unstable architecture of meaning and resistance held together by overlapping thresholds, edges, and partial views. In this space, corners are active sites of encounter where histories accumulate, ideologies falter, and private worlds briefly surface. Across ceramics, sculpture, painting, and tapestry, Akers, Klebes, Hill, and Mattes converge in a logic of fragmentation and reassembly. What materializes in Four Corners is a provisional world shaped by friction: between domestic space and public ideology, intimacy and spectacle, and handmade forms and mediated experience. Rather than resolving these tensions, the exhibition holds them open.Cathy Akers
Cathy Akers’ artistic practice is rooted in a multidisciplinary approach that has included ceramic sculpture, photography, and narrative text. Her work is characterized by a conceptual and research-driven style, often manifesting as immersive installations that interrogate the utopian impulse and its gendered dynamics. She has exhibited widely, including solo shows at Tyler Park Presents, Pitzer College, Elephant, Emma Gray HQ and Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles. She received a Parent-Artist Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, a Traveling Scholar Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an Artists' Resource for Completion (ARC) Grant from The Durfee Foundation. Her work is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as well as numerous private collections. Based in Los Angeles, she holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and a BFA from Tufts University, in affiliation with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Danielle Klebes lives and works at the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY. Danielle has exhibited in notable galleries and museums throughout the United States, Europe, and Canada. These include solo shows: Wassaic Motorcycle and Paint Club (2026) presented by Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY, Moving Target (2025) at York College of PA, in York, PA, Hurricane Becomes a Cloudy Day (2024) at Standard Space in Sharon, CT, and group shows: Where the Wild Things Are, at ART06870 in Greenwich, CT, Departures (2025) at 81 Leonard Galley in New York, NY, Fifty (2022) at MoCA Jacksonville, Jacksonville, FL, Summer (2022) at Galleri Christoffer Egelund in Copenhagen, Denmark, Portraiture Today (2021) at the Springfield Museums, Springfield, MA, and Confluence of Tongues (2021) at Grove Collective in London, UK. Danielle received her MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University College of Art and Design in Cambridge, MA, in 2017.
Janet Loren Hill is a New York City-based artist whose work exists at the intersection of installation and painting. Dripping with absurdity, she has built a world around the Chattering Teeth and Hammerhead People who play out propaganda techniques within her paintings, sculptures and performances. Hill received an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a BFA from the University of Washington. She has exhibited at numerous galleries nationally, including Field Projects Gallery (NYC), Feia (LA), The Border Project Space (NYC), Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston) and Kapow (NYC). Hill has participated in multiple residencies internationally, including Wassaic Project, Anderson Ranch, McColl Center, Beijing Royal School and The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA) Studio Program. Hill’s work has been recognized in Artnet, Hyperallergic, The Boston Globe, Boston Art Review and W Magazine. Most recently, Hill presented a two-person exhibition at the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, marking her museum exhibition debut.
Kayla Mattes received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and her MFA from University of California Santa Barbara in 2019. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at Charlie James Gallery, (Los Angeles), California Center for the Arts Museum (Escondido, CA), Eli & Edythe Broad Museum (Michigan), Asia Art Center (Taipei), and Richard Heller Gallery (Santa Monica). Recent group exhibitions include Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne), Benton Museum of Art (Pomona, CA), and Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Portland, OR). Mattes' work can be found in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Eli & Edythe Broad Museum, and The Bunker Artspace. She is one of twenty weavers included in the 2018 book, Weaving: Contemporary Makers on the Loom. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.