WHERE I END AND YOU BEGIN

THREE-ARTIST EXHIBITION
AUGUST 1-30, 2026

OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, AUGUST 1, 6-8PM

CLOSING RECEPTION: SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 4-6PM

Featuring a Poetry Reading by Natalie Shapero and an Intimate Artist Talk and Q&A

FEATURING: LIV AANRUD | JULIA CURRAN | JON HUCK

The Middle Room is pleased to present Where I End and You Begin, a dynamic three-person exhibition featuring Liv Aanrud, Julia Curran, and Jon Huck. On view from August 1 - 30, 2026, an opening reception will be held on Saturday, August 1, from 6-8pm. Curated by Shannon Rae Fincke, this exhibition brings together a trio of contemporary Los Angeles artists combining figuration and symbolism to communicate complex and highly charged psychological, sociological and emotional experiences.

Where I End and You Begin explores the friction between isolation and connection, asking where the self stops and the other starts. While each artist works within a distinct medium and thematic focus, their individual voices unite to reflect modern vulnerability in an increasingly hyper-connected yet deeply isolating world. Whether working in textiles, printmaking, painting, or sculpture, each artist creates dreamlike, enigmatic figures suspended between reality and imagination—communicating through expressive proportions, colors, symbols, and narrative ambiguity.

Borrowing its title from a haunting Radiohead track, Where I End and You Begin interrogates proximity and boundaries, setting a psychic undertone that reverberates through the physical space. Rejecting exhibition hierarchies, the installation assembles the works in an unconventionally tight, irregular, high-and-low layout. These unpredictable spaces invite viewers to make their own connections. This contrasting, at times claustrophobic arrangement mirrors the sociological unease of modern existence. However, this compression also sparks an intimate dialogue, compelling the pieces to bridge their gaps and discover a collective power. While some works lean into dystopian discomfort, others are brightly tinged with humor, hope, and levity. Together, they confront our shared humanness, balancing vitality against the weight of existential and political dread. Ultimately, they navigate a fragile place in nature and time, as well as our sense of self and others.

What materializes is a collection of artworks that possess a magnetic, uncanny energy. This grouping creates a dense force of diverse points of view, each carrying a profound message to share. The gallery feels charged with a secret vitality, as if these uneasy figures are merely holding still for the viewer and will spring to life the moment the lights go out and the doors are locked. Ultimately, these works remind us of “the gap where we meet,” and that these altered reflections of the self or the other are bits and pieces of us all.

Liv Aanrud lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Her hand-tufted textiles are an attempt to slow time, to hold fast in a world that is impossible to keep up with. Each second while making becomes tangible, ticked up in a stitch, and a tapestry becomes a tactile record of her days. Repetition and the rhythm of creation is a necessary retreat, an expansive place where there is an opportunity to daydream. Time to consider that perhaps yarn is really just a rolled up line…that can become a soft drawing...that resembles a painting. Or that a figure can contain a whole world, and every face tells a story.

Julia Curran lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Her multi-layered mixed-media compositions combine printmaking and painting, casting Mother Nature as a mischievous propagator of decomposition and regeneration, as well as opener of portals between worlds. A storyteller, she is interested in what happens to a society that separates the brain from the body, and sees itself as divorced from the rest of the natural world. Rooted in female Surrealism, anatomical prints, and Danse Macabre woodcuts, her work invites us to dig into our inner depths to reconnect with the substance of ourselves, our environment, and each other. Using soil as a powerful metaphor for transformation, her complex work calls for time to digest and asks what parts of ourselves can be reborn if we allow our most destructive parts to break down into fertile mulch.

Jon Huck was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. His paintings and sculptures are a way of finding things he couldn't have imagined beforehand, allowing shapes, colors, and images to emerge through intuition, accident, and revision. His ambiguous figures exist somewhere between human, animal, and object, carrying expressions that feel deeply familiar yet resist easy narrative interpretation. He looks for simple forms that can carry complex feelings—a crooked posture, an awkward expression—where a face can be humorous, uneasy, vulnerable, or absurd all at once. Embracing diverse mediums from collage to animation, his practice values spontaneity and the possibility of surprise, creating work that occupies a space that is both familiar and slightly off balance—funny, tender, mysterious, and quietly human.

Natalie Shapero lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Her latest book is StayDead (2025), longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Natalie’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books,The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at University of California, Irvine. 

The opening and closing receptions are open to the public. The artists will all be in attendance. For press and sales inquiries, appointments, previews, or a checklist of the artwork, please contact info@TheMiddleRoomGallery.com.

The Middle Room is open by appointment and on Saturdays and Sundays from 1-3pm while the exhibition is on view.