Charlie James Gallery

About the Gallery
Charlie James Gallery was formed and opened in 2008 in Chinatown, Los Angeles, and is owned and directed by Charlie James, a collector turned gallerist who had a background in CRM application consulting at Microsoft and other companies before opening the business. The gallery’s ethos asserts that art should engage with the time of its making, and is known for platforming work of significant political and cultural engagement. In the gallery’s early years subversive text-based work and institutional critique were emphasized, largely in response to the trend of Neo-modernist abstract painting. In 2013 the gallery started working with Ramiro Gomez (now Jay Lynn Gomez) which was a catalyst for significant growth and focus for the gallery. With and following Jay Lynn, the gallery has established a strong reputation for platforming and historicizing numerous young artists from Los Angeles and beyond such as Patrick Martinez, Narsiso Martinez, Shizu Saldamando, Danie Cansino, Lucia Hierro, and Manuel Lopez. The gallery also works with mature career artists of strong reputation including Nancy Buchanan, John Ahearn, Lee Quiñones and Erika Rothenberg. The gallery is regarded for its success in placing works by our artists in esteemed museum collections ranging from the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the LA County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, MoCA LA, the MFA Boston, the Walker Art Center, and many others. The gallery operates out of two spaces on Chung King Road in Los Angeles, California.

About the presentation
Charlie James Gallery will exhibit Danie Cansino’s chiaroscuro paintings on wood panel and Mexican serape cloth, interspersed with ballpoint drawings. Cansino describes her work as a love letter to her Chicanx culture and community in Los Angeles. Her subjects are drawn from her family and close friends and their shared geography around Calvary Cemetery in east LA. Building upon a legacy of Mexican magical realism, the paintings blend time periods and conflate the spiritual with the real. The presentation will focus on Cansino’s landscapes supported by portraiture and still lifes.