Driftwork explores the power of remnants at the Southern Guild gallery, Los Angeles

Southern Guild presents Driftwork, a new group exhibition curated by writer and art curator Essence Harden, on view from November 14, 2025 – January 10, 2026, at its Los Angeles gallery. Bringing together 11 contemporary artists working across painting, photography, sculpture art, installation and mixed media, Driftwork begins with the notion of remnants—material, psychic and historical—to shape new forms of knowledge and imagination. The exhibition features work by Zalika Azim, Sandra Brewster, Sydney Cain, Janiva Ellis, Shaniqwa Jarvis, Anique Jordan, Lebohang Kganye, Nandipha Mntambo, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Sidony O’Neal and Jasmine Thomas-Girvan.

“Driftwork begins with the notion of remnants: fragments that persist after departure, traces that endure past erasure, impressions that hover in the space between consciousness and reverie,” notes Southern Guild, foregrounding the show in an official release. Across the art exhibition, remnants appear as “archival traces, chemical imprints, ghostly echoes and ritual gestures”, each becoming a site where social history, institutional memory and diasporic experience collide. “They are scraped into canvases, stitched into fragile paper, blurred in image, conjured in shadow and silhouette, and mapped across analogue, digital and sonic registers,” the gallery continues.

For the contemporary art show, the artists take up remnants as both material and method. Toronto-based Jordan reimagines erased histories through what she calls ‘impossible images’, turning archival absences into speculative portals. Nigeria and Texas-based Ogunji stitches, cuts and traces delicate surfaces, mapping rituals shaped by longing and apparition. American painter Ellis erodes and scrapes her canvases, revealing fractured layers that balance ruin with ‘uneasy illumination’. San Francisco-based Cain conjures spectral graphite drawings that flicker like apparitions.

Other artists work through reconstruction and reconfiguration. Photographer Jarvis transforms images into collaged fragments that acknowledge both rupture and repair. O’Neal from Portland builds provisional systems from fragments, staging indeterminate spatial logics. South African artist Mntambo overlays abstract surfaces with gold leaf and shadow, examining hybridity and mythic transformation, while South Africa-based Kganye animates family archives into theatrical scenes. Sculptor Thomas-Girvan assembles salvaged and ornamental materials into sculptures that seem alive. Brewster, a Canadian artist, transfers images onto creased, ruptured surfaces, capturing diasporic motion and memory, whereas Afro-Caribbean American artist Azim creates ritual and kinetic gestures through everyday materials, grounding spiritual ascent in the familiar.

“Driftwork is permeated by a sense of reverie, where remains drift between material, psychic and social registers. These works are impressions, unsettled presences that invite audiences to move slowly, to sense what lingers at the edge of perception,” concludes Southern Guild.