Matriarchs: Featuring Adrienne Kinsella, Amy Smith, Connie Roldan, Melly Trochez, Rosalyn Myles, Sophia Gasparian

LAUNCH LA is proud to present Matriarchs, a group exhibition featuring six women artists whose practices reflect on the intertwined relationships between nature, culture, and regeneration. Bringing together works by, Sophia Gasparian, Adrienne Kinsella, Rosalyn Myles, Constanza Roldán, Amy Smith, and Melly Trochez, the exhibition explores the creative and philosophical power of the matriarchal lens as a means of renewal and resistance. This exhibition is curated by Steve Galindo.

Through a diverse range of materials - including painting, installation, street art, and assemblage - Matriarchs reimagines creation as an act of reclamation. Each artist engages with earthly elements and lived experience to question systems of commodification, displacement, and environmental imbalance, offering in their place visions of care, equality, and regeneration.

"Matriarchs honors the feminine as a regenerative force," says curator Steve Galindo. "Each artist works from a deep relationship with land, ancestry, and community, weaving narratives that speak to survival, reverence, and rebirth. Together, their works invite viewers to reconsider their own role in nurturing balance within the natural and social worlds around them.”

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
In her practice, Constanza Roldán draws from classical mythology to explore how ancient narratives continue to echo within contemporary life. Through painting and ceramic sculpture, she reinterprets mythic moments - acts of transformation, resilience, and tenderness - as reflections on modern ideas of power, identity, and belonging. For Matriarchs, Bejarano engages with feminine archetypes not only as symbols of authority or motherhood, but as complex, deeply human figures. Her whimsical and figurative imagery bridges the sacred and the everyday, suggesting that mythology remains a living, shifting language through which we can understand change, connection, and contradiction.

Los Angeles-based artist Sophia Gasparian is known for her wheatpasted images of young women that celebrate the feminine spirit while confronting patriarchal and elitist structures within contemporary art. Through accessible, street-based imagery and bold feminist messaging, Gasparian's installation amplifies issues of women's rights, immigrant experience, and equality, transforming urban language into a shared visual activism. In Matriarchs, her work resonates as a public declaration of visibility and empowerment.

A descendant of the Tongva people of Los Angeles, Adrienne Kinsella's paintings and drawings collapse time and place in a continual search for belonging. Through self-portraiture and native botanicals, she reflects on heritage, memory, and ecological continuity, illuminating her ancestral presence within the contemporary cityscape. Her work in Matriarchs honors the unseen connections between place, identity, and healing, situating the feminine as both witness and caretaker of land and lineage.

Rosalyn Myles constructs powerful installations from recycled wood, fabric, text, and found materials. Her assemblages serve as layered narratives exploring womanhood, race, and survival in American society. Within Matriarchs, Myles reclaims discarded histories, transforming fragments of the past into structures of visibility and empowerment that speak to resilience, memory, and community renewal.

Through her immersive installation Persephone's Revenge, Amy Smith envisions a post-collapse world seeking balance through matriarchal wisdom. Using handmade and salvaged materials - paper, moss, dirt, and wood - Smith creates a symbolic temple of transformation where destruction gives way to renewal. Her work critiques greenwashing and overconsumption while inviting viewers into a meditative space of reflection and reconnection with nature's cycles.

Melly Trochez examines the commodification of Latino culture and the erasure of community identity through gentrification. Her works draw from urban storefronts and symbolic signage to critique cultural appropriation and displacement, asserting the right to self-representation. Within Matriarchs, Trochez's practice underscores the necessity of reclaiming voice and visibility in the face of social and economic oppression, emphasizing autonomy and cultural preservation as acts of resistance.