Manipulation: Featuring Delbar Azari, Richard Bruland, Courtney Colgan, & Lori Nielson

LAUNCH LA is proud to present recent works by Los Angeles based artists Delbar Azari, Richard Bruland, Courtney Colgan and Lori Nielson who handle materials and manipulate surfaces in unique and captivating ways. These paintings and mixed media works defy simple categorization and yield impressive examples of technical precision and inspiring beauty. Delbar Azari is a former electrical engineer whose art practice explores how light, color, and material shape perception and space. Years investigating the balance between the industrial and the organic reveal how reflective and translucent materials can evoke calm, stillness, and quiet movement. Richard Bruland uses only traditional methods and materials to produce acrylic paintings that not only draw people in, but will hold their own - even in this modern world of easy technological solutions. Courtney Colgan is interested in the quality of light. She observes light as it moves and changes in space and over time. Lori Nielson creates non-representational deep field paintings that are characterized by frenetic yet meditative layered abstractions.  

Please join us for the Opening Reception on Saturday. September 12th 6 – 9pm and at the Closing Reception and artist’s led walk-through on Saturday, October 10th at 4pm.

Delbar Azari explores the interplay of light color and diffusion. She presents wall mounted panels that transform continuously in response to light and the movement of the observer.

Though constructed from industrial materials, the panels radiate an unexpected softness. Their layered surfaces capture and diffuse light in ways that feel organic, even meditative. As one moves around them, color appears to shift from within, as though the work itself were breathing.

The pieces draw inspiration from the fleeting conditions of light and air along the Southern California coast, the glint of ocean waves, the soft gradient of the horizon, and the diffused fog that veils the Santa Monica Mountains. Rather than depicting these places, the work evokes the sensation of being suspended in time, where light and atmosphere become the true subjects. 

Ultimately, my intention is to create spaces for reflection and stillness; visual environments that resonate with nature’s rhythms while acknowledging the technological world from which their materials arise. ~ D.A.

Delbar Azair (b. Tehran, Iran; lives and works in Los Angeles, California) is a Los Angeles–based artist whose work explores how light, color, and material shape perception and space. Working within the lineage of California’s Light and Space movement, she creates wall-mounted panels that respond to their surroundings—subtly shifting in tone, depth, and reflection as light changes throughout the day.

Azari holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Tehran and a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California. Her dual background in art and engineering informs a precise and process-driven approach to fabrication, uniting technical rigor with a sensitivity to surface and atmosphere.

A Kipaipai Fellow, Azari has completed numerous site-specific commissions and exhibits her work nationally. She has also served on the board of the Topanga Canyon Gallery, contributing to the region’s creative community. Through her practice, she continues to expand the material and perceptual language of Light and Space in a contemporary context.

Richard Bruland uses acrylic paint to build up surfaces of panels, to later meticulously remove thin layers of paint to reveal abstract documentations of time and process.

Although structurally abstract, I think of my paintings in landscape terms. Focused on the transition from light to dark, and referring to the natural, or real world, they often infer a sense of ‘place.’ Clarity, and the use of color to achieve a certain psychological edge are of primary interest to me.   

My newest paintings are focused on smaller, more human scaled paintings on non-traditional supports that are meant to be picked up and held by the viewer. 

My paintings are neither issue-driven, nor an anthropological examination of cultural minutiae - but rather a very personal exploration of my own particular signatures. ~ R.B.

Richard Bruland was born in Lima, Peru and grew up in Geneva, Switzerland. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a graduate (BFA) of California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. He has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. For many years Bruland was represented in Los Angeles by Lora Schlesinger Gallery in Santa Monica until her retirement in  2021. From 1982 -1990 he was owner/operator of Bebop Records & Fine Art, a combination retail record store, art gallery, and performance place in Reseda, CA. Bebop regularly hosted shows by artists, musicians, and poets. 

The Richard Bruland Bebop Records & Fine Art Archives at California State University, Northridge, is now home to the over 800 individual hand-made posters Bruland made to support shows and events at Bebop, as well as other photos and memorabilia relating to Bebop. Bruland is married to artist Dori Atlantis, and works out of his studio in  their Silver Lake home. He teaches acrylic painting at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, and  lectures and speaks regularly about contemporary art in the Los Angeles area.

Courtney Colgan is interested in light, space and color relationships in the paradoxical industrial landscape that dictates color psychology and emotional response.

I am interested in the space where two colors meet and a blur emerges. In the blur is a mystifying pull. There is a sense that something is there.

In the paintings on canvas bright bold color pushes itself outwards from the edges towards the viewer. The edge serves as a suggestive space, where color pours back into and simultaneously pushes out from. These large areas of color create an expansive atmospheric space within the limits of the object itself. The emergence of color transcends a sensory experience. These paintings function beyond formal relationships and offer a space to consider an undefined force. Color is an energy that creates a presence. The paintings offer the viewer the experience of permeability through looking.

The possibility of new color relationships in a space that not only allows the perception to exist but to luminously vibrate drives my return. In a world where there are instant solutions to problems, painting makes you look, think and work. There is a discipline in the return to the studio and in the labor of process that brings stability and growth. Living in a fast paced, high-pressure society bears a psychological and emotional weight that dissipates in the process of creating new space through color relationships. Painting serves as a place to refocus. What truly matters becomes precedent again. The result is the connection to the mysterious unknown through painting. ~ C.C.

Courtney Colgan (b.1988 Linden, NJ; lives in Los Angeles, CA) is a contemporary artist whose work explores a state of emergence through light, color and materiality. Colgan grew up taking the train to New York City, closely observing the wetlands and swamps. The urban landscape was alluring in its paradoxical state. She took visual note of the synthetic colors seen in the water, harsh chemical smells, and overall muck. Stillness and motion, nature and industry, the power of opposites in a condensed space. 

In 2015 Colgan moved to Los Angeles, California and immediately noted a similar paradox in the coastal landscape. In the studio Colgan observes how the paint sits into or on top of the material and closely notes the moment something begins to emerge. In some works, color boldly pushes forward out of canvas. While in other works color seeps in from the edges and slowly dissipates across the surface. Colgan keeps the work in a state of emergence offering a viewer experience that transcends the sensorial.  Colgan continues her exploration of light, space and materials through the western landscape. Her work has been exhibited throughout Southern California. Outside the studio Colgan holds a 10+ year career in Fine Art Services and is an avid animal rights advocate.

Colgan earned a BFA in Painting with a minor in Art History from Pratt Institute in 2010, and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2026.

Lori Nielson uses meditative markings and effective, subtle gradations controlling light and depth to create magical atmospheres.

My paintings are simple in structure and driven by an additive process through which depth is gradually created. Color washes and white tones accumulate and compromise the previous layers until an archetypal darkness emerges within the composition’s depths. I work this way for the enjoyment of this process, the search for artistic meaning and to find a possible beauty that I can create. ~ L.N.

Lori Nielson grew up in Oxford, Ohio, and completed the BFA program at the Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University, Indianapolis. She then moved to California to pursue an MFA at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. 

After graduation she proceeded to live as an artist, while also working various jobs. She proudly resides in Alhambra where she focuses on her art practice.