Window Dressing

A window display
^{Badly Licked Bear, CASSANDRA, Spring 2020}

WINDOW DRESSING is an annual cycle of short-term installations presented in the exterior vitrine of the Cerritos College Art Gallery

Previous Cycles:
SPRING 2018 | SPRING 2019 | SPRING 2020 | FALL 2021 | FALL 2022 | SPRING 2024 | SPRING 2025

- SPRING 2026 -

Kiki Jia Qi Zhen
POSTURE
Jan 11 – Jan 24, 2026

As a first-generation Chinese-American artist, Kiki Jia Qi Zhen has regularly experienced cross-cultural clashes, as well as inter-generational tensions. In her search for an understanding of what it means to belong to a multicultural American, she creates work that alludes to this simultaneous, and often conflicting, sense of the familiar and the unfamiliar, of connection and displacement. Across her performances, sculptures, and site-specific installations, Zhen reflects upon diasporic experiences of migration, memory, and trauma; in particular the ways each manifest for her, as a member of the Chinese diaspora. Her Window Dressing installation, POSTURE, pulls from a number of recent works that investigate functional objects – such as beds, chairs, and stools – associated with being physically stationary. These cultural artifacts, and the attendant formulaic non-movements they engender, grabble with the complexities of individual bodies, repetitive gestures, and the influence of the collective unconscious. For example, one sculptural piece within the installation, Yearning Support, draws from the squatting posture widely associated with Asian bodies, a gesture that has been flattened into stereotype through generalization. The work reclaims this pose as a site of embodied knowledge, interrogating how cultural practices are misread, named, and fixed. A related work, the cheekily-titled sculpture, Potty-Trained, challenges the cultural hierarchy of hygiene by merging two iconic toilet types: the "luxury" of a padded Western porcelain throne with the tiled humility of the squat toilet. By fusing comfort with discomfort, the piece pokes fun at the Western gaze that often deems squat toilets as primitive or inferior. This hybrid form becomes a tongue-in-cheek monument to bodily function, cultural bias, and the absurd politics of what we consider “proper” design. It asks: what does it really mean to be civilized and who decides? Another piece, Kin-Kin, emerges from the familiar object of immigrant circulation, the shopping bag, as a vessel of movement, labor, and survival. Its material logic is rearticulated into a limited, yet mutable form, hovering between furniture and shelter, permanence and impermanence. A final piece, Merged Scheme, is composed of multiple segments and structures that together create a form both familiar and ambiguous. While each part suggests a potential function, their assembly resists clear utility, inviting viewers to question purpose and perception. Echoing the form of a folding bed, the work unfolds in shifting configurations, with each segment acting like a limb as flexible, interdependent, and unstable on its own. This piece, like the installation as a whole, explores themes of fragmentation, adaptability, and the tension between structure and uncertainty, presenting a body in flux that never fully settles into a single, fixed state.
_{Kiki Jia Qi Zhen is an interdisciplinary artist from Guangdong, China, whose practice
reflects both direct and inherited experiences of immigration. Working through performance,
sculpture, and site-specific installation, her work engages trauma, memory, and storytelling
as these surface through form, gesture, and material. Central to her practice is an
attention to intergenerational complexity. How displacement, care, and survival are
negotiated within the body and across time as a first-generation immigrant. Her work
has been presented at institutions including the Cleve Carney Museum of Art, Museum
of Contemporary Art Chicago, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Irvine Fine Arts
Center, as well as at artist-run and alternative spaces like Woman Made Gallery and
5 Points Art Gallery. Her practice has been featured in publications such as MAAKE
MAG, Friend of the Artist, Studio Visit Magazine, Floorr Magazine, and EMERGENCY INDEX.
She was a 2024 Grantee for The Billboard Creative. Zhen received a BFA in Studio Arts
from the University of Illinois at Chicago.}

Joy Ray
THE GHOST KINGDOM
Jan 25 – Feb 7, 2026

“The past is a field of possibility.”
– José Estaban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

“How does one tell impossible stories?”
– Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts

In 1979, psychologist Betty Jean Lifton coined the term “Ghost Kingdom” to describe the speculative world that adopted people dream into being in the absence of factual information about their identities and backgrounds. This mysterious world is populated by what-if’s, what-could-have-been’s, and what-might-be’s, a panoply of ghostly figures and infinite possibilities that can never be truly resolved. The artist Joy Ray is one of those adoptees, whose origin story is a black box that I can never open. Her Window Dressing installation, THE GHOST KINGDOM, brings this haunting experience to life through a range of archival materials, text, soft sculptures, and video, allowing viewers to viscerally experience the uncanny reality that is adoption. One wall is covered in black fabric with hand-painted white text sources from personal archival records and historical documents pertaining to adoption. Hanging white soft sculptures, evoking spectral bodies, slouch and sway in front of this textual backdrop. Around the corner, hidden behind more black fabric, is a darkened space containing a single video projection, visible through strategically placed peekholes of various sizes, shapes, and heights. The video, stitched together from found footage, explores such interconnecting phenomena as dark matter, Derrida’s hauntology, spectral photography, incomplete archives, and the ruins of language. Mimicking the inherently incomplete experience of the adoptee, the video, and the installation as a whole, emphasizes the productive melancholy that follows from any concerted inquiry into the mysterious, the fragmentary, and the unknowable.
_{Joy Ray is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher who lives and works
in Los Angeles. Ray uses installation, textiles, and digital media to investigate
the palpable presence of the unknown, unseen, redacted, illegible, uncanny, and haunted.
Central to Ray’s research into the unknowable are methods of abstraction, concealment,
illumination, and reconstitution that extract visual language from archival texts.
Ray’s research-based installations activate the poetics of archival material, bringing
ghosts to life. Her work has been featured at Hauser & Wirth (NY, 2025), the MCA (Chicago,
IL, 2025), the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University (NY, 2025), BravinLee (NY,
2024), Patricia Sweetow (LA, 2024), the Museum of Art and History (Lancaster, CA,
2023), the Hawaiʻi State Art Museum (Honolulu, 2020), and the Museum of Quilts and
Textiles (San Jose, CA, 2018). Ray’s work has been recognized with prestigious residencies,
including Vermont Studio Center (Full Fellowship, 2025), Ragdale (2025), and Virginia
Center for the Creative Arts (2025). Ray’s practice and exhibitions have been featured
in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, and Harper’s Magazine. Joy
Ray holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Sarah
Lawrence College.}

Amy Zapata
BODEGONES AND STREET LIGHTS
Feb 8 – Feb 21, 2026

In many urban and industrial regions throughout Southern California, especially those inhabited by Black and Brown communities of color, the local liquor store often becomes both a touchstone and lifeline. These family-owned local tienditas, like the well-known bodegas on the East Coast, supply underserved communities that are regularly overlooked and ignored by larger commercial interests, providing everyday essentials from clothes to medicine, from household items to party supplies, and, of course, food and drinks, even if only the hyper-processed variety. Often, they provide more than just material goods too; they also provide community, serving as a central hub where otherwise disconnected community members can interact. Histories of racist redlining and the way freeway construction frequently segregates formerly-integrated neighborhoods from one another, has made these local stores all the more significant over time. For her Window Dressing installation, BODEGONES AND STREET LIGHTS, photographer Amy Zepata presents a simulated version of the familiar retail displays found at so many of these little local shops, complete with the usual assortment of potato chip bags, candy bars, sex pills, lottery tickets, and beer bottles. LED lights, mimicking neon signage, illuminate these quotidian commodities, many of which are replicated only as photographs, a playful nod to the historic genre known as bodegón, a hyper-realistic painted still life from 17th century Spain and Mexico, in which objects like uncooked food, kitchen utensils, and various other household items are presented in a formal arrangement against a backdrop of nondescript humble surroundings.
_{Amy Zapata is a photographer, installation artist, and documentary filmmaker working
between San Bernardino and Los Angeles. Her documentary work has been shown internationally
and throughout Los Angeles and New York. Much of her photography and video work focuses
on her hometown on San Bernardino, emphasizing the neighborhoods and people, though
other projects, such as the ongoing multimedia art event, Pochx, have focused on highlighting
Southern California’s queer Latinx communities, including the drag scene in DTLA.
Her film, Genderfuck, won the Best Documentary at IFF in 2024 and she has served as
an Artist-in-Residence at Arquetopia in Puebla, Mexico, since 2022.}

Shannon Freshwater
TOTAL WINNER
Feb 22 – Mar 7, 2026

Very important work. Some say the most important. You look at it and you see it. Tremendous depth. The most depth. People everywhere are saying it. Nobody has seen anything like it. Really first class. Unbelievable quality. The most quality. Believe me, people can't stop talking. It's huge. Nobody does depth like this.

Shannon Freshwater grew up in Las Vegas, but she has lived in the Los Angeles area since 2005, and her work combines both the theatricality of Hollywood and the kitsch of Vegas. She is interested in façades and the illusionary membrane between truth and fiction, exploring these themes through video performance, installation, and sculpture. For her Window Display, TOTAL WINNER, she explores the aesthetics of fascism, particularly in context of the return to Rococo opulence, pointing a finger at the fraudulent and performative spectacle of it all. Pieces in the installation reflect an imitation of elegance that is marked by gilded surfaces, lavish yet hollow decorations, and exaggerated neoclassical monstrosities all serving as empty symbols. By poking fun at this aesthetic, she aims to critique the superficiality, excess, and incongruities found within this present moment, inviting viewers to reflect on the cultural meanings and implications behind such symbols. A custom damask wallpaper inspired by the Oval Office covers the walls, but upon closer inspection, hidden patterns resembling demonic faces create an unsettling psychological atmosphere. On the left side of the long window, a handmade inflatable eagle, made from found trash bags and grocery bags, emphasizing the idea of corruption and waste, pushes into the display, obstructing the wall behind, awkwardly and clumsily filling the volume of the space. To the right of the eagle, a screen in the place of a portrait displays a video depicting the artist as a “trad wife,” holding a fake baby, baking and eating a pie, along with other tropes. Consistent with the artist’s previous videos, elements of camp, humor, and absurdity abound, presenting a feminist critique of what appears to be an otherwise regressive form of femininity. Displayed in the corner of the window is a giant chandelier. Instead of crystals, it is made up of hundreds of tiny plastic pieces taken from used bottles, tin foil, gold-sprayed hula hoop parts, and trash. Despite its utterly mundane materials, the chandelier is still lit to emphasize its grandeur and sheen. On the short wall, a second video is displayed, a variation on the first. Spray painted gold trophies and small sculptures mimicking those on display in the Oval Office are scattered and piled on the floor. The large collection of trophies will be made from fast food containers and trash spray-painted gold. Thrift store and dollar store tchotchkes covered in gold become empty symbols of wealth and power. A plethora of golden wall appliques made from cardboard fill any and all empty space left on both walls, reflective of a maximalist horror vacui. Columns are constructed from gold-painted Home Depot buckets, with cardboard tubes painted a faux marble. The pieces for this exhibit are made with precision, but the installation itself feels slightly awkward, as if it could fall apart at any moment, revealing the fragility of authority and accentuating this pantomime of elegance.
_{Shannon Freshwater resides in Los Angeles, having spent her formative years in Las
Vegas. The distinctive and exaggerated landscapes of both places have left a lasting
impact on her work as she focusses on the disruptions within conventional paradigms
and explores the tension between objects, characters, spaces, and timelines that appear
familiar yet are challenging to place within established historical contexts. She
received her MFA from Cal State University Long Beach and BFA from Art Center College
of Design. She has received a Center for Cultural Innovation Artist Grant and held
a residency at the Camera Obscura Art Lab in Santa Monica. Her work has been included
in solo and group exhibitions at Durden and Ray, Cal State Long Beach, Ice House Arts
Complex, La Luz de Jesus, Torrance Art Museum, Giant Robot, Hey There Projects, Avenue
50 Studios, Sp[a]ce Gallery, Jen Tough Gallery, and Jonathan Levine Gallery. She currently
teaches at Cal State University Northridge and Art Center College of Design.}

Sunyoung Lee
LIQUID BORDERS | LIQUID ARCHITECTURE
Mar 8 – Mar 21, 2026

LIQUID BORDERS, Sunyoung Lee’s site-specific Window Dressing installation, transforms the exterior glass vitrine into a liminal painterly construction -- an environment where social, material, and emotional borders become permeable. The work unfolds along the interior edge of the glass façade, moving across the short wall and spilling onto the floor before extending toward the long wall, creating a continuous spatial flow. This iteration on the artist’s ongoing LIQUID ARCHITECTURE series incorporates small envelope-folded canvas pieces -- made from denim and canvas – interwoven with blue pigments. Denim -- worn across gender, race, age, and profession -- functions as a democratic fabric that softens social hierarchies. By integrating this everyday material into the architectural surface, the installation bridges personal and structural levels, linking everyday life to social discourse. A second layer of semi-transparent printed film on the glass presents a digitally rendered abstraction of Los Angeles’s urban terrain. Seen from the campus walkway, this exterior layer merges with the denim-canvas structure inside, forming an ever-changing visual border between the college buildings and the gallery within. As light changes throughout the day, and into the night, the film and the interior canvas overlap and separate, generating a dynamic interplay of opacity, transparency, and reflection. Conceptually, the work responds to the physical and emotional traces of borders -- lines that divide yet inevitably connect. By merging democratic materials, painterly surfaces, and urban mapping, LIQUID BORDERS opens a space for viewers to consider contemporary issues of migration, separation, and belonging. Visible from both sides of the glass, the installation echoes the dual perspective of those who look through and those at whom are being looked.
_{Sunyoung Lee is a multidisciplinary painter whose practice bridges painting, architecture,
and literature. Drawing from her background in these disciplines, she explores how
social and spatial discourses, along with forms of habitation, shape perception. Through
her notion of liquid architecture -- a painterly space --. Her work engages canonical
architectures as conceptual counterparts to everyday spaces, constructing fluid dialogues
between structure and image. Working between abstract painting and architectural drawing,
Lee transforms the canvas into text and object -- adding, deconstructing, and reassembling
its modular units into architectural installations. For Lee, painting is a manifesto
-- translating emotional structures, the zeitgeist, and traces of lived experience
into visual form. Her work has been exhibited at San Fernando Valley Arts, Kavanagh
Gallery of Fine Arts in St. Charles, the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, Laguna Art Gallery,
Workhouse Arts Center, Spark Gallery, and Edgewood Gallery. Lee holds a MS in Architecture
from UC Berkeley and a MFA in Painting from Syracuse University, as well as a BFA
in Painting from Hong-ik University and a BA in English and English Literature from
Pusan National University. She has served as an Instructor at Texas A&M University
and an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Pittsburgh.
Lee currently lives and works in Los Angeles, where she serves as Assistant Professor
of Drawing and Painting at California State University, Northridge.}

Devin Wilson
WHALE OIL
Mar 22 – Apr 4, 2026

Over millions of years, immense heat and pressure slowly compresses decaying organic material into crude oil and what used to be living organisms becomes the fuel that powers industry. Oil rises to the surface. Buried deep under the ocean, non-renewable resources are extracted, refined, and burned to generate energy. Devin Wilson’s Window Dressing installation, WHALE OIL, is part of his ongoing series, Beneath the Surface, which looks below the crust of the earth at the relationship between fossil fuels, prehistoric marine life, and mechanical systems. Suspended from the ceiling of the gallery, like a specimen in a natural history museum, is a mechanical whale skeleton. The remains of the Dorudon Atrox, a creature that once dominated the prehistoric oceans, are hoisted like a vehicle under repair. The work hybridizes the vertebrae of the skeleton with the chamber and piston layout of a 4-cylinder engine, aligning fossil structure with the mechanics of combustion. This work does not attempt to revive the whale, but rather maps how the logic of the engine is directly tied to the geological and biological remains it consumes. Before petroleum extraction, whale oil served as one of the primary fuels for industrial production. The carcasses of whales were rendered into a commodity to power lamps, factories, and early machinery, turning once-living marine life into an engine for human progress. The transition from whale oil to petroleum did not shift away from using death as fuel; it only exacerbated it. Oil rigs extract crude and natural gases that have been compressed under layers of sediment, transforming organic decay into energy. Pipelines, refineries, and gas stations extend this logic. Our engines still burn what once swam, grew, and breathed. WHALE OIL reimagines the gallery as both excavation site and speculative laboratory. The installation explores the contradictions of the Anthropocene, where human progress is inextricable from ecological collapse and ongoing forms of extinction.
_{Devin Wilson is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and digital fabricator based
in Southern California. Their work has been presented at UC Irvine’s University Art
Gallery and Beall Center for Art and Technology, David Horvitz Gallery, Pacific Design
Center, Phase Gallery, the Hollywood Hills House, Angels Gate Cultural Center, and
Human Resources. They hold a BFA in Sculpture from Boston University and a MFA from
the University of California, Irvine, where they served as a pedagogical scholar with
the Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation. Devin is a current Supercollider
SciArt Ambassador and was the recipient of the 2024–2025 Digital Residency at California
State University, Long Beach. They have served as a lecturer at UC San Diego, Cal
State Long Beach, Cal State San Marcos, and UC Irvine.}

A. Laura Brody
BANNED BOOKS AND PAPER PEOPLE
Apr 5 – Apr 18, 2026

A. Laura Brody sculpts for the human body and its vehicles. Having begun her professional career as a costume designer, her work continues to investigate bodies of all forms and capabilities, including developing wearable art projects. For her Window Dressing installation, BANNED BOOKS AND PAPER PEOPLE, Brody has developed new series of life-sized paper sculptures, reminiscent of those she designed for a gala event in 2017 celebrating the seventh season of the HBO TV show, Games of Thrones, and which are now on display at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Though paper is not her primary medium, for these costume sculptures, displayed on mannequins, she incorporates various paper-based materials such as wall paper, house wrap, damaged maps, old calendars, and other found and discarded documents. The new series developed for the window display, relevant in their presentation at an institution of higher learning built on freedom of inquiry and expression, focuses on characters from books that have recently been banned at numerous school and libraries throughout the United States. As Brody highlights, right now there are determined efforts to ban and censor books and educational materials across this country. Denying real history, eliminating access to differing viewpoints, and banning works that do not fit into a fundamentalist belief system is problematic, causing harm both immediate and over time. In the long term, children and young adults across America will not get access to alternative ideas about how the world and its people operate. This project is an opportunity to claim a new narrative by celebrating those banned books and introducing students to their characters in an unexpected way.
_{A. Laura Brody is the founder of Opulent Mobility, a series of exhibits that re-imagine
disability as opulent and powerful. She is also the host of Genius Teatime, a series
of talks that explore fascinating folks from all walks of life. Since 2023, her curatorial
work expanded with exhibits on the Goddess in all her forms and wearable art. Ms.
Brody is a skilled and innovative artist, curator, and educator who re-imagines disability
as something to celebrate, not fear. Along with her disability arts community she
builds opportunities and starts genuine conversations about diversity, access, and
inclusion. Brody began her professional career as a costume designer and maker, working
in film, television, opera, dance, and cosplay. She changed course many times, but
kept returning to art making, community learning, and social justice. Her artwork
has been shown at ACE/121 Gallery, Art Share LA, Brea Gallery, California State University
Northridge, the Charles River Museum of Industry, the Dora Stern Gallery, Ikouii Creative,
the Los Angeles Makery, Westbeth Center For the Arts, and The World of Wearable Art.
Opulent Mobility has shown at the Mike Curb Gallery at CSUN, Thymele Arts, Arts Unbound,
AVC Gallery, the Los Angeles Makery, USC's Hoyt Gallery, and Brand Library & Art Center.}