Jimi Gleason "Landline" is now in the Laguna Art Museum Permanent Collection

Jimi gleason, Landline, 2023, silver nitrate, acrylic, canvas, 56”x80”

We're delighted to share that Jimi Gleason's Landline (2023) has been acquired for the permanent collection of the Laguna Art Museum.

At 56 × 80 inches, Landline is a striking example of Jimi's signature process: silver nitrate and acrylic on canvas, producing a surface that catches and shifts with the light so the painting is never quite the same twice. Laguna Art Museum has championed California artists for more than a century, and this acquisition places Jimi firmly within that lineage.

Museum recognition like this is a meaningful milestone in an artist's career, and we're proud to have supported Jimi's work.

Jimi gleason, Landline, 2023, silver nitrate, acrylic, canvas, 56”x80”

RADIANT TERRAINS

Among the exhibition highlights are works by Light and Space pioneers Peter Alexander, Craig Kauffman and Helen Pashgian; Anthony Friedkin’s photographs engaging the luminous movement of breaking waves; Stephen Hendee’s illuminated architectural environments; Lita Albuquerque’s explorations of celestial space; and Jay McCafferty’s solar-burn drawings. Together with paintings, photographs, installations and other works from the collection, the exhibition demonstrates the diverse ways artists have used light to alter, challenge and expand our understanding of the world around us.

The exhibition is curated by Tyler Stallings, a Southern California curator, writer and researcher who previously served as Chief Curator of Laguna Art Museum. Stallings has organized numerous exhibitions examining California and contemporary art and has curated several exhibitions drawn from the museum’s permanent collection.

Radiant Terrains is presented as part of Laguna Art Museum’s annual Art + Nature program, extending the initiative’s exploration of the natural environment through light, one of nature’s most fundamental and transformative elements. Throughout the exhibition, light creates connections between ocean and sky, body and landscape, scientific observation and spiritual reflection.

ABOUT LAGUNA ART MUSEUM

Laguna Art Museum exists to engage and enlighten people of all ages through art that embodies and preserves the California experience. Laguna Art Museum presents exhibitions relevant to California art and artists throughout the year and is home to the annual Art & Nature Festival celebrating the museum’s unique relationship to the environment.  In 2025, Laguna Art Museum served a record-high 21,000 people during Art + Nature. This year's festival begins on September 19, 2026 with the Radiant Terrains exhibition from the Permanent Collection, which will be on view September 19, 2026 through January 10, 2027.

Jimi Gleason’s 2025 exhibition Vapor Wave at William Turner Gallery

Jimi Gleason turns painting into a shifting register of its surroundings. Using silver nitrate and acrylic, he creates luminous surfaces that reflect, distort, and partially absorb the viewer and the gallery around them. Light glides across the painting's metallic skin, producing subtle shifts in color and tone as viewers change position. Rather than functioning as a conventional mirror, the work returns a softened, fragmented reflection, making the viewer an active participant in the painting itself.

Gleason's layered surfaces oscillate between mirror-like clarity and pearlescent opacity, never settling into a single image. His practice shares affinities with Helen Pashgian's perceptual investigations, yet where Pashgian embeds light within translucent materials, Gleason allows it to remain on the surface. Nearby, Jennifer Bolande similarly redirects attention to the act of looking itself, reminding us that perception is continually shaped by light, movement, and our own presence.

Tyler Stallings - Guest Curator - Radiant Terrains

JIMI GLEASON: Vapor Wave - Digital Exhibition Catalog

Santa Monica, CA - William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Vapor Wave, a solo exhibition by Jimi Gleason,  opening April 5 and running through May 31, 2025.

Vapor Wave is Jimi Gleason’s most ambitious body of work to date. Utilizing a rich vocabulary of materials and styles, Gleason has built up gossamer thin layers of iridescent paint to create a series of paintings that are engagingly enigmatic. They confirm an artist at the height of his talent, confidently exploring the power of nuance and understated expression.

In this new series, vaporous ribbons of color play across lustrous surfaces that morph and shift as one engages them. The effect elicits a sense of unexpected revelry - much like the kind one might experience gazing across a lake in a predawn moment, captivated by the growing light as it caresses and undulates across the water’s surface.

And like water, Gleason’s surfaces are quietly in motion, their iridescent paints subtly shifting in hue as light plays across them. In some of the canvases, sharp diagonals bifurcate the compositions, providing dramatic structural rifts to these ethereal surfaces. The effect is a hypnotic and prismatic visual structure, where light, color and form intersect in ever-changing play. Gleason has a uniquely personal connection to water: he grew up surfing, and took up rowing in college. When he talks about his work he also talks about, “the way the light looks underwater,” and early mornings rowing when the calm water reflects the sky at dawn. 

Like many artists working in the Light and Space arena, materials and their catalytic visual effects are essential to their work. In Gleason’s case, he employs silver nitrate and pearlescent paints to activate his surfaces, which catch and reflect surrounding light, further engaging one’s sense of the surrounding space. Gleason is a leader in that next generation of Southern California artists to work in the Light and Space ethos, carrying the dialogue forward and using his work of art to explore the phenomenological properties of perception.

Born in Newport Beach, CA, Gleason received his BA from UC Berkeley in 1985. He studied printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute before relocating to New York City, where he worked as a photo assistant and technician. Returning to California, Gleason was employed in the studio of Ed Moses for five years. Combining the disparate technical and compositional skills developed during his exposure to printmaking, photography and mixed media painting, Gleason is now the subject of considerable curatorial and critical attention. 

Gleason’s work is exhibited in significant public institutions, including the Hammer Museum, the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, the Long Beach Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Tucson Museum of Art.The artist’s paintings are actively collected by a growing number of major public and private collections around the world.