Artist spotlight | November 9 to 12, 2026 · Artist of the week | November 9 to 16

Fallon Lavertue

A stone can keep you company. For Fallon Lavertue, the rocks carried from New Hampshire to California became a way to think about distance, memory and the people a place holds. In Glyphs and Stones at solo. in San Pedro, that private attachment becomes painting: a familiar weight made strange.

Things that stay

Lavertue was born in 2002 and earned her painting BFA at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2024. She is now an MFA candidate at CalArts. That move across the country matters to the work. In her account of Hard Place, her earlier CalArts exhibition, stones are reliable companions: objects whose lives stretch far beyond her own. Painting them gives her a way to return to a place without pretending she is still there.

The exhibition text for Glyphs and Stones describes river rocks kept in the studio, some wrapped in black cord or copper wire using fishing-net techniques. They are objects to handle and subjects to paint. The shift between the real stone and its image keeps the work from becoming a simple landscape souvenir. A rock can be both an ordinary thing and a container for a very particular memory.

Sources: artist biography, artist CV, and the exhibition text published by Curate LA.

A room, before

The earlier room makes the relationship easy to see. A stone form spreads across two canvases on the wall; smaller objects rest on a low platform. The gap between the panels interrupts the image, while the floor pieces insist on their own physical presence. The installation is useful context for the new show, not evidence of how solo. is hung.

Ron Linden's text for Glyphs and Stones points to another register: muted, brushy grounds interrupted by floating marks, which he compares to glyphs in military UFO imagery. The paintings move between something held in the hand and something impossible to locate. Our interest is in that unstable scale: the small, stubborn rock and the uncertain space around it.

Look slowly

Lavertue lets layers dry before adding the next. In the exhibition text, she describes resisting the pressure to arrive at an image too quickly. That patience is a good way into the work. Look at a whole painting, then its seams and edges. What first reads as a solid object can start to feel more like a remembered one.

Visit solo.

Founded by artist Peter Scherrer in fall 2024, solo. gives one artist a room for an extended look. Its stated focus is the work, the artist and what the work is about. That makes it a fitting setting for paintings that ask for time rather than a quick read.

Gallery background: solo.. Further work: Lavertue at CalArts Expo. All images above stay with the artist and gallery through official Instagram embeds; original posts remain available through the captions.