Greg ‘CRAOLA’ Simkins’ seventh solo exhibition with the gallery invites viewers into The Middle, a liminal world where memory and imagination collide. This collection of paintings and drawings unfolds a dreamscape shaped by surreal logic, childhood wonder, and the fractured architecture of lived experience. Recurring characters—trickster creatures, hybrid animals, and symbolic figures—navigate fragmented landscapes made of crumbling walls, graffiti, and fantastical flora emerging from flesh.
Simkins’ animals take on new roles: pandas become jokesters or soothsayers; rodents and invertebrates act as cunning guides; fish defy gravity by floating into space; birds perch on remnants of broken concrete marked with faded tags and vintage cartoons. These figures exist in a mythology rooted in both urban street culture and subconscious storytelling, blending elements from graffiti, comics, and personal memory into a vibrant, magical reality.
The exhibition’s centerpiece painting, also titled The Middle, presents a lush, interrupted ecosystem where time seems suspended between transformations. Graffiti-covered wall fragments litter the scene, symbolizing the artist’s origins in Southern California’s graffiti culture and serving as memorials to past boundaries broken. A red-caped hero atop a giant blue bird offers a shining pearl—an emblem of hope and freedom echoed by the many birds scattered throughout the work.
The show explores dynamic contrasts: the sacred and the scrawled, wildness and weariness, youthful imagination and mature reflection. It is not about neat conclusions but about reckoning with the past and present, where characters from previous narratives return to remember and confront history. These cracked walls and spectral markings function as both visual anchors and metaphors for the traces that history leaves behind, even within worlds shaped by fantasy and invention.
Simkins describes The Middle as “a place of forgotten memories and stepping-stones layered in graffiti and vestiges from the past.” The exhibition serves as a personal archaeology, revealing the artist’s creative origins through a fantastical lens. It brings together childhood wonder, street-born rebellion, painterly precision, and mythic storytelling into a singular, immersive experience where imagination and memory merge.
