"I’m definitely inspired by dance, and really, any kind of movement," Laura Berger told us in a feature in our print edition last year. "I’m not necessarily thinking of the figures as dancers or dancing, but I want them to be deep in their bodies and physically expressive. I try to use the positions that I’m painting as a way to visually render their psychologies, their inner lives."

Hashimoto Contemporary in Los Angeles is pleased to present Flight Path, a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Laura Berger. Returning for her third solo presentation with the gallery, the new body of oil paintings explore connection and the many facets of humanity.

The new paintings are "centered around constriction and escape to and from the various things that bind us -- our familial ties and histories, our personal narratives and relationships to ourselves and others, our environment, the human worldly experience versus the spiritual experience, or the unknown experience of what comes before and after this life." Each work is a glimpse at a memory or dream, offering open narratives that are at once familiar and unknowable.

Pathways are charted in each of the compositions through intimate gestures that transfer energy and emotions of the gathered figures, light and shadow become fluid passages connecting and dividing the intertwined women. A sense of tactility is present in each work, visualizing shade, sunlight, air currents, rippling water and physical touch between the paintings' subjects. The interconnected moments between the feminine figures and their natural, botanical surroundings are grounding, while the buoyancy of the freedom found in release pulls them forward.