Subliminal Projects is pleased to present Earthquake Country, a solo exhibition by Echo Park-based artist Rob Sato, featuring a new body of drawings, paintings, and collaborative textile works. Rooted in his daily drawing and dream documentation practice, Sato explores the tension between the chaotic forces that shape our existence and the need for rest and restoration. With a layered interplay of humor, horror, and beauty, the exhibition is both a personal reflection and a broader meditation on the literal and metaphorical tremors that define contemporary life.
“Rob Sato’s art lives in a thrilling zone where seductive, colorful, surreal landscapes invite exploration but paradoxically hint at ominous bad trips lurking over the horizon," Subliminal Projects owner Shepard Fairey notes. "Sato’s paintings conjure Willy Wonka’s edible candy garden where the fine line between delicious and deadly is crucial to the mystery and adventure.”
Set against the backdrop of his career in illustration and animation, and rocked by tectonic cultural shifts as seen through the window of Echo Park, Los Angeles, his home and creative base for nearly two decades, Earthquake Country is a homecoming for Sato. “Drawing is my main source of play and my main tool for seeing and thinking,” the artist reflects, “This body of work is marked by a period of trying to commune with the world I encounter every day, and to make art more intuitively than ever.” Blending figuration, abstraction, and experimentation, Sato excavates the paradoxes of sleep through dreamy, fragmented compositions that fluctuate between the coexistence of life’s volatile cycles and languor.
Underscoring the importance of grounding in community and place, the exhibition also highlights Sato’s collaborations with local artists, including Subliminal Projects alumni Ako Castuera, multidisciplinary artist Rosie Brand, and natural dye expert Graham Keegan, whose contributions translate Sato’s drawings and paintings into textiles. The interdisciplinary works presented in Earthquake Country are both a reckoning and a release- an invitation to rest, reflect, and reimagine as we shift within spiritual, physical, and cultural unrest.
