VSF is pleased to present Solastalgia, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Jessie Homer French (b. 1940, New York, NY) and Minga Opazo (b. 1992, Santiago, Chile), both of whom live and work in Ojai, California. Solastalgia is a term that describes the psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change—particularly shifts brought on by human activity such as climate change, deforestation, and industrialization. Homer French and Opazo address this collective unease through distinct yet interconnected practices.
Jessie Homer French chronicles the ecological and existential conditions of the American West with a stylized clarity and formal restraint. Over the course of several decades, she has cultivated a practice that is at once personal and mythic, mapping the contours of a landscape shaped by fire, death, and quiet resilience. Her saturated palettes and meticulous surfaces create a studied stillness that belies the urgency of her subject matter—wildfires, cemeteries, environmental collapse—rendered not as spectacle, but as lived, recurring realities. In the context of California’s increasingly volatile climate, her long-standing engagement with fire and drought takes on a renewed urgency, not as a reaction to crisis, but as a sustained meditation on its inevitability. Her paintings offer more than aesthetic contemplation—they extend an ethical invitation to slow down and consider what it means to live in a world on the brink of disappearance.
In Texas Panhandle Fires (2024) and Fleeing Tarpon (2024), Homer French renders environmental catastrophe with a quiet, almost devotional stillness. A pair of jackrabbits—pink-eared sentinels—pause mid-crossing as wildfires consume the prairie on either side of an empty road, smoke billowing into an apocalyptic sky. Offshore, an oil platform burns as silver tarpon glides calmly beneath the surface. With her characteristic flattening of space and attention to atmospheric detail, Homer French creates a visual stasis where the landscape becomes a record of both endurance and erasure.
Opazo’s practice, rooted in textile and Bio-Art, investigates the environmental toll of the global textile industry while proposing materially grounded alternatives. We are living in the Plastocene—a geologic epoch shaped by humanity’s relentless production, use, and disposal of synthetic materials. Textiles, once central to cultural identity and survival, have become significant contributors to planetary degradation, accounting for an estimated 15% of global plastic waste and 10% of annual CO₂ emissions. This paradox—where a medium so integral to human life now drives ecological harm and labor exploitation—sits at the core of Opazo’s inquiry. Through her practice spanning textiles, fungal systems, and material experimentation, she produces works that are materially inventive and conceptually rigorous.
For Solastalgia, Opazo presents a series of wall-based weavings composed of reclaimed textile scraps—materials diverted from landfills and repurposed into vibrant, abstract compositions. These works not only critique systems of waste but actively participate in cycles of renewal. In parallel, she introduces living sculptures made from fungal mycelium and discarded clothing: layered compositions in which mushrooms metabolize textile waste, transforming it into regenerative soil. Through these experimental forms, Opazo proposes a radical, hopeful model for how we might reorient ourselves toward the materials we discard.
Together, Homer French and Opazo offer parallel meditations on ecological grief and resilience—one rooted in observation, the other in transformation. Across painting and bio-material installation, Solastalgia becomes not just a site of mourning, but of possibility: a space where attention, care, and material engagement gesture toward new modes of coexistence on a damaged planet
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Jessie Homer French (b. 1940, New York, New York, lives and works in Mountain Center, California) is a self-taught, self-proclaimed “regional narrative painter” who routinely, perhaps even obsessively, paints archetypes of death, nature, and rural life. She has held solo exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway; Massimo De Carlo, London, UK; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, Texas, and Seoul, South Korea; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin and London; the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California; Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, California; Winchester Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia; and Ankrum Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles; CLEARING, New York; the Palm Springs Museum; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach; Samuel Freeman Gallery, Santa Monica; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; and ANOTHER SPACE, New York. French’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, Palm Spring Art Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She was included in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, and the Hammer Museum’s Biennial in 2023.
Minga Opazo (b. 1992, Santiago, Chile. Lives and works in Ojai, CA) received her MFA from CalArts in 2020 and her BFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. Opazo has exhibited works across the United States and Latino America. Selected solo exhibitions include the Architecture Foundation of Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA), Carnegie Museum (Oxnard, CA), and Sargent’s Daughter (Los Angeles, CA). Selected group exhibitions include Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles, CA), The Bunker Artspace part of the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody (Palm Beach, FL), San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (San Luis Obispo, CA), Gavlak Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles, CA), Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Ana, CA), Museo de Artes Visuales (Santiago, Chile), and Worth Ryder Art Gallery (Berkeley, CA). Opazo has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, ACRE, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, MASS MoCA, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
