2026 Featured Artist

Emily Colvin is a Los Angeles based artist working across glass, painting, and neon to create immersive installations that explore movement, color, and the element of chance. Her practice blends material experimentation with sensory experience, often resulting in works that resemble shifting aerial landscapes or fragmented environments in motion.

Her year-long exhibition at Hotel Figueroa, High Water, reflects an ongoing dialogue between environment and process. The title draws from the idea of continuing regardless of conditions. For the past seven years, Colvin’s studio has flooded during periods of rain. What began as disruption has become embedded within her practice, influencing both the physical evolution of the work and the rhythm in which it is created.

Throughout the exhibition, paintings, glass works, and neon installations move between states, reconfigured, layered, and repeated. Neon becomes a language of its own, building through iteration, while compositions emerge through a balance of control and unpredictability. Beneath these shifting forms is a quiet invocation, gestures that echo ancient deities, muses, and high priestesses whose presence lingers beneath the surface of contemporary life. While we often elevate modern icons, these foundational feminine forces continue to take the stage, guiding cycles of creation, destruction, and renewal.

Installed throughout the hotel, High Water opens a narrative that invites viewers to lean into something both personal and collective, a space where intuition, transformation, and time converge. The work speaks to the unseen forces that shape us, to create, to refine, and to trust the process as it unfolds.