Alake Shilling, Made in L.A. 2025 artist builds an imaginative world in which cuteness, melancholy, and material rigor coexist. Her paintings and ceramics feature wide-eyed hybrid creatures—resembling frogs, bears, or bugs—which reference children’s cartoons, pop iconography, and Afro-diasporic visual traditions. These beings carry complex emotional charges: sadness, ecstasy, doubt, and amusement. Shilling’s ceramics are the products of intuition and finely honed skill. Their abject materiality extends the legacy of California funk while their surreal, sometimes grotesque figuration aligns them with the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists working in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s known for their cartoon-like forms, bold colors, and irreverent humor. The worlds that Shilling constructs purposefully court irresolution, contradiction, and the quick and continuous slippage from one state of being to another. In other words, what may seem like fantasy in fact refracts the messiness of everyday life.

14 Holographic Stickers approximately 1"x 1" in.

Sticker Sheet Dimensions: 5" x 8"