Sovern, with support from Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Presents
Navigating the Heart in 2025
A multimedia exhibition curated by Rosalyn Myles
featuring Calethia DeConto, Leslie Foster, Rosalyn Myles, and Ana Rodriguez
This exhibition celebrates diverse expressions of love, self-acceptance, and the impacts of modern technology and social media on our perceptions of romance.
Our hope is to spark conversations about love, connection, and our current epidemic of loneliness. We invite the community to witness, investigate and embrace a more expansive appreciation of our human connections. This thought-provoking exhibit also addresses the essential theme of self-love and encourages visitors to reflect on their own definitions of romance and relationships. Navigating the Heart is an opportunity to engage with issues of over-connectedness while celebrating the excitement and mystery associated with love in all its forms.
Featured Artists
Ana Rodriguez is an artist born and based in Los Angeles, California. Through her paintings, she explores the intricate relationship between pattern and design, interior spaces, decorative motifs, embroidery, traditional Mexican pattern that she recalls from memory, and the relationship between household decorations, and interior decorations such as, curtains, sofa patterns, wallpaper, flooring, clothing, sarapes, and Mexican embroidery. Drawing inspiration from her own memories and images of the multiple homes she and her family lived in, Ana’s work transcends physical objects and delves into the realm of the subconscious. Her canvases are a visual representation of her identity (as a first generation Mexican American), human psyche, and relationships between objects of ritual found in the home as symbols of identity and tradition. Through her art, Ana aims to evoke a sense of familiarity and emotional resonance between her viewers, inviting them to reflect upon their own personal narratives and relationship to constructed space and identity.
Leslie Foster, Artist Statement: As an artist, I’m particularly interested in combining time-based media, installation, and object-making as a way to create pocket universes in which Black, queer folks are able to push past our waking lives and step, if only for a moment, into contemplative ecologies built through dream logic. These spaces are homes to speculative rituals that I create in an attempt to explore the beautiful illegibility of the Black, queer experience. In these spaces, the pleasure, possibility, and future of the Black imaginary serve as a place of refuge and solace.
“Nyxontology,” a term I coined, quantifies the emergent property formed by three foundational elements of our dreams: the re-exploration and mutability of memory; the elongation and malleability of time; and the semi-permeable boundaries of the self, the other, and the unknown. This dream logic allows for the creation of rival geographies, spaces in which the non-linear logics of Black, queer thought slip sideways into alternate topographies that challenge Eurocentric geographies of confinement.
Rosalyn Myles, “I am a multidisciplinary artist. I use found objects, photography, fabric, wood, and text
to construct collages and installations that shine light on our untold stories. Utilizing various forms of expression, I aim to highlight social and political issues that are emerging from the discourse of modern culture. I am mining society's lesser-known stories about women and our shared experiences as people of color in these United States. Bearing witness to the often ignored concerns that plague our cities and disenfranchised people all over the diaspora.
As a contemporary artist, I am interested in exploring the conversations taking place in this new normal.
How can we as a people move forward and find better ways of navigating the future?”
Calethia DeConto is a lens-based artist known for imagery that explores a conscious relationship with nature, personal rituals in healing, sensuality, and metaphysical intuition. Her photographs and short films have been exhibited in solo and group shows across the United States. She uses her lens to study and honor the natural world, capturing found objects, feminine forms, and organic shapes that reflect rituals to create a unique cosmology. Working across collage, cyanotype, experimental film, and photography, DeConto bridges the tactile and ephemeral, revealing a deep connection to place, memory, and transformation.
Growing up in a constantly shifting landscape, she developed an awareness of temporality and spirituality at a young age. These themes thread through her work, where intuition, energy, and the unseen play a central role. By layering textures, silhouettes, and light, she creates images that feel both intimate and expansive, inviting viewers into a dreamlike space of contemplation.