Living Abstraction: When Observation Becomes Form brings together nine Phoenix-based artists whose practices begin with the act of looking at bodies, plants, landscapes, and systems and transform those observations into form. Some works appear immediately recognizable, while others resist clarity, existing between abstraction and representation.
Across the exhibition, natural elements such as cacti, anatomical structures, organic patterns, and rule-based systems are fragmented, magnified, or reassembled. What initially reads as shape or gesture may reveal itself as something living. What seems literal may dissolve into abstraction. Biological, environmental, and computational processes coexist, reflecting systems that are constantly adapting and evolving.
Presented within a professional environment, the exhibition invites viewers to slow down and reconsider how meaning is constructed through perception. Living Abstraction challenges expectations of corporate art as purely decorative and instead positions art as an active presence within the workplace that rewards attention, curiosity, and close looking.
Bill Dambrova
Based in Phoenix and working from his art studio in the Bragg’s Pie Factory Building in Downtown Phoenix, Dambrova has been focusing on his art practice as well as designing exhibitions for well-known museums, zoos and aquariums across the United States.
Dambrova seeks out museum design projects that tackle conservation issues and convey current thinking about our relationships with all living beings. Concepts and ideas he has learned from exhibitions about sea life, plant biology, or the latest research about dinosaurs inevitably makes their way into his paintings. Dambrova has had solo exhibitions of his artwork at The Torrance Art Museum in California and The Mesa Museum of Contemporary art, and group exhibitions in notable museums and galleries including The Phoenix Art Museum, Tucson Museum of Art, Sky Harbor Airport Museum and the University of Arizona.
Dambrova has created site specific art installations and public art at locations including Valley Metro Rail, Burning Man, East Jesus, Meow Wolf and Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport Rental Car Return Station. His work can be found in the public collections of institutions such as The Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona State University Art Museum, The City of Scottsdale, The Sky Harbor Airport Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, The State of New Mexico: Art in Public Places Program, DuPont, Kroger, The City of Tempe, and The Phoenix Suns Legacy Partners.Dambrova has entered the realm of public art designing a terrazzo floor based on imagery found in his paintings at the new recently opened Sky Harbor Airport Rental Car Return Train Station that you can visit using the Skytrain.
His most recent solo show of paintings and sculpture was at Bentley Gallery in Phoenix July 2024.
When Observation Becomes Form
Living Abstraction
John Albert Armstrong
A master printer, artist, exhibition designer, and fine art framer, John Armstrong is co-founder of Armstrong-Prior, Inc. a multi-faceted arts business encompassing fine arts printing, publishing and arts brokering. Armstrong along with his wife, Joan Prior, curate some of the most prominent private and corporate art collections in Arizona. A former museum director, curator and teacher, Armstrong now devotes his time to creating his own work in sculpture, painting, and collaboration with artists in his printmaking studio.
Casey Farina
My work lives at the intersection of synesthesia and indeterminacy—exploring how sound and image blur together, and what happens when control gets loosened.
Indeterminacy is the thread running through all of it. I build systems and algorithms that I can set in motion but can't fully predict. The outputs surprise me—they head into territory I couldn't have planned. That's the experiment: designing frameworks that generate something genuinely unknown, then discovering what emerges alongside the audience.Casey Farina is a Phoenix-based artist known for audio/visual works created through iterative computer processes. His practice draws on animation, sound design, visual effects, digital fabrication, and improvisation—all coming together in video sculptures.
Beyond the gallery, Farina creates commissioned public artworks throughout the Valley, including interactive projection-mapped pieces that transform urban spaces into immersive experiences. His animated-graphic scores have been presented internationally, and in 2019 Phoenix Magazine named him Best Multimedia Artist. He's received support from the Contemporary Forum Emerging Artist Grant, Canal Convergence, Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
Future Retrieval
Future Retrieval, founded by Guy Michael Davis and Katie Parker in 2008, re-examines and disrupts the history of decorative arts through the excavation and empirical study of digital archives and museum collections. Taking objects held in institutional collections as its starting point, Future Retrieval investigates global patterns of transmission and dislocation across cultures and times, both with respect to an object’s iconography, materiality, and utility, and concerning its eventual path to the archive or museum collection.
The collective uses contemporary methodologies and approaches (including digital scanning) to create works across many mediums, including sculpture, textiles, wallpaper, installations and beyond. Their work speaks to the wonders of the past while simultaneously addressing imbalances of art history that too-often neglect so-called decorative or minor arts. Through objects that may initially appear functional in form, Future Retrieval reconsiders the tensions among contemporary art, craft, and design, subtly yet critically subverting the implied hierarchies among these fields.
Erika Lynne Hanson
Artist Statement:
In his essay "From Things Flow What We Call Time" Timothy Morton writes: Again: before it is Nature, ecology is coexistence. Ecology is weird because it is the uncanny realisation that there were always already other beings. Awareness of ecological beings – a meadow, a city, a coral reef, a microbe – is in a loop.
Weaving - as a practice, history, and metaphor - forms the core of my research and creative work. I draw from pre-historical traditions that rely on the simple interlocking of threads, yet also utilize contemporary practices intertwining digital technology, collaboration, site-specific projects, and social engagement. My work seeks to illuminate multiple temporalities through both process and outcome. Time intensive craft technologies (woven textiles, ceramic vessels, cast concrete) are combined with found, purchased, or borrowed objects (rocks, slag glass, lichen) to offer a record of a site-specific encounter. With these objects in dialogue, new sites are forged to consider our contemporary relationships with human and non-human systems and networks.
William Lesch
Artist Statement: I live and work in an adobe home, studio, and courtyard/gallery I built myself, by hand, in downtown Tucson. I have lived in this home for over 35 years, putting down roots, raising a family, living in place much as my barrio neighbors have for generations. I have learned the names of the plants, the animals, the stones and the watersheds of my homeland, have studied the light and the changing seasons. My art is about this place, an affirmation of life in one place on earth: the Sonoran Desert Bioregion. Our culture has forgotten how to talk to trees, how to sing to stones and saguaros. I have spent a good part of my life walking the desert, kayaking it’s rivers, sitting by it’s streams, listening to those forgotten songs. The songs are of rainclouds forming over a parched land, of new life amid the dry shards, the bones of fallen cactus, of deep canyons, forgotten caves, windswept shores on the Sea of Cortez.
Tiffany Lippincott
Tiffany Lippincott is an artist whose work explores interior spaces, both architectural and emotional, through layered compositions grounded in color, texture, and gesture. Working with the human figure and botanical forms, she creates immersive, multi dimensional worlds that reflect memory, intuition, and psychological depth. Her practice is rooted in experimentation and intentional mark making, allowing subtle shifts in tone and surface to emerge over time.
Lippincott’s work is driven by empathy and reflection, transforming quiet, personal moments into expansive visual environments. Through her use of color and layered form, she invites viewers into spaces that feel intimate, contemplative, and alive with emotional presence.
Tom Ortega
Tom Ortega was born in Houston, Texas in 1961. He studied painting and drawing at North Texas State University (now University of North Texas) before pursuing an advertising degree at Texas Tech. After relocating to Arizona in the late 80s, Ortega exhibited in Scottsdale and Phoenix art galleries, including the Elaine Horwitch Gallery and Bentley Gallery. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in Dallas, Houston, Denver, Santa Fe, Mexico and Bulgaria and featured in Art in America, NY Arts and Phoenix Home & Garden. Tom is a community activist, serving on the board of Audubon Arizona and working for First Place AZ, a nonprofit dedicated to adults with autism and developmental disabilities.
Tom Ortega’s paintings and wood constructions reveal personal narratives through a history of materials and a playful yet profound exploration of form and color. Nearly recognizable dreamlike images appear and disappear with weathered surfaces activated by gestural and layered mark-making. There is a freedom in his work that can be attributed to his admiration for folk art traditions. Finding potential in all shapes and forms, Ortega transforms an economy of materials into expressions of whimsy and wonder. He currently shows at Chiaroscuro in Santa Fe.
Mark Pomilio
My artistic interests are fueled by a desire to create artwork, which mirrors naturally occurring systems in our world. In “mirror” I am referring more to ideas regarding physical processes rather than mimetic duplication. I find inspiration on a myopic level by attempting to imitate cell repetition and cloning. I have chosen to create imagery, which expresses a developmental process rather than an overt visual depiction. The origin of this research has been formulated through a series of simple geometrical equations. These equations have yielded a group of “parent” rudimentary geometrical forms. One or several of these forms are multiplied and folded equally throughout the pictorial field. Through this process, a formal pictorial structure is born. Therefore, each image has evolved through the development of pictorial representations of geometric systems of growth. This “parent” form is representative and meant to emulate a single or multiple cells dividing and compounding into a complex organism. In many works, formal decisions are multiplied equally throughout the field, causing a type of visual unity. This balance and symmetry has a visual equivalency in how we read the meditative qualities of a reflective pool, or a religious icon. In the end, my goal is to force a harmony upon the image field that, in turn, forces a potential meaning through the integration of the image and title.
Originally from Philadelphia, Mr. Pomilio is currently living and working in Phoenix, Arizona. Where he is a Professor of Painting and Drawing within the School of Art, at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.
January 2026 - June 2026
Untitled
Deconstructed/Reconstructed, 2024
Monoprint with collage reconstructed as floating shapes with blue wood structure
41 x 49"
$6,900
Possibility of Space 1, 2023
Generative video and laser cut acrylic
62 x 35"
$7,000
Garden Pot 1, 2024
Stoneware
6 x 11.5"
$3,000
Copper and Brown Tailing Pond, Silverbell Arizona, #40
Mixed media direct print to paint with archival pigment inks on aluminum panel with copper patina and UV varnish
36 x 48"
$5,000
The Architecture of a Day, 2025
Oil on canvas
36 x 24"
$900
Pick a Selection, 2008
Mixed media on panel
40 x 47"
$2,800
Universal Patterns III, 2021-2023
Oil on linen
40 x 60"
$14,000
Garden Vignettes, 2020
Wood, hand cut paper, porcelain, and plexiglass
45.75 x 22 x 7"
$2,000 each
Vertical Saguaro Skin,
Brown and Orange
Editioned print with black border, mounted on dibond aluminum panel with UV varnish
76 x 22"
$2,400
Middle Seat, 2025
Oil on canvas
24 x 18"
$500
We Can Design Future Worlds, 2024
Mixed media on canvas
84 x 108"
$24,948
To inquire about the artists or their work please contact:
Logan Browning Mandes
Browning Art Advisory
520.465.4067
logan@browningartadvisory.com
Mycology Monday, 2020
Hand cut paper
43 x 39"
$4,500
Browning Art Advisory helps collectors, corporations, and estates navigate the art world with clarity and confidence. With over 15 years of expertise in both the primary and secondary markets, we provide personalized guidance through every stage of building, managing, and refining a collection. Our approach is rooted in deep market knowledge, curatorial insight, and a genuine passion for connecting clients with art that resonates.
Erika Lynne Hanson
In his essay "From Things Flow What We Call Time" Timothy Morton writes: Again: before it is Nature, ecology is coexistence. Ecology is weird because it is the uncanny realisation that there were always already other beings. Awareness of ecological beings – a meadow, a city, a coral reef, a microbe – is in a loop.
Weaving - as a practice, history, and metaphor - forms the core of my research and creative work. I draw from pre-historical traditions that rely on the simple interlocking of threads, yet also utilize contemporary practices intertwining digital technology, collaboration, site-specific projects, and social engagement. My work seeks to illuminate multiple temporalities through both process and outcome. Time intensive craft technologies (woven textiles, ceramic vessels, cast concrete) are combined with found, purchased, or borrowed objects (rocks, slag glass, lichen) to offer a record of a site-specific encounter. With these objects in dialogue, new sites are forged to consider our contemporary relationships with human and non-human systems and networks.
Time travel as space travel as particles collide, 2021
Woven and dyed linen and lurex
50 x 48 x 2"
$4,500
Saguaro Skin Abstract Montage #4
Mixed media direct print to pain with archival pigment inks on aluminum panel with copper patina and UV varnish
42 x 54"
$4,650
Secret Spaces, 2022
Mixed media
12 x 12"
$900
Talk Over Tea, 2022
Mixed media
12 x 12""
$900
Tiffany Lippincott
Artist Statement: Tiffany Lippincott is an artist whose work explores interior spaces, both architectural and emotional, through layered compositions grounded in color, texture, and gesture. Working with the human figure and botanical forms, she creates immersive, multi dimensional worlds that reflect memory, intuition, and psychological depth. Her practice is rooted in experimentation and intentional mark making, allowing subtle shifts in tone and surface to emerge over time.
Lippincott’s work is driven by empathy and reflection, transforming quiet, personal moments into expansive visual environments. Through her use of color and layered form, she invites viewers into spaces that feel intimate, contemplative, and alive with emotional presence.
Pick a Selection
Reclaimed textiles
51 x 105 x 3"
$8,500
Untitled
Deconstructed/reconstructed monoprint with collage
41 3/8 x 48 3/4"
$6,900
Us, 2021
CNC milled maple and aluminum leaf
32 x 26 x 34"
$9,500