FALTAS TÚ • Opening Reception . Ventura

Commemorating 15 years of Art & Community on Main St. with a new exhibit, open studios, live music & food in Midtown's most creative space. Dama Gallery is pleased to announce Faltas Tú, a group exhibition on view in Ventura, California. Faltas Tú brings together a diverse cohort of artists whose practices span painting, sculpture, photography, and mixed media, united not by a shared aesthetic, but by a shared conviction: that no artwork is complete until it is seen. The exhibition's title, translated as "you are missing" or "you are lacking," positions the viewer not as a passive recipient of meaning, but as its final, necessary component. Every artwork begins with a maker, a mind, and a method, three forces that shape material into form, intention into image. But for the artists in this exhibition, that process, however rigorous, however resolved, remains incomplete without a fourth element: the gaze that meets it. Faltas Tú treats looking itself as an act of authorship, positioning the exhibition space as a site of exchange rather than display. The works selected span a wide range of approaches: from the meditative and the intuitive to the deliberate and the architectural. What unites them is not style, but posture, an openness toward the viewer, an acknowledgment that meaning is not fixed at the moment of creation but activated, again and again, at the moment of encounter. Each piece functions less as a closed statement than as a proposition: an invitation extended toward whoever stands before it. In this sense, Faltas Tú resists the notion of the artwork as a finished object awaiting evaluation. Instead, it asks viewers to consider their own presence as constitutive, their attention as material, their interpretation as the last brushstroke. What a visitor brings to the work, their history, their mood, their particular way of seeing, becomes inseparable from what the work ultimately is. And what they find there may surprise them, precisely because it was never entirely predetermined. This framework reflects Dama Gallery's broader curatorial ethos: that contemporary art is most vital when it remains porous, when it makes room for the viewer rather than closing itself off from them. Faltas Tú extends that belief into a fully realized exhibition, one that treats the gallery not as a repository of finished objects, but as a living space of ongoing completion. REPRESENTED ARTISTS Janet Milhomme Edgar Takoyaki Lynne Deutch Sara Koenig Mei Shibata Drew Shields Eloise Larson Chris Gocong Cameron Hurdus GUESTS ARTISTS Samantha Aldana Stephanie Leach Tristan Thames Catalina Wise Leslie Pontz