LOS ANGELES, CA.- Tierra del Sol Gallery presents Model World, a 32-artist group exhibition curated by Elliott Hundley. Opening January 17, 2026, with a public reception from 6 to 9 pm, the exhibition will be on view through March 1. Building on the gallery’s ongoing series of guest-curated exhibitions with collaborators including Alison Saar, Darren Romanelli, and jill moniz.
Model World marks the first time a guest curator has invited artists from outside Tierra del Sol’s studio program to exhibit alongside its artists. This expanded curatorial framework brings together diverse voices to examine models, miniatures, and imagined worlds as ways of understanding, shaping, and rethinking the present moment.
“Miniatures, blueprints, maps, and models are ways of holding the world in our hands,” says Elliott Hundley, a world-renowned artist in his own right. “They help us plan and design, speculate and explain, teach and imagine, play and remember, memorialize and make sense of what might otherwise feel elusive.”
Hundley continues: “Theorists have long tried to understand our desire to shrink the world into legible form. For Gaston Bachelard, these acts invite poetic reverie and imaginative immersion; for Susan Stewart, they summon nostalgia and the promise of control; for Umberto Eco, the miniature offers the seductive illusion of ‘perfect knowledge,’ a momentary grasp of the whole.
The contributing artists include Douglas Allen, Mario Ayala, Sucy Ayala, Tanya Brodsky, Vincent Blair, Beverly Buchanan, Claire Chambless, Terra Clendening,
Jory Drew, Mary Lou Dimsdale, Pippa Garner, Carissa Hackman, Karl Haendel, Lauren Halsey, Herb Herod, Liane Kaino, Wihro Kim, Abraham Khan, Shana Lutker, John Maull, Kristen Morgin, John Peterson, Kristopher Raos, Levon Riggins, Angel Rodriguez, David Romero, Ed Ruscha, Ellen Schafer, Christopher Suarez, Chiffon Thomas, Matthew Wilson, and Joe Zaldivar.
Says Paige Wery, director of Tierra del Sol, "We are honored to present this milestone exhibition -- curated by Elliott Hundley -- that juxtaposes our artists' work with so many important contemporary California artists.”
According to Hundley, some artists work systematically, beginning with measured observation—still photographs, surveys, and Google Maps—translating the seen into carefully constructed form. Others draw from memory or the mind’s eye, conjuring evocative worlds shaped by signs, symbols, and sensation. Still others stack and layer image-landscapes with riotous joy, delighting in excess and collision.
“From these approaches, three recurring subjects emerge: our country, our city, our home. Some artists present these places as they are; others imagine how they might be. Together, they offer ways of orienting ourselves within the vast, shifting complexity of the world,” Hundley concludes.
Elliott Hundley (b. 1975, Greensboro, North Carolina) is an artist based in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Known for dense, multimedia compositions that fuse painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, photography, and performance, Hundley’s work draws on mythology, art history, and contemporary culture. He has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including the Hammer Museum, Nasher Sculpture Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. His work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, LACMA, SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Broad. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow.
