Esther Pearl Watson's 'Celestial Road Trip' at Vielmetter Los Angeles

Esther Pearl Watson's exhibition 'Celestial Road Trip' at Vielmetter Los Angeles, on view from July 11 through August 21, 2026, marked a new era for the artist following the death of her father, Gene Watson, in December 2025. The show combined paintings, drawings, and photographs to explore memory, loss, and healing, drawing on her father's obsession with building spacecraft from scrap metal and his belief in angels as aliens. Watson, who moved to Joshua Tree after the Altadena fire, incorporated the desert's purple super bloom as a healing motif. The exhibition served as an ode to her childhood and father, blurring the line between recollection and fantasy. In an interview with Sara Beck, Watson discussed how the loss of her father and the fire influenced her work, her process of merging memory with imagination, and the importance of the wide open sky. She noted that photographs are less truthful than drawings or paintings, and that she enjoys the collaborative storytelling with viewers who look for cats in her pieces. The show closed on August 21, 2026.