The Mud – The Sky, and The 395: Wyatt Mills and Zak Christensen
Press Release
la BEAST gallery is pleased to present The Mud—The Sky, and the 395, a two-person collaborative exhibition featuring new works by Wyatt Mills and Zak Christensen. The show draws on a long familiarity with California’s Eastern Sierra, where memory and landscape fold into one adjoining concept. Along Highway 395, the sky is imposing, pressed against a long expanse of shifting granite, revealing a territory that is richly verdant yet deeply primeval. Reminiscent of creation itself, this elemental terrain becomes both origin and echo, a place where mud grants humanity the power to build while quietly reminding us it will always return to itself.
The Mud—The Sky, and the 395 opens with a reception on Saturday, October 4, from 6–9 PM at la BEAST gallery in Cypress Park. The exhibition will remain on view through November 8th.
About the Exhibition
“Deep in my memory lies a cabin. I have seen this cabin countless times, sitting askew in a meadow, visible from the highway, somewhere between Bishop and Mammoth Lakes. I cannot exactly remember when I first felt its pull, but this cabin, this very elusive cabin, has long been present in my mind. Less of a building and more like a remnant, maybe from another life, or from a Sierra that existed twelve thousand years ago. A time that was looser, more primal, less defined.”
The Sierra Nevada has long stood as a boundary between the familiar and the unknown. To feel its presence is to feel its grandeur, its exceptional beauty, its sheer dominance. It is undeniably majestic. Winding along its eastern base is a road, commonly known as The 395. A strip of asphalt, but more than that. A thread, one that stitches together salt flats, sage scrub, windswept towns, and of course, monumental granite. A fragmented dreamlike passage.
The towering wall of the Sierra may appear eternal, but even stone carries the slow pull of time. Peaks fracture, boulders crumble, sediment drifts into valleys. The mountain’s own body giving way, decaying into the very mud that underpins it. What feels immovable is, in truth, already in motion, already returning to the ground of origin.
The Mud—The Sky, and the 395 lingers in that cycle. Mud becomes both the residue of collapse and the substance of creation. The distant sky hovers above, forever beyond reach, while the highway carries us between the two. Here lies an elemental rhythm, where even the most solid forms dissolve, where memory persists, and where the horizon always promises more than it can hold.
