Dave Eassa: Head Above the Clouds

October 4, 2025 - March 1, 2026

At once elegy and offering, Head Above the Clouds explores the artist Dave Eassa’s experiences of love, loss, and longing. Through painting, sculpture, and collaborative installations, Eassa explores his relationship to familial histories and archives, as well as the complexity of grief and joy he uncovers in this process.

Anchored by a new series of figurative paintings, his first created in San Diego since relocating from Baltimore, Eassa constructs a dreamscape shaped by memory. Drawn from his family and personal archives, as well as his daily life, these paintings serve as monuments to the everyday and the people who shape us. 

At the heart of the exhibition is a cloud-like sculptural seating installation, a gathering place for rest, reflection, and conversation. Suspended above are four sails, each representing a season of life, featuring the drawings and paintings of youth and community partners created through a series of workshops at the California Center for the Arts and The New Children's Museum.

Building on Eassa’s history of community-centered practice over the last decade, Head Above the Clouds underscores the essential role of collaboration in contemporary artmaking. In inviting others to dream and reflect alongside him, the artist subverts traditional notions of authorship and affirms the power of shared storytelling.

Dave Eassa (b. 1991, Ellicott City, MD) is a visual artist, curator, and cultural organizer based in San Diego, CA. Working across painting, sculpture, and socially engaged practice, his work explores personal and collective memory, love, and the possibilities of community. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at Cody Gallery (VA), The Shed Space (MD), and Sistered (ME), and group exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery (NY), LVL3 (Chicago), and Signal (NY). Eassa’s work has been featured in New American Paintings, The Washington Post, and BmoreArt, and is held in collections including the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. A 2015 Open Society Institute Fellow, Eassa founded Free Space, a pioneering arts program in Maryland’s prison system. He has held senior roles at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where he led initiatives such as the BMA Lexington Market satellite and co-curated Histories Collide: Jackie Milad x Fred Wilson x Nekisha Durrett. A Salzburg Global Fellow and recipient of numerous public art and artist awards, Eassa continues to build projects that merge aesthetics with equity, and community with care.

—

This exhibition is organized by the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, with special thanks to The New Children's Museum, Persian Place, Escondido Union School District, and staff at the California Center the Arts, Escondido for hosting and sharing space with several workshops which contributed to the collaborative spirit of Four Sails.

Kayla Mattes: Reboot > Reweave > Repeat

December 6, 2025 - February 15, 2026

Los Angeles-based artist Kayla Mattes’s vibrant, handwoven tapestries explore the aesthetics and language of the internet age. Mattes, known for combining traditional weaving techniques with digital visual culture, creates richly layered works that merge pixelated graphics, online interactions, and everyday digital detritus with tactile, analog craft.

Mattes weaves together memes, emoji vocabularies, browser windows, pop-ups, and other digital culture references into material narratives that reflect her ongoing interest in the absurdities of online communication and the flatness of digital affect. Full of color, texture, and rhythmic patterning, Mattes’s tapestries function as spaces where humor, anxiety, and nostalgia collide. 

Image: Kayla Mattes, FUN FACT, 2023, Handwoven cotton, wool, and acrylic, 38.5 x 29.5 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Designing the Infinite: Virtual Worldbuilding in Art & Gaming

December 6, 2025 - April 12, 2026

Worldbuilding has long served as a tool for understanding identity, community, and our place within the universe, from creation stories and cosmologies to medieval illuminated manuscripts, speculative fiction, and early experimental cinema. Designing the Infinite extends this lineage further into the digital age, bringing together artists from across the globe who use game engines, virtual environments, and interactive technologies to construct new worlds and interrogate existing systems.

Video games share many foundational principles with worldbuilding practices, including the construction of characters and avatars, the design of environments and rule systems, narrative structure, and the negotiation of choice, agency, and consequence. These elements shape how participants understand their role within a world and how meaning emerges through interaction over time. Many of the artists in Designing the Infinite draw on these shared frameworks, creating virtual spaces that examine how identities are formed, how stories are carried forward, and how communities adapt to shifting conditions.

Emerging from more than sixty years of moving image experimentation, video games have long occupied a marginal position within contemporary art and criticism, despite their widespread social impact. In today’s networked landscape, they function as sites of social exchange, socioemotional learning, and radical imagination. Designing the Infinite considers this ongoing shift, presenting games and game-based artworks as cultural artifacts shaped by their moment, responsive to lived experience, and open to multiple ways of being encountered and understood.

Featured artists: Afrah Shafiq, Basmah Felemban, Cassie McQuater, David Blandy & Larry Achiampong, JODI, LaTurbo Avedon, Nicole Ruggiero, Peggy Ahwesh, Santiago Tamayo Soler, Seth Price, and Victor Castaneda H.

—

Designing the Infinite is organized by Museum Manager Rokhsane Hovaida, with Museum Education Coordinator Belen Torralba.

Support is provided by the California Center for the Arts, Escondido Foundation, with supporting sponsorship provided by Design Moe Kitchen & Bath.