Joel Zuercher - Nothing Ever Happens Until It Does

September 13 - 21, 2025

Opening reception September 13, 6-9pm

Keystone Gallery presents Nothing Ever Happens Until It Does, a solo exhibition of new mixed-media paintings, photographs, and assemblages by Los Angeles based artist Joel Zuercher. This marks Zuercher’s third solo exhibition with the gallery—and his first since the Eaton Canyon fire in January 2025, which destroyed the artist’s home and much of his personal archive.

The work in Nothing Ever Happens Until It Does is a tension between stillness and rupture, the fragile illusion of stability and the inevitability of change. There exists an uneasy truth that our lives are constantly at the mercy of forces outside our control. We build routines, habits, and patterns as though permanence is possible, yet beneath the surface, everything remains volatile—ready to ignite, collapse, or unravel at any moment.

The exhibition takes its cue from the concept of lachesism- the desire for clarity brought on by a disaster. Zuercher leans into the paradox: we fear catastrophe, yet we also recognize its strange, transformative pull. Do we long for the collapse of order, not just in spite of the chaos it brings, but because of it?

Lachesism
“The desire to be struck by disaster; to survive a plane crash, to lose everything in a fire, to plunge over a waterfall… something to put a kink in the smooth arc of your life, forging it into something hardened, flexible, and sharp.”
—from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

In January of this year, the Eaton Canyon fire swept through Altadena, consuming an entire community including the artist’s home and much of his artistic history. While several of the works in this exhibition were created before the fire, the disaster ended up reframing them. What began as meditations on erosion, fragmentation, and instability became uncannily prophetic—artworks that seemed to anticipate the very destruction that would later engulf the artist’s life.

Stylistically, Zuercher often employs décollage—a process of ripping, layering, and erasing—to construct his compositions. Surfaces are built up and then torn away, images are revealed only to be obscured again. The result is a visual language of both violence and renewal: beauty emerging from fracture, clarity from confusion. This physical act of tearing becomes a metaphor for disaster itself—a simultaneous act of undoing and remaking. In the wake of the fire, Zuercher began to see his own process as a kind of rehearsal for entropy, an unconscious preparation for loss.

The works are restless, haunted by a sense of foreboding, yet they also testify to resilience—the possibility that in destruction lies not only grief, but the seed of transformation. Ultimately, the exhibition is not simply about disaster, but about what follows: the reckoning with what is lost, the accounting of what remains, and the fragile clarity that disaster can bring.

Joel Zuercher is a Los Angeles–based artist and graduate of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.