Josh Cloud: Sunken Bust Shimmering Stone

Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present Sunken Bust Shimmering Stone, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Josh Cloud. The exhibition is our first solo presentation with the artist and will be on view from June 27 through August 22, 2026.

Sunken Bust Shimmering Stone features a series of heavily adorned figurative busts and totemic abstract works built from clay, fiber, and found wood. The exhibition continues Cloud's ongoing investigation into the abstracted figure, presenting works in which identity is conveyed through adornment, material illusion, and fragments of faces.

Cloud builds his works from the sketchbook outward. His drawings are improvisational and immediate, and what emerges is then coil-built in clay over months of slow, meditative labor. The sculptures carry a similar energy to their original drawings, evoking a meditative yet restless quality beneath layers of custom glazes and accumulated materials. Ceramic rocks mingle with real ones, dissolving distinctions between source material and its reproduction. Elsewhere, glazed orbs shimmer like pooled water or planetary bodies. The works are deeply interested in artifice - looking like one object, made from another - and reward the patient viewer who lingers long to find endless associations within Clouds’ forms.

The figurative works largely belong to what Cloud calls the "sunken bust" series, the result of a imaginary waterline that has been slowly rising through his practice over the course of years. Full bodies gave way to torsos, torsos to busts, and further still, the mouth and nose dissipated, morphing into abstraction. What remains is the eyes: the site of vision, of thought, of outward self-expression. From this reduced foundation, Cloud constructs baroque superstructures: bowls brimming with rocks, orbs balanced like crowns, and stalks of wood sprouting from the head.

The works draw formal and cosmological resonance from Yoruba sculptural traditions, particularly the concept of the ori - the head as the seat of personal destiny - which Cloud folds into a distinctly queer autobiographical register in some works. The burdened, crowned self-portrait becomes something simultaneously steeped in camp and sincerity: a figure ordained to support the weights of their own creation.

The exhibition also includes works of pure abstraction, among them the monumental Totem. Totem dispenses with figuration entirely, conveying its themes of natural cycles and the weight and precarity of life through ceramic and wood form alone. While the work is purely abstract, the scale of the piece connects to the viewer on a human-to-human scale, leaving openings to index the forms into a personal dialogue of material connections.

“I like to think in narrative foils,” says the artist. “If I create a work that goes strongly in one direction, there is a shadow of its foil that then demands to be made. It's a mental puzzle I deeply enjoy; to create something that pushes in a completely different direction while still relating to the original source of inspiration.” Together, the works in Sunken Bust Shimmering Stone describe a cosmology of intersections between past, present, fantasy, and the elemental, all filtered through a meticulous and passionate desire to understand the world and oneself through material exploration.