At the Mantel Gallery, Afrofuturist painter Jasimen Phillips’ debut solo exhibition Aquarium imagines robots encountering the underwater world
Long Beach, CA —For Jasimen Phillips, the inspiration for Aquarium goes back to a fifth-grade field trip. Growing up in the South Bay, Phillips remembers walking into the Long Beach Aquarium as a child and feeling as though she had entered another world. Years later, that memory became the starting point for her debut solo exhibition, now on view at The Mantel Gallery in Long Beach.
Visitor observing Aquarium installation by Jasimen Phillips at Mantel Gallery Photographed by JD Starling III
Phillips is a Los Angeles contemporary artist whose Afrofuturist paintings of robots and humanoid figures explore the relationship between humanity, technology and the natural world. In Aquarium, she explores the relationship between humanity, technology and the natural world. In Aquarium, she imagines those robotic figures on the other side of the glass—visitors to an underwater world, observing marine life with the same curiosity that draws human visitors to an aquarium.
“Aquariums bring the ocean closer to us,” Phillips says.
“They allow us to experience the beauty of marine life while removing the danger.”
That tension between proximity and safety became central to the exhibition.
“We get to observe the ocean from behind a glass wall,” she says. “There’s something fascinating about being so close to something so spectacular while still feeling safe.”
The paintings bring together two worlds that might initially seem incompatible: the mechanical and the organic. Phillips’ expressive robot figures encounter fish, coral and underwater environments not as conquerors or outsiders, but as curious observers.
“I’m interested in that moment when the mechanical and the organic face each other—not as competition, but as strangers trying to understand one another,” Phillips says.
Jasimen Phillips (left) discusses the artwork with an attendee at the exhibition opening. Photographed by JD Starling III
The setting adds another layer to the exhibition. Rather than presenting Aquarium in a conventional gallery setting, Phillips is exhibiting at The Mantel Gallery, a micro-gallery located on Fanwood Avenue in Long Beach. The gallery is curated by Sean Cully, who has been part of Long Beach’s micro-gallery movement, a network of small, often unconventional exhibition spaces that bring art into residential neighborhoods throughout the city. The movement was developed and expanded by Long Beach artist Dave Clark, who, together with his wife Carol, began creating micro-galleries in neighborhood spaces as an alternative venue for artists and a way of bringing art directly into the community.
Carol Clark, Dave Clark, Jasimen Phillips, and Kasey Phillips at the opening of the Aquarium exhibit at Mantel Gallery in Long Beach. Photographed by JD Starling III
The micro-gallery format creates an unusual relationship between the work and its audience. There is no large institutional architecture separating the viewer from the paintings. Instead, the exhibition exists within an intimate environment embedded directly in a neighborhood.
For Aquarium, that intimacy creates an interesting contrast: Phillips is considering enormous questions—technology, nature, humanity and imagined futures—inside an exceptionally small exhibition space.
The exhibition also continues Phillips’ broader Afrofuturist practice. Her robot and humanoid figures have become a recurring vehicle for examining what it means to be human in a world increasingly shaped by technology.
Phillips studied at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited at the Torrance Art Museum and the Santa Paula Art Museum, and she has presented artist talks and workshops at Loyola Marymount University and California State University, Dominguez Hills.
AQUARIUM is on view at The Mantel Gallery through September 5.
Exhibition Information
Jasimen Phillips: Aquarium
The Mantel Gallery
On view: August 22–September 5, 2026
Curator: Sean Cully seacully@gmail.com
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