Los Angeles–based painter Greg Ito has long wondered when an image transforms into a symbol. But it wasn’t until May 2020, when Ito and his pregnant wife drove outside of the city to see the super bloom of poppies—which struck him as a symbol of growth and renewal—that he began to think about creating his own iconography. Up to that point, he’d been uncertain about whether he and his wife had chosen a good time to start a family, as the Covid-19 pandemic only worsened. “I was thinking about my grandparents and how they started a family during the war; they fell in love in the internment camps,” Ito says. “Everyone’s family has this story that grounds them to their history and their ability to persevere in life. And those are the stories that I’m really excited about to share.” The result was a solo exhibition of paintings and installations titled Motion Pictures, which ran from October 2024 to this past February at the Long Beach Museum of Art.
Ito often draws inspiration from objects around his home, viewing them as representative of his own experience. Several of the pieces in Motion Pictures feature a candlestick, the lighting of which Ito likened to “looking in a mirror,” he says. “I connect that to people: the light that we have within ourselves, our ability to shine.” Within the series of paintings, he paired the candlestick with other household items—temporal objects, such as an hourglass or metronome; an apple meant to represent knowledge and the birth of science; blooming poppies to represent hope—to ultimately depict the ups and downs, the challenges and victories, of human life. A charred table and chairs also stood in the center of the gallery, framed by three paintings, initially appearing to symbolize the destruction of a home, the fracturing of a domestic unit—and yet, in the center of the table, blooms sprouted anew. The timing of the exhibition couldn’t have been more prescient: wildfires ravaged Los Angeles in January, and many refugees who ended up in Long Beach walked into the museum to see the show. “There’s always hope at the end of the road,” they told Ito.
