Therrio lives in Joshua Tree and never went to school for any of this. What he did instead was spend more than twenty-five years carving conceptual models for the footwear industry, which is to say that shoes you have owned started life as a block somebody shaped by hand, and for a long stretch that somebody was him. He worked on the Getty Villa. He worked on the Taggart House in Los Feliz and a bank in Long Beach. He worked in film.

In 2015 he stopped all of it and made only art. But his own catalogue of sculpture runs back to 1990, so 2015 was not a beginning. It was the year the work stopped having to share the calendar.

What he says about the making is the part worth carrying into the gallery. He starts with a direction, and then the material argues. The plywood will not do what he planned, and he has to go around it, and that forced deviation is, in his words, "where the magic happens." The rest he decides by feel: "It just feels right." Twenty-five years of hitting somebody else's spec, and now the whole point is the swerve. Compound puts it more plainly than a gallery usually does — the limitation of materials, it says, is where creativity happens.

The order the year runs in

Compound announced the whole thing at once — four shows, nine artists, dates running to the end of May 2027. What it offered by way of a through-line was a single sentence: four group and solo exhibitions featuring "a mix of locally-based and visiting artists in conversation around various themes." Then the themes themselves, listed like ingredients. Abstract geometries. Human and natural connections. Sculpture. Performance.

Which leaves the running order to make the argument. It makes a good one.

November 7 through January 3 brings Abstract Geometries, with Christopher Ronk, DA·MA, and Jenene Nagy working through symbols, color, line, shape and mark-making — three different ideas of geometric form set against each other to see where they grind. It is the flattest stretch of the year, canvas and line arriving directly after a room full of carved mass. Caroline Partamian, who runs operations at Compound and whose own practice is sound and performance built out of dance, is teaching a drawing workshop inside it. Date and time to come.

January 23 through March 21 is In the Scheme of Things — Dorene Quinn, Adriana Lopez-Ospina, SR Lejeune and Reeyna Daniel on the ties between people, nature, ecology, culture and construction, working in eco-corporeal forms, natural material, and close looking. Bodies again, four months after Therrio's, except now they are made of what is outside the building.

Then April 3 through May 30: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs's Everyone is Late to the Ruins, an installation of performance, film, sculpture, sound and scent built with local sand and clay, with a performance and a community choir planned.

Read those in order and the shape is hard to miss. The season opens with a material you buy by the sheet and closes with local sand and clay. It opens with one man alone in a shop and closes with a piece that is not finished until other people turn up to sing it. In between, the group shows widen — three artists, then four — as if the room were being filled on purpose. Whether or not anyone drew it up that way, that is what the year does.

Who is actually there

There is a second pattern in the roster, and it is the one that tells you what kind of gallery this is. Both solo shows go to artists who live out here: Therrio in Joshua Tree, Riggs between Los Angeles and the High Desert. The visitors arrive in the middle, in groups — Ronk from the Los Angeles area, Nagy from the Inland Empire, Lopez-Ospina out of a Cathedral City studio, Lejeune all the way from Pine Plains, New York, where they also keep a manual machine shop. And the middle shows are not imported wholesale. Quinn is in Morongo Valley. Daniel is in Wonder Valley, a former engineer from Saint Lucia who has been working in clay out there since 2019.

The bookends are ours. The middle is the conversation.

The choir is the long play

The April choir is worth knowing about this far out, because it is the one part of this season you can end up inside of rather than looking at.

Riggs has done this before. In 2016 she started Community Chorus in Los Angeles with the conductor Tany Ling — free, drop-in, meeting twice a month, singing at marches and rallies. A state-funded project out here ran bimonthly workshops for a free collaborative chorus taking on mental health, civic participation and the climate emergency, and finished with a performance called Distance Duet. What any of that becomes in a Yucca Valley storefront in the spring of 2027 has not been announced yet — no collaborator, no rehearsal schedule, no date. The precedent is a chorus that cost nothing and took whoever came.

Until then

The gallery is open Friday through Sunday, noon to five, through September 27, and at three o'clock on Sunday, September 13, Therrio walks the show himself. For work that came out of the material talking back, the walkthrough is the version to catch.

Go stand close enough to see the layers. It is the same plywood holding up subfloors and job-site tables across this basin, stacked until it turned into a body — and in seven months an artist will fill that same room with local sand and clay and ask the neighborhood to sing in it. Start at the near end, where one man got there with nothing but the material and an argument with it.