Trap Door: Andy DeLapp, Gabrielle Medina, Ester Tuva
Opening July 18, 6 - 9 pm at Winona Gallery
On view through July 18 - August 1
Hours by appointment
Email winona@winona.biz for the address or to set up an appointment <3
Limited-edition zines available for pickup at opening.
What’s an illusion to a contemporary painter? Rather than attempting to prove their technical prowess, Andy DeLapp, Gabrielle Medina, and Ester Tuva twist the rules of perspective to play ironic or self-referential jokes. The visual tricks and puns in these paintings remind viewers they are, in fact, looking at paint on a canvas in the shape of other forms, asking us not to get too lost in the forms themselves. This ask is, ultimately, a prompt to wonder about the line between reality and fiction, made complicated by each painting’s precarious barrier between its content and the world. This prompt is ultimately an ask to wonder whether these works present trapdoors: secret or accidental ways out of the narrative dilemmas of our time.
About the Artists
Andy DeLapp is a trans-masculine artist based in Seattle, WA. He established his career while achieving his BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 2023, where he discovered his practice as a representational oil painter. After completing an internship in object conservation at the Seattle Art Museum, art history became an inspiration and a central part of Andy’s practice. In 2025, he was named a finalist in the Neddy Artist Awards and was recognized as a Highly Commended Artist in the Homiens Art Prize, an international artist grant. Gabrielle Medina is a Mexican American painter. She was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, where she received her Bachelor's in art history and studio art at the University of Arizona. She received her Master's of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts. She is currently living and working in Oakland, CA.
Ester Tuva is a painter and weaver based in Oakland, CA. Her work is inspired by silliness, embarrassment, and guilty pleasures: moments that belie performances of coolness or detachment. A reverence for meticulous craft also plays a key role in her work. She hand-weaves the canvases and uses hand-controlled methods on the floor loom to add patterns and text into those weavings. Her latest undertaking is learning woodworking to create custom structures for my paintings.
Tuva graduated with an MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2022. Prior to CCA, she studied Psychology and Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.
ESSAY: TRAP DOOR
This text was produced for a limited edition zine I made for the opening of Trap Door. The exhibition ran from July 18 - August 1, 2026.You can download the text here.
And you can download a booklet-formatted PDF here.
Tell me if you’ve heard this one: there were two great rival painters in ancient Greece, Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Being adversaries for many years, their rivalry was coming to a head: they had to determine once and for all who was the superior painter. They thought a contest would be the right setting, and whoever could depict reality in a way so true-to-life it transcended painting, would be the winner.
Zeuxis unveiled his painting of purple grapes. The grapes were rendered so realistically that birds flocked to the artwork, attempting to peck them off the canvas. Believing he was victorious, Zeuxis marched confidently to Parrhasius’s painting for inspection. Parrhasius asked the other artist to remove the curtain veiling the painting underneath. Zeuxis obliged and was stunned when his fingertips could not grasp the curtain—this velvety purple covering was, in fact, the painting itself.
“I have deceived the birds,” Zeuxis declared to the audience, “but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis.”
This story and its variations were popular with European painters in the 18th and 19th centuries, who found themselves subverting the rules of perspective that had been developed and perfected in the centuries before them. These artists, working through the European Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution, prized drafting techniques that rendered three-dimensional space on the canvas so convincingly that the artists could create hyperrealistic illusions—an effect sometimes known as trompe l’oeil. When photography was invented in 1826, and people could easily render the world using only a machine, painters began to favor techniques a gadget could not reproduce, such as the smudgy impasto in Impressionist paintings.
So, what’s an illusion to a contemporary painter? Rather than attempting to prove their technical prowess through deception, artists Andy DeLapp, Gabrielle Medina, and Ester Tuva twist the rules of perspective to play ironic or self-referential jokes. The visual tricks and puns in these paintings remind viewers they are, in fact, looking at paint on a canvas in the shape of other forms—forms that, in reality, have unique political and aesthetic connotations. This ask is, ultimately, a prompt to consider the line between reality and fiction, made complicated by each painting’s precarious barrier between its content and the world. Each work contains a trapdoor, a secret or accidental way into a world that looks uncannily like our own. Some doors, you’ll find, lead right back to where you started
***
Over the past few years, Andy DeLapp has drawn compositional inspiration from the subjects and techniques of the Italian High Renaissance and the French Rococo. Pasted on top of these compositions are little doodles—a worm peeking out of an apple, an emoji-like smiley face, a cartoonish cat pleading out to the viewer, or blue painters tape holding the composition together. DeLapp applies these graffiti-style doodles like stickers on top of the classically styled paintings, mimicking the aesthetic of a dive-bar bathroom rather than a regal palace or museum.
In Trap Door, DeLapp becomes an observational-style art-history stand-up comedian. These paintings show tightly cropped views of meticulously rendered architectural spaces where doodles, stickers, or tape-ups interact with the larger looming landscapes of the artwork’s fabricated worlds. Party Tricks (2026) tells perhaps the most on-the-nose joke of the bunch. The painting shows the back of a stretched canvas, held in place by staples on the painting’s border. But this canvas has little structural integrity of its own. A large gash in the center curls back, revealing a dark, empty space on the other side of the painting—the side where we, the viewers, would be standing under normal circumstances. A paper cutout of a hand holding three red balloons pops into view through the gash, confirming that there is some form of life on the other side. DeLapp makes insider art quips, using painted blue tape to “secure” a large flat paintbrush to the top-right corner of the canvas, objects that an artist would typically tidy away before showing their finished painting to the world. In the bottom-left corner, he “tapes” a cutout of a banana, perhaps an allusion to the infamous 2019 sculpture Comedian by artist-prankster Maurizio Cattelan, in which the artist duct taped a ripe banana to the wall at Art Basel Miami. DeLapp positions these objects carefully on the small canvas’s plane to blur the line between our reality and the painting’s. Who is real, and who is only as real as the canvas? And, if there are two realities within this painting, how many realities could our own little world contain?
***
Before we continue, a flyover art history lesson on illusions in artworks. The earliest trompe l’oeils we know of were painted on the walls of ancient Greek homes, typically depicting a false window to make a stone house feel larger. But not always. The “un-swept floor” motif was a style of trompe l’oeil popular in Greek and Roman tile mosaics between 300 – 200 BC, depicting bugs, mice, food scraps, and other debris as if scattered across the floor. Perhaps meant to infuriate a particular neat freak in an artist’s life, or call to reference a debauched banquet, these works show an enduring lightness and humor that this genre has carried forward through the centuries.
But then the genre disappeared. After the Goths took over Rome in the 5th century CE, illusionistic painting gave way to flat compositions, in which artists painted figures and landscapes exclusively in the foreground of the canvas. There was no line of sight receding into the background. Art was flat for about 800 years, waiting for the re-emergence of joy in daily life.
In the 1200s, Franciscan preachers proposed that joy could be central to Christianity. Inspired by their preaching, the 14th-century painter Giotto di Bondone separated figures and architecture into a foreground, middle ground, and background, with the latter receding toward the painting’s center. These seemingly small choices would influence the painters of the High Renaissance to develop and perfect perspective painting techniques from the late 1400s into the 1500s.
In the year 1600, a form of entertainment that blended music, narrative, and visual art emerged: opera. The epitome of Baroque period drama, the medium prized illusionistic stagecraft, in which scenery and stage mechanics sought to depict real life. Later, in the 19th century, realism and naturalism became popular artistic movements in which artists attempted to depict subjects exactly as they appeared in life, without idealizing or obscuring any part of reality. Backdrops for theater and opera became as realistic as artists could render them. While this meant the artists were painting true to life, it also meant they had to perfect their ability to render the world not necessarily as it is, but as we see it.
These artistic developments unraveled the concept of the fourth wall, where fiction could spill out of an artwork into the real world in an unexpected, unsettling way. With this barricade broken, perhaps the “real world” could find its way into art, not like the realist or naturalist movements that attempted to depict life as it was, but messy, unpredictable, unresolved life walking into a work of fiction. The fourth wall opened an unstable portal, a trapdoor one could easily, accidentally fall into, but perhaps could not as easily retreat.
***
Paintings are traditionally two-dimensional, meaning painters must manipulate their single “wall” to create the four “walls” represented in a theater. Breaking the fourth wall, then, is not impossible, but it is challenging. When we look into a painted scene, we look through that invisible barrier, but the subjects on the other side cannot acknowledge us. Paintings that do break down this barrier, like those in this exhibition, often reference themselves as works of art: constructions whose concepts are delicately held together by the confines of the canvas. Just as DeLapp reaches through this barrier by layering realities on top of one another, Gabrielle Medina creates portals through hyper-realistic renderings of logos, cartoon characters, and even other works of art, combined with discarded objects she embeds into the canvas.
Her largest work, Mexican Standoff (2026), ties together the Xbox logo, a Kodachrome transparency of two baby brothers, a note from a client, two plastic cowboys, and her own rendition of a nocturnal Thomas Kinkcaid scene all on a dusty rose washed canvas. “at least three to five things from Taco Bell” reads a Laffy Taffy purple text in hand-painted serif font scrawled perpendicularly across the canvas—a dividing line between the Xbox logo and the Kinkade copy. Like impressions from dreams that dissolve upon waking, each reference in Medina’s work is tied to a thought, memory, or feeling that is deeply personal yet somewhat inaccessible—even to the artist herself.
Medina groups logos, images, and materials that appear to belong to the same low-brow category but could not be more different politically. For example, the ornate pink plastic frame, punctuated with rhinestones, and her Kinkade reproduction inside it could be seen as belonging to the same group of kitsch or low-brow objects. However, their political connotations are opposite. Thomas Kinkade’s simple, quaint depictions of “American scenes” sold comfort by erasing complexity, showcasing fuzzy, warm, Christian neighborhoods that have never existed in the United States. In a different context, viewers might read the pink, girly, plastic frame as “simple,” because “hyper feminine” is often linked to “uncritical” or “unthinking.” However, here, I would associate the plastic material and bimbo-istic aesthetics with “white trash,” another purely American form of being. By having the taste connotations of the frame encase the political connotations of the facsimile painting, Medina flips Kinkade’s trade-off on its head: she is complexity, even opacity, over comfort. Protruding from the canvas, this pink frame breaks the fourth wall—the barrier between the viewer and the painting’s content. It reminds us that depictions of the world like this one are fictitious: we behold a representation, not reality.
***
Ester Tuva’s work is a vertigo-inducing balancing act. Her depictions of pop cultural references, recognizable to those who came of age in the 2000s and early 2010s, straddle the line between deliberate and naive camp. Like Medina’s pink frame, the subjects and aesthetics Tuva depicts may be tacky, sentimental, or “cringe,” but are also pulled from moments and places deeply personal to the artist. A tiny rendering of Pearl Jam’s self-titled album, for example, may seem like a relic of Seattle grunge nostalgia. It is, however, a reference to the exact poster Tuva’s middle school teacher, Mr. Murphy, hung up in his classroom at the International Community School in Kirkland, WA. By imbuing this cultural imagery with a meaningful, occasionally embarrassing, memory, Tuva creates moments of connection to others whose adolescence was filled with discomfort.
In Western Wallflower (2026), Tuva paints a woodland canopy inspired by fantasy and folklore illustrations, using the same aesthetic threads as Medina’s Kinkade copy but with more sincere intentions. Tuva creates this landscape by returning to the swirly patterns of her high school notebooks with a sense of whimsy and pride, having outgrown the embarrassment of being a bookish, nerdy teenager. Below the canopy, running into the Lisa Frank-style rainbow floral pattern, a fairy with an uncanny resemblance to the surrealist writer and director Julio Torres rides a speedy squirrel. Without the key knowledge that this is a scene from the explicit, gender-bending picaresque novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, the tableau appears sweet, cute, even. However, with the knowledge of this reference—specifically, that this fairy is on its way to steal a human baby—the viewer sees this composition as more sinister, less proper, and certainly gayer. Perhaps this queerness emanates from below. Tug on a wooden handle in the painting’s center, and you’ll reveal another painting of two emo boys kissing. This seemingly non-sequitur image is an homage to Tuva’s teenhood web searches, giving a thematic—and in this case, literal—gay underpinning to the images on the painting’s surface.
Notably, Tuva constructs the surfaces on which she paints: she carves each trapdoor, she waves her own canvases. Having been a set maker in her high school drama department, Tuva aligns herself with the craftspeople of the theater: those who, if they were experts at their craft, were entirely invisible to the viewer. Her fabricated set pieces, Rock (2026) and Dandelions (2026), surround the gallery’s exterior, bringing the trompe l’œil into our three-dimensional realm. These set pieces emphasize the charade of the gallery itself—it is, after all, a Home Depot shed—as well as the spectacle of decor and its role in differentiating one space from another. Good stagecraft differentiates a lavish abode from a meager dump; good set making creates separations between the aesthetics of class.
***
Here is my final point. Like the 17th-century Baroque artists who depicted velvet curtains across their works or placed painting tools and palettes in the foreground of still life paintings, DeLapp, Medina, and Tuva blur the line not only between reality and their depictions of it, but also between what an artist should and should not reveal. Many of the most famous examples of trompe l’oeil were painted in the 17th century by the Flemish painter Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts. In these vanitas paintings—a subgenre of still life painting that used objects to remind us of life’s transience—Gijsbrechts was largely interested in provoking viewers not only to recognize an artist’s craftsmanship but also to remember that we cannot take these paintings or their contents with us when we pass. The reminder of one’s inevitable expiration and the reminder that mortal hands created this image are one and the same.
A memento mori is typically a skull or skeleton placed in an artwork to remind the viewer of just that: no matter how much wealth they accumulate or how much status they gain while living, the viewer must die. Artists like Gijsbrechts often inserted these reminders into still lifes to reinforce this worldview. The presence of the skull, therefore, reminds us that this depiction of life is impermanent, even if these works have outlived their makers.
DeLappe, Medina, and Tuva do not use memento mori, but each uses a version of memento pictūram—remember you look at a painting. Despite the artists’ attempts to break the fourth wall, we, the audience, cannot enter their realities. The simulations of reality seen in art can break open the narratives that haunt us, that stay with us from childhood through old age. But we’re the ones who must finish the story; we must decide what happens after we fall through the trapdoor. As art viewers, we have been conditioned to believe that we have no agency in the matter; we believe we are on a track ride rather than driving cars on a two way street. But we have some power—not against an artist’s ability to deceive, but to decide how a painting becomes a threshold, and how we will be transformed after being thrust through the trapdoor of experiencing it.
Zeuxis and Parrhasius, as arrogant as they may have been, celebrated the illusions they could create, their ability to fool creatures of the natural world. They remind us that the world we live in is the one we have, the only one we can all change. We can be the birds pecking at the painted grapes, or we can be artists, pranksters in our own right, shaping reality, remaking our futures.
Afterword: A Roll of the Dice, From Far Away, Always Looks Like an Empty Hand Job
The trapdoor, whether a stage door hidden beneath prop leaves or a loose maintenance hole on the street, is a potent narrative device, with endless possibilities. Their activation implants fear or excitement for the viewer in a staged setting. In reality, however, there are more uncertainties behind the trapdoors: they’re reminders that we have choices, but we may not have control over which choices we are given.
In 2016, the New Museum published a collection of essays on the discourse around trans visibility in culture titled Trap Door. The conceit behind the title came from the essay “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things,” where the authors Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos posit that some doors are traps, in that we do not know what is behind them, and some doors are thresholds, through which you can pass into, and perhaps be transformed. But some doors are trapdoors; they may not be traps set for those who pass through them, but they do deceive those who do not know they are there. Through a trapdoor, someone might slip away unnoticed, escape from danger, or meet an unpleasant fate. In all cases, these passageways represent points in space, time, culture, that can trigger change.
But those thresholds do not appear on their own; we have to create them. “A roll of the dice always, from a distance,” the authors write, “appears to be a hand job, but a hand job doesn’t appear, or take form.” Leaving something to chance does not always mean you’re getting lucky. If writing through these artists’ works—in this time when we hope to have luck on our side—has taught me anything, it is that we make our own trapdoors; we make our own ways through and out. Through is living, not wishing, or dreaming, or waiting, but living the lives we have. There is only through. A roll of the dice may not bring a hand job, but lift your gaze ahead, gesture toward another person, and it might.
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