Hilary Pecis

Hilary Pecis (b. 1979, Fullerton, California) is a Los Angeles–based painter known for her vivid still lifes, interiors, and landscapes that celebrate the everyday. Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, Pecis transforms scenes from daily life—domestic spaces, urban streets, and nature trails—into kaleidoscopic compositions drawn from photographs and memory.

Her paintings often depict the layered environments of friends’ homes, filled with books, records, plants, and artwork, rendering each space with affection and an eye for detail. In recent work, Pecis turns her attention to overlooked public spaces—stoops, sidewalks, and vendor stands—captured during her runs, commutes, and travels around Los Angeles. The result is a body of work that blurs the boundary between observation and personal narrative, highlighting the visual richness of ordinary life.

Pecis received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and was the 2008 recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship. She is also a co-founder of Binder of Women, a Los Angeles-based collective of female artists. Her work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally and is included in the collections of institutions such as the Aïshti Foundation, the Orange County Museum of Art, and the Nasher Museum of Art.

Curated by writer and art historian Katy Hessel, Dwelling is the Light is the first in a series of group and solo online exhibitions planned for this spring. Inspired by the evolving effects of the current global lockdown on our attitudes towards nature versus domestic living, Dwelling is the Light presents a curated selection of works by contemporary female artists working within a range of mediums, from figurative and abstract painting to tapestry, sculpture and photography. The title of the exhibition is derived from William Wordsworth’s seminal 1798 poem ‘Tintern Abbey,’ which centers on the author’s meditations on the restorative powers of nature, even in the form of memory. With its emphasis on the dichotomy between sublime nature and urban living, this landmark of British Romantic poetry serves as a point of comparison to these artists’ intimate and often surreal explorations of outdoors and indoors, interiors and exteriors, nature and domesticity.