Connor Tingley celebrated the opening of his exhibition What Do You Think You Believe? with a cocktail reception at Maxfield. The event marked the kickoff of Frieze Week in Los Angeles, drawing industry friends, local communities, and art enthusiasts to experience Tingley’s newest body of work.

“I’ve said these works are ghosts of what I once believed,” says Tingley. “Each painting is titled after what I had Googled. They expose my own bias — how quickly I judge people by how they present themselves, what they claim to believe, and who they say they are, all of which are images no different from the ones we create or consume as photographers, painters, and participants in media.

All images carry influence, sometimes accurate and sometimes distorted, and I recognize that I am just as susceptible to that influence as anyone else.

My process of sourcing images through the everyday act of searching words and scrolling, then spending hundreds of hours repainting the found images, I confront the snap judgments I was once instantly convinced by. Classically painting them in a photo negative palette restores a mysterious sensitivity to the subject while connecting early painting traditions to the authority of modern photography, and back again to the phone where the image first appeared to me.

That circular return is the point — an acknowledgment of human error, influence, and the possibility of growth within the same image.”

What Do You Think You Believe? ultimately invites viewers to examine their own reflexive assumptions and to reconsider the images, narratives, and beliefs they encounter daily. In doing so, Tingley reframes the act of looking as both responsibility and opportunity: a space where error can give way to awareness, and awareness to growth.

The exhibition will remain on view at Maxfield through March 9, 2026. 

Image courtesy of Connor Tingley