As 2025 begins to take shape, it would seem that protests against power structures and prevailing limitations for challenges against power will have to come in different forms than typical activism. Noelia Towers, as a painter, is the type of artist that has created a body of work that is both subtly and powerfully challenging traditional notions of power, the effects of centuries of infrastructures of abuse and the notion that strrength and authority comes from the top down. She is a protest painter, and but not in a tradional sense. Her new solo show, An Account of Preceding Events, at de boer in Los Angeles, is cinematic and obsessed with the details of a moment, the in-between rush of acts of motion. She plays with ideas of myth, both personal and universal, using imagery that creates a feeling of familiarity but abstracted to make you rethink your expectation of memory. —Evan Pricco