A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

— Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

High Noon is pleased to present The Eighth Veil, the gallery’s third exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Fatemeh Burnes. The title draws from Salomé, in which Oscar Wilde invokes the seventh veil as the final unveiling of truth in human character. In Burnes’s interpretation, however, there is another layer beyond this threshold. The eighth veil points to what has become most urgent in her work. As she states, “Beyond the complexity of human character— the ways we construct, destroy, rebuild, and contradict ourselves— the deeper revelation is the absence of compassion. That absence, once uncovered, becomes the most significant truth.”