As California’s wildflowers bloom this spring, Oceanside Museum of Art will present Kate Tova: A Place to Rest (My Tired Mind), an exhibition that draws on imagery of the seasonal bloom to explore one of the most pervasive conditions of modern life: collective exhaustion and burnout. The exhibition opens on Saturday, May 2 and runs through September 27.
Works from Tova’s newest series, A Place to Rest (My Tired Mind), greet visitors in the museum’s grand stairwell. The California-based artist explores emotional and physical burnout, questioning what it means to truly rest in a culture that equates productivity with worth. Interspersed throughout the stairwell are selections from her Flux series – her signature “glitch” compositions created during the pandemic – which reflect the constant motion of contemporary life and the broader forces beyond our control. Inspired by nature’s resilience, these works suggest both disruption and continuity.
Inside the gallery, the exhibition unfolds as an immersive environment, surrounding visitors with works from the A Place to Rest series. Inspired by the gentle hills surrounding her studio that erupt into wildflowers each spring, Tova’s paintings envision wildflower fields as inner sanctuaries. In these works, the meadows become a metaphor for the mind at rest: expansive and unforced. The less we interfere, the more they thrive.
Tova began this series while recovering from burnout herself, confronting deeply ingrained beliefs about labor, worth, and rest. Raised by a Soviet grandmother with rigid ideas around work and shaped by the pressures of proving herself as an immigrant in the U.S., she developed what she describes as an unhealthy relationship with rest. This body of work represents a slow unlearning of guilt and shame in response to the simple human need to pause.
A Place to Rest (My Tired Mind) invites viewers invites visitors to reflect on cycles of depletion and renewal, finally finding permission to sit with stillness and heal.
Kate Tova and OMA’s spring exhibitions will be celebrated at the public Exhibition Celebration on May 2, 2026, from 5pm – 7pm.
