Anemoia Is a Beautiful Longing

Posted on by Diversions LA

One of the many beautiful series of work created by photographer Stephen Levey is coming to the gallery space of two other fantastic photographic artists, Diane and Bruce Cockerill.

Levey’s Anemoia lives up to its elegaic name, which refers to “nostalgia for a time or place you have never personally known or experienced.”

The lovely exhibition consists of ten black and white framed images that were taken by the artist on  a ranch, located in a secret spot in the Nevada Hills back in 2018. Viewing them allows one to honestly assimilate anemoia, and feel the experience of seeing this special place for yourself.

Levey’s prolific and often profound photographic career has been curtailed, the casualty of a terrible accident that nearly took his life, and that has led to repeated and terrible health challenges. Certainly taking home one of these splendid, rich photographs is an excellent way to provide a bit of support, as well as acknowledgment of his gifted work.

Come see these compelling and carefully curated images at San Pedro’s First Thursday art walk, October 1st, from 6 – 9 p.m., and again on Saturday, October 10th, from 2 – 5 p.m.

The studio/gallery is located at 364 W. 7th Street – San Pedro, CA 90731, in the heart of the San Pedro arts district. For more information: dianecockerill617@gmail.com. To contribute to Stephen Levey’s GoFundMe, visit https://gofund.me/04817ca7

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist via Diane Cockerill

The Magical World of Glenn Waggner’s Figurative Art

Posted on by Diversions LA

Every picture tells a story, and for artist Glenn Waggner, it’s a magical one, merging the real world with a sense of wit and wonder. Working in oil,  Waggner creates resonant, meaningful figurative works that soar with imagination and devote themselves to indelible detail.

Waggner is both an architecht and an artist, and as such, it is perhaps unsurprising that he says he is “inspired by cities and mostly urban environments. A few times I have been in certain places where I had the feeling that everything was perfect. That’s what I want to paint.”

When he first began his journey as an artist he says he “started out painting twisting buildings at impossible angles. The work evolved into a more realistic portrayal while becoming more abstracted and looser. He adds that “Over time, the lighting and tones have become a little more surreal, like the lighting that occurs during an eclipse or seen in dreams.”

Make no mistake, Waggner’s worlds have that special hint of the magical that transforms even the most recognizable scene of getting morning coffee at a stand or hailing a taxi.  He works in oils exclusively and finds that he plans to keep that medium as his first choice for creation.

“I switched to acrylics for a short time, and while I found the colors were the same, acrylics dried way too fast for me. I like to blend the paint in layers to give it a richness,” he points out.

Thematically, he says he is moving toward a change, however. “I am heading towards a more abstracted, expressionistic style. Not abstract expressionism, but more of a disruption of images.”

While he is currently exhibiting a solo exhibition at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery, he will also be exhibiting at the Brewery Artwalk in November, where he has shown for ten years; and returning to DFA for an exhibition in a December group show.

He is also looking forward to building a new body of work for future shows, and regardless of the changes he is planning in his work thematically, he will always tell wonderful stories. Asked what comes first, the story-making or the visual art, he says “The visuals almost always come first. The narrative develops naturally during creation. I also like to have fun with titles.”

Above: Waggner uses a skateboard for a canvas for his “Mall Grip;” detail of same; a look at “Girl Times Three.”

Waggner adds that “I love it when people see my work and [I can] watch it trigger memories or a narrative, many times completely different from what I see or intend.”

Certainly in his current exhibition, there are a wide range of pieces that could and do evoke memories and stories in the viewer, such as a stunning, panoramic take on LA’s Dingbat architecture; another such dimensional piece depicting a stunning view of the Strand beach walk, sea and sky…

…and even a simple and warmly recognizable image of a surf-board-carrying youth, holding his iPhone as he does what the title suggests, “Texting in Sick” in order to catch a wave.

There are orange clad monks in meditation, a dark car on a rain-slick road, a mustard-yellow train engine chugging on, and even a lovely portrait of the Broad Museum in DTLA.

Take a peak at these and other examples of Waggner’s bountiful, beautiful slice-of-life visual stories in Golden Days, now at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery located at 1069 N. Aviation Blvd. in Redondo Beach through October 4th.

  • Genie Davis; photos courtesy of the artist and Davis

 

Linda Stelling Paints Nature’s Portraits

Posted on by Diversions LA

Linda Stelling doesn’t paint what she sees: instead she paints what she knows, “from my childhood, from my life. Nature first; the garden, the weather, water, atmosphere, seasonal change, environmental shifts…I absorb it from experiencing it and noticing.”

She describes color as a “physical necessity for me: color is my food.” And she washes that down with a deep perception, she says.
“I’m fascinated by how differently we each see and experience the same thing.”

Stelling’s work is also steeped in memory, dreams, and the subconscious, and she lets her work lead her brush. “I respond to how the painting wants me to go. Inspiration for me can come from anywhere. I think I’m constantly collecting things without realizing I’m doing it at all.”

While the artist began making art at a young age, supported by a family that included those who were artists herself, her art creation has shifted and grown over the years. “Style has alway been difficult to identify from the inside. I’m highly responsive to my surroundings and experiences and these leaves residues which stick to my emotional cavity, affecting my choices…but I don’t think I am always aware of that.”

She notes that change is ineveitable for her, because she is always absorbing her art work. “I can’t remain the same. For me it would be horribly boring.”

Her art has an alchemic energy, whether she is creating landscapes with full moons or blazing suns, calming ocean waves, or bouquets of clouds. She creates abstract, hot pink and orange striations as seemingly effortlessly as she shapes figurative cloud and seascapes and flowers and a wide range of landscapes and emotional scales between the two.

“Place was a big change for me,” she says. Originally living in Wisconsin, coming to Los Angeles was exciting and challenging for her, she notes.  “Sensitivity and experience gave me a different way of seeing. What changed in me is what changed the work. I think what has changed most is not necessarily how I create but how much more life I bring with me when I go to the studio.”

She adds that becoming a mother changed her “internal compass. Time became more real. Time eventually asks us to choose. Wandering has given me material. I’ve taken detours, changed environments, taught, and kept making work. Time is funny thing.”

Stelling works in a wide range of mediums from painting, weaving, and wearable art, to ceramic sculpture, stained glass, and the creations of large scale installations. Her undergraduate degere in ceramic sculpture helped give her “form and dimensionality,” but painting has become her “most immediate language.”

Currently, the artist has a solo exhibition at Diversions Fine Arts in Manhattan Beach,  and a near-future goal in mind, to “develop a two or multi- women show at a large space.”

In the meantime, nature is her manifestor. “[It] is sensory for me. The changing light, a sudden warm current of air that can change all movement. I notice everything…Sound, smell , vibrations, all produce a reaction and a resonance.”

Color is a big component of that manifestation. ” It’s what drives me, excites me, feeds me on so many levels. My emotional brain goes on overload. Color is how nature reaches me. The studio which is like a giant tree house that provides me with a bird’s eye view of blue water, green trees, pink and red flowers, the bluejays flying by ( stopping for the peanuts I feed them). Color is sustenance for me.”  She attests that “Painting is mark making but color says what marks cannot.”

It is also an invitation from Stelling. “It pulls the viewer toward the painting and then asks them to enter it. Once inside, I’m not asking them to understand anything, just allow a memory or recognition. If I’m lucky, the viewer might leave with a sensation or a pleasure.

Diversions Fine Arts is located at 1069 N. Aviation Blvd. in Manhattan Beach. The exhibition runs through October 4th; there will be a curatorial walk through at 3 p.m. on October 3rd; on October 4th, an artist talk and closing reception will run from 1-3 p.m.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist and by Diversions Fine Arts

Dataland: An Immersive Adventure in AI Art

Posted on by Diversions LA

Dataland is literally something else as far as an art experience. Fiercely, even reverentially experiential, it is an immersive adventure into “living” AI. It is in a way a combination of familiar things rendered into something entirely different.

For me it was one part IMAX viewing experience; one part the traveling Van Gogh exhibition Immersive Van Gogh with its 360-degree, floor-to-ceiling animated digital video projections; and one part reminiscent of Images in Space and Time, an international collection of fine art holographs which originally came to Los Angeles in the 1990s via the California Museum of Science and Industry. The latter was semi-permanently located in the concourse galleries close to where Dataland is now.

The bottom line with Dataland is that it is entirely unique and a lot of fun, a spectacle of light and color and moving images.

The experience begins by listening to an introduction to the experience, and then donning a neck-wrap device the emits scents related to the visuals, and a wristband not dissimilar to a Fitbit, which measures your own personal metrics, which are then monitored by the AI.

Descending a mirrored escalator to a cavernous room where shifting light projections cover the walls and floor, over the course of about 40 minutes, there are flowers and trees and what look like living, surging seas and colorful beads and swarming colors and even moments that illuminate one’s own metrics in blue and white circles on the floor. A soundtrack merges with the scents that support the scene from forest to flower to sea breeze. This gallery is the Latent Forest.

It’s galvanizing and absolutely embraces the vision by the installation’s cofounders Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç with their inaugural Machine Dreams: Rainforest exhibition. The AI itself was trained on and based upon datasets about nature; culling information from diverse sources such as the Natural History Museum in London and the Smithsonian.

According to museum literature, the commitment to nature includes sustainability as to use, with the system operating on primarily carbon-free and renewable energy.

While that exhibition is the main, and longest experience at Dataland, it is not the only one. Upon exiting, Latent Forest, there is the interactive adventure of the Latent Gallery in which three separate kiosks allow hands on projections of various flowers,sea, and forest images that visitors can explore and learn about, such as orchids, mushrooms, specific trees.

In this area there was also a small stand where visitors could select, or have AI select based on its reading of ones’ personal metric, one of four flavors of chocolates. While my AI chose milk chocolate with mushrooms (and it is true, I do like Hershey bars to this day), I selected my own, the orange bitters and dark chocolate with cardamon.

There were two, timed, separate limited admission gallery experiences, the quite lovely and haunting “The Dream of Ruwe Pinu,” a journey through the Amazon rainforest led by a translucent hummingbird, and “The Sanctuary.”

The latter makes use of visitors’ own biometric information collected via their wristbands, and is vaguer in intent, consisting of patterns of writhing colorful, sand-art-style beads, blooming and snaky florals, and mysterious near-landscapes that materialize on the dimensional screen. It ends however, with the lovely sound of a bird now extinct, issuing its call to a non-existent mate. One could feel deeply elegaic about that birdsong. The bird is gone, and here we are, sitting in an air conditioned sanctuary enjoying its last poignant hope.

However, hopefulness, rather than a last, forlorn lost hope is really the intent of these exhibitions. One of the visitors came with an 18-month-old, who vividly enjoyed crawling around these smaller galleries, interacting with the patterns cost reflectively on the shining floors, and clearly as immersed in experience as one could possibly be.

The child was feeling joy in the sound, colors, scents, and lights. That is the true crux of this experience: its joyful, playful, and also resolute in its depiction of AI as our artistic friend or at least our artistic spectacle creator. While shaping our own memories it is also preserving existing ones, or dreamscapes that involve memories of nature’s rainbow.

Dataland is more art experience than museum or gallery, so with that in mind, go and experience it and all its scents, sounds, and motions.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis