Studio System II at Torrance Art Museum: Audience with a Muse

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Making art is magic.

There is no other way to describe what viewers have been privy to see this past month at the Torrance Art Museum. I’ve visited twice during the process of artists working at their month-long, in-house residencies, and both times the experience was incredibly special, profoundly illuminating, and offered a look at what it means to have an artistic muse.

At the closing tomorrow night from 6 to 9, we’ll have a chance to see the finished products, but as with life itself, it was the journey to get here that was so profound.

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Perhaps the real expression is soul-satisfying. Museum curator and director Max Presneill allowed artists space and freedom to work their own individual magic, to bond with and be inspired by each other, and to share their artistic alchemy with each other. And in so doing, he created the ability for visitors to not just interact with the artists but to get in touch with something indefinably special, to be an audience to the manifestation of beauty.

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It’s a bit like being present for the creation of the universe.

Okay, on a slightly smaller scale.

Resident artists include: Jodi Bonassi, Chenhung Chen, Tom Dunn,
Huo You Feng, Anna Garner, Lawrence Gipe, Debby and Larry Kline, Feng Ling, Hagop Najarian, Khang Nguyen,
Samuelle Richardson, and Tyler Waxman.

Tam JB 2Bonassi weaves complex, delicate and precisely realized realistic paintings and drawings that capture an indelible image of people, often surrounded by small magical beings, or animals. From her lush color palette to her intuitive emotional resonance, its a treat to see the artist slip in and out of the worlds she’s created.

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Chen creates beautiful, flowing sculptures of cords and woven metal and other found objects. Her use of detritus to shape enigmatic, motion-filled sculpture is rather amazing; she weaves her sculptural works from seemingly nothing into something graceful and mythical.

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Khang Nguyen’s sacred geometric art is hypnotic, drawn in pencil and painted in acrylic.

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Each piece is like the frame of a kaleidoscope image, dancing with light and shape, as if caught just in a brief and fragile moment before a shift. His works, in a muted, earthen palette, bloom as if flowers were plunging up through the soil.

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Hagop Najarian is inspired by music – and uses its rhythms and sounds to create vividly colored works that reflect that inspiration. His multi-layered works have the consistency – or rather the illusion – of stained glass.

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Feng Ling, also known as Carmen Zou, has created a lovely, Zen-like tea room, offering visitors tea and small snacks of raisins and nuts, and engaging them in conversation. For my grandson, present on both visits to the space, this was an introduction to a beautiful ritual, and allowed him the calm to interact with it and share through it. Older participants wrote their names on the wall behind Zou, and spilled tea on a scroll, upon which the artist will be symbolizing each participant.

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Also highly participatory and involving,  Huo You Feng, a guest artist from China – where he is working on lithographic projects – has created a movable, mutable large scale sculpture reminiscent of both the Stone Henge and abstract art. The installation consists in part of mega-sized hay bales which Feng has shaped into a space the resembles a temple of sorts. Scattered soft hay forms the base from which these bales rise.

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Viewers can touch and walk through, and in the case of my accompanying 3-year-old visitor, help to reshape the work while in progress.

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Samuelle Richardson builds sculptures from fabric and wood, creating beings that seem almost alive, and very much on the same page with the “woke”  by love Skin Horse character.  Her distinct,  shabby-chic works are ready to take flight here, in what she describes as a flock of “angry birds.”

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Her work is entirely fresh, and upends the concept of sewn, material based exhibitions as being “less than” and women’s work.  These are powerful creations.

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Tom Dunn has created large scale works that are mural-like in size and scope for this exhibition. The paintings are abstract but oddly recognizable; the pieces shimmer and shiver as if waiting to pop off the walls and dance.

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And don’t miss the potent political and social messages inherent in Debbie and Larry Kline’s series work here. They bring a sense of humor and humanity to their interactive mission.

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Gipe, Garner, and Waxman all have equally beautiful works.

Whether you’ve followed them all in their process or this will be the first time viewing – don’t miss the closing on Saturday from 6-9 p.m.

TAM is located at 3320 Civic Center Drive in Torrance.

 – Genie Davis; photos Genie Davis; Hagop Najarian – photo credit to Chenhung Chen 

Mis (Missing) Information: Jody Zellen and Brian Moss Curate the Media

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If you missed MIS (MISSING) INFORMATION, the powerful show at Charlie James that closed at the start of this month, make no mistake, you’ll be seeing work both by curators Jody Zellen and Brian C. Moss, and the artists in the exhibition again, soon.
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The exhibition featured works which drew from ‘the media’ in one way or another.  Beginning with an image, a Google search, or the daily newspaper, the artists in this exhibition shift the information dialog in fascinating, evocative, and prescient ways.
The thirteen artists include:  Merwin Belin, Jan Blair, Andrea Bowers, York Chang, Michael Genovese, Elissa Levy, Brian C. Moss, Michael Queenland, Casey Reas, Susan Silton, Samira Yamin, Andrew Witkin, and Jody Zellen.
Print and digital mediums were both a part of the show. Zellen notes that print was a particularly fertile ground for art making.
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“As raw material for art, this combination of paper and ink amounts to a never-ending supply. It’s relatively cheap and endlessly varied. Most of the artists in this exhibition have a predisposition to print, as only a few have embraced digital delivery of information. The ways artists have and continue to use news media as form and content in their work is wide-ranging.”
From the altered newspaper pages of Merwin Belin and Elissa Levy to the work in which artists such as Jan Blair, York Chang, Michael Queenland and Andrew Witkin clip images and texts, representing them in new configurations, there are new front pages, shamed icons of power, and a reflection of both glory and self-loathing that seems to define modern information culture.
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Blair looking for clues and hidden information about our civilization the pages of The New York Times.  Chang works from an archive of found images and text culled from years of scanning the Los Angeles and New York daily newspapers.  Queenland presents a pairing of the front and the back of a single newspaper clipping, while Witkin selects multiple newspaper clippings because they contain printing errors, shaping images from these which are then shrink-wrapped and encased in a custom frame.

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In contrast to his selection of errors and information overload,  Susan Silton and Samira Yamin are interested in transformation.
“Through her familiarity with the international language of commercial offset printing, Silton has commissioned printers in different countries to create a series of posters that call attention to the relationship between different types of appropriated materials.  Yamin creates intricate geometric patterns found in Islamic culture by hand cutting information away from a January 11, 2010 edition of Time magazine dedicated to the ongoing wars in the Middle East,” Zellen says.
Andrea Bowers and Brian Moss also step back from the mechanical, using graphite to transcribe what they find on the printed page. Moss creates jarring juxtapositions in the form of delicate tracings; Bowers creates using highly detailed pencil drawings of activists in the service of social justice.
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Casey Reas and Jody Zellen both gather their content via digital algorithms, while Michael Genovese uses the computer as a starting point, typing specific searches into Google and capturing the results before the images appear.
In Zellen’s own piece, News Cycle, she collages front pages and headlines originally captured by her iOS app, News Wheel.
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“Each artist in the exhibition mines the media looking for specific content,” Zellen says. “Their artworks call attention to what is seen, what is missing and what is inferred, as well as the myriad reasons for the disconnects between fact and fiction and the wonderful dissonances that are discerned through their creative investigations.”
According to Zellen “This was not not solely a newspaper art show, but one about missing or mis-information, taking into consideration what is presented, missing and how we fill in the blanks about this kind of ‘information.’
Zellen says she couldn’t play favorites with this exhibition, which focused on LA-based artists, but also included those from out of the region.
“I like them all for different reasons. I was blown away when I saw Merwin Belin’s show at as-is gallery and knew I wanted to include his work in this context. I love York Chang’s new pieces. I saw Andrew Witkin’s work in an art fair 2 years ago and the stayed with me and I knew I wanted him to be in the show. I was also quite taken with Michael Genovese’s images of the screen before information loads and thought they would be an interesting counterpoint to images of the newspaper.”
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Zellen says she wanted to include both artists who work with the actual newspaper and artists who “appropriated” the concept.
“For example, Casey Reas uses the digital version of the NY Times to create an ever changing stream of folding news images in his computer generated work. In thinking about the space, I wanted to draw people to the center of each wall where there was a colorful work, then out to the edges. It was also really important to me to include more than one work by each artist if possible, so it was not a show of one image by each artist. I wanted to present bodies of work, not single images.”
Offering an exhibition that was absorbing, deeply pertinent, and, yes – newsworthy – Zellen and Moss created an exhibition both for and about our times. It was one of our favorite topical exhibitions of the year so far, with plenty to “read into” contained within the images.
Look for these curators and artists to pack more of a political and social punch soon.
– Genie Davis; photos: provided by curator

Pro Proscenia: An Elegant Exhibition Closing this Weekend at JOAN

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It’s time to hurry: Pro Proscenia is closing this weekend at Joan Gallery. Curated by Jeanne Dreskin, the three solo artists  – Walter Askin, Sandra Vista, and Elizabeth Bain – each convey a beautiful and unique sensibility.

The works on display are retrospective in nature,  spanning the time period from the 1970s to the early 90s. Highly detailed and vibrant in palette, the works each manipulate space and surface, crossing the line between painting, sculpture, collage, and drawing. The dimensionality of each work engages viewers,  and represents beautifully rendered techniques that call into question both time and space.

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Askin in particular looks at time – as a line to be followed in a hopscotch fashion. Working with cultural images taken from a random series of historical times, he combines artifacts and figures, shaping worlds that shift beyond the natural realm into that of the highly theatrical.  They glow and shift, a lovely transitional element in inherent in his body of work.

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Bain looks at a world of night landscapes and urban geometry, creating evocative abstract images that revel in a world that is staged – or perhaps as Shakespeare put it succinctly, all the world IS a stage to her. She shifts horizons into stage curtains, cityscape into facade. We are an audience not the performers in her precise landscape.

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She uses shapes as metaphors for more detailed images, and her palette is that of a city after dark, her images as a kind of wordless signage.

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Vista’s work uses a wonderfully rich, highly feminist series of techniques and images, touching on the Pattern and Decoration movement that originated in the 70s and 80s while reimagining the ideals and images behind it with layered, tactile works that feel rich and deep.

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Her images resemble quilts and tapestries, dancing with color and texture.

In the work of all three artists, we get a sense of artistry and artifice, of subtle meaning and refined motion.

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We see stylized figures,  familiar yet reimagined shapes, and layered, fabric-like patterns. It is in these ways that the artists – and the viewer through them – makes sense of the world, or rather, changes the sensibility of world.

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This is a fascinating show, with both a sense of history and a timeless luster, a performance well worth taking in.

  • Genie Davis; Photos provided by the gallery

 

Randi Matushevitz Rocks Her World

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Randi Matushevitz’ recent residency at Shoebox Projects invited viewers into an installation that was it’s own world. Like many of the artist’s recent works, her images here were layered, socio-political, filled with the energy of our times. “My images explore the psychological dichotomies of dark and light, the tension of anxiety and fear, and the quietude of contentedness and assurance,” Matushevitz remarks.

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Her work is designed to immerse her viewers in a reality they may usually refuse to acknowledge, to draw them into a visceral conversation about “the fact that many of us live in a state of illusion, where entitlement, safety and security are only a barrier to hide the disparity and inhumanity that others live.”

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The haves, the have nots. How many of us have what we really want? How many of us appreciate what we have? How many of us walk in the shoes, sleep in the bed, see through the eyes of those who have little or who tread a thin line between the comforts of home and hearth and the cold of the streets.

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“The goal of my Shoebox Projects Residency was to find the thread that runs through all of my art projects. I connected this residency to my previous installation Conundrum, thinking about cultural fear,” she relates.  “I began with the horrors of homelessness and looked deeper into the darkness of the other, the invisible, and illusions of safety to find that I am interested in pointing to the connective tissue of being human, without race, gender or culture.”

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As she worked, however, she says her sense of purpose and the strong linear poetry that suffuses her work, both shifted.

“My ideas evolved as I had real and hard conversations, the tent, my shelter, became a space where all thoughts co-exist. I realized the crux of my artwork is, and has been, to point to human equity. ”

So rather than depicting a habitation that was outside many viewers experience, she dug deeper into something more inclusive, yet riven with intense hope and dread.

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“I created this space, where the coexistence of all thought exists, contrarian and temporary, to reflect the nature of life itself.  This space is fragile yet strong. It has been constructed, deconstructed and re-organized from cardboard, wallpaper, string, clamps, personal ephemera and phrases that represent the emotional and contrary inner workings of our minds.”

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Matushevitz’ process in creating it  was dynamic and highly visceral. “I cut, punctured, tore, only to tie and clamp the fragments back together.  The divisions mimic the physical, social and psychological walls that often divide and separate community and individuals; only to counter these barriers with ideas of commonality, safety, love and joy.”

The most overriding sensation in viewing this installation was of being deeply involved in the world she created.

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“This work is my first to focus on viewer engagement. The viewer is prompted to walk through, sit in, add images or phrases to the whole, to recognize shared human experience.”

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Matushevitz succeeded entirely, and this is just the beginning of this particular body of her work.
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“I am continuing to build upon the experiences of this residency, by creating more spaces for human engagement,  make objects that point to complicated space and contrary experience,” she explains.
While Matushevitz’ next project is a group show in Berlin scheduled for the Fall of 2018  – in conjunction with Enter Art Foundation in Berlin – expect to see more of her work in LA, and to live the viewing experience.
– Genie Davis; Photos: Genie Davis