TAM Creates Magic with Three Potent Exhibitions

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TAM Creates Magic with Three Potent Exhibitions by Genie Davis

There are three powerful art exhibitions at Torrance Art Museum now through May 24th. Each is exciting in use of material, form, and a message at once inclusive and emphasizing both the diversity and promise of human interaction and differences.

In the main gallery, Body Counts adds up to something special, presenting a wide variety of media that highlights figurative art, while also reflecting on  representation, trust, group dynamics, alienation and the effects of these on today’s democracy, structure, and civil rights. Artists offer realistically figurative – and less so – paintings as well as more eliptical images through kinetic sculptures that rivet with mysterious motion. Artists in this fascinating group show include Alison Blickle, Danie Cansino, Amir H. Fallah, Lanise Howard, Justine Otto, Duane Paul, Jose Sanchez III, Meghan Smythe, and Haena Yoo, whose sculptural works are richly involving.

In gallery 2, a solo show is visually – and literally – electrifying. David DiMichele’s Envirotechnology is startling combination of technology and nature.

Artist David DiMichelle

Utilizing LED light tubing, DiMichelle literallly and figurative entwines light strips with oak branches, creating what looks like a lightning strike on a tree, while emphasizing the metaphorical idea that nature and technology can co-exist harmoniously.  The space shimmers with light as the gallery transforms into one immersive sculpture.

In the museum’s Dark Room, Erin Cooney’s video installation Aire Libre draws viewers into a haunting depiction of environmental disharmony and injustice. Filmed in South LA and made collaboratively with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, a community advocacy group based in Commerce and Long Beach, the images swirl and seethe. At the exhibition opening March 29, a live performance based on elements of Aire Libre was held in the museum’s courtyard, in which dancers performed live choreography also rendered on screen merging into a collective experience.

Each of these exhibitions are joyous, while offering questions about the importance of community, collective alchemy, and bodily independence. Don’t miss these three wildly inventive and rewarding shows. On view now through May 24th.

Torrance Art Museum hours are 11-5 Tuesday-Saturday; the museum  is located at 3320 Civic Center Drive in Torrance.

  • Written by Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis

 

 

 

 

 

A New Way of Seeing – The Art of Windswept

Posted on by Diversions LA

A New Way of Seeing – The Art of Windswept – by Austin Janisch

“Every great artist gives birth to a new universe, in which the familiar things look the way they have never before looked to anyone.” – Rudolf Arnheim

 

To experience a work of art is to be momentarily displaced, invited into a new way of seeing. Windswept, Wönzimer Gallery’s latest exhibition, curated by Genie Davis, offers such an invitation. Through sculpture, photography, collage, mixed media, and video, the group exhibition interrogates our relationship with the wind: a natural omnipresent force. Windswept brings together artists whose interpretations of “wind” reflect not only diverse artistic practices but also diverse perceptual worlds.

The exhibition features 17 painted works from throughout Susan Ossman’s career, alongside contributions from Dani Dodge, Angelica Sotiriou, Beth Elliott, Linda Sue Price, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, Diane Cockerill, Bruce Cockerill, Scott Meskill, Eileen Oda, Jason Jenn, Nancy Kay Turner, and Nancy Voegeli-Curan.

Works function as invisible presence, as metaphor, as force, as memory. From a power capable of sculpting landscapes to a passing breeze felt gently on the skin, the wind is as violent as it is lyrical, as abstract as it is corporeal.

Throughout the gallery, Susan Ossman’s paintings seek to make visible the movement of the wind. Through the use of color and line, Ossman illustrates the wind’s ability to transform, uplift and carry with it the qualities of the surrounding environment. In one work, a breeze becomes a conduit for pollen and a symbol of generative force, rendered through delicate hues and swirling pink ribbons. In another, Shamal (2022), the wind acts as an agent of abrasion, a hot, dusty current moving across the desert. A tumultuous force, taking on the coarse characteristic of the sand it casts up. The piece evokes the harsh winds of the Middle East, perhaps part of a regional lexicon in which the wind, through sandstorms, is not a whisper but an engulfing presence. These dualities, fertile and destructive, soft and coarse underscore wind’s shifting character.

Susan Ossman’s work left, Linda Sue Price’s neon to the right

Elsewhere in the gallery, Jason Jenn explores the weight of wind’s influence through a symbolic juxtaposition. The work presents thirteen red bricks painted with clouds resting atop a square cushion stuffed with feathers. The contradiction is immediate: bricks, symbols of mass and gravity, paired with the ethereal imagery of clouds and the literal lightness of feathers. The piece challenges our common perception by illustrating the true weight of clouds and the enormous force exuded by wind that lifts up these visibly weightless objects. It is a meditation on unseen power, presenting what art critic and novelist John Berger might call a “new way of seeing” by disrupting the assumed hierarchies between weight and lightness, gravity and lift.

Each artist offers new, diverse depictions of the wind revealing facets of the shared conceptual element. While some works depict the result of a windswept landscape, others capture the feeling of touching or being touched by a common encounter. Eileen Oda Leaf presents a whimsical take on the idea of being “windswept,” while Nancy Kay Turner’s response is one of rupture both physical and metaphysical. Turner’s mixed media piece evokes an aerial view of a landscape being torn apart. Coupled with her use of vintage photographs, the work suggests a sense of loss or longing as if a connection to the past is perhaps what is being swept away.

Installation by Dani Dodge
Central painting/collage from Angelica Sotiriou; smaller images to the right and left, Snezana Saraswatsi Petrovic

Nancy Voegeli Curran

Snezana Saraswati Petrovic

Recalling the essays grouped within Ways of Seeing, Berger reminds us that our perception is never neutral. “The way we see things,” he writes, “is affected by what we know or what we believe.” Windswept exemplifies this principle, revealing how cultural context, sensory experience, and artistic framing shape our understanding of something as seemingly straightforward as the wind. The exhibition doesn’t offer a singular narrative but rather a constellation of perspectives—each artist conjuring their own universe, each work inviting us to re-experience a common element through their lens.

As a whole, Windswept invites viewers to consider how art can visualize the invisible not merely to represent, but to reframe. The exhibition is one that turns an abstraction into various modes of sensation.

A closing and curatorial walkthrough of the exhibition along with a selection of short films on wind from artists Dani Dodge, Jason Jenn, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, David Isakson, and Johnny Naked are scheduled for 5-8 p.m. on Thursday, April 17th.  Walk-through at 6, films at 7.  Wonzimer is located at 341-B S Avenue 17, Los Angeles, CA 90031.

Written by: Austin Janisch; photos: provided by Wonzimer Gallery; additional images by Genie Davis