Jenny Hager Makes Magic Myths, Gay Summer Rick Finds Calm in a Firestorm

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Jenny Hager Makes Magic Myths, Gay Summer Rick Finds Calm in a Firestorm – Genie Davis

At the Jose Drudis-Biada Gallery on the campus of Mount Saint Mary College in Brentwood, Mountains, Monsters, and Cosmos converge in a stunning solo show from artist Jenny Hager. As impressive as the works themselves are, perhaps even more impressive is the fact that they were all created within the last two years.

Vibrant in color, startling and compelling in line, these works are a swirl of motion, representing horses, planets, earthly landscapes, and chimera-like behemoths, all hovering within riveting explosions of raw, fierce, abstractions. The artist has shaped a dream-like lore of magic and myth, an alchemic recipe for reflection and passionate perception in a mix of emotional darkness and light.

Hager explains the exhibition as an “exploration of complex traumas (both personal and observed), situated in the immediate experience of the chaos and expansiveness of such moments, as well as the synthesis and examination of such experiences as it becomes one narrative of many.” In short, the artist examines, extrapolates, and rewrites her own stories, and makes them one with the histories of her viewers.

She reveals that the abstract expression of her subjects “produces a hierarchy of things allowed to speak and things that are censured… a representation of confrontation and incomprehensibility that defies categorization through language structures and resides in the visceral.” Her art speaks what words cannot.

Compelling and multi-textured, these paintings are fairy tales and alchemic myths writ large, bold, and entirely beautiful in a landscape of vivid palette and startling juxtapositions that create both haunted landscape and fiery, fierce hope.

The exhibition runs through November 8th. The gallery is located at 12001 Chalon Rd, Los Angeles, CA 90049

Moving slightly south to Bergamot Station, Gay Summer Rick offers a wistful, peaceful view of coastal life in her new series Stratus, now at Bg Gallery through November 1st.

Like Hagar’s work, Rick’s is intensely personal and created in a consolidated time period; in her case, created entirely in the fraught 8-month time period following the January firestorm in the Pacific Palisades and Malibu. Rick’s work is the calm in the firestorm, an immersion of recovery, a peaceful protest against the shocking aftermath of the devastating blaze. Like a moment of held-breath, a captured meditation, the work exudes a calm resilience in atmospheric paintings which also reflect on the inherent beauty within even moments that are most uncertain.

The artist notes that the series title comes from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s definition of “Stratus” clouds: “broad, layered, diffuse forms that blanket the sky with soft cover.”

It is with that sort of softness and wonder that each oceanscape and sky fills the viewer with a special sense of place and peace.

Bg Gallery is located at 2525 Michigan Ave #A2, Santa Monica, CA 90404

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

Night Gallery Shines a Light

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Night Gallery Shines a Light – by Genie Davis

With four dazzling exhibitions on view this month, Night Gallery lights up October with revealing solo exhibitions. Closing November 1st, hurry to see these shows, which are each entirely unique and richly rewarding.

Ross Caliendo’s Peace Fellow turns landscape painting inside out with beautiful images that contain mysterious otherworldly visions within. Lush and infinitely dreamlike, gorgeous natural images of flora and fauna can be taken at face value, while deeper truths tease and immerse the viewer moving from the illusion of the recognizable to an unseen universe peering through the heightened lens of the artist’s vision.

 

This is exciting work from a mesmerizing artist, pairing beauty and wonder with a deeper, more haunting experience within.

Nasim Hantehzadeh mixes a variety of mediums to create images that evoke memory and magic. Working with acrylic on linen, dreamy colors and patterns converge in sinuous, motion-filled images that dance and delight in Tickles, Dance, and Goosbump Blooms.

Vast in size and complexity, shimmering and joyous, the works vibrate with a rich intensity and dimensionality that speaks to the artist’s early years living in Iran, as well as a universal desire for freedom and love. The images are a dance of motion in a watery world.

LaRissa Rogers’ Dust of the Streets is a tour de force of mediums, from layered ceramics to photographic work, all of which revolves around a gazebo holding the most monumental of the ceramics works. Dealing with the difficult legacy of her mother’s immigration as an adopted, mixed-race Korean, the often poignant images are startlingly transformative, asserting the blossoming of life despite traumatic and potentially crippling emotional injury.

The resilience of the human spirit and the support of a creative soul takes deep hurt and turns it into power, power which can ultimately form art, art which shapes joy.

And finally, Wanda Koop’s Magnetic Fields brings a galvanizing dimensional intensity to abstract images that speaks to the unsettling presence of AI, as it inserts itself even into the limbs of trees. Using a color palette that enhances a sense of the surreal, the work is both amusing and terrifying, even as it simmers with graceful lovliness.

Summing up, don’t let another day go by before you enter Night Gallery, with exhibition space at 2276 E 16th Street  and 2050 Imperial Street in Los Angeles.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis 

 

 

In Memoriam of Albert Vitela Reposted from 2015 : Albert Vitela

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Photo by Jack Burke
Photo by Jack Burke

This article is reposted in memory of Albert, who recently passed away. Albert’s work lives on.

Original posting date: August, 2015. At Chinatown’s Red Pipe Gallery Albert Vitela’s “New Works” exhibition revealed the Los Angeles native’s work as a sweeping panoply of color; abstract depictions of historical events, religious figures, and celebrities. Worlds expressed in fragments of motion-filled color, Vitela combines memories and history in a combination of pop art and abstract expressionism.

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All Photos by Jack Burke
All Photos by Jack Burke

Curated by art critic Mat Gleason, Vitela’s show is about history, anger, war, peace, resolution, and beauty. His belief is that beauty itself cannot exist without awareness, and that peace can become a natural outgrowth of this awareness. He seeks mystical, surreal moments from concrete events ranging from World War II to battles between Samurai, all of which exist for Vitela beyond conventional time constraints.

Vitela has a strong concept in mind when he paints. “My goal is to enrich humanity through my work. I want to create an environment that leads to world peace. You look at television news and you see warfare, you see crime, you see situations such as Watergate. I meditate on all these things. On warfare and peace, the beauty and the ugliness. And then I meld them together.” He finds himself inspired by both current and historical events, and views them as of one piece.

Vitela’s art uses an Impressionist’s color palette in his abstract approach. His samurai in “Kojiro Vs. Musashi, Ganryujima Japan” are cast in striking yellow and blue, his angels’ skin is salmon pink. “I’m looking to create in my art, in my meditation, a beautiful future for the human race. If we do what we say, if we want what we see, that’s emblematic of both war and peace. We can go either way. My paintings express that.”

A talented emerging artist, Vitela works from his own dreams to create vibrant dreamscapes of figures from history and modern life.

  • Genie Davis