Closing, Closing, Quick Go See About a Box at Shoebox Projects and Phantom Lim at TAM

Posted on by Diversions LA

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At Shoebox Projects through the 25th – when the gallery will hold a closing recepetion – are whimsical, wonderful, moving, and evocative – wait for it – shoeboxes. Using the shoebox itself in a very meta fashion given the gallery’s name, 29 artists contributed a variety of vibrant dioramas within the format of the shoebox. Some artists turned the boxes inside out, or used sections of shoeboxes to expand on the format, but the majority of the art works reside inside these perfect, minute spaces.

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There are works political and profound, tiny portals to peer inside, neon to shine. Cosmic, brooding, hilarious, and always prescient, the works here are a dazzling display of ingenuity. If the ‘tiny house’ movement offers an alternative living space for want-to-be homeowners, then About a Box offers a compact alternative to a gallery wall.

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Participating artists include: Debby Kline and Larry Kline, Nancy Larrew, Diane Williams, Susan J Osborn, Nancy Kay Turner, Emily Wiseman, Dani Dodge, Jennifer Gunlock, Kayla Cloonan, Chenhung Chen, Debbie Korbel, Elizabeth Tinglof, Lorraine Heitzman, Susan T. Kurland, Frederika Beesemyer Roede,r Karen Hochman Brown, Cathy Immordino, Steve Seleska, Colin Roberts, Pranay Reddy, Randi Matushevitz, Maya Kabat, Katya Usvitsky, Catherine Ruane, Bibi Davidson, Dwora Fried, Linda Sue Price, Ashley Hagen, Vincent Tomczyk, and Don Porcella.

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Shoebox Projects is located in The Brewery Arts Complex just east of DTLA.

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Then head south through September 1st for Phantom Lim at Torrance Art Museum, a mind bending and material morphing exhibition about perception, liminal boundaries, and physical space.

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Curated by Benjamin Tippin and Max Presneill, mixed media works spill from the edges of their mediums and into the sublime and surreal in the main gallery. The works alter the perception of their form – air filters become a robot-like creature, wire and metal a dragon, wood wall sculptures are a tribute to stained glass, a tumbleweed becomes a red flaming bush.

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Artists include: Coleen Sterritt, Jessica Stockholder, Joan Tanner, Valerie Wilcox, Steve DeGroodt, Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, David Gilbert, Julia Haft-Candell, and Gedi Sibony.

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A fitting adjunct to the main gallery exhibition is in Gallery 2: Nascent Love features large scale and lyrical mixed media art works by Erika Ostrander and Christian Tedeschi. Contemplative and somewhat haunting, the works seem to transcend time, as if artifacts from another era.

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The Torrance Art Museum is located in the heart of Torrance – which we promise is less than 30 minutes from the heart of downtown.

There’s no reason not to make it a double header.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and gallery overviews provided by TAM

Collectivity Shines at Durden and Ray

Posted on by Diversions LA

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Closing this weekend, Collectivity at Durden and Ray gives viewers a blueprint for the modern world. A joint-exhibition between two art collectives – Hyperlink in Colorado Springs, and Durden and Ray here in Los Angeles – hence the title – the show was collaboratively curated by UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art Director Daisy McGowan and Durden and Ray artists Lana Duong and David Spanbock.  Representing the works of 12 artists from each collective, the show offered a fresh look at image making, and what these images mean to us.

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Larua Shill’s dynamic – and ironically Instagram-ready – mixed media sculptural work, Separation Perfected, features selfie sticks, plaster, and laser cut mirrors. Her held-aloft cluster of handsare lifting mirrored cell phones to take the ultimate selfie..  Reflective of today’s cultural mores and on what makes art truly art,  the work is compelling visually and emotionally. What do we see in these mirrors but ourselves? And what do we reflect? Creation? A memory? A reverential tribute to ourselves as the ultimate significant other?

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David Leapman’s series of gold ink and watercolor works are also visually dazling;  the prolific artist also offers large scale works such as Vampire Blues, using cristalina and acrylic on canvas. Leapman’s dayglow Rambler’s Gristle vibrated with color, a mysterious voicing of change and possibility in a world that seems overwhelming at times.

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Leapman above, Jackel below.

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Ben Jackel’s stoneware, ebony and beeswax sculptural works Fortress Wesel and Fortress Sedan evoked a sense of flight and a wish for escape. As with many of the works here, a sense of mystery, and of a future inexorably tied to the past seemed to whisper from these works.

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Sijia Chen’s lush, lavender-dominant Veil resemebled an abstract sunrise, shadows aslant, or a look into a wordless, wondrous afterlife.  The large scale work has an ethereal glow.

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Jorin Bossen’s oil, acrlic, and pastel works – virtually headless, rust-colored images of gunslingers from the old west – are time travellers, icons caught in a transition between now and the past.  Representative of the masculine ideal, no faces to distract us, these works have a rooted irony,  as well as being potent memorials to a part of the American mythos.

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Powerful, witty, and passionate,  Collectivity offers a brilliant commentary on the components of our modern life, and on our beliefs, hopes, and dreams. The exhibition offers evocations of the past and lush portals into an unknown future.  The show was brilliantly laid out,  taking us into tomorrow and yesterday, moving skillfully between the hyper-awareness of our modern existence and the restive spirit of the great unknown we all face. Above all, this is a show that invites viewers and artists alike to go dancing forever in the art of the now.

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Durden and Ray is now located in the Bendix Building in the heart of the Fashion District. Come for the art and stay for the sunset, too.

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  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis

 

 

California Drawin’: Frederika Roeder Paints a Landscape

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Frederika Roeder has a California state of mind. She says her art is inspired by the state and its “diverse landscape that ricochets from barren deserts to peaks of 11,000 feet in the Sierra Nevadas, to epic surf along the Pacific Coast with swaths of blue skies holding it together.”
As a self-described “4th generation Californian,” Roeder grew up with the ocean, desert, and mountains defining her early years.
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“My grandfather used to take me on weekend excursions to the high desert of Lucerne Valley. He like to explore the old mines and take the dirt roads into the unknown distance.  It was he who taught me to love the rocks and sand, and yuccas and the Saguaro trees…. I learned to watch the endless horizons of the desert.”
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Her family’s love for California was intergenerational – Roeder says her father was one of the first surfers in southern Orange County,  an area which still resonates with her, particularly the area around Dana Point. “For me it embodies all that is iconic about Southern California. There is also a narrative of my life buried in the landscapes.  I think of our landscape as essentially high contrast, not a blend, so it can be exhilarating to go from one area to another and learn to love them all.”
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Roeder has transferred that love of landscape into her work. “I would like viewers to take away from my art a sense of awe, beauty, and inspiration that hopefully and possibly transfers back to the respective beauty of place that they have experienced personally. And if not that, of California,” she relates. “I want viewers in a way to be redirected both to their own lives in respect to the beauty of landscape,  the fragility of our own coasts, deserts, and mountains in the face of the inevitable onslaught of civilization and necessary development. These places deserve to be respected, cherished, and held in awe.”
With that in mind, Roeder believes that “This is the beginning phase of resisting the bulldozers that tear the state apart, segmenting it into freeways so those endless horizons become less and less.  Perhaps it leads to environmental activism.”
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Roeder hopes that viewers of her work “take away a re-appreciation for the blues of the Pacific, the nearly synthetic pinks of sunset, and the glistening whites of Sierra snow, and San Clemente sprays of white from the waves. In some of my work, I have been inspired by a long walk at the beach with the green of kelp interspersed with the black of mussel shells.”
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Roeder has worked as an artist all her life, and is today “continuing to explore my San Clemente Series,” lush paintings that evoke sea, sky, and sand (above).
  
She says her color palette is “anything derived from the ocean –  from kelp, to waves, to foam, to tar, to coves, to huge swells, the night sky, the sand, the sounds, and the smells, as well as the unsurpassable beauty of Tahiti, Hawaii, California beaches, the great Sonoran deserts as far south as Borrego and north to Lancaster and northeast to Bishop – and the mountains that line all of this.”
It is a palette that vibrates with light, life, and nature; her abstract works seem to send energy right off the canvas. Her use of light, space, and color evoke an artistic environment that is entirely original and yet one which seems innately familiar – a kind of homecoming, perhaps, for California.
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To say natural landscape is the quintessential driver of Roeder’s work is not hyperbole. She’s in love with the “gently morphing” sunset colors; and sees “the browns and grays of the desert sand and LA as a neutral that makes the colors even more vivid.  The pines of the Sierras and the gray green of the oaks are not absent from my palette, often referencing them with a line like a pinstripe on a Mustang Convertible,” she explains.
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Darkness, too, gets its due. “Even the dense fog, black nights, and the red tides have influenced my color sense.”
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She adds that “Once I realized that nature can be as neon as it gets, it seemed to justify my use of neon, interference, luminesence, and all things shimmering.”
Her colors are textured and rich, with a depth that seems to come naturally to her in her use of layers, and overlapping colors. Roeder says this visceral quality has not always been the case with her work, which has grown more textural in recent years.
“Combining mixed media collage, acrylic, and ink, and acrylic pens with glazes and full body acrylic with even mediums that make it even thicker, has become interesting and vital to me,” she relates.
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For Roeder, her technique and mediums all come back to the landscape itself. “I like to think again to nature where everything is mixed: smooth against rough, thick against thin.”
As an artist, as well as a conduit for the natural beauty that she personally adores, she says she also allows the canvas  — or ground — to be part of the painting.  “It is both an historical reference to canvas as one of the main grounds for art-making, as well as a reference to the sound and look of real canvas sails, and a non-digital reference point.  I also just like the look, feel, neutrality, and perfect off-whiteness of canvas.  It adds a natural consistency and texture to the paintings I like.”
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Roeder’s work is as rich, varied, and jeweled as the landscapes she so admires – and transmits to viewers through the many-faceted dimensions of her art.
– Genie Davis; photos: Frederika Roeder

Tape Artist Chiho Harazaki in 3-Day Pop-Up

Posted on by Diversions LA

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Coming to Venice August 17-19,  SOVO// Magazine offers viewers a chance to witness – and participate in – the creation of a ceiling-to-floor wall mural from LA-based contemporary tape-artist Chiho Harazaki.

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What is a tape artist? Like a maker of mosaics, Harazaki, who was born and raised in Japan, shapes delicate work from fragments of electrical tape. Wielding scissors and precision knives, she creates fascinating, dynamic works that combine elements of cultural, historical, architectural, and lifestyle elements into elaborate depictions of scenes set in both Japan and LA.

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The artist has worked in this medium since 2014, and its uniqueness enhances her cool, clean, and visceral style. She says that her life in Japan and now in the U.S. both inform her subjects and her art. Indeed, the meticulous nature of the work, and the lyrical aspects of her composition seem to have arisen from her heritage; while the boldness of meaning and many of her physical settings are pure Los Angeles.

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Harazaki’s work offers a fresh take on iconic LA locations such as Union Station and Sunset Junction, as well as a poignant depiction of children at play in her “String Game,”  salary men dining in Japan, and in a piece commissioned by SOVO, “Bookends,” she depicts busts of former President Obama and Trump at either end of a row of books, with titles between them depicting each man’s philosophy of life.

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“The refuse of tape: tiny, useless, leftover scraps; can become perfect components of an artwork. I found the beauty of imperfection in tape art,” Harazaki says.

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Her hand-cut shapes and lines resemble traditional Japanese arts such as woodcut and paper cutting, but are themselves  fascinating and entirely unique mixed-media works.

The 3-day pop-up art installation and music event commemorates the magazines second half-issue, ​[ Issue 2.5 ] and is planned to help attendees interact, break routine, and manifest understanding through art.

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Harazaki, who will be present throughout the exhibition dates, says “Let’s focus on growing love. Play together. Know each other.”

She will be working live on a large-scale artwork, offering a rare chance to see her unique, process in action. And, in addition to viewing Harazaki’s original works, a limited edition T-shirt, designed by the artist and produced by SOVO//, will be available for sale. When worn in front of each of the murals Harazaki makes, the shirt creates the illusion that participants are standing within the artwork itself – Instagram ready. Art prints of three of the scenes from the exhibition will also be available to view and purchase by special order.

The immersive event unfolds at 214 Lincoln Blvd., in Venice, August 17-19. Hours are 5-11 p.m. Friday, 12 noon to 11 p.m. Saturday, and 12 noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday.  A variety of live performances including music, DJs, hula hoop, and more will take place over the 3-day period.

SOVO// is a new quarterly, high-concept print magazine produced in a limited edition; art-and-music-oriented events launch each issue and half-issue.

  • Genie Davis; photos: provided by the artist