Fabulous and Photographic – Before You Now at MOAH and Multispectral at Von Lintel Gallery

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Fabulous and Photographic – Before You Now at MOAH and Multispectral at Von Lintel Gallery – by Genie Davis

Just closed at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, Before You Now: Photographic Transmutation, dazzled with brilliance of idea, color, and technique. The exhibition was a tour de force of both traditional and more experimental photographic form.

The exhibition featured work in separate solo shows by five outstanding photographic artists: Ellen Friedlander, Naida Osline, Brad Miller, Osceola Refetoff,  Andrew K. Thompson.

In Brad Miller’s Water Shadows, lush black and white patterns are hypnotic and delicate, a beautiful mix of nature’s ability to create the abstract with the photographic eye’s immersion in symmetry.

The images present three different types of water: waves, ice, and bubbles, and makes of them resonant and rich captures of light and its luminous prisms on water that are as exciting and involving as they are filled with a visionary grace.

Rightly named, Botany of Transcendence: Mythic Plants through the Lens of Naida Osline provided a lush merger of intimate images of nature with vivid color in a startlingly heightened palette. The exhibition brings together 51 pieces of the artist’s compelling botanical work from 2007 until the present, each image a revelation of wonder. Within the collection on view were five different series, each layered, mystical, and dream-like.

Her focus is primarily on fungi and plants, presenting a still, almost-sacred beauty. Her use of light makes vibrantly colored images dance. In only one of the exhibited series, Chasing Clouds, do people appear, consuming plants by smoking them, surrounded by haunting and ephemeral patterns of smoke that remind the viewer of human souls exhaled.

Speaking of the soul, The Soul Speaks from Ellen Friedlander turns photography itself into a sculptural form with brilliant, bisected images that use pin hole photography and long exposures, creating intimate and highly personal portraits. The artist then cut and divided the images she shaped, reassembling them as if the emotional puzzle that makes up all our souls was fitting itself together through the revealing eye of a camera lens.

Friedlander’s result is visionary and alchemic, a transformation of self into something graceful, elliptical, and alchemic. Always a dazzling photographic artist, here her work builds an exciting new way of looking at human subjects.

Andrew K. Thompson’s A Sky Full of Holes gives the viewer exactly what his exhibition title describes: holes within images, taken from the artist’s Chemical Landscapes series. The result is both edgy and moving, speaking to climate change, humans’ often futile attempts to change nature, and the creative impulse to both alter what appears unalterable, and press our shapes into the world.

Mysterious and compelling, Thompson’s work vibrates with an intensity enhanced by his use of two-sided, standing frames for some images, each of which are a single, intense hue altered by bleach and thread.

Osceola Refetoff’s work in his Magic and Realism, previously reviewed on this site, blends documentary subjects with surrealistic elements, taking the viewer on the road and into regions as diverse as the Mojave Desert and the Arctic Circle with galvanizing results.

2023 (from the series Chromatopia)





A large collection of Refetoff’s work is now on view at Von Lintel Gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station. Multispectral runs April 26th through June 7.

From the startling and textural color compositions depicting Palm Springs to the artist’s stunning black and white images of road and desert, Refetoff’s images edge into the surreal and dreamy while creating potent portraits of the environment as seen through a visionary eye. He utilizes a variety of approaches to shape these startling depictions from pinhole photography to infrared photography to the use of non-contemporary analog filters. Multispectral exposures combine infrared and visual spectrum light using filters in front of the lens to control the recorded wavelengths.

One of the most fascinating aspects of his work is the mix of recognizable, relatable subjects with shimmering, surreal technique. The viewer is suspended between the realistic world of architectural forms, everyday objects, wide-open desert skies and roads, and a dream that merges the past and future, a dramatic reshaping of scene into something unexpected, startling, and utterly riveting.

His is a world of shapes, shadows, vibrancy, and empty spaces. With a background in filmmaking, Refetoff’s work always provides a strong narrative vision, making stories from his images, and commanding the viewer to “read” them deeply. His optical, in-camera approach to shaping his work creates a sense of the immediate in each diverse image.

Always searching for interesting subjects, he doesn’t rely on a single setting or project, but rather moves between interrelated images that provide viewers with a fresh, new approach to seeing the world around us, from ice flows to the human form.

The Von Lintel exhibition offers a rare treat for LA-area viewers, as only one of the works has ever been exhibited in Los Angeles. It will be on view through June 7th.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and provided by the artists

Artist Kate Kelton Survives, Thrives, and Makes Art

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As an artist, Kate Kelton has a wide and varied practice from paintings and drawings to photography and performance. Her wide ranging genres are based not not just on restless talent, but also she says, “It’s just about what is physically, tangibly possible for me to accomplish. Photography is a lot easier on my hands than painting, but that of course varies from shoot to shoot.”  

Her favorite medium however remains the painted canvas. “I think acrylic paint will always be my first love, but I’ve run out of storage and lack ‘the spoons’ to sell off all my beloved old stock that’s currently mostly hanging in my lake house.”
The prolific artist has been through many battles, both in terms of health and her purpose-driven actions “We tried having another gallery show, with Gallery 30 South, a couple years ago but Instagram nearly shut down their account… Elevating survivors comes at a cost in almost every political climate, I’ve found.”
Over the years, her work has changed directions, if not entirely by choice, she notes. “Learning to adjust to market demand while recalibrating expectations according to limitations my body sets has definitely presented a hell of a learning curve. Maintaining the illusion that all is well is a holdover from my acting career, but moving from painting to producing photo shoots and magazines and video content has been a nice throw back to the art and film school days of my youth,” she explains. With this mind, she most recently created a stunning new magazine – eponymously called kelton.
She has a simple explanation for what drew her to make what is truly a compelling new publication. “It will shock no one reading this who knows me that my disabilities led me to be what was endearingly known as, ‘extremely online,’ over the past few decades,” she relates. “And since social media has been weaponized so brutally by the oligarchy class, I’ve resorted to connecting with folks I’m shadow-banned from reaching online via old school email lists and physical throwback media, like this ACTUAL paper and ink magazine. I loved pinning photography I’d torn out of magazines to my walls as a kid, and it became the driving force behind deciding to leave most words out of it.”
For the artist, her magazines origins are a natural progression.
“ When I was growing up I’d send photos abroad to my family and order them very specifically to tell a visual story… the advent of the social media photo carousels elevated this skillset further, culminating in this present day ordering and grouping of visuals for the magazine. I named it not after myself, but my dear late father whose signature makes up my logo. He loved anything aesthetically pleasing from abstract art to the way a wall socket met a corner, say,” she explains. “So the themes tend to find me organically, and mostly show a running commentary of what I’ve been up to lately, be it reacting to the political climate, or simply visiting the deserts, mountains, forests, lakes, ocean or hot springs around me to soothe and fix all the broken down bits currently ailing because of it.”  The latest issue of kelton Magazine, Volume 9 is available here.
Kelton notes that the magazine features “my favorite paper artist from Ukraine, Asya Kozina. It also includes work from Swedish installation artists, Anonyouse, as well as from the absolute punk rock visual baddass icon that is Donna Bates, and then the very first immersive womb-like piece of Laurie Shapiro’s I ever walked through!”
Laurie Shapiro, above
She also mentions another recent issue of kelton, Number 8, also still available online. “I’m thrilled to finally showcase your exceptional photography, which I’ve always been such a die hard fan of, for Volume 8, which also showcases a haunting starry sky shot from the days after the Los Angeles fires by artist Steven Wolkoff,  recently a part of Mexico’s Clavo art fair. Those images are alongside an incredible moon capture from Canadian artist and photographer Johanne Levesque,  from the 13 year old online space, the Cochrane Visual Art Gallery,  as well as a sunset dazzler from Toronto artist and crafter Sara Ballantyne.”
With the magazine in full bloom, Kelton says she’s recently “been asked to mull around some ideas for potential comic book covers for Hard Case Crime’s Heat Seeker series. They’re the same publisher who put out, The Colorado Kid, that Stephen King short story my Syfy tv show, Haven, was based on, as well as it’s re-issue, for which I provided inner cover illustrations. I’m excited to branch out into this badass art form as I love their representation of strong women who take no shit… especially right now,” she asserts.

Don’t miss the next step in Kate Kelton’s evolving career or the next issue of her beautiful magazine.

– Genie Davis; photos provided by Kate Kelton 

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

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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