New Dazzler at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

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New Dazzler at Tany Bondakdar Gallery – Genie Davis

Sandra Cinto’s Prelude to the Sun, at Tanya Bonakdar, on exhibit through July 2nd,  is golden, literally and figuratively. The artist has restructured the gallery walls themselves to glow with a site-specific golden installation, a large-scale curved wall drawing.

Also on display are a series of tondo and oval-shaped canvases that shift from blue to gold in an exploration of the day’s cycle from dawn til dusk.

These are visually stunning works that use the sun as an inspirational element and to reveal the passage of time. Stars, waves, cliffs, bridges, and swings, are among the delicately rendered subjects presented. It’s a gorgeous show, and one that should be soaked in just as you’d sit on the beach or in a park and enjoy a little sunshine. Meditative yet energetic, this is a stellar exhibition made to be seen live.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

 

 

Desert X Marks the Art Spot

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Desert X Marks the Art Spot  – by Genie Davis

Through May 11th, don’t miss the 5th iteration of Desert X, in of course, the desert – Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, and Desert Hot Springs are among the locations this year.  This is one of the strongest and most successful editions of the exhibition, whose purpose is to create and present international contemporar art that fits the desert sites in which its located. We saw each of the works over a leisurely two day visit.

Let’s start where we did, with Agnes Denes jubilant, flower filled work at Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage. The Living Pyramid is both an artwork and an environmental intervention, per Desert X – under any category, it’s a deeply touching piece that reveals the fragility and promise of life in the desert.

Completely different and located in the raw desert piece is Muhannad Shono’s viscerally haunting What Remains. The fabric works evoke windswept sails on long dried seas.

Sarah Meyohas’ Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams is a pristine vision that unfolds like a bright white ribbon. Her immersive installation creates significant word patterns using  “caustics,” light patterns formed by the refraction or reflection of light through curved surfaces. What a dynamite piece.

Ronald Rael’s Adobe Oasis in Palm Desert is just that, a maze that also serves as a place of rest and succor from the sun.

Out on Highway 111, off Tramway Road, in Palm Springs, Kapwani Kiwanga’s Plotting Rest is beautifully matched in setting and offers different encompassing views of art and scenery from every angle.

Sanford Biggers’ work sparkles as it brings the sky, or at least its clouds, closer to earth. Beautiful from all angles, Unsui (Mirror) shines.

Possibly my favorite in a field of favorites this year (or a desert’s worth, perhaps) is Kimsooja’s To Breathe, a dancing, light-filled walk through prism that changes with the direction of the sun. We visited at noon, when the piece gave off rainbows.

While G.H.O.S.T Ride moves about, when we saw it, the Mad-Max-like work by Cannupa Hanska Luger was just up the hill from Kimsooja’s piece. Delightful and imaginative with an audio component, the location was a tough climb on a hot day, let’s hope it’s easier to view in these warmer final weekends.

Alison Saar brings heart and soul to a terrific and interactive Soul Station in Desert Hot Springs. From a fully realized gas station interior, to signs with mantras for peaceful living, and a gas pump with a seashell silver handle that offers beautiful poetic messages to listeners, this art is fully alive.

Also in Desert Hot Springs, Jose Davila offers monoliths reminscent of Stone Henge – if Stone Henge was made today and spoke to the movement of immigration as does The act of being together.

 

Past and Perfect – Exhibitions at Durden and Ray, Wonzimer Gallery, and Persons Unknown

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Sometimes life just gets the best of you. You see great shows, post all the photos, and have no time to write the actual reviews. So here are three recently closed, truly wonderful exhibitions that deserve mention. Look for these galleries and artists in upcoming exhibitions throughout the year.

Wonzimer Gallery – We Insist On Growing – Cheyanne Washington 

Cheyanne Washington’s solo exhibition, We Insist On Growing, combined fiercely textured, exciting and sinuous forms wtih the astonishing use of her own natural pigments. If ever an artist deserved the description “alchemist” it would be Washington. Paintings, banners, and a wonderful sculptural work comprised this beautiful exhibition,  the title of which resonates with what the artist calls “the resilience and persistence found in nature.”

There’s a gravitational pull to these works, a life force that seems to arise from nature itself, embodied by the earth-rendered paints and clay. Washington shapes figurative art that exudes a sentient, sensual connection to the natural world, and transcends both its materials and subject, creating work that is serene and absorbing. Both paintings and ceramic works elevate the viewer’s grasp of nature, and relate to the intrinisic joy of creation itself.

If Washington insists on growing, then viewers everywhere should insist on watching her do so.

Currently at Wonzimer: (above) a solo exhibition by Gary Brewer, Everything is Radiant through May 15th, paintings and sculpture.

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Durden and Ray – Tieze – Group Exhibition

Curated by the powerful trio of Arezoo Bharthania, Dani Dodge, and Hagop Najarian, Tieze was the always-inventive collective gallery’s response to the bedecked halls of the Frieze art fair. Fresh and vibrant, the exhibition featured work by Ismael de Anda III, Carlos Beltran Arechiga, Arezoo Bharthania, Jorin Bossen, Gul Cagin, Sijia Chen, Joe Davidson, Dani Dodge, Vita Eruhimovitz, Jenny Hager, Regina Herod, David Leapman, Atilio Pernisco, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, Carolyn Mason, Hagop Najarian, Ty Pownall, Max Presneill, Dylan Ricards, Stephanie Sherwood, Curtis Stage, Valerie Wilcox, Alexandra Wiesenfeld, and Steven Wolkoff.

From the swirling movement of figurative abstracts by Najarian to Wolkoff’s paint sculpture, magical video from Petrovic, asonishing sculptural works from Pownall and Davidson to small but mighty sculptures utilizing Monopoly pieces by Dodge, there was a medium and a message to compel the eye of any viewer. It would be hard to pick just one favorite among a myriad of stand outs. Bhartania and Hager showed vibrant, multi-layered paintings while Wilcox showed a delicate looking paper cocoon of a sculpture. A far cooler and more cutting edge group exhibition than was present at any of the commercial art fairs this year, the exhibition artists were all Durden and Ray artist/curators, participating in the only show each year dedicated to highlighting all of the Durden and Ray artists’ work as a group.

Currently at Durden and Ray (above): Smiling in Chaos – Group Show – Co-curated by Gonzalo García Gaitán, Ismael de Anda III, Carlos Beltrán Aréchiga through May 18th,  a collaboration between Columbian collective Si Nos Pagan Boys and Los Angeles based artists, all of whom use humor and levity in their work as a form of resistance.

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Persons Unknown – Into the Hamper’s Belly – Group Show

Into the Hamper’s Belly featured four artists working in sculpture, installation, and painting. The group exhibition was devoted to those who “revel in ongoing processes of accumulation and transmutation…[and] a sense of porous frementation.”

Artists Inga Hendrickson, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Caitlin Servilio, and Corrine Yonce used a variety of atypical art materials ranging from cardboard, cement, pigment, foam, silicone, wax, plastic, sand, and even clamshells, to create an exhibition of diverse artists and art forms that nonetheless presented as a whole; a mystical and organic installation that merged into one being within the cutting-edge gallery floor.

And in the back studio space, the beautiful work of gallerist and artist Ariel Oakley Pelletier.

Currently at Persons Unknown (above): Fumbled Worlds – The Invented People of Alfonse Aletto – through May 20th, a survey of painted works from a prolific self-taught artist.

Look for these galleries and previously exhibited artists as well as current shows ASAP.  Great art is a joy we should all be sharing — especially in today’s precarious world.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and provided by galleries

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