Sur: Biennial at Torrance Art Museum Revs Up

Posted on by Diversions LA

Sur: Biennial is an exhibition series that made it’s first apeparance in 2011, and is still going strong today. Highlighting the impact of Latin American culture in art, this year’s compelling works are bold and in some instances, wonderfully surreal.

Works on exhibit include those by Carlos Beltran Arechiga, Carlos Rittner, chris velez, Elena Manero, Jesus Max, The Lowrider Alliance, Migues Rodriguez Sepulveda, and Priscilla Mondo.

The Lowrider Alliance also presented four absolutely gorgeous cars outside the museum on opening night, each their own work of art from metal work details to vibrant paint.

The entire exhibition shines with a glorious light,  from those exhibited cars outside to culturally resonant photos taken by The Lowrider Alliance inside, to Carlos Rittner’s large and exciting neon, and chris velez ‘ glowing anime-style figure offering blessing from inside a tech version of a confessional booth.

velez also exhibits a wild update on the Sword and the Stone, with “The sword was never removed by a King it was thrust by a Saint” a sculpture that embeds a sword in a microfilm reader’s screen.

There are twisted, sinuous sculptures from Priscilla Mondo that despite their monumental size, seem to float on the gallery floor.

A massive oil and acryllic on sewn canvas painting by Carlos Beltran Arechiga, “Conjura,” (above) reveals fantastical pink and white figures that are both abstract and figurative at the same time; a smaller work by the artist was created in part by using different blends of coffees from Mexican Nescafe to Starbucks, each creating a different texture.  The latter work, “Balance: Fragil” speaks beyond texture to the treatment of workers at coffee plantations.

Jesus Max displayed a compelling series of hyper-realistic paintings that flirt with surreal elements; Elena Manero’s paintings are graceful stories come alive with nuanced color, and Migues Rodriguez Sepulveda also contributes outstanding work.

Last, but certainly not least, Lowrider Alliance contributions to SUR Biennial were curated by Art Limon (President, Lowrider Alliance) featuring artists Alfonso “Fox” Orozco, Estevan Oriol, G. Alfaro, Gil Ortega, Horacio Romero, Ignacio Gomez, Teresa Rodriguez, Vidal Herrera.

In the museum’s dark room, executive producer Dolores Huerta, presents Backstreet to the American Dream (2021), an insightful and intimate film about race, labor, and class in modern-day America, focusing on blue-collar entrepreneurs and Latino immigrants in a 90-minute presentation.

Gallery Two also offers a fascinating and immersive exhibition…

In Affective Territories, Alternate Belongings, video and multimedia works focus on technology, its growing importance and our reliance on it, as well as its outgrowth of and from our human world. The exhibit is exciting, provocative, and leads the viewer into a world we know about but often prefer to remain unseen.

Exhibiting artists include:  Allyson Packer and Jesse Fisher / United States, Camille Dumond/ Switzerland, Chrystele Nicot & Antoine Alesandrini / France, Holly Veselka / United States, Joe Harjo / United States, Laine Rettmer / United States, Margaret Noble / United States, Paul Moore / Northern Ireland (UK), Scott Massey / Canada, Sophie Dia Pegrum / British/American, Spencer Chang / United States, Woohee Cho / South Korea/ United States.

In short,  TAM has once again curated a terrific group of exhibitions that speak to the immediate world, the future world, and our ongoing history.

Vibrant with color, alive, and thoughtful, these shows are worthy of a very long cruise down Whittier Boulevard and into East LA — and an extended visit to the Torrance Art Museum.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis 

Innovative and Exciting Exhibitions at the Bendix

Posted on by Diversions LA

While each of these splendid shows now at the Bendix in DTLA’s fashion district are worthy of their own review, time, and an imminent last weekend September 6th, waits for no one. So let’s take a look at the exuberant exhibitions currently at the Bendix, and mark your calendars for a viewing this coming weekend.

On view 12-5 p.m. at Durden and Ray is the winner of the gallery’s SPOTLIGHT24, the Durden and Ray member committee reviewed  solo exhibition proposals for the gallery. Winning artist Shannon Freshwater was born into a Las Vegas environment few visitors have seen, a mix of Mormon and Souther Baptist religion and hippie artists. Viewers will experience a witty yet ominous living room scene in the front gallery, while mirrored images dance with the viewers own in the second. It’s a garden of strange, surreal, slightly spooky delights using textiles, paintings, and unusual surfaces to render a world gone deliciously mad.

Persons Unknown is presenting another solo show that’s dusted with the whimsical and determinedly wild, in both texture and territory. The Museum of Human Touch imagines a future — that frankly doesn’t seem too distant — where our intimacy with screens has replaced physical experience. Only in this world, sculptures shaped from digital waste ranging from packing materials to discarded gadgets and ephemera are the unique visualization of reshaped human identity. , reshaping our bodies and identities. Featuring sculptures crafted from recycled digital waste such as obsolete gadgets, medical tubing, and packaging materials, the exhibition explores the seductive pleasure and hidden violence of our device-driven lives, challenging us to reconsider the fluidity, fragility, and possibility of the human body in a tech-saturated world. The boldly textural and delightfully weird are conjoined in a series of devastatingly and wonderfully weird works from Agustin Rosa.

At Tiger Strikes Astroid, and also closing this weekend is El Portal, a rich and wonderfully mind-opening exhibit organized by Ricardo Harris-Fuentes and Lauren Armstrong. Comprised of the workd of six visual and five performance artists, the theme is transformation and transcendent reality as assisted by the visionary experience of ayahuasca ceremony as its inspiration point. We had the pleasure of viewing a roof-top live performance by artist Sean Noyce involving a gorgeous metallic shield on exhibit in the gallery along with a consciousness pyramid sculpture, which Armstrong used in another galvanizing rooftop performance.  The group show is inspirational and aspirational.

Down the hall at 515, books are the mind blowers… in this large group exhibition, you can indeed judge a book by its artisically created cover, as artists shape visionary book favorites with covers that more than live up to the words on the pages between.  Artists were asked to pick their favorite books and create a cover to fit their vision, and wow, were these visions extraordinary. Just a fun and brilliant show, it will make you want to pick up a book and read it — and imagine your own cover to hold it. Fabulous use of sculptural materials and engaging visions of the meaning writ within the books. Special Collections II will be holding a closing reception from 7 to 9 p.m on the 6th. Take a look at the online library linked above and view its wide ranging artists, and go visit. These books will never be banned.

And last but not least, in Monte Vista Projects, a debut solo of bronze and porcelain sculptures, Invitation, by Renée Pepion is a feast of things floral, feminine, and unconventionally lovely, or as the artist describes the work “my way of processing what it means to be alive in a body.” Inspired by images of the Last Supper, this is a splendid exhibition of twists and turns both terrifying and terrific.

Get thee to the Bendix this weekend for these grand finales.

  • Genie Davis, images by Genie Davis

 

 

 

Linda Smith Shapes Cat (and Human) Creations

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Now at bG Gallery, The Cat’s Meow isn’t just an exhibition title – it’s a celebration of a show, a sweet, fun, impressive solo from artist Linda Smith. There are paintings, ceramic sculptures, and most impressively lush ceramic totems, slim towers that offer viewers multiple kitties or in some cases, humans, and pups, towering up to 6 feet in height.

Above, inside Smith’s studio

Each living creature offers a face full of wisdom and a presence that exudes that species’ essence. The cats look curious, intelligent, willful; the humans thoughtful, observant, or contemplative; while the puppies look ready to leap, play, or curl up on your feet. In short, each creature has a presence that draws the eye and the heart. There’s a magical quality to her works.; whether paintings or ceramics, Smith covers every surface with color and pattern, willing the viewer to experience the fun on offer, and enter into her world.

A joyous use of vibrant color is Smith’s style, along with a textural use of pattern that hums with energy and enthusiasm for her subjects. It’s that vibrance that makes her images come alive. Smith is as prolific as she is joyous, with a wide variety of whimsical, lustrous works that are expressive, charming, and utterly unique.

Smith describes her exhibition as consisting of “my new large ceramic totems, smaller ceramic sculptures and paintings I have created over the years. This show has recurring themes of mine, [such as] faces, figures, cats, birds, and dogs…my daily life expressed in an adventure of bold color and pattern.”

It’s a delightful crazy quilt of her life, saturated with a sense of excitement and jubilance. You could just call it fun. Stacked orange and blue heads are topped with a brilliantly plumed bird in one totem; in another, striped, dotted, and flowered humans rise watchfully.

Each work has the elements of a fantastical fairy tale brought to life, in which cats and humans coexist in an endlessly bountiful world punctuared by dots, dashes, lines, and patterns. Her bold use of yellows, oranges, reds, and blues brings a joyous buoncy to her images.

Whether small ceramic busts of felines,  or wild rainbow rays vibrating from and around a woman’s face with a playful outline of a cat above it, Smith speaks to happiness and hope.

Both are welcome subjects. In fraught times, happiness can be in short supply, but it’s doled out delightfully here. Smith captures the playful, inquisitive, and mysteriousness of the feline, along with the cavorting of canines, and a contemplative view of human nature, all in a cavalcade of color.

The exhibition held a press preview last weekend, but opens to the public this coming Saturday, September 6th, from 4 to 7 p.m. The artist talk and walk through will take place September 13th from 3 to 5 p.m.

If you’re looking for some unadulterated joy in your life, come take a romp around the art world.

  • Genie Davis; images provided by Linda Smith and bG Gallery

 

 

 

 

Not Shockboxx Rocks James Frost Solo Exhibition

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The always edgy, always inventive Shockboxx Gallery may have electrified its last exhibition a few months ago, but Not Shockboxx is alive and well, with its first exhibition by realist/surrealist (yes, the two can be one) artist James Frost bringing in robust crowds and welcome red dots.

Frost’s Don’t F&$%( ING Touch Me is a true tour de force. The artist describes the show as “everything I like” which apparently includes wolves and alien spacecraft, curled up cats beneath other spaceships, Barbara Eden, the Dali Llama, angel fish, lonely landscapes, music heroes, art gurus, and so much more.

His art is the boy screaming against the clamor of the city; the young man surrounded by a colorful aura.

The realism, the heightened use of color, the pop sensibility, the touches of the surreal – Frost’s art is entirely his, entirely wild, and entirely involving, as hyperrealistic as it is dusted with the surreal and serene. It jumps off the wall and engages the viewer with Frost’s mastery of craft, and the dare-I-say zany aspect of some of his subjects. This is pop culture sublime, smooth and sensual, vividly at high volume, if art could shout.

Its boldness to some extent contrasts with Frost’s own quiet, from sound muffling head phones (the artist speaks of being on the spectrum) to conversing through sign language skills.

Above, a detail from Interstellar, a personal favorite, with the absolutely perfect kitty under the beam-me-up spaceship.

His art, in other words, truly does speak for him and vibrates with both fantasy and the fantastical, threaded together with the artist’s own quiet spirit.

Frost says of his work “Every ounce of peace that comes to me comes from painting, so my hope is that you. get that magic I’d been missing for far too long.”

Indeed, to see it is to feel it. Go see the magic through September 20th.  It’s extremely cool work.

Not Shockboxx is open daily 10 to 4 p.m. and is lcoated at 636 Cypress in Hermosa Beach.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis