The Reality of Nature at Launch Gallery

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Above, Catherine Ruane’s Burn Joshua Burn

The Reality of Nature at Launch LA Gallery through September 30th, is a profoundly beautiful show with a profound message – what is the reality of nature? Is it all wonder and light and the embrace of flora and fauna? Is it a force unto itself, and one often to be reckoned with? Do we really look at the natural world or simply exist in it? These are just a few of the questions this exhibition posits.

If you’ve ever heard the expression “natural wonders,” then you’ll see just that in this exhibition that offers a variety of mediums and powerful portrayals of both the natural world and man’s interaction with it.

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According to curator Kristine Schomaker, above, this lushly beautiful exhibition had a political and social genesis. “After the election, I participated in the Women’s March which was a fulfilling experience. I felt like somehow I was making a difference. I wanted to do something else where I could use my experience and my voice to talk about important issues in todays world. My brother is passionate about science and frustrated with the climate change deniers and had been talking about it on Facebook. The more I thought about it, I realized I knew so many artists whose work focuses solely on the environment, nature, science in one way or another. So I decided to put together a show continuing the dialogue about the external forces of nature rather than the internal.”

The result: a truly wonderful pairing of thirteen artists: Terry Arena, Andrea Bersaglieri, Jeanne Dunn, Samantha Fields, Jennifer Gunlock, Virginia Katz, JJ L’Heureux, Erika Lizée, Constance Mallinson, Catherine Ruane, Steve Seleska, Marie Thibeault, and Devon Tsuno, the exhibition blossoms with color, light, and meaning.

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Here we have Catherine Ruane’s monochrome graphite and pencil lushness with “Burn Joshua Burn” – a desert plant,  perfectly detailed, surviving in a harsh environment, so wildly successful at its adaptation that it is spilling onto the gallery floor.

Erika Lizée’s site-specific trompe l’oeil work shimmers in blue, a cosmic creation, a mysterious sea-swirl alien form seems ready to emerge from “The Seed of Life.”

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So supple, sinuous, and both serene and emerging: in an instant, this piece portends change.

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Below, Devon Tsuno’s acrylic and spray paint “Watershed (Los Angeles River)” series gives us the fluidity of water with the tension surrounding that which is the LA River – harnessed, abused, wild at heart, reclaiming it’s own power. This is water as stained glass, broken glass, sunlight and storm.

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Below, artist Jennifer Gunlock with her dimensional mixed media gesso, acrylic, photo collage,  on wood board, “Landmark.”  This is an urban take on the environment, at once made of man and overtaking what is manmade.

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Below a detail of one of the works presented by Andrea Bersaglieri, “Suburban Tuft.” Her oil on canvas is perfectly drawn, delicately rendered – but her subjects are hardy, unruly survivors, eking a claim to patch of earth.

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Below, the almost shockingly vibrant abstract oil by Marie Thibeault, “Deposition.” If nature had a house in the city, this just might be it. The words ‘urban jungle’ come to mind.

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Below Steve Seleska’s incredibly dimensional work makes viewers want to dive in and explore his depths. The mixed media “Landscapism #7” is a natural world gone askew, surely – yet the silvery, spidery tangle is as alluring as it is frightening.

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Among the works undepicted, the gorgeous, diminutive detail of Terry Arena’s stunning graphite on metal platter, tiny and perfect works revealing lemons, rosemary, and one of her most poignant subjects, bees stands out with its intricate lines and grace; as does the “Ross Ice Shelf” in vivid, painterly blue of J.J. L’Heureux’s photographic work.  Jeanne Dunn’s acrylic and oil works of trees are graceful and seemingly sentient. They dance, they embrace, as living beings do.

In short – don’t miss the closing, this Saturday from 3-5, which includes conversation with the artists.

Launch Gallery is located at 170 S. La Brea in Los Angeles.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis

 

 

 

Order and Chaos: Rich and Rewarding Work at Orange County Center for Contemporary Art

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Order and Chaos, at Orange County Center of Contemporary art through this Saturday, is a supremely lovely show, visually rich and full of life; infused with the wonders of science and the intensity of the artistic process.

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Artist and curator Annie Clavel notes that the show is a continuation of her past work, Parallel Universes, and is built around the scientific concept of “chaos theory.”

“I have always been impressed by how a simple equation in mathematics could burst into an incredible never ending complexity, like fractals,” Clavel says. 

The French-born artist, now based in Long Beach, explains that chaotic systems, such as fractals, can appear smooth and ordered. Fractals themselves are a never ending pattern, created by a simply, repeating process in a perpetual feedback loop, and as such are pictures of chaos.

As fascinating as this is – particularly when viewers recognize that Clavel is a scientist and mathematician as well as an artist – the exhibition works purely on its visual beauty, with a surreal and swirling palette.

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Above, Clavel’s watercolor “Oasis,” is part flower, part imploded planet; mysterious and fecund with a glowing life force.

Below,  Osuna’s work in oil, “Conundrum,” seems to draw viewers inside darker unfolding, a velvety night, an imploded star.

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Clavel and Miguel Osuna started working on their show a year ago, sharing information and ideas about its theme.

“We knew each other work quite well. His paintings are monochromatic and huge. My paintings are colorful and most of them are small. It’s this diversity that looked like a perfect fit,” Clavel relates.

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Above, Clavel’s series of small paintings are intimate, perfectly wrought abstract works.

“The display is not chaotic, but the diversity goes into the direction of chaos. I would like that the viewer feels harmony and disproportion, balance and imbalance, order and chaos,” Clavel says.

Osuna’s oil on aluminum works, below, seem to have absorbed both light and color within their surface, works whose form are as yet inchoate, but seem in the process of definition.

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Osuna views his work as intuitive. An architect, his desire is to create order from chaos in his art.

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Clavel’s “Lava 3” is a fiery, volcanic rush; contrasting with work such as this is Osuna’s “Rule of Thumb,” below, is an equally intense work, but far different in style and approach – this is lava that has cooled and formed a more cohesive pattern.

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“His paintings in this show are conversing with mine, even if they are very different. Many viewers have expressed that Miguel’s paintings were order and mine were chaos. It is not: both of us have experienced in different ways order being chaos or chaos being order,” Clavel attests. “I hope that the viewer can feel the cohesion of our experimentations.”

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Above, Clavel’s “Cosmology 3” appears to be in perpetual motion. Thick, lush colors evoke a world viewers could almost touch. Below, her “Thunder” throbs with the power of a raging sea.

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Over the course of their preparations for the show, Osuna and Clavel both shared photos of their works and their concept on Instagram, #OrderAndChaosShow

Osuna says that his latest explorations on surface, reflexion and glare allow him to create his own mini-universe.  “I can represent both my understanding and my questioning of the universe at large. Ultimately, my hope is that the viewer shares this microcosm with me, searching for the same ideas, solutions, and emotions that connect us.” This view drew Clavel’s interest at a time in which she was still working on her previous series.

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Above, Clavel’s “Playing Dice.”

“I thought that we could do something about ‘Universes,’ however I wanted to change the direction of my work,” she attests. “At that time I was reading a few books written by mathematicians, such as What we Cannot Know by Marcus du Sautoy and Does God Play Dice? by Ian Stewart. Those books inspired me to think about the way the universe behaves, and that’s how the idea of a show about Order and Chaos came to my mind.” 

Clavel invited Osuna to participate in her show as a guest artist.

The result is a show that shimmers with light, form, color, and mystery – the very essence of chaotic impulses that are the basis for creativity. If the world formed from chaos and became ordered, then the world of art, with all its passion and chaos, creates order in the form of channeled artistic impulse.

A conversation with artists Annie Clavel and Miguel Osuna will take place Sept. 23rd, 2017 – 2 to 4 pm, moderated by Jill Moniz.

The gallery is located at 117 N. Sycamore in Santa Ana.

  • Genie Davis; photos courtesy of the artists

 

William Leavitt: Cycladic Figures at Honor Fraser

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Movie sets, paintings, and sculptural installations comprise William Leavitt’s fascinating Cycladic Figures at the Honor Fraser gallery in Culver City through October 23rd. It’s a quintessentially Los Angeles exhibition, vibrantly artistic and infused within the form of the film industry. After all, we are still a filmmaker’s town as much as a blossoming art center, so what better way to combine the two creative heartbeats of the city than in an exhibition that makes Honor Fraser into a personal sound stage. Leavitt is a Los Angeles-based artist, known for his immersive installations, and is a true L.A. renaissance man, writing plays, building sets, making films, creating paintings, drawings, and installations. The artist has said that his work frames a story through an object, situation, or painting. From there, the viewer is left to continue the story, making his work gently interactive.

The title of the exhibition sets the stage, so to speak, for what the viewer experiences. It refers to sculptures created in the Cyclades Islands located off the coast of Greece five thousand years ago. The name of these islands refers to a circle, and the islands were said by the ancient Greeks to surround the holy island and sanctuary of Apollo. Little is known about the Cycladic people and their world – and perhaps we, too, know little about our own — perhaps we circle an unknowable sanctuary.

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In Leavitt’s work, the sense of mystery that surrounds the Cyclades Islands also surrounds our contemporary world. At Honor Fraser, there are intimate universes that the viewer walks through and around, part noir, part sci-fi. Color and light make each work into a separate and immersive space. With “Lennie’s Set,” the effect is pure noir, all that’s necessary is for the femme fatale to walk into the room and engage the services of what surely must be private investigator Lennie. Sunglasses, an almost archaic wind-up clock, and a rotary phone are on the desk, while a shadow, undeniably feminine, dark against a wash of golden light, is projected onto the brown venetian blinds behind that desk. There’s a brief case on the floor, a standing lamp with a dusty brass base. And yet – there is also an empty, clear green plastic leftover container which no noir p.i. would have ever seen. Are we time travelers?

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With “Faraday Cage” we are surely entering the realm of science fiction, with a wood and metal mesh cage surrounding a plastic lawn chair. Behind these objects is a garage cum Rube Goldberg-esque science lab. Once serving as a set in Leavitt’s film Cycladic Figures, an interesting transition happens when this set is displayed as an artwork.

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It is like watching a film within a film – a set artfully rendered becomes a sculpture that could serve as a film set, one in which the “audience” is invited to break the third wall of cinematic framing and walk on through. Viewers are thus invited to alter the narrative scope of the sculpture – their very presence changes it.

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Also a part of the exhibition are Leavitt’s paintings and works on paper. In a similar fashion to his installation work, he creates layered scenes that invite the viewer to develop them. Leavitt’s conceptual work in his “Head Space” series reveals two silhouetted faces against a background that morphs fields and cities as distant landscapes, while the faces themselves contain floating objects and architectural ruins.

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We are where are as much as who we are, Leavitt seems to posit, and where we are is not only this time or corporeal space but the past and future landscape as well.

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Courtesy of artist/gallery and Genie Davis

Richard Chow’s Photography Converges at the Neutra

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Get ready to evolve. Convergent Evolution, a solo show by photographic artist Richard Chow at the Neutra Gallery in Silver Lake is a beautifully evocative mix of black and white images and a vivid color palette that show a wide and evolutionary range of Chow’s work.

Exhibiting images from radically divergent bodies of work, Chow takes bold risks in presenting disparate images that transcend beauty or social commentary, stimulating, challenging, and engaging the viewer in dialogue with the art.

Curated by Dulce Stein along with Chow,  the work here features predominantly black and white images, making the vibrant full color photographs in Chow’s “URBANSCAPE” series a striking focal point.

IMG_3481“A New Angle,” above, is a strong example the artist’s exploration of how color and form can be reimagined within the construct of the urban landscape. Bold use of color is an essential component here, and it seems as if Chow is painting with his camera, using his surroundings as a palate.  The intense colors and tight compositions that are characteristic of this series create compelling, dynamic images with an abstract modern aesthetic.

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In sharp contrast, images from Chow’s more recently developed body of work, “Distant Memories,” are an ethereal black and white, crafted by inserting secondary lenses between the subject matter and the camera.  In the series, the artist acts as curator of visual memories, questioning how they influence our individual humanity. Although the images, like the recollections they depict, are softy diffused and rely heavily on the use of light to convey emotion, the compositions are classic and strong.

“Memories,” Chow says, “are the result of a subconscious sifting through life experiences filtered through our emotional response. This process leaves them fragmented, somewhat indistinct.” The works, set against backdrops that are fertile ground for memories, explore subject matter that spans the emotional spectrum, triggering the viewer’s own memories.

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Chow’s most recent body of work, “Into the Light,” returns to his architectural roots, but features black and white photography. These images, frequently larger in scale and devoid of color, allow the artist to plumb the depths of light, form, and function, exploring the urban landscape in relationship to those who inhabit it. While the series shares subject matter with its architecturally based predecessor, “URBANSCAPE,” here the photographer uses light, not color, to convey tone, atmosphere, and context – resulting in compelling images with an abstract modern aesthetic. No less vibrant and engaging for the absence of color, these images show Chow’s  progression as an artist, the works becoming more experimental in nature. Chow makes extensive use of geometry to add structure and organization to images that are more abstract than his earlier works. These compositional techniques allow him to quite literally lead viewers into the light.

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The exhibition closes Sunday, so add it to your weekend list. The Neutra is located at 2379 Glendale Blvd. in Silver Lake.

  • Lisa Broadway with Genie Davis; photos courtesy of artist