There’s Magic Made in the Mojave

Posted on by Diversions LA

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The Museum of Art and History (MOAH) is a crown jewel in the Antelope Valley, a beautiful, airy modern space that makes the perfect two-story setting for the brilliant, magical exhibition Made in the Mojave.

Nine artists take on the landscape of the desert and create vibrant images from it, each original, startling, and fresh. It’s rare, frankly, to see so much beautiful art on a single subject that sings with this much meaning.

Artists include Samantha Fields, Kim Stringfellow, Carol Es, Catherine Ruane, Aline Mare, Ron Pinkerton, Nicolas Shake, Randi Hokett, and a site specific installation by Antelope Valley artist Marthe Aponte.

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Samantha Field’s “Ten Years” includes stunning, large scale landscapes that depict dramatic, powerful desert scenes bordering on the apocalyptic. Filling a large first floor gallery space, these paintings offer sweeping vistas, roiling clouds, a deer seemingly both frozen and in mid-motion.

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Spilling from the museum’s first floor windows, Randi Hokett’s jeweled mixed media “Crystalworks” look like desert geodes cracked open to reveal riveting beauty inside.

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Catherine Ruane’s stunning black and white graphite and charcoal works feature intimate, textural visions of desert plants, starry skies, Joshua trees and yucca. “Dance Me to the Edge” pulls viewers into a world so perfectly defined one can almost feel the sharp spines, smell desert sage after a rain, caress the soft flowers.

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Meticulously rendered, twelve small round drawings surround one larger central piece of a Joshua tree in bloom.

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Marthe Aponte creates an installation in a darkened side room that glows with golden light. With “Memories of a Joshua Tree” she’s shaped a sensuously spiked tree and the goddess-like figures of mythological Fates.

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This is work that is redolent with life and light, a portal, a beacon of life in the darkness.

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Aline Mare’s “The Angle of Repose” is a lush, passionate exhibition that presents an up close look at vividly colored desert minutae, a seed pod, a poppy, tree roots. Fusing multiple images photographed, scanned, painted, and altered, these are compositions that defy simple interpretation or a single gaze.

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The depths of the universe seem to emanate from a seedpod – and really, is this an illusion, or a wondrous truth?

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Intense, saturated color and surreal structures made from desert discards mark the fascinating work of Nicolas Shake whose “Wasteland” combines sculptural arrangements with photographic compositions that could be the homes of interplanetary travelers.

 

Ron Pinkerton’s “The Last Stand” offers night skies and mysterious streaking stars, abandoned cars and empty pools, ghostly and transcendent.

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Kim Stringfellow’s “The Mojave Project” documents the desert in its dangerous, transformative, and compelling glory. She takes on waste and abandonment, the complex landscape itself,  with photography, artifacts, and what will be a large scale video installation scheduled to travel the country over a two year period, bringing the desert – so close to home here in Southern California – to more distant regions.

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Carol Es gives us whimsical mystical oil paintings and collaged works inspired by Joshua Tree National park locations, and an installation of a campsite inside which the artist’s short film “Up to Now” is screened.

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The desert often hides its vibrant life beneath the ground until a rain, or the quiet of nightfall brings out the creatures, the flowers, the wind to play. For a look at the secret heart of the desert and its sweeping magnificence, step inside MOAH and look around. There is nothing empty about this desert exhibition.

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The show runs through July 30th and is well worth the drive from LA. MOAH is located at 665 Lancaster Blvd. in Lancaster.

  • Genie Davis; Photos – Genie Davis and courtesy of artists

 

 

 

 

 

Art Gone Wild with Book Club: Going Native at Durden and Ray

Posted on by Diversions LA

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Stephen Wright’s post-modern novel Going Native is a wild ride of literary fiction fused with pop culture.  When an art exhibition is based around the book, and includes performance pieces and cocktails made with absinthe, then art lovers can expect a wild ride when it comes to the exhibition, too.

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Durden and Ray’s delightful and provocative “Book Club: Going Native” is indeed wild – wildly inventive and conceptually clever. Curator Steven Wolkoff assembled a cadre of visual artists, a mixologist, hair stylists, dancers, and a choreographer to create an opening that fused art with performance plus an excerpted book reading.

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While I’d only read a few chapters of the novel when the opening rolled around, it did not dim my pleasure in the experiential evening, which included the work of: Ania Catherine – choreographer, Ben Jackel – visual artist, Constance Mallinson – visual artist, Dani Dodge – visual artist, Dave Bondi – toy designer, David Leapman – visual artist, Kate Kelton – actress/artist, Gavin Bunner – visual artist, Jayna Zweiman – architect and co-founder of the Pussyhat Project, Jenny Hager – visual artist, Jon Flack – visual artist, Kio Griffith – visual artist, Liza Ryan – visual artist, Michael Webster – composer, Robin Jackson – best bartender/mixologist in LA (per LA Weekly), Steven Wolkoff – visual artist, Tom Dunn – visual artist, Traci Sakosits – Creative Director of Vidal Sassoon, North America, and Matthew Kazarian – Vidal Sassoon.

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Dancers with their hair knotted to each other spun in a circle. Mixologist Robin Jackson poured sapphire, saline solution, absinthe, and oleosaccharum into cups and candy-colored water pistols for guests to shoot into their and other’s throats. The guns themselves were crafted by toy designer David Bondi, whose design, packaged and labeled as “Durden n’ Ray” also hung from a display rack on a wall.

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Artist Dani Dodge offered up a compelling, layered painting “Previously Unthinkable Patterns.”

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The painting, a mixed-media fusion of paint, duct tape, party favors, a piece of a wedding dress and the ashes of papers that contained burned fears dripped off the canvas literally with a 72″ tulle train puddling on the ground. The ghostly shape of the car that figures large in the novel emerges from the layers like a ship through thick fog, the canvas begs to be touched, but one doesn’t touch; still the almost physiological impression of being touched by the artwork persists.

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Above, artists Dani Dodge and Kio Griffith.

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Kio Griffith’s “Whichever Wolf You Feed,” a mixed media piece of wood, sheet metal, paint, sandpaper, and a ventilation duct, oozes mystery; the mood abetted by a dancer positioned against the corner wall next to the piece.

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David Leapman’s “Salt hungry butterflies,” gold ink on black paper, has an elegaic feel that evokes calligraphy and Japanese woodblock prints. The artist contributed three similar works in all to the exhibition. Jenny Hager’s abstract “Bedlamite,” acrylic and marker on canvas, is bold and heated; Tom Dunn’s detailed, fascinating “Mesopotamia Drawing Series” functions as a kind of adjunct to the book’s chapters which are themselves a series of connected yet separate stories.

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Curator Wolkoff  created a series of “wedding rings” crafted of acrylic paint without support, they are as warped as the book’s belief system. The spacey stop-motion video of Traci Sakosits and Matthew Kazarian, “Basic Space,” compels repeated viewing, as does Dodge’s second piece in the show, the haunting “Evidence,” a video shown wall mounted on a mini-iPad.

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All eyes were turned to Jayna Zweiman’s “It considered other facts, other views,” a dark green kaleidoscope-like sculpture which guests peered through and took IG-worthy semi-selfies through.

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Constructed with mirror, plywood, and oil-based paint, the work was fabricated by Paul Guillemette and suspended from the gallery’s ceiling. The architect and co-founder of the Pussyhat Project has created a wonderful, changing fractured image that reflects both the quality of the book and a reader’s perception of it. It’s a fun house mirror take on art, life, and novel. The work’s green exterior represents the color of the stolen car driven by the novel’s protagonist.

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While seeing the exhibition without the dancers, drink, and electronic soundtrack hum is a different experience than the opening night, it is a worthy one. The art stands alone, and one could know nothing of the book and have heard nothing of the opening’s vastly entertaining art circus and still enjoy it.

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Above, a pop art distillation of the book, “Helter Skelter” by Gavin Bunner, goache and ink on paper.

Like many of Durden and Ray’s shows, this one is edgy and thought-provoking; the gallery and the art collective are building a reputation as a must-see in the crowded field of LA art.

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Genie Davis

 

Poignant and Surreal: Eric Joyner and Lori Nelson at Corey Helford Gallery

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One of the most engaging aspects of the current exhibitions at Corey Helford Gallery is that they are both visually entertaining and metaphorically deep. These are the figures of a childhood that never was, stories that could yet be. Steeped in magical realism, artists Eric Joyner and Lori Nelson each offer a strangely satisfying assessment of technology, childhood, fairy tales, and childish things roaming about in the world.

San Francisco-based artist Eric Joyner’s “Tarsus Bondon Dot” is an exhibition of large scale images that often feature brightly colored robots and large-scale donuts. The realistic style of Joyner’s landscapes belies their whimsical surrealism.

helford ice cream The oil on panel “Special Delivery” features a robot driving an ice cream truck into an abyss; “All Systems Go” sends a not-too-happy cat into space; while in “Escape Velocity,” an X-12 tears through the clouds while giant donuts rise like a monolith in the background. “Rockin’ at Sharkeys” depicts a big robot crowd watching a robot match-up in a boxing ring. 

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Absurd though these images may be, they ably depict aspects of real life in juxtapositions that make viewers smile. Working in a vibrant palette that full utilizes the texture and depth of oil, Joyner manages to fuse the amusing, the touching, the strange, and the mysterious in his Transformers-like fairy tale world.

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In Gallery 2, Lori Nelson’s bewitchingly lovely  “Cryptotweens: Find My Friends” pairs well with Joyner. Both artists work in oil and use fanciful figures and sharp wit; both have an underpinning of wistfulness, even sadness.  Nelson’s fairy tale scenes are darker than Joyner’s, illustrating with delicate precision a parallel world in which creatures both human and not traverse a territory that is frozen between childhood and adulthood. Personal growth aside, these inhabitants have bigger things on their mind – avoiding or girding themselves to co-exist with a technology that is threatening to overtake them.

Nelson’s dark blue palette creates a nighttime world in which her characters roam, hide, and search. The exhibition’s title piece, the diptych “Find My Friends” reveals two almost-tweens using hand-held computers as if they were flashlights, creating beams of light to undertake a search in a dark forest. A raccoon, an owl, a bunny, and a squirrel accompany them, with glowing red eyes. The squirrel holds a satellite dish, while behind them, other satellite dishes float on a river.

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“Opt Out IV” has a cryptotween curled up seeking safety and escape below ground. Cozily snuggled with bunnies beneath the roots of a tree, above ground satellite dishes and scanners ominously proliferate.

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And in gallery three, lush paintings by Iva Troj & Sergio Lopez create classical images in a rich dreamscape.

Running through June 3rd, these shows serve as both fascinating art and highly entertaining pop culture – with a little shiver of recognition thrown in. 

Corey Helford is located at 571 S. Anderson Street in DTLA.

  • Genie Davis; photos Genie Davis and courtesy of Corey Helford Gallery

Francisco Alvarado: Luminous Work in Running With the Bulls

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Above, artist Francisco Alvarado. Below – another of his vibrant bulls. Note the abstract, almost collage-like quality, the depth, the dots and lines.

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Originally from Quito, Ecuador, Francisco Alvarado has found a physical home in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles, and a spiritual home in his art.

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Raised with an explorer’s eye and a passion for color and landscape, Alvarado calls himself “Lucky to travel with my father at a very early age. I used to explore the Amazon jungle…my father was also a bullfighter. No one sees a bull as happy, living a special life, running in the hills of South America and bred to be active. I try to show that in my work.”

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From bold bulls to beautiful, compellingly colored landscapes, Alvarado speaks with his colors, which he mixes himself. The inherent luminosity in his work comes in part from creating a transparent glaze which he layers in. There is a serene strength and poetic power in the artist’s approach.

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“You can add surface, build texture when painting with acrylic. For the most part the medium is flat, but you can add dots and lines,” he relates.

Alvarado tells his visual stories at times using digital technology, drawing with his mouse, using Apple Air to simulate painting. “I’m currently looking at land art, the drawings in Peru, the large spirals,” he notes.

Alvarado began making art by sketching his friends at the age of 6, and he moved on to create maps. Today his work in acrylic includes a series based on the characters in Don Quixote, images that are fragmented and abstract.

His evocative works tell stories. “I was influenced a lot by my grandmother, Esther. She was a wonderful story-teller who encouraged me to read. I’m an avid reader,” Alvarado explains. 

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“The story I’m trying to tell here is of lying in tall grass in green lush fields, looking up at the sky,” he notes. “In my imagination, I create happy pieces. I paint the experiences people have, I have – and where do they take you.”

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We saw this artist’s vibrant work in his “Running with the Bulls” at Art in the Arthouse held in Laemmle’s NoHo 7 Theater- a great space for an exhibition and talk.  “Running with the Bulls” has just completed it’s “run” through early May at the Laemmle. Look for Alvarado and his fresh, stirring work elsewhere around Los Angeles in the coming months.

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  • Genie Davis; Photos: Genie Davis