Fire, air, water, earth. At Loft at Liz’s “Elements,” the gallery’s annual nature themed exhibition, six potent artists create this year’s entry in an annual show that focuses on nature. Six artists, Doron Gazit, Michael Giancristiano, Moses Hacmon, Luigia Martelloni, Jeff Frost and Joan Wulf re-create these natural elements as something profound and poetic.
Environmental artist Doron Gazit has worked with inflatables for thirty years, and his kinetic wind sculptures here potently visualize the unseen. Using nature as his canvas, he has worked with plastic tubes that are hundreds of feet long.
Writ on a smaller scale here, “Frozen Flow,” take up substantially less space, white and illuminated from within, they channel air currents and pull viewers into a world both haunting and beautiful. It’s not hard to visualize Gazit working on his next upcoming projects in Iceland and in the Amazon forest.
Artist Luigia Martelloni takes on the element of earth in an installation that fills the smaller exhibition room at the Loft. Luigia’s work involves crystals, earth, organic materials, and paper prints.
“It’s a very personal journey, that goes back to the vastness of the land that I explored in 1986. I’m translating to the audience not information about finished objects, but about recovering and salvaging materials and translating ideas. The crystals are about a trip I took from the Colorado mines to Utah. There is salt from Salt lake City, dirt from Monument Valley. I prepare my paper in an organic way, and I use papers that are a collection of years and years.”
Joan Wulf “fell into” her own burning ring of fire – she was painting on wood panels, and found a particularly beautiful wood grain that she did not want to gesso, instead using the panel to burn rather than paint her work.
Now this pyrographic artist is creating art painted with flame rather than brushes, burning canvasses, crafting images that resemble ancient cave paintings or conversely, modern patterns that just happen to be burned into shape rather than conventionally painted.
Moses Hacmon uses a liquid film technique to render images of water on aluminum. His eco-friendly project creates images that evoke both the depths of the ocean and the earth from space, watery images that shine over aluminum that could merely be representing the crystal clear waters of a distant cove.
Michael Giancristiano says his art in this show, featuring air plants, was “inspired by melting ice caps and what’s under them. Scientists have reanimated organisms, a rebirth,” he notes. He wanted to use “organic materials that are alive and growing. The air plants are held onto functional handbags and panels by fasteners. They can be interchanged, removed, and watered.” The air plants he uses here come from the pineapple species.
We did not have the opportunity to talk to Jeff Frost, whose images of fire are seductively palpable in his photographic and video art works.
Find the element that moves your spirit through June 20th at the Loft at Liz’s, 453 S. La Brea Ave.
- Genie Davis; Photos: Jack Burke
