Grief and Loss: the Face of Fire

Posted on by Diversions LA

Grief and Loss: The Face of Fire – Genie Davis

There has been an enormous amount of loss and grief throughout Los Angeles, as artists and other creatives have lost homes, studios, work, livlihoods,  and family history.

It is unprecented: isolating due to air quality and the heaviness of sorrow; galvinizing, as in the outpouring of community support; infiuriating due to society’s collective ignorance of climate change and the politicization of even the natural landscape.  Still ahead of us are spiked rent increases, the tangled web of insurance and government bureaucracy, and the immediate loss to the art community of canceled shows, diminished sales, and actual artworks.

All we can do is mourn, and express our inchoate longing for the life that came before, and hope for a time that comes after.  All we can do that is, except to express our generosity of spirit, plan fundraising efforts, respond to Go Fund Me accounts of loved ones and friends, donate goods and foods and a helping hand.

It is with that in mind that I want to suggest that anyone with a personal – or a friend in the art community’s – GFM or other fundraising platform that benefits this community, please mention it in the comments section.

Here are a few to start off:

For all the non-human victims out there please give generously to: Pasadena Humane Society  

Drop off donations:

Torrance Art Museum, TAM. Per museum director Max Presneill:

“To help where we can Torrance Art Museum (TAM) will be accepting donations (in goods, not money) for those families devastated by the Los Angeles fires. You can drop off things you think they might need to TAM: Tues 13 – Sat 18, from 10am-4pm. Please ring the bell at the staff entrance (not Museum entrance) around the back, to drop off your donations: 3320 CIVIC CENTER Drive, Torrance, CA 90503

The Torrance Theater Company will also be accepting donations at the same times: 1316 Cabrillo Ave, Torrance, CA 90501

We are especially looking for:
– Clothes and shoes
– Personal hygiene items and sanitary products – new toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, diapers, etc
– Tinned food, bottled water, dry goods, snacks, baby formula
– Blankets, sleeping bags, pillows
– Charging cables and extension cables
– Books, puzzles, games, cards

These items will be delivered by TAM staff to the Bendix Building at 1206 Maple Ave, downtown LA, and available for those hit by the fires to collect on Sunday 19th January, 10am-4pm in suite 800, on the 8th floor.”

Los Angeles Makery

  • What’s available: Tools, supplies, and materials for artists who lost studios.
    Items such as paints, canvases, cameras, paper, and more are available for free.
  • Contact to donate or receive supplies: thelosangelesmakery@gmail.com | Text 213-392-2611
  • 260 S. Los Angeles Street, Los Angeles (Little Tokyo adjacent)

Superchief Gallery LA

  • Collecting supplies and essential items for fire victims, including art materials.
  • Location: 1965 S Los Angeles St, Los Angeles, CA 90011

Thinkspace Projects

  • Collecting supplies for the Red Cross and distributing N95 masks.
  • Location: 4217 and 4207 W Jefferson Blvd

Per ArtShare LA:

Below is a list of additional resources, spaces, and grants available to help you recover and continue creating:

Temporary Space and Resources

Immersive Art Collective

  • What’s available: Temporary storage for salvaged artwork, instruments, and more.
    • Large space with internet access, air purifiers, seating, tables, heating, and restroom facilities. Small kitchen area with tea, coffee pots, refrigerator, and microwave.
  • Location: 1035 S Olive St, Los Angeles, CA 90015 (south of L.A. Live)
  • Contact: 310-894-3638 | info@immersiveartcollective.org
  • Cost: Free

Emergency Grants and Financial Support

Emergency Micro-Grants for Artists

Craft Emergency Relief Fund (CERF+) Emergency Assistance

Rauschenberg Emergency Medical Grant

  • The Rauschenberg Medical Emergency Grants program provides one-time grants of up to $5,000 for recent unexpected medical, dental, and mental health emergencies to artists in financial need* who are creating in the visual arts, film/video/electronic/digital arts, and choreography.

Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant

  • The Foundation provides financial resources up to $50,000 for visual artists to create new work, acquire supplies, rent studio space, prepare for exhibitions, attend a residency and offset living expenses.
  • Apply here: https://pkf.org/apply/

Entertainment Community Fund Fund Entertainment Assistance Program

Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Emergency Grant

  • Financial aid for painters, sculptors, and printmakers who have experienced catastrophic events.
  • Applicants must demonstrate 10+ years of mature work. Grants range from $5,000 to $15,000.

Artists’ Fellowship, Inc.

  • Provides financial assistance for visual artists facing unexpected emergencies, natural disasters, or extreme hardship.
  • Open to active artists who make their livelihood through the sale of artworks.

LA Art World Fire Relief Fund

  • Mutual aid fund to assist artists and art workers with severe loss or damage to homes, studios, or property.
  • Apply or offer aid: LA Art World Fire Relief Fund

MusiCares

  • Support for music professionals impacted by the fires. MusiCares provides crisis relief, preventive care, recovery resources, and need-based financial assistance for people across all music professions.
  • Contact: musicaresrelief@musicares.org | 1-800-687-4227

Mental Health and Social Services

We Rise LA

  • Offers a 24/7 Help Line and links to mental health resources.
    Get Help Now: Call 1-800-854-7771 or text “HELP’’  to 741741 anytime for a crisis counselor.

Mental Health America of Los Angeles

Los Angeles County Arts and Mental Health Resources

  • Joint resources from the Departments of Arts and Culture and Public Health.

THIS IS THE SPACE TO CONTACT ME TO ADD GO FUND ME ACCOUNTS

Go Fund Me accounts shared with me as of this writing:

John Knuth family 

Camilla and Josh Taylor

Eva Montealegre

Ann Storc and family

Margaret Griffith and the Carter family 

LA Yoga Aid (instructors and other community members who have lost homes)

I will cut and paste other links as they come in and add to this post.

You can also reach me personally with this information via email, genie@diversionsLA.com.

Sending love out to those who are experiencing the devastation, and to those who are processing it, lending a helping hand, and hoping for a reborn and better tomorrow.

  • Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis

Lock/Unlock Opens New Doors to Art at Loft at Liz’s

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Lock/Unlock Opens New Doors to Art at Loft At Liz’s  by Genie Davis

LOCK/UNLOCK examines the past, present and future of security, privacy and protection through art and technology. Interactive, inventive installations and artwork cover the gamut from 19th century BC lock and key mechanisms to today’s present encryption and biometrics.  Participating in the exhibition, a part of the Getty’s PST programming of art and science pairings, are artists, engineers, coders and historians, including:  Krista Blake, Derek Curry, George Dyson, Liz Gordon, Jennifer Gradecki, Debby Kline, Larry Kline, Laure Michelon (Studio MMR), John Peralta, and Lena Alexandra Root.

As the exhibition’s curatorial notes state, the artists in this exhibition are posing questions such as: “Do we consider privacy a human right? What is the trade off between privacy and transparency? Are we afraid of technology or who controls it? Are we willing to change our digital behavior?” All intriguing questions and premises for art exploration, as is the notation that “the need for security systems remains resolute” in today’s world.

Along with new work by these artists, there are on exhibit historical wrist restraints;  locks and dead bolts and keys, all displayed  by gallerist Liz Gordon. The installation of antique keys is both beautiful and mysterious.

It’s exciting and innovative work, including many fascinating and viewer-involving, thought-provoking works such as Jennifer Gradecki and Derek Curry’s “Generative Persuasion,” an interactive installation with a mobile command center that reveals the startling effectiveness of live language models at generating false content – the world of disinformation we live in now come to demonstrable life.  Those who participate can enter their or another’s bias in perception to generate completely different takes on “reality.”

Debbie and Larry Kline offer “Unlocking the Truth,” in which stone sulptures – granite and powdercoated stainless steel – are washed periodically in water to reveal the word “truth” only when the flow of water stops. The intentionally blurry carving increases the viewers focus and analytical capabilities, ably demonstrating an exploration in clarity and confusion. The thematic approach is inspired by a talk given by Thomas Albright at the Salk Institute for Biological Sutdies, discusing the brain’s inability to see accurately.

Even more visceral in terms of the Lock/Unlock subject matter is the Yale safe lock and bitcoin piece created by John A. Peralta, “How Safe,” which is both a visual game and an apt illustration of the illusion of security and the ability to “crack” it.

Lena Root’s “Men” takes a feminist viewpoint of technology and “locking” the truth, with images that depict chastity belts in front of a woman’s face.

Studio MMR has another immersive work in technolgy that interacts in words and image to one’s presence in the secondary, smaller space at the Loft, just off the main gallery – impressive and involving work. “Mediated Realities” provides sensory inputs to interactions with the viewer.

Krista Blake and George Dyson also present involving and thought-provoking work.

Art talk and closing reception are February 1, from 3-5 – time to unlock all the vicissitudes of the new year and uncover possible remedies with a visit to this exciting exhibition.

  • Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis

Back to Her Roots: Marisa Caichiolo

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Back to the Roots: Marisa Caichiolo at Manhattan Beach Art Center –  by Nancy Kay Turner

Marisa Caichiolo’s compelling exhibition which just concluded at the Manhattan Beach Arts Center, explores colonial legacy, the domestic sphere and collective memory in a quietly mesmerizing installation. At once both epic and intimate, Caichiolo creates a dream-like environment filled with symbolic narrative elements that juxtapose fantasy and realism while wrapping the viewer in multi-layered visual poetry.

Caichiolo has specific iconography, an alphabet of images that she uses to great effect to communicate what is hidden and concealed, buried deep or only half remembered. Roots – that system of nourishment and communication so necessary to tree survival is both fact and metaphor – here drawn on walls, attached to the bottoms of monochromatic shadowy ghost houses, or gathered in a circle underneath two columns hanging from the ceiling.

These two white dress columns are reminiscent of Baptismal gowns, christening dresses, communion and wedding dresses that hint at transitions and ritual. These dramatic dresses with their high empire waistline, decorated bodices look like inverted Greek ionic columns, while their draped column-like skirt echoes fluted marble Greco-Roman marble columns. As the materials reaches the floor, it puddles gracefully where it is ringed by roots. With many layers of meanings that suggest fashion, religion and even architecture these two, theatrical large -scale pieces highlight Caichiolo’s superb psychological use of materials.

Nearby are several images printed on a lightweight diaphanous fabric hung banner-like on the wall. One is of a section of an ancient edifice with two columns while the other is a drawn image of one of the dresses, and the third is of a singular marble column. Each appears fading, ghostly or only half-remembered. Places and spaces of private and public activities abound here.

The sense of walking through a dream landscape persists as a large mural sized photograph of a bright vista opens the room up. Clad in a long white gown (not unlike the one suspended nearby) a woman lying in repose on the bottom edge of this mysterious image prompts curiosity.

There are video monitors embedded in artificial turf that capture a performance connected to honoring the earth and planting seeds – a ritual both practical and sacred. A large still image of the lush green jungle-like environment adorns the space and a small triangular pile of earth with a seedling in it occupy the space as well. This room feels intimate, warm and speaks to survival, renewal and memory.

Cultural ideas of nourishment, of beauty or embellishment are explored here as the colonial legacy is overlaid on indigenous peoples in Latin America and everywhere that was colonized. The resulting cultural hybridity is complex and intertwined much like the roots of many trees. Caichiolo’s conceptual investigation of mixed ancestry, the role of women in preserving culture and the strength and necessity of ritual is not only elegantly installed but opens a mysterious portal in time, drawing the viewer in to ponder legacy and memory.

Leonard Bernstein said “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between contradictory answers.” In this stunning immersive exhibition Marisa Caichiolo does just that by posing questions that may be unanswerable through her inspired juxtapositions of image and material.

  • Nancy Kay Turner; photos by Nancy Kay Turner and Genie Davis

Kaleidoscopes of Color and Light at MOCA Geffen

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As dazzling as the midnight sun – a sight doubtlessly familiar to Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson –  is his new exhibition OPEN. The exhibition fills the MOCA Geffen with light and color in an astonishing series of works by a powerful and deeply compelling artist. As a part of the Getty’s PST ART programming, it’s a dynamic one, and my favorite body of work within it. OPEN is the first solo mueseum show by Eliasson in the greater LA area.

Merging light with color, the precision of the geometric form with child-like wonder, Eliasson continues and expands upon his own explorations, here involving parts of the museum’s  own architecture.

The main gallery is home to towering kaleidoscopes beneath observation structures that point both skyward and to the MOCA Geffen building itself.  While some show the effects of light and mirrors, others offer looks into the sky or roof top.

Some offer fascinating, even surreal hexagons and interconnecting, jungle-gym-like lattices that seems as if they came from another world; another is a simple rainbow. Images shift with time of day and weather, creating marvelous illusions of color, shadow, light – and pure joy, in both the artistry and the wonder of the exhibition.

In another gallery space, colorful jeweled rings and painted works represent the color spectrum along the gallery walls.

In the center of the space, triangular shaped kaleidoscopes point not outward but inward, forming shifting geometric color shapes that resemble flowers or buildings. In the same gallery a large geometric prism hangs, a sculpted version of light and shape made manifest.

Elsewhere on the museum’s cavernous ground floor, an interactive room invites viewers to become colorful shadow participants in light and color magic; upstairs a series of mirrors and large half rings create riveting optical illusions as if one is standing inside a ring within a ring.

The artist and the museum encourage viewers to borrow a pillow from the information desk and recline or sit beneath the main gallery’s large structures to contemplate and view the magical shifts of light and form. Yes, it is all smoke and mirrors – no real smoke, just that of the imagination – and it is an incredible illusion, one that will entrance, enthrall, and change how you view the world.  It’s the vision of magicians and angels, and the viewer is the better for having seen it.

As the artist himself posits:

“AM I OPEN/ To facing my numbness?/ To receiving a No?

To explore where I place my attention?/To wonder?/To vulnerability?

To explore where I place my attention? To wonder?/To vulnerability?

Step into this exhibition and invite yourself to find out.

Olafur Eliasson: OPEN is organized by José Luis Blondet, Senior Curator, and Rebecca Lowery, Associate Curator, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, Curatorial Assistant, and Anastasia Kahn, former Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The exhibition runs through July 6, 2025 – OPEN up your eyes to it this year. MOCA Geffen is located at 152 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles in Little Tokyo.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis