Watch for the Lights: Linda Sue Price – Glowing Neon Artist

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Neon artist Linda Sue Price creates compelling, vibrant images that, in her own words, “mix form, light, reflection and texture.” Communicating through the fluidity of her glowing shapes, Price expresses her idea that change is the ultimate form of communication.

Her mixed media neon sculptures use free-form bent, unique abstract shapes. Whether using backgrounds that are simple and reflective or complexly textured, Price creates a visual texture that reflects the neon itself. She layers elements that enhance the glow and playful aspects of the neon, such as acrylic rods and patterned backgrounds. Her pieces have a depth that cast the neon tubes as living elements.

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Such an approach may be natural to Price, who has been a neon-admirer since her childhood. She notes that “A visit to Las Vegas was always special because of the extensive use of neon all over the buildings. There was a palm tree in front of one of the casinos that I loved. Motel signs often had animation. I liked to look at them and try to figure out how the animation patterns.” Today, Price uses color as well as shape and background to make her pieces sing. While the initial color source is dependent on the gas itself, from neon’s red to argon’s purple, krypton’s white, and argon with mercury blue, colored glass tubing and fluorescent powders painted or baked inside the tubing create more color choices. She creates beading in the tube through the natural use of the gas itself, controlling it with small transformers that pulse the beading.

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In Price’s “Solo Works,” her “Dancing Girls” show five caught-in-motion female forms undulating against a multi-textured background whose peaked pattern evokes the shape of a house, with the girls perhaps dancing on a metallic lawn in front of it. Green and purple light images are the largest, with red, yellow, and spotted white figures significantly smaller, as if these were girls of all ages, shapes, and sizes, their spirits as bright as the light that represents them.

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Inspired by an article the artist read about the translation of Chinese poetry, Price’s “Words” series uses some of her own “favorite words such as Consider, Change and Pause.”  In “Change,” nearly entangled green and red coils serve as yin and yang like figures, partially framed by bent tubes of yellow, green, and red over a softly mottled background. “Reveal” is a complex yellow coil, bright as the sun, partially framed by green and blue tubing that remind the viewer of grass and sky.

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Price’s “The Garden” series stands as fresh and bright as the plant-like images she shapes. “Green Beans” contrasts stalk-straight blue and green tubes with curved blue and green shapes rising from a blue flower box. The images remind the viewer of a spring day, when all things are growing and possible. Price notes that the images in this series are crafted to “create a neon garden.”

Dedicated to the idea that it takes a great deal of discipline to stay focused in the moment, the artist’s “Stay in the Moment” series reflects her own necessary discipline in focusing on bending neon tubing. “The shape of the tubes express the joy of being in the moment,” Price says, and the viewer can see this beautifully illustrated in her rich orange, yellow, green, and blue “Wild Child,” for which she created a layout after bending the tubes. Her pink, red, and purple  

“Pacific Sunset” features a reflective blue background that warms the neon tubes into a riveting sunset image. Two of the tubes bead through a pulsing transformer.

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Evocative and ethereal in nature, the neon glow behind Price’s works stay in the viewer’s mind, their soft color and curved shapes imprinting like a new form of neon nature. Recently exhibiting Art + Science + Craft II at the Fine Arts Building in Los Angeles, Calif. , Price has upcoming shows in Long Beach at Arts Exchange, as part of an All Media Juried Exhibition at the Chico Arts Center in Chico, Calif., and also has two exhibitions planned at the TAG gallery in Santa Monica, Calif. before the end of the year.

  • Genie Davis

Lindsey Price

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Mixed media artist Lindsey Price is a photographer with a vision. Of doors to the imagination or perhaps another realm entirely in her “What’s on the Other Side” series, of the empty places where magic is just waiting to fill the gaps in her stunning black and white seascapes, “Empty,” and in “Desert Retreat” of pastel colored skies over rugged hills awash in late afternoon glow and soft sunset. Where her photography edges – into the magical and sublime – her collage’s fully land.

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Pink flamingos, wild flowers, and fields of Saguaro cacti meet ascending to a Middle Eastern palace with a minaret in one piece, evoking a fairy-tale landscape in a world where such juxtaposition may just lead to the excavation of ancient cities that stretch below the palace, or perhaps to a meeting of the minds and souls of the people crowded on rocks to the left of the collage.

As with all of Price’s collages, the field is packed with images, but never cluttered. The eye roves from one corner to the next, taking in the surreal and the real, the delicate colors, the kaleidoscopic technique. Speaking of a kaleidoscope, another Price collage uses the circular prismatic image pattern viewed through one as the frame work of a piece depicting four images of a woman’s strikingly made-up eyes, four of a flowering cactus, a spiny plant, a sea shell, each set of four meeting its twin on the other half of the collage. Between them, linking each set of four, is a set of two twinned women standing in profile against a single colored circle. The colors, with much green, blue, purple and iridescent shine add to the feeling of entering a mythical realm, a portal through space and time into the heart of a female-centric beauty.

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Similarly, three images of a dark haired woman, back turned to the viewer, stare toward three images of a planet, suspended in a glowing sky above dark mountains and swirling pink clouds below them. It’s a woman’s world, wherever we are. The woman’s body, the iconic shape of the mountains, and the beams of light all recall iconic anime images and Japanese wood block art.

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Inspired by the surrealist art movement, Price describes her continued amazement when she creates “a representation of my innermost desires, fantasies and dreams. I create my art with the home that others will travel through the images I’ve put together and be awakened to their own desire.”

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Price is a photographer, editor, designer, and artist, with her BFA in photograph and Media from the California Institute of the Arts. Residing in Los Angeles, she brings a SoCal feel to her work, from the California deserts depicted in her photography to the color palette in her collages.

  • Genie Davis

 

Mike M. Mollett

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Performance art, sculpture, and installations – Mike M. Mollett is a versatile artist who creates both living and still-form art. The founder of L.A. Mudpeople, and the sculptor of large scale pieces created from found art, shaped into balls and bundles, Mollett’s work offers a look into a different reality, one in which what look like clay statues live and breathe, and bundles of wires move in the wind and become animate themselves.

On the performance art side, Mollett considers his troupe of L.A. Mudpeople to be non-performers who function as “essentially living sculptures.” Mudpeople don’t speak, and move slowly and deliberately, almost as if lumps of clay had shaped themselves and literally come to life. The troupe gets its mud from Silver Lake, Hollywood, and northern California, as well as using commercial mud such as potter’s clay. The artist started his mud-work in 1989, booking himself and others at an African-Reggae club for a single night – and the rest is art-tribal history.

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L.A. Mudpeople vary in number, with sometimes as many as forty members participating in events like the Doo Dah Parade, or conducting walkabouts along the L.A. River, Melrose, or Old Town Pasadena. Their work has appeared in National Geographic Magazine, and exhibitions of their attire and artifacts have been shown at both UCLA and Cal State L.A. They’ve been the subject of a film, imitated by Leonard DiCaprio, and have become an iconic part of Los Angeles’ rich street art scene. The Mudpeople wear their own simple clothing, and create full head masks made from cloth, paper, mud, and binding. Conceptually, these living sculpture performances are all about the freeing of self from time and worry, muddy yogis who, according to Mollett “don’t have to do anything. We just are.”

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Mollett has participated in the Los Angeles art scene for forty-some years, and it’s not all about “mudding-up.” His sculptures are often created from items and forms he’s used from work as a landscape artist, found objects that he morphs into what are essentially time capsules of society and life itself.

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His sculpture balls include pieces like “Migrant World,” a bundle of artifacts that were gathered along the Arizona-Mexico border trails. Tied with rope and cords, viewers see a Mexican shawl, a battered pink backpack, a hat, water bottle, and baby bottle among other objects, built around an ocotillo wand armature. The over all effect is poignant – these are the belongings that people took with them as they migrated from one land, or realm, to the next. Mollett’s rope and wire bound “The Giant Ball,” features the detritus of modern society, such as milk cartons, wine bottles, paper bags, and pill containers. This, Mollett seems to be saying, is what we have allowed ourselves to be made of. The balls serve as personal sculptures that use material collected from Mollett’s life or another’s life, shaping a biography or autobiography of that person.

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Unlike his balls, his Time-Twists of wire and wood are linear, reaching like mysterious urban plants skyward. “The Giant Bundle: A pLAyLAnd Twist” is installed indefinitely at The Brewery Artists Lofts in Los Angeles. His “Woody Bundle” includes an accordion tape measure. “Wild Red Twist” looks like shocking pink licorice has fused into corral, with blue, yellow, and black wires twisting in an invisible ocean wave. “Mostly Electric Story” incorporates rope, wires, and computer cables.

What makes both the Time-Twists and balls so compelling, is the feeling as if these entirely inanimate objects could suddenly become animate – just as Mollett’s Mudpeople do. A sinuous quality infuses the Time-Twists, making the viewer think of snakes, or strands of DNA twining and untwining. The balls are like transparent eggs filled with the stuff that life is made from, ready to hatch into human form.

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Mollett’s “Gate Series” also feels embryonic. In “The 2nd GATE,” Wire mesh is woven with wires, ropes, sticks, bamboo, Dracaena Draco leaves, and twines. Mollett’s “Mostly Friendly GATE” also features Dracaena Draco leaves, orange, wire mesh, sticks, bamboo, wires, and ropes. The flat aspect of the gates resembles a thin slice of human tissue, the wires and leaves the inner-workings of the body, or the inner-workings of technology just as fragile, just as capable of being alive in a technology-driven world.

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Installations like “Leaves in the Poet’s Winter Garden,” a part of Mollett’s solo show at Matters of Space in Highland Park, also use sticks, wires, and pipes to create the illusion of alive-ness. In this piece, pipe and bamboo stand tall, while at the base of these “plants” are small pieces of paper with two sets of disparate words or phrases written on them. A wonderful concept that illustrates the fluidity of creative thought, the passing “leaves” of discarded verbiage. Other installations have included a Mudcave at an Eagle Rock pop-up space, PlayLand, and The Mud Room created for the NadaDada Festival in Reno, Nev. Recently, Mollett was also a part of group exhibitions at Los Angeles Contraventions and the Los Angeles Juried Exhibition. Mudpeople have recently performed at the Highways Performance Space, as well as along the L.A. River, and at Beyond Baroque in Venice, Calif.  You can find out more about Mollett’s work here: http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/los-angeles/mike-mollett-la-mudpeople.html

– Genie Davis

Photographer Lori Pond: “Menace”

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Photographer Lori Pond uses her art to blur the lines between perceived reality and her dreams. Long accustomed to vivid dreams, and questioning the parameters of the real world since childhood, Pond uses both the camera itself and her post-processing tools to paint a full range of images and emotions through color, light, movement, and texture.

Photographer Lori Pond
Photographer Lori Pond

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In October, just in time to greet the boogeymen of Halloween, Pond will be exhibiting a solo show at the Los Angeles Art Association based on her series, “Menace.” This series vividly depicts images of things we fear – or think we do. These are velvety, dark, and ferocious photographs of wild animals that trigger gut-instinctive responses of fear. In these photographs are shadowed images designed to heighten the fight or flight reflex of viewers’ subconscious minds, instinctive reactions that we share, that make hearts race, even as we are viewing these images in a safe space.

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Raven, tiger, boar, bear – the eyes of these creatures stare intently and wildly out from clumps of voluptuously close fur, causing our ancient instinct to run. Try holding the gaze of any of these creatures and feel the power shift between viewer and subject, with the subject winning. But before viewers hurry on, the astute observer will notice the real point of these rich, noir photographs. This point  isn’t to confront viewers with their fears. Instead, Pond is posing a challenge, manipulating viewers to take one look at these frightening, shadowy creatures, and then to look again. What is truly menacing is in the viewers’ minds. These animals are taxidermied, a danger to neither the artist or the viewer of her art. The images were taken in bright shops, altered through the artist’s craft to demonstrate a ferocity that doesn’t exist. In short, Pond tells viewers that fear itself may be false and unjustified. Perhaps, along with ingrained and visceral responses to these animals, the 21st century has also brought us fears that are merely imaginary, or created by others.

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Beautifully rendered, these fearsome images are impressive in their own startlingly heart-thumping right. The context of these photographs, that fear itself may be mostly imagination, adds depth and weight to the carefully detailed and beautifully lit images. Every bird feather, every bristling bit of animal fur is perfectly rendered. Truly the stuff of dark dreams, dreams which break apart when confronted with daylight, yet linger in the psyche throughout the day in fragments created by our own primal instincts.

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To print “Menace” and her other photographic series, Pond uses Epson Ultrachrome archival pigments on matte rag papers, which adds to the deeply detailed and dream-like quality of her subjects.

A Southern California native, Pond has worked as a graphic designer and operator for live television productions including the Academy Awards, the Emmys, and Grammys, as well as for Conan O’Brien. Her photographic art has shifted through the years from street and documentary images to macro studies of the natural world in her series “The Intimate Universe.” Her highly emotional and autobiographical “Divorce” series chronicles the impact of divorce after twenty years of marriage. Using the wet plate collodion process, Pond has also created tintype portraits in her series “Strange Paradise.”

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Pond has won awards for her nationally and internationally exhibited work, and has been published online and in magazines, as well as in two books of her photography, “Lori Pond – Self,” and “Arboreal.” Her photos are a part of the permanent collections of the Center for Fine Art Photography in Ft. Collins, Colo., the Center for the Arts in Los Angeles, and at the New York headquarters of Morgan Stanley.

Her recent exhibits include a solo show at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, “Nothing in the Entire Universe is Hidden.” She’s also taken part in the Artist Alliance at the Museum 2015 in Oceanside, Calif., and the 2nd Annual LACP Members’ Exhibition in Los Angeles. The artist is a member of APA, the Art Directors Guild, and the Los Angeles Art Association, among other arts organizations.