10th Annual Spectrum Gestalt Kicks Off Summer at bG Gallery

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It’s the 10th Annual Spectrum Gestalt and we arrive at Bergamot Station and watch as guests spill out of bG Gallery with an energy and crowd that is just as colorful as the exhibition. Many of the attending artists are dressed in their respective color palette and I am no exception.  Joined by my two young boys, I made certain to have a serious talk before entry. You know, the Do Not Touch Anything talk, matched with the No Running in the Gallery talk. My intent eyes linger affirmingly on the littlest, spunkiest of the duo and is followed by a required “Yes, Mom,” before we proceed. We work our way through the crowd and into the gallery and are immediately hit with powerful waves of color. I look to my 10-year-old and find him wide-eyed, jaw ajar. We pause and allow the chromaticity to settle in.

The exhibition is arranged in a classic salon style that flows in the respective sequence of each hue in the rainbow. It’s almost impossible not take a step back and look at the installation in its wholeness. Each band of color is refracted with a range of art styles and media that take the viewer on an electromagnetic & multi-dimensional journey. From visually captivating paintings and detailed drawings to tactile works of embroidery and sculpture to photographic feats that all bode their own greatness, yet meet the viewer’s eye on a level playing field— gestalt indeed.

Spectrum Gestalt was the exhibition that initiated bG’s inception at Bergamot Station Arts Center 10 years ago. Gallerist, Om Bleicher, shares that although they had a location on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica and another in La Brea, when a space at Bergamot presented itself for a one-month pop-up, the opportunity to make a big splash in this creative hub was one not to be missed. Bleicher aimed to activate the space by involving as many talented artists as possible, knowing that the scale of people taking part would amplify and even permeate bG’s presence. The timeline to prep for such a show was short. So much so, that artists were asked to make their own art labels in the color of their work. But it all came together and the scale of people that attended the launch of Spectrum Gestalt energized bG in a new and exciting way, and a sense of place here at Bergamot was born. To be nestled amongst over a dozen fine art galleries that gather both artists and collectors from around the globe was undeniably alluring, and the one-month pop-up subsequently turned into a permanent lease signed & roots were formed. Now, 10 years later, this flagship exhibition serves as an annual reminder of bG’s beginnings at Bergamot.

Chromatecton #5, Sung-Hee Son

This year’s exhibition was heavily reliant on the curatorial direction of Sung-Hee Son, who is an artist her own right. While the unification of impact was achieved, there was a rhythm found in the grounding consistencies presented. Whether through the color wave itself, or the fact that several artists had multiple pieces throughout the exhibition, there was opportunity for the viewer to seek out congruencies that offered an overall fusion.

An Act of Hypnosis, Michelle Kingdom

Established artists such as Michelle Kingdom showcase narrative embroideries in keeping with her recent bodies of work, while emerging and student artists like Trevor Coopersmith shared a handful of playful ceramic wall-hung sculptures sprinkled throughout.

Linkage, Trever Coopersmith

Houlihan, Tamara Tolkin

I found myself absolutely enthralled with both the painted and threaded lips of artist, Tamara Tolkin.  Pretty in pink, the toothy pout of one piece is acrylic on canvas and another is a textile dream of wool, cotton, and linen that speaks to my inner (and let’s be real, outer) appreciation for detailed, yet playful precision.

Laffy Lemon, Isabella

Fig and Water Drop, Paul Art Lee

Windows and Doors 1,  Angela Kent.

No matter what color you find yourself among, the subconscious intuitively stirs. And although my work hangs along the wall of black, I find myself smiling at all the yellow.

Catch your favorite pantones at the closing reception this Saturday,  July 1st 5 – 7 P.M., before all the colors in the rainbow are wrapped up and hauled out until next June.

bG Gallery 2525 Michigan Avenue, #A2, Santa Monica, CA 90404 | Gallery hours Wed-Sun 12 – 5 P.M.

– Written by Aimee Mandala; photos by Aimee Mandala, Paul Art Lee, Zoe Silverman

 

Quick Takes on Hot Art: Mon Dieu Projects Goes Abstract and Shockboxx Heads to Summer Camp

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Two terrific group shows have started the summer season off right in LA.

Mon Dieu Project‘s sophomore exhibition, Absctract Adjacent, is a lovely, lush show that gets its title from being, in many cases, somewhat figurative, or at least elements of the figurative dance through this group show.

Shadowy white figures, both ephemeral and graceful, dance through the vivid red background of lustrous works from Nadege Monchera Baer, created with acrylic and colored pencil on Vellum. Baer’s pointillist style here is new to me as a long-time follower; but like past works, it is poetically perfect.

Lucas Biagini combines wax with oil paint to shape visceral, dimensional images that flow like colored lava.

DL Alvaraz offers surreal and colorful sci-fi shapes; working in graphite and colored pencil the effect of his color and medium is that of a collage. Jaehong Anh is more surreal still, Dali-esque, perhaps and texturally deep.

Eva Blue’s astonishing giclee on glass depictions of the Northern Lights, dazzles with color.

Rick Boling’s vivid crowd scenes, even blurred or dotted with confetti, edge toward the figurative with one eye on abstract wonder.

 

Christopher Kuhn devotes swirls and layers of acrylic and oil paint to creating ropey, fascinatingly complex abstract puzzles.

Jeffrey Nachtigall gives viewers a lavender sky and an alien space craft in his single work in this show, a glossy and absorbing mix of spray paint, latex, and acrylic.

Shadowy, nearly submerged images in more muted shades mark the work of Bernardo Montgomery, who works in mixed media on copper and steel here.

The exhibition just closed, but it will be exciting to see what’s next for the gallery, which is new by a few months to the LA art scene. The light filled space offers inventive, smartly conceptual work that feels bracingly fresh in the DTLA art scene. Abstract Adjacent is available for viewing online, here. 

Also fresh in the summer heat, Shockboxx Gallery‘s group show, Summer Camp delights with a wild array of artists in full seasonal splendor. From the campy (yes, pun intended) to the haunting, from stunningly detailed landscapes to fuzzy textile sculptures, this exhibition is as welcome as a cold glass of lemonade (spike it if you’d like) on a hot day.

Eileen Oda’s large-scale “Spring Flowers” is a jaw-droppingly detailed field of poppies in a quintessentially Californian landscape that draws the viewer straight into the sunny meadow.

Aimee Mandala’s wonderfully mysterious glowing blue house in a dark wood, created in charcoal, is both elegaic and grand, a slice of summer memory.

Debbie Korbel delights with a hilarious Barbie narrative.

Emily Wallerstein’s perfectly detailed sunset pink desert sky and Joshua Tree in “Full Moon Covid Camping, Mojave Desert” is all ethereal light. From Amrta’s golden textural swirls to gallerist Mike Collins’ wittily subversive “The Buzzards Left, so it wasn’t me they were after,” there is something for everyone here.

Viewers will find an embroidered “Homeless Man’s Skewer” by Priscilla Vincent; a sensual oil painting from Celina Bernstein;  a whimsical yet fraught paper bag enclosed figure from Isabella Fernanda and Lori Markman’s equally fraught ballpoint pen on paper monster in “I’ve Got My Eye On You.”



You better check in to this summer camp, no tent required, as the show ends July 2nd. You can also view many, but not all of the 39+ works on exhibit here.

Mon Dieu Projects is located at 720 E. 18th Street in DTLA, open 12-4 Tuesday-Saturday.

Shockboxx is located at 636 Cypress in Hermosa Beach and is open on weekends or by appointment.

  • Genie Davis, Photos: Genie Davis

 

 

 

Artist Arezoo Bharthania Welcomes Viewers to A Home in the Inbetween

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Arezoo Bharthania’s evocative mixed media solo exhibition, A Home in the In-Between, is both delicate and layered. As skillfully curated by Jason Jenn at LA Art Core in Little Tokyo, the exhibition is divided into three distinct areas: hanging panels, which viewers can walk between, like scrolls that tell the story of both Bharthania’s childhood, early adulthood, and current life; similarly unfolding narrative pieces that flow from ceiling to floor, fringed at the bottom, recalling exquisite Persian rugs; and projected images exhibited in muted twilight, and viewed at least in part, through clear, etched panels. Linking each of these spaces is a section of  nuanced and delicate works of wall art which resemble sections of a quilt or pieces of beautiful wallpaper.
The combination of curated spaces leads the viewer from one room to another, just as you would pass between the rooms of a home. But the home here is a dream-like one, composed of memories and plans, present reality and past sensations.
As the artist leads viewers from her recalled life in Iran to her life here in LA, her personal story reflects a broader one, a uniquely human experience of emotion and sensation, observation and understanding, envirorments both interior and external. It is the unfolding and expansion of roots and the blossoming of the future on the fertile garden of the past.
The exhibition allows the viewer time to take in the full view of her emotional, physical, and remembered home spaces. Viewers are invited not just to see but to explore Bharthania’s carefully explored territory, which she depicts through painted images, photographic depictions, and a range of tactile materials.
This is a graceful show, immersive but delicately so, shaping personal images of home, and with the artist’s projected images, a more urban and global one.  What makes a home? For Bharthania is it is heart and soul, the colors of her world, from lime green to gold and pink, vibrant and personal, and moving into her images of cityscapes, a world that can be more muted and distant, a way to process, perhaps, the urban noise.
Throughout the world and throughout time, home is a place we live, we inhabit, we at least try to make in our own image – a safe refuge. It is a place in which we long for a life outside its walls and equally yearn for the succor of, or at least the hope for, sustenance that we find within them.
There is intimacy and immediacy in Bharthania’s work, and there is also a view out the windows of her metaphorical home so to speak, a look at the broader world, and the passage of time.
The artist shares beauty and wistfulness, the fragile nature of the past, the permanence of personal roots, and the restlessness of urban life, all while acknowledging the constructs of home from beyond the personal to a grander, broader, more social view.
This lovely exhibition closes Sunday, with a curatorial and artist walk through conducted by Jenn and Bharthania at 3 p.m. The gallery is open 12-4 Thursday-Sunday.  LA Art Core is located at 120 Judge John Aiso St,. Los Angeles, CA 90012.
– Genie Davis, Photos: Genie Davis

Entering the Spiritual Realm of Where Earth Becomes Aether at Wonzimer

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There is both the mystic and the mythic in Where Earth Becomes Aether, curated by Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanovic now at Wonzimer in DTLA through June 30th. Viewing this immersive show is a spiritual experience, both literally revealing the Zen-like soul of the art, and in its cathedral-like presentation.

The gallery’s soaring walls and ceiling create the exhibition’s own canvas, and the curators and artists have worked together to create many site-specific pieces that shape the space into a true church of awe-inducing art.

The group exhibition of 13 artists include works from both Radovanovic and Jenn, as well as Marthe Aponte, Francesca Bifulco, Adrienne DeVine, David Hollen, Aline Mare, Rosalyn Myles, Catherine Ruane, Nancy Kay Turner, Cheyann Washington, Christine Weir, and Sean Yang.

Thematically, the art looks at the “elemental nature of art making, constructed by earthy resources and inspired by ethereal ideas.”

The artists use everything from paper to plants, rock, metal, and clay, inviting viewers to enter a space that the curators describe as both “physical and emotional, the ephemeral and eternal, and the material and immaterial.” Aether refers to a divine substance, one that according to ancient Greeks, served as a connector between the earthly and the celestial. In short, the exhibition is one every bit as sacred and ethereal as its intent.

The viewer’s eye is immediately drawn to the backwall of the gallery, whose height is often overpowering in other exhibitions. Here, it’s fully utilized by co-curator Jason Jenn. Mixed media and acrylic paint are the materials used for “Interconnected: the Sky Serenades, the Earth Dances,” a site-specific installation available for re-creation.  Blue above and brown below, the serendipitous combination reveals both sky and ground, with elements that include a swirl of gilded metallic leaves, bones, and rock.

The piece is the physical backdrop and backbone of the exhibition, leading beautifully to works on either side of it and in the center of the gallery, where curatorial counterpart Vojislav Radovanović’s work serves as the exhibition’s all seeing if splintered eye.

To the left, some pieces mounted in soft dirt, are the lustrous ceramic and clay works of Sean Yang. There are four separate installations: “Filial Piety,” gives us resin cast gloves forming a kind of lei, draped off a wall-mounted chair; in pale sea green “Four Noble Truths” and “Noble Eight Fold Path,” are a perfect poem of ceramic and porcelain; while hands in a variety of oceanic shades protrude from the aforementioned soil display in Earthly Delight, an installation that contains ceramics, porcelain, and raku glazes. With a Madonna-like bearing, a female form contains two heads, one devilish, one peaceful in “Hanya,” which uses ceramics, Nara porcelain and metal oxides in its creation.

Rising just beside Yang’s work, and powerfully linked to Jenn’s in its swirl of leaves,is a virtuoso work from Catherine Ruane. Her vast “Vortex” encircles what appears to be the inside of a tree stump, or perhaps a magical black hole. Graphite, charcoal, white paint, and photo collage on rag paper make up this magnificent and vast profundity of delicately constructed black and white leaves. It is a tree in a snowstorm, a tree from Heaven, a cyclonic force as seen from above, embracing and encompassing. Here, Ruane’s work glows with the opalescence of her white paint, the delicacy of her leaves and her visceral accuracy of form, incandescent with a contained life force.

To the right of Jenn’s back-wall work, there are two delicate, ephemeral, fairy-like female figures rising within Aline Mare’s photographic works printed on glass. There is the luminous female form contained within the autumnal colors of “Anubis Head,” and the meltingly green and white fecundity of “Butter.” These beautiful works are as soul-soothing as they are slightly witchy, a heady brew.

Next to it is a tornado of site-specific smoke curling upward like a magician’s experiment from the curved natural sculptural forms created by Francesca Bifulco in “Wound Over the New Ground. ” Here, burnt burlap and wood with hand-stitched cotton thread is used along with a found palm frond and custom-built metal climbing spikes. It is plant and fire, smoke creature arisen from a jungle detritus, magnificent and fearsome.

Next to her piece is a series of conjoined and delicate works from Nancy Kay Turner, “Lethe: River of Forgetting.” Despite the title, her mixed media on parchment scrolls are not only memorable but evoke the idea of memory, as does her “Ghosts and Unintended Consquences Series,” offering mixed media including found photographs on wood panel. At the base of both series, which form a primarily blue, white, and brown nexus on the center wall, is “Pilgrimage,” 28 vintage wooded shoe lasts which evoke the fallen or the forgotten. It is a haunting, massive series of works that fits together like pieces of the same, heart-rending puzzle.

Cheyann Washington’s “Conjunction” creates the appearance of human figures arisen from the earth or sky. Using natural mineral pigments on oak-mounted fabric and an extension rope of woven dried plant material, she seems to be shaping her own Adam and Eve with sweeping, strange, grace.

Working in delicate perfection, Marthe Aponte shapes a sphere and a shield that seem like the perfect potential defense for Washington’s figures. Using picote, paper, mirrors, beads, and velvet, her two works here,  both “Reflexion/Reflection (Sphere)” and “Shield as Spatial Dialectics, ” also recall and celebrate the vaginal nature of birth, both physical and spiritual .

In the center of the gallery, powerfully reflecting Jenn’s back-wall piece as well as Bifulco’s, and others in the gallery, is a spill of mirror pieces that co-curator Vojislav Radovanovic uses like a pool, from which arises an incredible installation that resembles a church window in the heavens. Irridescent, luminous, and a simply vibrating mix of color, his “Painting for a Liminal Sanctum,” is a soaring song of mixed media on canvas. On the backside, wood shapes, plastic, and concrete forms support, both physically and emotionally, this rich glowing rainbow, a vision into an unseen universe embedded with small, delicate drawings within its hypnotic glow. It’s an enormously powerful piece that epitomizes the title and the intent of the exhibition as a whole.

Work by Christine Weir, “Override,” “Progenitor,” and “Emergence No. 2,”are each graphite on clay board, and tie into the heavenly ethereality of Radovanovic’s work and make a beautiful form and color match to Ruane’s work in the exhibition. Weir’s pieces here are their own vortex, their own celestial window, flowers or stars exploding in space.

Adrienne DeVine’s mixed media installations and wire art mobiles sing of the earth, if the earth were given wings to spin. Her mobiles are accompanied by rocks and palm leaf sheaths – which speak to Bifulco’s work directly across the gallery. The largest piece is “Serenity in the Garden of Mother Earth and Father Time,” which is surrounded by her other works, including the magical motion of “Dance For Mother Earth.”

Forming a kind of temple is David Hollen’s precise and absorbing “Ordered Heap,” a geometric gem constructed of hemp rope, stainless steel, and rubber, in earthy beige.

Acting as a kind of curatorial companion to Hollen’s spiritual building is the blue and gold work of Rosalyn Myles who offers both an astral map of fabric and dried flora, individual linocut prints, and a site-specific installation, “Stellar, “which seems to be a space pod ejected from the mother ship, replete with throw-back record player. It is squarely aimed outside the gallery, at a window to a street, and our present-day, pedestrian earth, a world which this viewer found it difficult to re-enter, after spending a wonderful afternoon taking in the celestial wonder of Where Earth Becomes Aether.

To say don’t miss the exhibition is an understatement. Just go. On June 30th, the gallery will host its closing event, a curator walk-through and film premiere from 6:00 PM 7:30 PM. The film is a visual scape for a music album by Joseph Carrillo entitled “Sanctuary Songs,” and it should serve as a delicate adjunct to this intensely beautiful show.

Wonzimer is located at 341-B S Avenue 17, Los Angeles, CA 90031 and is open from 12-7 every day but Monday and Tuesday.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis