What could be better than a drive-up or walk-by art exhibition of lustrous abstract neon? Linda Sue Price offers a lush, vibrant, and yes, lit-up experience in her new show, Safe in the Light, opening today, Saturday March 6th, at Loiter Galleries in Long Beach.
The gallery notes that after months of storefront closures and darkness due to the pandemic, gallerists felt it was “now time” to make the city’s 4th Street promenade shine with this pop-up exhibition located at The Streets shopping center.
Price’s new exhibition opens at 6:30 p.m. tonight, with an outdoor look at the art; it will be on display and clearly visible from the windows of the gallery until April 17th.
The exhibition marks a grand reopening of the galleries’ space. Price was chosen for the reopening because, “her work’s dual focus on light and positivity felt right for the moment,” the gallery states. It’s neon nature also lends itself to outside viewing by passersby, making it perfectly COVID-19 safe, as well as uplifting.
Jesse
Price says “The work in this show trends toward bright light because it is exhibiting in daylight,” she notes, when describing what makes this particular body of work different from others of her highly textural, sinuously-shaped neon art.
Rose
“I was invited to this show because the curators wanted to focus on light and positivity. Two pieces Rose, and Jesse, honor people who encouraged me to be me and also celebrated the energy of abstract art,” she explains.
Energy is certainly a quality that her work is infused with. It is the transcendent quality of her medium itself, her choice of color, her use of curves and shadows. The supple quality of her bending evokes movement and fluidity, providing the viewer with a synthesis of light, color, and captured motion. Her ability to exude light as a kind of life-force permeates the consciousness, inspiring an inward energy and awakening in the viewer.
Seeds
Echoing the passion and connectivity of all great abstract art, Price paints with her tubing in intense and visceral strokes.
Turn Left
Like many artists during pandemic times, she relates that the pandemic itself has of course influenced her work and impacted her personally. “I changed my focus from art making to gardening. While I continued to practice my bending skills, my creativity was channeled into figuring out how to successfully grow healthy vegetable plants. I recently grew my first winter garden. The journey continues. I am now using seeds to grow some of my plants rather than purchase them from a nursery.”
Unsurprisingly, her interest in gardening has also influenced the literal and figurative growth of her artwork. “My current project is to create invented herbs that will encourage the appreciation of women with opinions, and the sipping of two other invented herbs that will encourage support democracy…and the list goes on.”
Curves Ahead
In short, her neon continues to bloom and grow, just like her garden. And viewers can experience it live in Long Beach, starting tonight.
Loiter Galleries is located at 180 E. 4th Street windows in Long Beach; opening outdoors, live Saturday March 6th and on Instagram Live at Loiter Galleries.
Artist Randi Matushevitz has created astonishing three recent bodies of work that are both emotionally resonant and plugged into the zeitgeist of today’s world.
The earliest series is Dystopian Lullaby. What is such a song? Does it soothe, does it rock the saddest soul into something astonishingly beautiful, hovering at the edge of hope? Does the strange melody somehow also seem distorted and off-balance, chaotic and inchoate? Matushevitz somehow manages to do all of these things with this series , one which is so poignant and real as to defy any routine categorization.
It is that poignancy perhaps that serves as a lullaby to these dystopian faces and settings. The people she creates, and even their elusive situations, are each sublimely real; they have lives we may not have been invited to visit before. For every element of distortion or horror at the state of their – and our – world – there is a sense of the rhythm of life, a brief impulse of comfort or longing. Created in oil on linen, the artist’s paintings feature backgrounds that are muted, often grey toned; the faces themselves reveal a palette of oblique and uncommon shades, while remaining entirely recognizable as “real.”
In images such as the artist’s “Cluster 4” (above), this dichotomy is richly evident. Matushevitz shapes an intimacy that compels the viewer into identifying with these dystopian inhabitants. In this work, a large, possibly disembodied figure appears to comfort a fully realized, frightened young girl. Behind her to one side, a shadowy outlined figure watches, with a benevolent if sorrowful expression. Two disembodied heads display alarm; one figure is partially reclining and seemingly viewing something entirely inward – perhaps this entire scene is a part of her memory. Like a film that makes the viewer long for a sequel, this work, too, aches for continuation and explanation, while still being wholly satisfying in its mystery.
There is a sense of family in each of the artist’s clusters, whether it is a “real” family, or characters that inhabit our own minds. Some of these characters reveal a sense of abject dread, but others seem at peace, resigned, ready to accept/embrace the dystopian world around them and possibly even shape an antidote for it.
Each image is both grounded in realism and yet layered in metaphorical abstractness. One can see the physical layers, which the artist creates by drawing, smudging, superimposing, and re-drawing or painting; and within those physical representations, within those impressive, passionate countenances, are layers of meaning and belief. If our own realities are made up of years of experience and knowledge, social interaction, and beliefs passed on from others and learned within ourselves, then so is the reality of these images.
With Headspace and Headspace 3D (above), Matushevitz continues her nuanced exploration of the human condition and spirit, her works entering into increasingly complex spaces, mesmerizing and self-illuminative.
She often presents a conundrum of the spirit, in which she reveals the fears and indecisions, even the anger, that may lurk in each of us, but also a sense of exhilaration, of hope and connectivity, all filtered through her own affection for and exploration of human emotion. Just as her work itself is physically – and now, dimensionally – layered, so too is the meaning within it, packed with feeling and perceptive sensation.
Using what she describes as “emotional” portraiture, she captures an enormous amount of grace and resiliency in human expression, in both the oil on linen Headspace series, and its 3D and video iterations, Headspace 3D, the latter of which offers a vast expansion of fresh perceptions.
To create Headspace 3D Matushevitz initially used smartphone technology to animate her works, furthering her passionate deep dive into human expression, and to foster a sense of connectivity and community.
She began with simply animating the still images from her Headspace series, shaping a number of the images into Headspace 3-D. However, now they have grown into longer video explorations, revealing the subject of each image as a character with a breadth of emotions, as the artist explores meaning and non-meaning, and the true nature of understanding, and when it can occur. Matushevitz believes “We have an innate human ability that is in our DNA and in our sympathetic nervous system to understand. It goes beyond culture, gender and language.”
These new-media digital art works last from 6 to 20 seconds, and offer an intimate looking into portraits that have become uniquely alive.
As an artist, she reassures us that we may not be perfect constructs – in fact, we are each inherently flawed – but that does not make us any less valuable or worthy. She celebrates her people, however imperfect, revealing varied expressions, changing moods, and inviting the viewer into a full and immersive interaction with them in her 3D works.
It is a wonderful morphing of technology and art, very much of the moment and yet very much infused with a classic, intuitive intimacy associated with the art of portraiture. Nodding, laughing, turning, smiling, eyes close to filling with tears – these are the “living” manifestations of the moments her oil works portray.
Both in the more surreal-tinged 3D version, and in the original Headspace, much like ourselves, the people in her portraits are complex. They are both fully realized and in-progress, both expressing our outward personas and our inward dreams, fears, hopes, and unrevealed traumas.
Matushevitz’ “Adoration” may be the most benign image of the Headspace series. Peaceful, accepting, she has a half-smile and the most realistically-grounded skin tone.
“At the Wedding” (above, top) is another graceful image, one that nonetheless reveals watchfulness, resignation, subdued interest or acceptance; “Call Me Coiffed, I just left the Salon” (second image, above) offers a similarly recognizable and interested countenance, here, that familiar expression of feeling self-confident in one’s looks, in appraising one’s appearance in a passing window or mirror and feeling “well-done.”
“Chuckles, an ode to Matthew Barney” (above) is darker in tone, just as Barney’s works were often riven with allusions to defeat, failure or a sense of conflict.
It is perhaps with “I am She” (above) that all aspects of this series coalesces: this portrait appears to be of the Headspace universe’s creator, certainly of an every-woman. She feels, thinks, and is – everything. You see pleasure, sadness, hesitation, strength, all of these shifting across this image, although it remains physically still, not a 3D AR depiction – at least as yet.
Two interesting things to note about the wonderfully deep Headspace and Headspace3D series: they are all of women, and in some way appear to be a kind of personal as well as collective self-portraiture; and the backgrounds are perfect and puzzling. Like a kind of patterned wallpaper or edgy Zoom background, these faces stand out against an environment that both clashes and offsets. All in all, that is not so dissimilar to how we experience the world today. We are who we are; the backgrounds we inhabit, whether IRL or virtual, do not empirically change us, although we may change them.
Headspace and Headspace 3D are both relatable and mind-bending, as all truly passionate art must be. These wonderfully immersive works make a perfect pairing with a visual “listen” to Matushevitz’ Dystopian Lullaby, a song for the senses, a melody of hope playing softly in a very discordant world.
Clovis Blackwell works in layers of color, thematically focusing on redemption and transformation amid apocalyptic images of change. If you haven’t quite grasped that, all you need to do is look at lovely yet unsettling works that Blackwell says were “inspired a lot by my childhood during the late Cold War, when the fears of nuclear war collided with sci-fi/fantasy and 80’s pop-culture.” He adds “A lot of the way I was exposed to this reality around me was through this rehashing of heroic myths often in a post-apocalyptic setting. In grad school I was exposed to Joseph Campbell and began to employ this apocalyptic imagery to my explorations of suffering/transformation.”
His layers of screen printing are inspired, he says, by William Burroughs and his use of the cut-up method. “There may be some differences between our intents, but that process has stuck with me since learning about his work during my undergrad.”
Blackwell’s work has evolved over the years, but one constant is his sense of being deeply connected to his art, and through it, seeking to express an idea important to him personally. “In the early 2000’s I began [to be] pretty ill with rheumatoid arthritis, and then had some other family losses over the next few years. It was an intense and painful time for me, and the work that came out of it was exploring suffering, and the feelings I had of being incapacitated or even incarcerated in my own body. That work was self-portraiture using pencil drawing and gold leaf inside of found boxes.”
He terms those images “heavy and sincere” but relates that it didn’t capture is complete persona. During graduate school he began to explore ideas of invincible superheroes and super villains, which he saw as Super-Clovis and Anti-Clovis. It was an exploratory phase in his work, as he examined everything from “commerce/commercialism, Jungian psychology, comparative mythology …all still rooted in coming to terms with how I dealt with suffering. Like the previous body of work, I was employing my own body/image, but doing so in a wide variety of media: screen printing, internet art, photography, performance art, sculpture, installation, merchandise.”
When his son was born, Blackwell saw another significant change in his life, and while he joked that his own world had ended, he stopped using his own image and turned to work that had more commonality with viewers, yet still examining the idea of suffering or loss leading to transformation. “This coincided with further reading of Joseph Campbell and a more detailed examination of my childhood, trying to make sense of growing up during that unique time. In 2010, I started working with the mushroom cloud by drawing it in bright floral colors. That year I also began teaching screen printing at a local university and so I focused my creative efforts into this discipline in order to improve my mastery of it,” he attests.
Most recently, he’s begun to mirror his printer layers either “on a vertical axis, or by adding more and more layers to further obscure the image. I really enjoy the ‘Rorschach effect’ that happens from the symmetry, and especially the response from my audience—I love to hear what people see into the work,” he attests.
He has also worked images using a lush complexity of beads, a medium he attests that he loves, and plans to use again.
He hopes that through his work, he can guide viewers to “reach conclusions that were helpful to me. That we sometimes go through painful experiences, but that we are not alone in this, that it is a universal experience, and that if we are open to it, we can change and grow through it. I try to make my work pretty for this reason. To make it easy to look at.” Ultimately, he’d like those viewing his work to be able spend time with it, and “absorb the idea of transformation into a daily routine.”
Blackwell thinks of his art in cycles. “I might at times explore the highs or the lows of transformation and redemption both equally important parts of a cycle. Joseph Campbell wrote about Emanations and Dissolutions, and I’ve included these terms in the titles for my pieces. I define them in this way: Emanations are things coming into being, and Dissolutions are things coming undone. This cycle may be as small as a delicate flower, as large as the universe itself, or it may be our own lifespan. This gives me lots of room to play while staying within these thematic bounds.”
Using images of flowers and nuclear explosions are both lovely and potent takes on apocalypse and change. Blackwell explains these choices as something he feels compelled to make. “When I started working with the mushroom cloud image we seemed to be at a low point with nuclear proliferation, but then things heated up with Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China…so that changed the context of already very loaded imagery. This may have factored into my use of that vertical symmetry, which obscures the mushroom cloud imagery a bit.”
Despite expressing fervent hopes for lasting and positive changes in society, he is aware that the world has to some extent caught up with his art. “Now we’re in what feels like an actual apocalyptic event, and so I suppose there’s some potential for timeliness. I do hope that we can come out of this as a society and make some lasting and positive changes.”
Blackwell’s work is immersive and dream-like, a blend of dreamy evolution and a transition point from nightmare to positive awakening. He thinks of himself as an interdisciplinary artist despite a focus on screen printing.
“I’m really driven by process and learning new ways to make art, and the specific contexts each disciple brings, is always exciting to me. Screen printing keeps challenging me though, so I keep going deeper. Honestly, no other medium has held so many continuous surprises for me.”
Blackwell’s compelling, redemptive work can be viewed in an upcoming solo show in 2021 with Shoebox Projects; don’t miss.
Mixed media artist Valerie Wilcox works with common, salvaged materials creating what she calls “connections between our everyday lives and ideas about how we construct our physical and psychological space. I like to push the surreal with ambiguous shapes that hover between a two-dimensional plane and a three-dimensional structure.”
Her dimensional works play with space and perception, using the effects of light and shadow. She turns the objects with which she shapes her work into canvasses of sorts, emphasizing the materials as well as the painted and textured surfaces she creates.
“I form these hybrid dimensional constructions/paintings using discards, found elements and humble materials. Ideals of perfection versus inherent human fallibility are fundamental in my work. I embrace the mistakes,” she says.
Following the ideology of Wabi Sabi and the acceptance and beauty of transience and imperfection, she rejoices in the anomalies arising from the process of construction, she relates, saying they add elegance to the final work.
Wilcox says she is always experimenting with different materials throughout Constructs, her continuing body of work, enjoying the freedom to explore a wide variety of materials. “I started working with found discards and humble materials when I found myself with a lot of remnants leftover from my design work and previous projects. I was looking for the opportunity and resources to develop more sculptural 3D compositions while still working as a painter.” She adds “This way of working continually opens up new possibilities…Starting with the materials becomes e a meditation on form and shape. It’s like working with puzzle pieces that don’t fit together, but at some point, they make themselves awkwardly happy collaborators.”
Wilcox used these techniques in creating a vast commissioned piece, “A Bridge to Possibilities II.”
Creating the work, she employed her usual process, with one large difference involved: she had to start from scratch with the pieces she used to create it, as she had no scrap to work with and she needed to do specific design sketches for approvals, and pieces cut to fit the layout.
“This is not how I normally work,” Wilcox attests. “I’m very process oriented and usually start from the inspiration that the materials provide me, not from a pre-ordained design.”
The biggest challenge however was creating an extremely large work in her studio space. “The sculpture was made with 26 individual pieces combined to make the finished size of about 6 ft x 17 ft. I made it in 4 sections so it could be easier to transport and install.”
Because her studio isn’t large enough to work on all the pieces together, she purchased three 6 ft. tables and set them up in her home’s tandem garage. Using this system, she could paint the work all together when laid out flat.
According to the artist, “It was a new challenge for me to work this large, however, because of the way I work in general, which is to work on the separate pieces first and then combine them together, I was able to work like a production line and prepare the individual pieces separately in my studio and in the garage. In order to see how the piece was working and provide progress photos to the client, I had to lay it out in our driveway and shoot it from our rooftop to get it all in one photo.” Next time, perhaps, a drone.
While many of the techniques she used to create the work remained consistent with her work on other pieces, in this case she used a stronger but just as lightweight material called Gator Board to make the work easier to install.
“I also worked with a fabricator to create a wood cleat system on the back for hanging. They did the installation using a matching cleat system on the wall. This was hung in 4 sections that fit into each other like puzzle pieces,” she says.
The piece was commissioned through an art consultancy formed hired by a New York-based designed firm that renovated the hotel. The team liked Wilcox’ original “A Bridge to Possibilities,” and sough a larger iteration of it that used colors fitting well with their interior design.
The piece will have to wait for the pandemic to – finally – end to find its audience. It was commissioned by the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego, located in the downtown San Diego harbor area, and it’s installed in the main bar. The bar is of course closed until restrictions are lifted.
That makes Wilcox’ large and lovely artwork another gem to look forward to experiencing in the coming new year. It will be a “Bridge to Possibilities II” indeed, for most of us.
Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis and courtesy of the artist
