Curated by Chenhung Chen with project management from Linda Sue Price, Sway, at the Brand Library and Art Center, is an exciting exhibition that is both perfectly curated and filled with stunningly original art work in a variety of mediums.
One of the most beautiful aspects of the exhibition is Chen’s astonishing ability to create a show in which the works seem to truly speak to each other; they are linked and separate at the same time, a cohesive presentation that pulls viewers into the experience of the exhibition.
Each of the seven participating artists use a variety of materials including wire, cords, neon, plastic, found materials, graphite works, and acrylic and pencil. Primarily sculptural, the dimensionality of the works adds the to sense that the exhibition is a living, mutating form that swims with motion – or shall we say, sways with it. If this is a world of art – and it is – it’s a new world, composed of lines and light, intense color, grand patterns, and highly tactile images.
Chen’s flowing, often delicate wire copper wire crochet work constrasts and compliments her thicker wire abstract sculputures. Both styles of her work undulate, as if they were strange sea creatures, or alien life forms.
That sense of the alien and unexpected, of sea life and forest floor, permeates the exhibition and the viewers’ gaze. We are invited to experience something unique, alive, delicate materials made strong and connected.
Snezana Saraswati Petrovic’s work here includes a room-sized installation that utilizes video images as well as delicate, lace-like plastic to immerse viewers in an a dive deep into a sea of art.
Other works of Petrovic’s pulse in fierce orange or yellow, and again we seem to be a part of a world of mysterious alien shapes, puzzling and vibrant, highly textured and dream-like.
She gives us starfish and stars, sea nettles and dimensional snowflakes, webs, fissures, and the illusion of plunging beyond or into our own consciousness.
Price’s neon works throb with kinetic energy and motion, the colors seem impossibly vibrant, they are as vivid and visceral as light pulled from the center of the earth and straight through the soul.
Pieces that literally move and those whose colors dance create a sense of nighttime magic, a glorious lit-up world that is both transcendent and emersed in noir.
Speaking of light, Echo Lew creates drawings based on light and shadow, strange and ethereal, as rhythmic as if they had sound.
His unusual process in creating these drawings from something as ephemeral as light itself is reminiscent of auras, ghostly presences, a spirit world.
Both Debbie Carlson and Gina Herrera work with found materials that include articles as diverse as ladders and yarn and bottle caps and latex gloves.
Herrera in particular creates works that are infused with a sense of humor and wit, fantastical and fairy-tale-like. She creates both creatures and abstract shapes out of what could be artistic detritus in less gifted hands.
Carlson’s sculptural works link prosaic articles and repurpose them into something sublime, strange, and cooly geometric.
The eye studies the lines that make the shapes that fuse recognizable objects into something far more interesting and rich.
Anne Marie Rousseau exhibits a series of painted acrylic images, both sharp, modern, and shiny with color; lines of gold dance and opal-like paint shimmers within the works like the veins of rich minerals found within the earth.
The large scale works seem to vibrate; located on the outside wall of the main galleries, they serve as a kind of introduction or portal into another realm. Her work is always filled with a sense of motion, here, the pieces are perhaps the most literal and lyrical interpretation of the show’s title.
It perhaps goes without saying that the works here are each magical, they invoke and call out a sensual beauty, a reworking of line, shape, form, and texture that upends the expected and presents a new and intensely satisfying view of the world.
Above, curator Chen, attendee Betty Brown, artist Petrovic
Sway is an exhibition to be savored – go take it in. The Brand Library and Art Center is located in Glendale – or perhaps, with this show, in another universe entirely. The exhibition runs through June 14th.
- Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis
