Come to Lake LA with Daniela Garcia Hamilton

Posted on by Diversions LA

Offering a rich and evocative, deeply personal look at life in Antelope Valley’s Lake Los Angeles, Daniela Garcia Hamilton takes viewers with her on a visit to Sundays in Lake LA.

The exhibition is a warm, visually lovely body of work which focuses on Garcia Hamilton’s childhood, as well as on the idea of what makes the idea of “home “- a home. The images seem bathed in a sunny, Southern California light, one washed with a soft patina from the dusty high desert landscape of the town.

Paintings depict the artist’s extended family at gatherings, and the nature of her family home as a safe space for children and other family members when first arrived from Mexico.

Infused in color, a brightness that is resonant and uncompromising, this is narrative painting at its finest, infused with the refined story telling of memory. Because of that infusion, these works are galvanizing. While the art itself is graceful, even languid and dream-like, the depictions of everyday life and the profound meaning those small, perfect slices of existence make are quite visceral. Poignant, hopeful, and masterfully painted, in a lush style that is nonetheless vividly realistic,  Garcia Hamilton takes us on a journey in which we are all travellers through the intimate migration that is life itself.

In “Hasta aqui llegamos, gracias a tí pa (Thank you dad, we made it this far), we see the artist’s father looking slightly upward, as if toward dreams for the future – the future of the child in his arms and the child seated next to him.

“In Between” takes viewer and artist on a more fraught journey toward the future, with a young child kneeling on a serape, a toy truck by her side, a dog in front of her. She is clearly a traveller, undoubtably crossing the border from Mexico to the U.S., but also crossing a different sort of border, from childhood to adulthood. The toy truck she plays with has become a real truck containing her on her journey north.

“Ofrendas de fronteras” or “Border offerings” seems an even harder journey, as wrapped in a serape, a boy lies sprawled over what could be a field of flowers and plants; a woman curled at his side, discarded toys beneath and behind him, as if this passage –  with the image of a wall at the left bottom of the canvas – was particularly difficult, a passage in which the innocence of childhood was left behind in a quest for survival beyond that wall.

Repeated subjects appear in various works, such as dogs, children, colorful serapes and cloths; while each are unique, they shape a connected story of childish innocence and joy, growth, and a vision of a brighter future despite the difficult journeys in which the subjects arrived in Lake LA. Now that they are here, they were seemingly born to move into the dry high desert light and infuse it with their own bright hopes.

Also repeated throughout the exhibition are elaborate, colorful patterns as backdrop for these works.  The patterns are used as wall paper, shadows, floor tiles, carpet patterns, all an intricate and delicate lace that recalls papel picado or perforated paper, the traditional decorative craft banenrs created by cutting precise designs into thin paper sheets. The decoration is often used for parties and celebrations such as birthdays, Christmas, and Dia de los Muertos.

In this art, the celebration is based on homecoming, and the formation of a home, a family, a life in a new land. Forged in the fire of difficulties, Garcia Hamilton’s family shapes a solid, lasting bond between past and future, Mexico and America, the old and the new. That bond is as eternal as an unshakable faith in a better future, a child’s promise, familial love.

Visit Garcia Hamilton’s rewarding family of art at Luna Anais at the IVAN Gallery, located at 2709 S Robertson Blvd. In the back, the studio work of resident artist Barbara Mendes should also captivate.

Garcia Hamilton will be conducting an Artist Walkthrough at noon on Saturday, 11/12; the exhibition closes on November 18th. Don’t miss.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and provided by the Luna Anais.

A Cosmic and Richly Colorful “Cosme”

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Bettina Weiß’s Cosme, exhibited at Edward Cella Art + Architecture at the Himalaya Club in Inglewood, dazzled with color and shape. Using geometric abstract forms, she shapes her own unique view of nature, one as bold as it is vivid. Using both oils and acrylics on panel, bringing in metallic elements to add an extra sense of dimension to both her neon and opaque shades, her work explodes passionately on the wall.

Like florals spun out on an abacus, she combines an almost mathetmatical precision with a joyous universe packed with energy and dynamic color.

Soleil, above

Whether creating circular, visually spin-worthy works such as “Etern #1: or a triumphant, crowded series of triangular lines that compel the eye to not-look-away, as with “Rio #2,” or her pinwheel-perfect blue “Lunium” paired with a vibratingly golden hued “Soleil,” she rivets viewers with her masterful use of line and color.

Lunium, above.

This series of paintings is as lush as it is deep; the viewer feels its energy and passion,  as well as the perfection of form that barely contains both, immediately upon entering the gallery space. While Cosme has closed, it is viewable online, here –and expect to see more from this potent artist in exhibitions to come.

You can also view several of her images in a group show at Cella’s other exhibition space, Pattern | Nature now at the Edward Cella Gallery @ The Thomas Lavin Showroom in West Hollywood’s Design Center.  Weiß’s work stood as a powerful first exhibition in a series of three solo shows  at Himalya Space through Edward Cella, with the overall trio of shows titled Berliner Fokus intended as an annual series of exhibitions. Up next at the Himalya Club is Moritz Neuhoff in his first U.S. solo show.

Above, the artist with Edward Cella

  • Genie Davis; images, Genie Davis

The Art of Exotic Dance – Photographer Elizabeth Waterman Explores the World of Female Strippers

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You may never have considered strippers and exotic dancers as subjects of fine art photography. But Elizabeth Waterman did with her MONEYGAME project, and viewers are the richer for it.

The project began last year with a book of these photographs. Waterman spent five years of Saturday nights in the strip clubs of Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and New Orleans, capturing uniquely personal photographic images of the women earning a living there. From arraying themselves in glitzy performance attire to climbing the pole, and counting their dollar tips at closing time, she captures both the strenuousness of this work and the agility it requires, a combination of competitive athletics and charismatic performing styles.

Now, images are on view at ArtBarLA in Mar Vista, with a closing event set for Sunday ,August the 14th, and more exhibitions planned through 2023 in London at BOOGIE-WALL, in the fall, and at Boston’s Howard Yezerski Gallery next spring, among other locations.

Beautifully lit and elegantly sinuous,  whether in vibrant color or pristine noir black and white, the photographs are both art and activism. Waterman has used the images to help support  LA strippers who are currently on strike in the local area. A picket line at North Hollywood’s Star Garden Topless Dive Bar is in its fourth month, with the performers locked out for speaking up about safety issues, working conditions, an attempt to unionize the club. If they succeed at realizing their demands, it would be a very needed first in this country. The often elaborately costumed picket line has started the Stripper Action Fund to cover their basic needs, and Waterman will be donating a portion of the proceeds from print sales of her work on the 14th, to support the Stripper Action Fund.

When MONEYGAME itself opened last month, one of Waterman’s subjects and one of the strikers, performed and spoke about the strike’s goals. At the August 14th closing event, strip performer Tess, also on strike, will participate in a short Q & A about it, and perform a pole dance.

 

Along with supporting the laudable goals of the stripper’s strike, attending the closing exhibition will garner a look at the intimate look at stripper life that Waterman reveals. The intimacy she depicts was hard won, after months of struggling to access clubs to shoot her images and working to establish genuine relationships with the dancers. Saying that she herself has been changed by the experience she notes, “I’ve taken on some of their audacity.” She shoots in a bold, highly cinematic and narrative style, engaging both her viewers and subjects with a sense of immediacy through her fluid style.

Recasting the women’s work through a feminine perspective allows viewers to see stripping and exotic dancing as a rigorous job, one that requires skill and grace, as well as the grit to endure the often-fraught setting of performing and cultural mores about the job. Waterman’s gaze is both nuanced and relatable, celebrating the humanity and commitment to craft that the dancers share in their work and to their separate personal lives and future plans.

Curated by Juri Koll, founder of the Venice Institute of Contemporary Art, the exhibition includes photographs taken from the book, and others that have not been seen previously. The images, shot primarily on 35mm and 120mm film, capture both the skill and effort of performing, and the societal position of the performers. One could easily say that despite the skill required in their work, the dancers do not receive the reverence bestowed upon those performing classical ballet, nor as respectful an audience.

The photographer’s beautifully realized exhibition photographs, and those in her coffee-table book MONEYGAME, published last year from XYZ Books, reveal a profession, the lives behind it, and their unique challenges, all with a genuine beauty in presentation. A very limited quantity of the book will be available for collectors who purchase prints at the exhibition.

Devoted to her subject and the complexities and nuances of this type of “women’s work,” the Los Angeles-based Waterman plans to continue photographing strippers and exotic dancers, the better to support them in their efforts for better working conditions.

ArtBarLA gallery and stage is located at 12017 Venice Blvd., on the west side.

  • Genie Davis; photos probided by the artist

Hagop Najarian Styles Up

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Styles change but art remains. For Hagop Najarian,  his move from figurative to abstract to a more hybrid body of work is all about vibrant color and a dancing morph of figurative form into geometric abstracts. While his current body of work on display in his Bendix Building studio is just such a choreography, the change really showed itself in a December 2021 exhibition at Launch gallery.

“Home Turf at Launch LA was a great opportunity for me to synthesize a lot of the ideas that I have been working with for the past decade. Home Turf meant going back to my art making roots and expanding on the formal and conceptual aspects as they relate to the work. Incorporating my technical advancements with my art historical influences. A synthesis of my visual DNA,” Najarian says.

While he began his art career painting more realistic figurative narratives for decades, in 2014, he decided to “not paint imagery, but study color, light, composition and application of paint through the format of abstraction. I think that now the synthesis happens in my current work because of the mark making and gestural forms that happened in my abstract work would almost always relate to the formal things I do when painting the figure: the curve and overlap of forms, the division of space by light and color.” He adds “With the abstract work, I specifically focused on color and sound. I made direct connections to volume, speed, texture, flow and fracture using different musical genres of Classical, Jazz, Punk, Reggae and how they translated to the emotional impact of color.”

Najarian is also a musician, finding painting and music somewhat interchangeable influences. His work at the Launch exhibition was created during the quarantined portion of our ongoing pandemic, a dark time indeed, when he says he “hoped to bring some optimism to the viewer by having the figures supporting each other in a composition made of a fractured environment. The color in the painting actually started from a trip to Palm Springs where those mesmerizing sunsets happen that glow with blue violet/ orange symphonies. I loved the tranquility of that peaceful nature setting as a backdrop to the crumbling human interaction. As the painting progressed, I enjoyed watching the colors and images transform and purposefully using gray as my unifying element.”

Those colors, combined with his palpable joy in drawing and painting his figuartive naratives define a large portion of his work, but so does “allowing myself to use the lessons of abstraction and emotive color from previous abstract paintings as an environment for the figures.”

His loved for painters such as Giotto and Michelangelo is also embedded in his work, for which his process is to “make many drawings and gouache paintings to provide variations of the outcome. I will have a theme or idea on what I want to say, but the paintings are live activities for me. I allow the structural changes and developments to determine the final outcome. So, I may have the main composition in mind, but I will keep moving things around on the canvas with each painting session until it feels done.”

According to Najarian “The Home Turf series really opened new doors to my visual vocabulary and continues to fuel the work that I am making now.”

The artist is also currently an integral part of three art collectives: Durden and Ray, Museum Adjacent, and High Beams. From community and opportunity to inspiration for installation and performance based work, Najarian keeps busy. “I curated three shows in 2020 with Durden and Ray which were all amazing experiences through a time of pandemic. Cautious Optimism I co- curated with Brian Thomas Jones and Curtis Stage , which invited artists that were making work through the pandemic to keep art alive. During the summer when the gallery was at a dry spell, we were fortunate that the members of Durden and Ray allowed us to curate a fundraiser show for the artists that lost their studios and life’s work in fire that destroyed the Little Tokyo Arts Complex. With the invaluable help of Stephanie Sheerwood, Katie Shanks and Noel Madrid, we hosted a three day fundraiser in the Durden and Ray gallery, generating over $12,000 in sales that went directly to the artists from the Little Tokyo Arts Complex.”

And then there was High Beams #3 Laser Snake held in the Bendix parking lot, where he says “I collaborated on ‘Visual and Musical DNA’ with my daughter playing live music, while my two fellow artists Tom Dunn from Durden and Ray and Surge Witron from Museum Adjacent painted live on a clear vinyl canvas in front of us until it filled up with imagery during our performance.”

More recent was High Beams #5 Night Moves rooftop event at the Bendix building, for which Museum Adjacent participated with an 8 x 8 foot free-standing wall that was a ”ZOOM Meeting.” And for the Carl Baratta, Max Presneil, and David Wiesenfeld helmed B-LA Connect, just last month, Najarian co-curated an exhibition on the 6th floor as a pop-up.

He says he most wants people to know that he is, above all else, “a story teller, a communicator, a humanist. At best we all want our work to be a true reflection of who we are. I hope that viewers who see the work and don’t know me can get a sense of my interests in color, joy, my humor and celebrating life. I think that viewers who do know me would say that I am in the work.”

Balancing his visual art with his music is important to Najarian, who describes the two types of art in this way: “Painting in the studio is a private act that we share with the public when we hang it on a wall. As a musician, I love composing and recording music, but playing it live is the most validating confirmation, which is very hard to do in painting. So the live act of painting becomes the recorder for the performance that we share with the public. I think I am at a place where the work is at a good balance for me of my love of music making and art making.”

Using color to amplify the emotional impact of his narrative, he says that regardless of whether the work is figurative or abstract, “It is that element of surprise and live painting that I enjoy most…our sense of memory, our history and life experiences are always visible in our work. As an Armenian immigrant growing up in La Mirada, the colors, smells and sounds from my house made an impactful foundation on me that I still see every time I start a painting. We are who we are thanks to our youth.”

Above image courtesty of Leah Shane Dixon; Brand exhibition

Currently, you can view some of Najarian’s prolific works at the group exhibition Abstract Generations at the Brand Library in Glendale.

  • Genie Davis; photo images, Genie Davis, except as noted