Sya Warfield Creates Pulp Idols

Posted on by Diversions LA

Working in mixed media on wood, artist Sya Warfield has created a new series, Pulp Idols. Completed throughout the last year, seven of these layered works will open this weekend in a new Santa Clarita gallery space.

Consisting of seven, immediately recognizable images, Warfield used photographic pulp transfer, combined with water-based pigment inks, acrylic ink, crackle paste medium, metal leaf, vintage newsprint and spray paint.

Warfield’s work is quite alive in her depiction of iconic and well-known figures and the ideas associated with them. Elevating these images into fresh focus, the artist has shaped entirely original portraits, centering them in a way in which each individual’s character, cultural importance, and era, are also a part of each artwork.

Warfield says she chose to create “portraits of key figures who have effected change within our societies and cultural lives… [such as] controversial 1980s-era artist Keith Haring, pictured with one of his own designs on his t-shirt; and Andy Warhol, [with] heavy bangs across his eyes and a constellation of stars applied to his shoulders.”

Other images include those of Frida Kahlo, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Nelson Mandela, and Malala Yousafzai. A direct and intensive gaze is the dominant feature of the artist’s evocation of Kahlo; her works featuring Monroe and Madonna exude a hypnotic sense of both power and sexuality that pull the viewer into these popular stars’ worlds.

She also includes a kindly smiling Mandela and a serene yet watchful image of Yousafzai. While the latter two images are inextricably bound to global politics and just causes, and Kahlo is a passionate icon for art and women’s issues, Warhol, Haring, Monroe, and Madonna are true pop – or pulp – idols.

According to Warfield, “The series invites viewers to reflect on the complexity of life, the passing of time and the ongoing ripples of influence we experience and can exert positively in the world.”

The work also includes a message rooted in “elements of the Japanese notion of Wabi Sabi, deliberate imperfection. There are spiritual elements to this series which include the energies that surround [these] people supported by colors and textures,” Warfield says.

Each image seems to emerge from the wood it is created upon, as if rising from underwater, or the passage of time. It has a resonance that builds upon the featured image, transforming and elevating it. The viewer might consider not only each subject as an icon in society, but due to the image Warfield creates from it, as an updated and secular evocation of a worshipped religious icon.

Her images have layered, gilded quality reminiscent of the Byzantine images that decorated churches from the 4th century on. In a way, the viewer can see Warfield’s idols as just as venerated in our modern culture as the figures of early saints.

Pulp Idols represents just one aspect of Warfield’s work. The artist has created images using photography, video, and mixed media, including the process used in her current work utilizing the “photographic pulp transfer process combined with water-based pigment inks and acrylic inks,” along with a variety of other elements.

“My work has definitely evolved over the years,” Warfield asserts, explaining that she is always seeking new challenges. She’s specifically looking forward “to working bigger and creating installations. I want viewers to be curious, inspired, and hopeful.”

To that end, Warfield has also recently completed a public art commission of 2 utility boxes in Del Rey.

Her current Pulp Idols exhibition is on view starting this weekend in Santa Clarita’s new Canyon Country Community Center. The show opens October 30 at 10 a.m. and runs until December 16th.

Santa Clarita’s new cultural hub, the community center is located at 18410 Sierra Highway, Canyon Country, CA, 91387.

The exhibition is also on view virtually on artsteps.com.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist

Cultural Undertow Will Pull You In

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There is something quite wonderful in the Cultural Undertow, something that allows the viewer to be pulled into the waters of observation willingly, and rebaptized in them. Curated by artist Narsiso Martinez, at Luna Anais Gallery in the Tin Flats exhibition space, Cultural Undertow offers a variety of works by two exciting LA-based artists, Gloria Gem Sánchez and Tidawhitney Lek.

Working in acrylic and oil, Lek’s exquisitely rendered figurative works shape involving depictions of viscerally recognizable moments in time, each filtered through a highly feminine and feminist sensibility. In one painting, a sinewy man, looking away from the viewer, glancing back toward a sunset sky, is carrying a bright pink bucket and one very large koi in Lek’s “Between the Bucket and the Sun.”

In another, a female cat and dog, rear ends directed our way, vibrant sky and brilliant orange and yellow flowers as background, serve as a prescient double entendre in “The Pussy and the Bitch.” In another lovely work, “Encounter,” dark clouds rim an intense patch of blue, and a wall, topped by flowers, separate a woman’s face from the reaching, hands and multi-colored nails of another woman on the other side of the wall. It’s both elliptical short story and mystery – they could be a couple separated but longing to see one another, they could wish each other harm. The dark clouds and that brilliant sky – it portends many things.

Regardless of subject, Lek’s use of startlingly vivid color, floral elements, and an underpinning of longing mark her as fresh and fascinating, a highly original talent taking both the figurative and the feminist to an entirely new and heightened level.

Sanchez’s work is entirely different, and yet Martinez’ thoughtful, conversational curation binds the two artists’ works into a cohesive and immersive experience. Sanchez offers a variety of lush mediums here. Her richly blue cyanotypes are haunting, some, as in the otherworldly figure revealed in “Twin Spirit” (far left), literally seem so; others are more abstract. Her archival photographs, like Lek’s paintings, revel in original portrayals of floral elements that celebrate personal heritage.

Perhaps most involving are her mixed media works, from woven, vividly colored wall work such as the tapestry that is “Nocturne Before Dawn” to her more sculptural work, each evoking something of the mystical and ritualistic, like “Araw (Sun),” consisting of a mix of shed snakeskin, bamboo, hojas de maiz, and faux hair. There is a strong element of the spiritual, even mystical, in each of these works.

Both artists’ work arises in part from their family’s cultural roots; for Sanchez it is a Xicana-Filipina heritage and for Lek, it is Cambodian. Martinez, having celebrated his own heritage through art, including a profound sense of respect and honor revealed in paintings of Mexican farmworkers in America, is no stranger to introducing intelligent cultural references and encouraging a broadening of viewer understanding and experience through art. His attention to intimate detail and his passionate respect for often under-represented communities is fully evident in this gracious, 18-work show.

And while representing those outside the standard artistic mainstream, Cultural Undertow also serves as a galvanizing focal point for the diversity, beauty, and electrifying wonder that celebrates a variety of family backgrounds as well as an intensely feminine point of view. Perhaps most profoundly of all, the art allows us to see all of these elements as part of a beautiful, universally relatable and recognizable whole.

The exhibition is on view at Luna Anais at Tin Flats, located at 1989 Blake Avenue, Los Angeles,  through July 24th.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis

Entwined Roots: Symbiotic Relationships – Magical Art from Gary Brewer & Aline Mare

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Works of Mare, left, Brewer, right

Originally scheduled to open when COVID-19 hit in 2020, through June 4th this lustrous collection of works is now viewable at Wonzimer Gallery in DTLA. The article and most of the photos are taken from its earlier frozen-in-time incarnation, but it is expertly curated at Wonzimer.

The radiantly lovely works of Gary Brewer and Aline Mare are a fine collection by married artists enmeshed in a beautiful dance of passionate art and companionship.

Aline Mare

Entwined Roots: Symbiotic Relationships is a tribute to both artists’ works, individually and viewed together.

Aline Mare

Mare works in hypnotically dense, fabulously fecund mixed media; Brewer in oil on canvas. Both are abstract artists, each non-figuative piece here is nonetheless rooted with recognizable elements from their artistic pasts that are sublimely figurative images of nature.

Gary Brewer

Their palettes are rich, their sense of beauty sublime. There is a wildness in both artists’ works that defies categorization, that welcomes the subversive and the sweet in equal measures.

One can view the cosmos or the untamed sensuality of nature in both artists’ works. Mare gives us a universe in a forest floor; a galaxy within a rain soaked garden. Brewer gives us twined cells, seeds and flowers, twisted cords of natural beauty that are larger than life. Both create works that flow in a fine and fanastical series of perfectly calibrated colors and patterns that are almost hypnotic.

Mare’s “Green Seeded” combines a delicate, evocative painted background with photographic images of seeds and images from space. Layers of paint shift the image so that the viewer is both above, beyond, and within the it; we are seeing the vast and infinite in the small and perfect.

Brewer’s works here feel more decidely floral, but what a fierce and marvelous series of blooms these are. In his “Constellation,” or in “Seeds of Life,” we see orchids that seem to burst from the canvas with a muscular life-force. These flowers are no swoony, scented bouquet, but rather vital, living entities.

Brewer, above; Mare, below

Where Brewer works in vastly large canvases depicting what could be minute objects – petals, seeds, flowers – writ large, Mare’s smaller works depict a strange and tumultous vastness contained in a smaller space. Both artists seem to work in a kind of synchronistic counterpoint, creating a sense of unseen wonder and hidden, intertwined gestural relationships.

And speaking of relationships, their own – to each other, to their art, to the way in which they seem to play off one another both in life and in this exhibition, is intrinsic to this exhibition. It is a great ritual alchemy celebrating the “other” within all of us.

Both artists invite the viewer – or perhaps the correct word here is compel – to go beyond surface perceptions and into a deeper, stranger, more wonderous realm: that of intertwined roots of life and love and into the celestial, where words may be inchoate but beauty falls like a welcoming, luminous light.

Now that this exhibition is no longer in COVID limbo, the life force it brings to the viewer cannot be constrained. Drink it in deeply, in the heart of downtown.

Wonzimer is located at 621 S Olive St, Los Angeles, CA 90014 – no appointment is necessary; check open hours; through June 4th.

  • Genie Davis; Photos at Wonzimer by Genie Davis; photos provided by the artists of individual works.

Ruby Vartan Offers Jeweled New Work

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Mutable and mysterious at first look, Ruby Vartan’s artwork represents a figurative abstract exploration based on the feminine form. Working in a wide range of mixed mediums such acrylic, oil, charcoal, and fabric, as well as with oil on canvas, artist Ruby Vartan weaves powerful, emotional images.

Her work expresses both her own inner world and experiences. It evokes the liquid as well as flame, revealing both what Vartan terms messages of peace and love, as well as a flood of highly emotional, evocative images that express her own generational and intimate trauma.

The artist describes her layered and poetically physical work as the process through which she feels most free, where no boundaries exist to arriving at her destination of expression.

From inner emotion to the external body, Vartan uses her own presence to represent a vital life force, light and renewal. Her process often includes painting, tearing, sewing, and the incorporation of unique mediums that resonate with love and pain. Works include elements of empty space which she views as a way to create and uncover and exciting new world that she makes her own.

Born to Armenian parents in Beirut, Lebanon, Vartan moved to the U.S. in 2008, and currently resides in Los Angeles. She says that her strong use of color reflects her heritage and identity, as well as symbolizing her dreams, desires, and emotions. She takes her work and her viewers into a world of volatile honesty and fragile self-expression.

Some images include canvas slashes the reveal a gold texture below, similar to the Japanese technique of Kintsugi that repairs the broken with the use of a precious substance such as gold, silver, or platinum. Other works include text, and intricate patterns.

Regardless of image, Vartan’s work exudes the aura of survival, resurrection, and resilience, shaping an experience of artistic and soulful redemption.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist