On Friday May 25 2018, the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect. DiversionsLA is updating its privacy policy to comply with the new GDPR standards.
If you want to keep hearing from us, you don’t need to do anything! We will continue to contact you with relevant news and updates. To unsubscribe from our list at any time, you can click unsubscribe at the bottom of this blog.
Opening at Castelli Art Space this Saturday, artists Susan Lizotte and Trine Churchill offer two dynamic solo shows running through May 12th.
Lizotte’s New Work and Churchill’s The Woodstock Landscape are both singularly beautiful shows, each using palettes that vibrate with color and light. And, each have another element that makes this pairing special: emotional resonance.
Lizotte’s show introduces a new series of paintings that serve as an elegiac, lush tribute and response to the passing of her adoptive father last year. Loss, rebirth, and transformation find metaphors in works that echo the beauty of nature and the the life cycle. Floral and animal images serve as metaphors for the LA-based artist, as sinuous snakes pass through multi-hued panels, or serenely move through a scattering of leaves.
In her “Untitled 7,” bursting with life, a vivid purple dress – which also evokes an image of a tree trunk, steady and fecund, is bordered by stunning orange flowered vines. A multi-hued stained-glass-colored snake rises from its center; giant red blooms erupt from the sides.
In another work, “Untitled 10” – each of these works are untitled, which adds to an aura of mystery, with the viewer responsible for interpreting them – ripe red roses rise from a surface that resembles fabric; in “Untitled 8,” white blossoms cluster, reminding one of a spilled wedding bouquet. Richly impressionistic, these works possess a beguiling, enchanted quality.
Two snakes’ tongues meet in another work, while a sorrowing face emerges from “Untitled 9” in a piece that evokes the bottom of the sea. Her “Small Four Seasons” features panels in which snakes slip across each separate but emotionally and visually connected work: the aquamarine of spring, the rich gold of summer, the rusty brown of fall, and the cool lavender of winter form the backgrounds.
Lizotte’s work can be viewed both as simply gracious depictions of flowers and snakes, a kind of evocation of the Adam and Eve story in a garden of the viewers mind; or it can be seen as a transcendent look at mortality, at the slippery slope of life, death, birth; renewal and redemption after a harrowing passage.
Churchill’s work is more defined. The Woodstock Landscapes vividly and sweetly express the cultural shift of the Woodstock years. The Danish-born artist saw the aftermath of the 60s era tumult from Denmark, as a child. Her love of the music of the era – first truly experienced when coming of age in the 80s, resonated strongly through the years. So while in terms of literal time, Churchill was not a part of that era, emotionally she had a strong connection to the tenets of freedom and and joy it evoked.
In honor of the upcoming 2019 50th anniversary of Woodstock, Churchill created the body of work on display at Castelli. The internationally-exhibited artist explores how the 60s counterculture manifested globally and continues to do so through the years.
Her blissful color palette features abstract landscapes that imagine the grounds of the Woodstock music fest merged with personal images based on family photos.
This is memory as a fiction, creating a dreamy narrative. Her stories are beautifully shaped, as in “After the Storm,” in which a couple appears to be dancing, while a child pulls a large, seaweed-like bouquet of daisies from the muddy ground, and in the background, smaller figures stroll among striped tents.
Her “Version 2” is more dream-like, with a lush forest background, as apparently nude (at least from the waist up) figures float across a lake in a multi-hued, abstract boat.
“Finals” gives us an angelic young girl almost gliding through a field of tall flowers; behind her a quaint cabin stands, a representative of something solid in a world that is shifting – or wants to shift- into a more ephemeral beauty.
Together, both artists weave beautiful stories, poignant and romantic, each in their own way depicting renewal, change, and wonder.
Castelli Art Space is located at 5428 W. Washington, Los Angeles.
The thick paint and vibrant colors of Charisse Abellana’s palette knife work burn with her passion for art and for life. Fire in Diversity, Abellana’s solo show at the Latino Art Museum in Pomona, opening March 10th, offers a wide variety of the artist’s lush, rich works.
Abellana primarily paints images of nature, flowers that are fecund and bursting with beauty. The petals feel touchable and tactile, the blooms seem to plunge from the canvas, aching to break free of the surface that constrains them.
The artist also offers still-life images that are restrained and measured, yet vibrate with the same seductive color palette and textured paint that make the viewer imagine the scenes mutating into action. It is as if Abellana had created a film and “paused” the image, and viewers could at any moment expect the artist to press “play” once again.
It is this compelling quality of motion, in the light that illuminates her blossoms, in the poised perfection of her fruits and plates and tea cups -that elevate the artist’s work with passion.
Abellana is nothing if not passionate, and exuberant.
“Life is upon us today and our tomorrow is born from our now…let us make …an indelible mark…my indelible mark is my art,” she enthuses.
She is also a keen observer of the world around her, the colors that flicker in nature, the shadows and shifts.
“Perception is everything. Perception is how an individual sees one’s self as good or bad, kind or evil, a victim or a survivor, a success or a failure,” she notes.
As a first generation immigrant with a Filipino and Spanish heritage, Abellana is driven to excel in the present and preserve the richness of her past. The artist first taught herself to draw by tracing the imprint of her father’s fashion drawings at age 4; always fiercely driven, she’s painted professionally since 2002, and in the past two years renewed her commitment to her art, through which she expresses her most personal emotions.
She posits the question “How could a flower or a pear be a picture of past pain, past struggle?” and answers herself with “…it is that thick palette knife stroke of the boldest colors of paint that is the expression of … fire!”
Abellana’s glowing, fully realized floral depictions exude life, which for the artist means that her works are intense, freeing, and rebellious. She believes that an artist needs both passion and pain to create. She’s chosen to be bold and free, she says, where others would hold back.
Working with a palette knife is an intrinsic part of her process, one in which “you never know if the next stroke will make or break a painting.”
She says she loves working with a knife – one gets the impression that she loves the challenge, the decisiveness, and the boldness of her technique. She was moved to adapt knife work after traveling in Peru and observing the techniques of a working artist there.
Abellana says each knife stroke can have an unexpected result, and that sense of surprise and wonder is one that she embraces. “There is always that moment of emotional upheaval every time I put a stroke.”
Working in oils, her layered knife technique creates a kind of sculptural and dimensional element to her images. She paints the sides of her canvases, creating a complete art work from all angles. The artist works by painting wet on wet with her oils. And as to her colors: she’s trained to mix her own, and can imagine any rainbow of combinations and translate her vision to the canvas via her fast flying knife, her elegant thrusts shaping images that offer delight, dreaminess, and yes, fire.
Catch the warm glow for yourself March 10th, when Abellana’s solo show reception takes place from 4 to 9 p.m. Curated by Dulce Stein, the exhibition runs through March 30th, and is on display at the museum’s Grand Salon West.
The Latino Art Museum is located at 281 S. Thomas St., Suites 104 and 105 in Pomona. The exhibition is a part of the 14th annual Women International Show.
Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist
Then/Now, the just-ended residency by Dani Dodge at Shoebox Projects, held its closing reception on the 17th, but like the ringing echoes of the car crash the installation depicted, the aftermath of the exhibition lingers in the mind and heart.
Above, the artist with the soft-sculptural portion of her exhibition.
The room-sized installation Dodge created in her month-long residency took the incident of a pile-up the artist was caught in, and used that as a springboard to depict survival – and the choices one makes after having survived.
There is an almost lighthearted feeling to some of the installation, which really makes sense when you consider Dodge’s approach to the situation: the seriousness of the accident, the jolt of realizing she had emerged from it more or less physically unscathed, her vulnerability and her strength, all coalesced to form a recognition of our fragility and, more importantly, of our resilience.
Viewers entered through a soft, spinning mobile gauntlet, velvety fabric sculptures resembling a steering wheel here, a tail-pipe, a hubcap there.
Dodge, center; video projection behind her. Left to right, artists Hung Viet Nguyen, Chenhung Chen, Dodge, Shoebox Projects’ founder Kristine Schomaker, artist Francisco Alvarado.
Photo above by Mark A. Dodge Medlin
Ducking through this somewhat random collection, an experience of the tumult of the very-LA morning commute, we were then presented with video footage of driving Los Angeles freeways, childhood photographs, and LA scenery. The full-wall projection incorporated music by The Proclaimers, terrific driving music — I used to drive to it all the time, “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).”
Suddenly the music stops, the projection goes black, and viewers are compelled to turn to a small analog TV on the opposite wall, which comes to staticky life with a shadowy image.
Photo above by Mark A. Dodge Medlin
Surrounding the TV are broken windshields, painted and decorated windshields, and what speaking personally were the most affecting images: a series of ghostly white and grey cars caught in a web of traffic, a shattered car windshield in front of them, and a painting of an orange vehicle with the license plate reading “Then/Now.”
Dodge seems to be positing the question: can everything change in a moment? Well, yes, of course it can. Can that moment, however dark, be shaped into something quite wonderful by the sheer strength of our own humanity? When it comes to this exhibition, the answer again is affirmative.
Photo above by Mark A. Dodge Medlin
Dodge’s 101 Freeway smash-up was surreal in the moment, and all too real in the aftermath when she checked on her own injuries and those of others, and surveyed her broken vehicle. But ultimately, the crash led to something like understanding: having survived, she examined her own sense of purpose. She made a conscious decision to turn the event into a work of art, one that has a visceral impact on viewers.
Dodge with Schomaker.
We are indeed fragile and vulnerable beings, despite the crunchy shell of the metal and fiberglass wheeled boxes in which we spend so much of our lives.
Photo above by Mark A. Dodge Medlin – author at the exhibition
Emerging from that cocoon, what exactly is our destination? Dodge posits that life is short, driving LA’s freeways can make it shorter still. Carpe Diem. Seize the day and that car insurance policy.
There’s no insurance against the vicissitudes of life – except living. And art.
Genie Davis; Photos: Genie Davis, and by Mark A. Dodge Medlin
