Night Gallery Shines a Light – by Genie Davis
With four dazzling exhibitions on view this month, Night Gallery lights up October with revealing solo exhibitions. Closing November 1st, hurry to see these shows, which are each entirely unique and richly rewarding.
Ross Caliendo’s Peace Fellow turns landscape painting inside out with beautiful images that contain mysterious otherworldly visions within. Lush and infinitely dreamlike, gorgeous natural images of flora and fauna can be taken at face value, while deeper truths tease and immerse the viewer moving from the illusion of the recognizable to an unseen universe peering through the heightened lens of the artist’s vision.
This is exciting work from a mesmerizing artist, pairing beauty and wonder with a deeper, more haunting experience within.
Nasim Hantehzadeh mixes a variety of mediums to create images that evoke memory and magic. Working with acrylic on linen, dreamy colors and patterns converge in sinuous, motion-filled images that dance and delight in Tickles, Dance, and Goosbump Blooms.
Vast in size and complexity, shimmering and joyous, the works vibrate with a rich intensity and dimensionality that speaks to the artist’s early years living in Iran, as well as a universal desire for freedom and love. The images are a dance of motion in a watery world.
LaRissa Rogers’ Dust of the Streets is a tour de force of mediums, from layered ceramics to photographic work, all of which revolves around a gazebo holding the most monumental of the ceramics works. Dealing with the difficult legacy of her mother’s immigration as an adopted, mixed-race Korean, the often poignant images are startlingly transformative, asserting the blossoming of life despite traumatic and potentially crippling emotional injury.
The resilience of the human spirit and the support of a creative soul takes deep hurt and turns it into power, power which can ultimately form art, art which shapes joy.
And finally, Wanda Koop’s Magnetic Fields brings a galvanizing dimensional intensity to abstract images that speaks to the unsettling presence of AI, as it inserts itself even into the limbs of trees. Using a color palette that enhances a sense of the surreal, the work is both amusing and terrifying, even as it simmers with graceful lovliness.
Summing up, don’t let another day go by before you enter Night Gallery, with exhibition space at 2276 E 16th Street and 2050 Imperial Street in Los Angeles.
- Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis
Great writing Genie!! Your insights and descriptions are clear and vivid! Thank you!