DABSMYLA’s Before and Further – All Photos: Jack Burke
Just south east of downtown LA’s arts district lies the industrial enclave of Vernon. A tiny town with political corruption battles, a few fast food eateries, and lots and lots of warehouses and factories. So why do you want to go there?
Photo: You might just be able to own chairs kind of like those – Modernica is producing some limited edition recreations.
For DABSMYLA’s astonishing installation art takeover of a factory workplace at the Modernica furniture factory.
Blacklight room
What is DABSMYLA? It’s a who, or rather two who’s, a thoroughly blended duo of married artists. A true creative partnership, the couple has melded not just their names but their artwork, and created among other works this 4,000-square-foot installation that looks like something you might’ve dreamed as a movie set.
And it’s only there until November 15th, so don’t hesitate to grab your significant other, friends, family, and camera to go see it.
Don’t worry about things like parking and admission costs: there’s plenty of the former in a guarded lot adjacent to the structure, and none of the latter: it’s free. Less crowded than the Broad and a super-fresh interpretation of modern art.
“Before and Further” is the title of what could be the home of the Cat in the Hat if he was hip and kind of into the 60s.
Paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and furnishings that include limited-edition fiberglass shell chairs available for purchase through Modernica are all a part of the artists’ collaboration with Modernica.
Inspired by DABSMYLA’s own shared process of creation, Before and Further is a house that has modern asethetics, pop art, giant cat faces, binoculars trained on a tiny elf figure perched on the roof of an opposite structure, a black light room with glowing cartoon faces, a black and white television running video art, a hi-fi portable stereo you can listen to, a secret movable clock and peep hole through which you can view the artists’ workshop.
Look behind the clock and peek inside: we did!
The duo call the piece an “adventure in modern living and artistic partnership,” for visitors it’s a wonderful mash-up of the surreal and the real. It’s the Modernist movement, its a gentle promo for original Modernica furniture creations, its a transformation that Alice in Wonderland would appreciate after going through the looking glass.
What would you do if you could completely gut and revitalize a creaky 1930s era Spanish Revival house perched on the lot of a factory where the furniture is made one piece at a time?
Chances are, you might have thought of something like this. If you’re DABSMYLA of course.
If not: visit 2901 Saco Street in Los Angeles Thursday through Sunday from noon til 7 pm UNTIL NOVEMBER 15th. Yes, it’s lit up at night. No, you can’t live there, no matter how much you want to. Besides, do you really, really want to live in Vernon?
Aztec dancers at Gallery H’s Day of the Dead Celebration – Photo: Jack Burke
The Dia de los Muertos exhibition at Gallery H of Phantom Galleries L.A. is a celebration of life, death, and the eternal. On display until November 21, this is one vibrant swirl of fresh, cutting-edge art. Curated by Gloria Plascencia, the art and the live performances that complimented it opening night, creates a joyful atmosphere. For the Aztecs, the image of a skeleton meant the transfer to another dimension or side of life, and this transformational quality is very much present in the Gallery H exhibition.
Last Saturday night, a stellar flamenco guitarist provided the sound track, Aztec dance troop Yankuititl, performed spirited traditional dances, and artist Cie Gumucio evoked the spirit of Frida Kahlo with the assistance of performers from Theatrum Elysum at the San Pedro Repertory.
Viva Frida – Cie Gumucio, Photo: Jack Burke
Bringing fully to life a piece that was part art installation and part performance, “Viva Frida” represents Gumucio’s new installation style, “If Art could Speak…What Would it Say.” Curator Plascencia says Gumucio first created the piece for a Day of the Dead celebration that she’d planned but was forced to cancel two years ago. “She’s been saving it since then,” Plascencia relates.
Viva Frida performance – Photo: Gloria Plascencia
The piece has grown in texture and style since then, aging like a fine wine. “I feel deeply connected to the Latin culture and magic realism so, in the spirit of Dia de Los Muertos I wanted the spirits of Mexican artists, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera to use their own words taken from Frida’s diaries and love letters with an art installation and a 7 minute performance,” Gumucio explains. “Diego and Frida’s lives were inextricably intertwined, so I took clothing resembling those they may have worn and sewed it together with red thread. I began the piece with an old wooden bed frame, which I painted vivid blue and orange, the colors of Frida’s home, Casa Azul. A body cast titled ‘The Wild Heart,’ like the one Frida was forced to wear after a devastating accident, is also part of the installation – at its heart is a red cage with the door open. If one looks deep inside, one can see the butterflies I painted on the inside walls, waiting to emerge – like her creativity.”
Ginette Rondeau’s altar to her mother – Photo: Jack Burke
Artist Ginette Rondeau’s altar, dedicated to her mother, is another outstanding piece. Brilliant with yellows, golds, and silvers and dotted with marigolds, Rondeau’s moving paean to her mother, who loved Spanish dance is deeply emotional. “It has so much meaning to the artist who created it,” Plascencia notes.
Also on exhibit: Ron Therrio’s “Puerta lluminosa,” an Aztec themed arch crafted from wood and concrete, and Patty Grau’s straw and palm “Queen Deadfall” sculpture.
Artist Patty Grau with her “Queen Deadfall,” Photo: Jack Burke
Grau says “The piece is the outgrowth of me picking up dead fall when walking my dog around my neighborhood. It started with a tree seed pod which I always thought resembled a bustier.”
Susan Melly “A Woman’s Work is Never Done”
Susan Melly offers the tongue-in-cheek “A Woman’s Work is Never Done,” an evocative painting wherein a naturalistic skeleton operates a traditional sewing machine.
Lois Olsen’s “Mexican Memories” evokes the living and the dead with an abstract, kaleidoscopic skeleton.
Conseulo Campos’ “Living La Via Muerta,” center
A mauve skeleton with flowers for eyes is the center of Consuelo Campos’ “Living la Vida Muerta.”
ALbert Vitala
Albert Vitala’s “Day of the Dead Girl” was produced specifically for the exhibition, Vitala relates. “When Gloria asked me to participate I realized I had nothing related to Day of the Dead, so I began to spray paint angular geometric shapes, which in the end formed a girl’s face. I adapted the face to become a classical Day of the Dead figure, and then applied an overlaid texture of acrylic paint to create the dimensional flowers.”
Terry Holzman
Terry Holzman contributed several mixed media pieces shaped through found art. “I only collect items within a two mile radius of my house in West Los Angeles,” she relates. “I repurpose neighborhood discards as art.” Using brackets and electrical fragments, she created a dancing electric socket skeleton for the exhibit that looks as if he could dance right off the wall.
Dan Milnor
Dan Milnor’s “Let the Dead Bury the Dead,” uses an orange traffic cone as the basis for his mixed media. Another riveting display is made up of a large, colorful collection of ceramic skulls from students in the Hawthorne and Lawndale school districts.
Gloria Plascencia
Finding the art to contribute to this singular exhibition took curator Plascencia on visits to other Day of the Dead festivals, galleries, and art shows throughout the LA region. “It was a process to find the pieces that represented my own aesthetic vision for the exhibition,” she says. She also contributed her own digital print, “Aztec Warrior.” In her charge to bring a fully realized Day of the Dead celebration to life, Plascencia is herself somewhat of a warrior – for art.
Above: collaboration between Susan Melly and Susan Chuka Chesney
Above: Gloria Plascencia in her element.
Join her triumphant charge – Gallery H is located at 12619 Hawthorne Blvd. just south of El Segundo Blvd. in Hawthorne. The gallery is open Saturdays 3-6 p.m. and by appointment with a call to Plascencia at (310) 869-4992.
Genie Davis, Photos: Jack Burke, additional photo: Gloria Plascencia
Performance and installation artist Dani Dodge has a solo exhibition coming up December 6th at LA Artcore’s Brewery Annex. Dodge, a former journalist, presents a vivid dissection of the emotion of fear through her installation, titled Peeled & Raw. Relating experience through abstraction, the artist tells pointed, poignant stories in her works.
(un)burdened
Dodge began pursuing her art while she was a working journalist covering the Iraq war in 2003.
“I was a newspaper reporter embedded with the Marines on the front lines when I realized that I couldn’t express everything in words,” she relates.
Always a vociferous reader and writer – as a fourth grader, the school librarian revoked her library pass to encourage her to play with other kids – Dodge was also drawn to the visual arts even while working in journalism. “I was the one who wanted to eat at Olive Garden so I could draw people’s portraits on the paper tablecloths.”
Dodge was invited to cover the Iraq invasion after the assignment was turned down by a reporter not eager to be on the front lines. Unlike her peer, Dodge didn’t hesitate to take the assignment.
“I was eager to share the lives of our men and women at war with the world. As we drove in silent nighttime convoys through the country, without headlights, we often had only words. Only stories. And I wrote them every day. Stories of calamity. Stories of heroism. Stories of second chances,” she explains. Her experiences evoked a culture upended, and she began to realize that the articles she wrote were only expressing a small part of the story. “We made it to Baghdad before the city fell. Bullets flew over our heads. A land mine blew up next to our camp. All around me were severed limbs, broken families, dead bodies. I knew I could no longer rely on sentences and paragraphs to convey the bravery and tragedy I saw around me. I needed more to express the conflicts of the world, and the conflicts within my own soul.”
So Dodge turned to art. “I came back from Iraq knowing I needed to find another path to tell the stories of the world, and the stories of my own soul. One of my co-workers took watercolor classes at an art studio. After going to one of her shows, and seeing the vibrant, expressive work of her teacher, Phyllis Doyon, I decided to learn watercolor.”
After taking a variety of classes in life drawing and other basics, Dodge was compelled to work in mixed media, then assemblage, and finally installation art. “Each move was prompted by the need to create something that would have even more impact on the viewer, who would eventually become the participant as my work evolved,” she says.
Dodge considers herself an installation artist, one who also uses interactive performance and video in her works. Currently, along with the upcoming ArtCore show, the artist has pieces at Oregon’s Coos Art Museum, and at the Halloween show MASque at Los Angeles’ Temporary Space.
At Coos Bay Art Museum
Dodge describes her exhibitions. “My installation, (un)burdened, at the Coos Art Museum is on view through December 5, 2015. It features fragile vintage birdcages stuffed with heavy rocks and piled on the museum floor. One wall is covered with a white mixed-media painting that incorporates bandages and sutures. Videos dance on window screens: birds flying, planes lifting off into the air,” she says. “Visitors follow the instructions and pick up a rock from the pile near the door. They feel its weight, its smoothness, its capacity. They write their own personal burden on it, then walk across the room and put it on a pile of other rocks, also written with words such as fear, poverty, and inertia. A ‘boulder’ floats above them. When the show is done, I’ll take each of the burdens and hurl them into the ocean. The event will be recorded and later viewed on the museum’s website,” she explains. The idea behind the show is that people will leave their viewing (un)burdened.
(un)burdened
Just as the Coos Art Museum show ends, the installation at LA Artcore Brewery Annex, Peeled & Raw, will open, running December 2 to 27 – with an opening reception from 1 to 3 p.m. December 6th. “With Peeled & Raw, visitors enter what at first glance could be a normal living room. There’s a couple on the couch watching a DIY home show on TV. There is a window, and pictures hang on the walls. But everything is covered with wallpaper. Everything. Even the couple. The program on the television is ‘How to Beautify Your Life with Wallpaper.’ Each layer is another attempt to change who we are and what we show to the world, and to hide the thing that frightens us the most.” Dodge has made this, too, an interactive installation.
“Visitors enter the room and use their fingernails to pick off edges of the wallpaper and peel away strips. Underneath the wallpaper, they find even more. Layers upon layers upon layers of attempts to hide imperfections. Each layer seems to lead to an older and older vintage wallpaper,” she describes. Dodge believes that by allowing viewers to participate in the exhibition and pick away at her installation, they’ll work at shedding their own fears. “People can write their fears onto the strips of wallpaper they have removed and leave them in a vintage garbage can. At the end of the exhibit, I will gather up all the fears, put them into a burn barrel, and torch them.”
The profound meaning behind this installation is the exploration of fear. “It gives people a way to name it, confront it, and shed it. The installation at the Coos Art Museum explores burdens and how to remove them from our soul so we can fully live. The piece I am creating for MASque Attack, a one-night group show, examines the fluid nature of how we see the world,” Dodge attests. She plans to use mirrors to plunge the viewers at MASque Attack into the piece.
Dodge says all three exhibits are similar in the intent to create moments, rather than objects, a purpose the artist finds easier creating a room-sized installation, rather than a small piece. “With a room-sized installation, I can surround the viewer with images,” she notes.
Dodge is an immersive artist
As a former journalist, Dodge finds herself employing journalistic techniques such as investigative reporting in her art. “In my performances, such as “CONFESS,” which I did for LA Pride 2015, I use my interviewing and listening skills to help people understand themselves better. In that work, I put up a confessional in a three-sided space with walls of black cloth. People ‘confessed’ to me, and I typed those confessions onto gold paper. The anonymous confessions were pinned to the walls. By the end of the weekend, the room had gone from black to gold with outpourings of heartache. Participants told me the experience transformed them,” Dodge explains.
However, sometimes Dodge’s journalism background hinders her work, she says. “After so many years of not taking a side, always being impartial, it can be tough to make bold political statements with my art. So instead I delve into what makes people human.” Such a choice results in focused, highly emotional and releasing work. The artist admires other large scale, visionary artists such as Swoon, Mark Bradford, Banksy, and Ai Weiwei, who, like Dodge, are not afraid to tackle fraught themes and topical scenarios.
The artist says many of the issues she wants to present come from the world she sees around her.
She is concerned with big-picture questions such as what most ails society itself, and how to address issues such as these. Just as resourceful with her art as she was working in journalism, Dodge creates exceptional visually and thematically powerful installations following her intent to “create moments, rather than objects.”
Dodge says she considers such subjects in her subconscious mind. “I’ll sleep and wake up with ideas on how to accomplish each piece. Often, it will require a technique I had not previously employed, such as video. So I pick up a video camera, sign up for a class and figure it out.” Her technique is to first envision all the pieces necessary to create her vision, then map it out on paper. “I’m always adjusting the plan until that final day of installation,” Dodge says.
Living and working at the Brewery Artist Complex in downtown Los Angeles provides the artist with “the perfect place to create and dream. “My studio encompasses the bottom of our 1,200-square foot apartment while my husband, my two dogs, and I live in the upper 400 square feet. It’s a very industrial space with concrete floors, scarred walls and a tin roof that roars when it rains,” she says.
To see the dreams and creations Dodge envisions unfold, visit the artist at www.DaniDodge.com, LA area residents and visitors should check out Dodge’s December show at LA Artcore Brewery Annex, 650A S. Ave. 21, Los Angeles, just east of DTLA’s central core.
The Los Angeles Art Association continues to knock them out of the ball park with a series of solo shows and one group show this month.
A Young Girl’s Vanity – Kristine Schomaker
Along with Lori Pond’s dark Menace, and Elyse Wyman’s insightful Conceal/Reveal, Daniel Leighton offers a portal to another dimension with Permission to Enter.
Daniel Leighton’s Permission to Enter
Through an augmented reality app, Leighton takes viewers beyond the experience of seeing his art and within it. The title of his exhibition refers to allowing or not allowing this interaction, or any human interaction – granting “permission to enter.”
Works such as “Their Place in the Sky” offer a bold color pallet and evocative forms that feel both elemental and impressionistic. Here the color purple gives birth to a new young shape that represents both a peaceful progression and uncertain melancholy.
Combining technology with his brilliant color spectrum and dream-like images makes Permission to Enter a magical exhibition that’s fully experiential.
Visions from the group show, Chestnut.
The experiences of many artists are on display in the group exhibition at LAAA, Chestnut. Juried by Walter Maciel of Culver City’s Walter Maciel Gallery, Chestnut includes works by a number of outstanding LA area artists including Linda Sue Price’s “Forget,” a blossom of neon; Jane Szabo’s archival pigment print “Superman,” which depicts a grown man getting his super-hero on in a child’s room; and Kristine Schomaker’s evocative “A Young Girl’s Vanity,” a mixed media sculpture that posits questions about body image, self-reflection, and self-awareness. Other standouts include Rob Grad’s spray paint on bi-level plexi-glass works, “Preflight” and “Unplugged,” and Dahye Kim’s video installation, “Dreaming.”
The Los Angeles Arts Association is located at 825 La Cienega in West Hollywood – and if you haven’t gotten the message yet in previous stories on present exhibitions, go see what art is all about.
