thread/bare at the Brand Library and Art Center

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Photos by L Aviva Diamond
Photos by L Aviva Diamond

In a well deserved extended run at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, the mixed-media exhibition “thread/bare” features a stunning collection of work by six women artists.

An expansion of an exhibition with the same name held in Camarillo last year, the show combines traditional mixed media style with sculpture and two large-scale installation pieces.The exhibition includes work by artists Nurit Avesar, Elana Kundell, Susan Kurland, Janet Neuwalder, Sigrid Orlet, and Peggy Pownall.

threadbare installation shot 2 by L Aviva Diamond

Each artist’s style is unique, but the six are all thematically joined in an exploration that lays “bare” the power of creativity.

threadbare Peggy Pownall by L Aviva Diamond

Peggy Pownall’s work uses circular patterns, collage, and photographs in a study of self-reflection. Pownall says “To me, the special nature of this exhibit lies in its strong thread of continuity based in the artists’ similar perceptions. My work draws its content and character from internal sources, personal memories and an almost compulsive need to sort through life’s chaos to create order and clarity. My methods and materials are born out of the need to find an expression of my themes, and as with all the artists in this show, they are unique to my work.”

threadbare Susan T. Kurland by L Aviva Diamond

Susan Kurland creates plexiglass pieces and sculptures that pay tribute to detailed needlework, a traditional female art. “I’ve come to realize and embrace the materials I now use and draw from my training and practice as a seamstress which continues to influence my practice as an artist.” Kurland combines conventional and domestic materials in her art. “To a certain degree being an artist does change how I see things. In training to be an artist, one learns to look at art with a discerning eye, comparing and evaluating; but all humans perceive our world differently even given the same situation.”

threadbare Sigrid Orlet by L Aviva Diamond

Sigrid Orlet uses burlap, dried plants, and traditional painting to convey a deeply dimensional quality in her art. Orlet notes “As a human being, I discovered that I could visually express that which I can’t ‘language’ in any other way. Creative process is the exploration of a pathless land. This exhibit is unique in that a group of women committed to a process of honest creative inquiry. Acting individually, we returned a body of work that vibrates with the colors, textures, and forms of living life on familial, societal, and global levels.” To Orlet, being an artist is “all about committing to the creative process. And, just like any other serious commitment, this relationship challenges us on many different levels. Art-making is one big life lesson, a lesson that fills me with wonder and humility.”

threadbare Elana Kundell by L Aviva Diamond

Elana Kundell creates stunning abstract landscapes that are rooted in the concrete. “My work stems from a fascination with color – its luminosity, instability and relationships, and especially its emotional immediacy. In recent work, I’ve been thinking about the nature of experience, memory, and creativity. These paintings are a sort of meditation in which layers of experience form a visceral and sensual new reality.” Working in oil paint and charcoal, Kundell says her work “alludes to the threading of experience, emotion, relationships and memory, and to the process of making the imaginary real.”

threadbare Nurit Avesar by L Aviva Diamond

Nurit Avesar creates patterned figurative paintings and portraits, layering mixed media. She describes her work as being “about migration and the effect of cultural legacies. I start each piece by painting on paper. Next I paste the painting onto a canvas, sand it, tear apart some of it and than collage over the stressed surface fragments of old paintings. I also apply rust, thread, cheese- cloth, paint, and graphite. I use destruction as a means of creativity. The final image is very different than the original painting.” She essentially recycles her painting into new images.
“I express the ideas of the interaction of history with the present, as well as my experience as an immigrant, piecing together a multilayer new identity.”

threadbare Janet Neuwalder by L Aviva Diamond

Artist Janet Neuwalder uses clay and mixed media in her pieces. “I see my contribution to the exhibition as showing how the specific media of clay combined with mixed media materials, parallels nature’s and our own growth and transformation.” She says that her art “allows me to take in every part, every moment of the world we live in on all different levels, engaging all senses. For me all of the sights, sounds, smells become potential seeds, or stars, beacons that at any time may co-mingle.”

Curator Yoram Gil, describes “thread/bare” as “maybe the best collection of mature raw and new talent to emerge into the LA art scene in recent years. The diversity and uniqueness of each artist is profound and stunning. You can really sense the friendship, care, and affection of all the participating artists. There is something very special about this show.”

All photos by L. Aviva Diamond

Memories and Demons – Kathy Curtis Cahill

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Photo by Jack Burke
Photo by Jack Burke

Mysterious, wonderful, frightening, inspiring. That’s the childhood world that photographer Kathy Curtis Cahill presents in her riveting exhibition “Memories and Demons” at the Artists Corner Gallery in Hollywood.

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The photographs Cahill creates feature eerily realistic antique dolls, positioned so that they, like her luminous photography, come startlingly alive. Cahill describes the pieces as inspired by her childhood. “It was difficult,” she relates. “My parents were blue collar workers, and we moved around a lot. My father gambled and drank, and abused my mother. My brother was boarded out. I’ve spent a long time getting over being angry.”

But Cahill’s work offers her closure, and the viewer an insight into a world of childhood both vivid and insightful. “This project was cathartic for me,” Cahill says. “My parents divorced, but ended up back together, in a toxic relationship they couldn’t live without.”

What Cahill can’t live without is her art. “I’ve always been involved in art and photography. I took  photography classes. I worked in film. I have been inspired greatly by Diane Arbus and Sally Mann.” She started “Memories and Demons” utilizing another long time passion, collecting antique dolls. The dolls are her subjects, and their haunting expressions and positions are profoundly alive. ow does she create her dolls’ life-like positions?  “Through trial and error,” Cahill attests. “I use paint cans, sticks, props. I work with them, and create an environment for them.”

Cahill has been creating her unique vision for just under a year. She works without assistance, using a variety of natural light sources in many pieces. “My ‘Please Help’ was shot by porch light,” she explains.  The naturalism of her settings, lighting, and interactions contributes to the surreal/real style of her work.

The poignant images show loss, longing, fear, and wonder, all in a very personal way that grabs the viewer by the heart and throat. Her first piece, “Small Comforts” was directly inspired by her mother. “I make these pieces for all the children who were traumatized, for children who are still affected as adults by what has happened in the past. I tell stories in images that children may not be able to tell in words.”

To learn more about Cahill’s dynamic work, visit Artist’s Corner, located at 6585 Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. A closing night reception and artist’s talk takes place Saturday, August 8th from  7 to 10 pm and should fall in your “do not miss” category.

 All Photos for this article by Jack Burke

Far from Small: Dwora Fried’s Miniature Tableaux

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Dwora Fried may create miniature tableaux, but her subjects and themes are far from small. Working with tiny figures and photographs to create spectacularly detailed worlds inside glass-topped wood boxes, Fried suggests rather than specifies her narratives. Then, in accompanying texts, she lets viewers see that these boxes contain searing representations of voyeurism, spectacle, and entrapment. Fried describes these pieces as depicting “a collection of climates, where even the most liberated are confined.” Her “Living Imprint” boxes depict the biographical stories of ten different survivors of the Holocaust in Lithuania, a country where ninety-five percent of the pre-WWII Jewish population – some 240,000 residents – were annihilated. Fried was one of three artists commissioned to memorialize the survivors.

Stunningly detailed, each box not only evokes a story but a visceral response in the viewer, who is pulled into the small, intricate world a box contains. Fried finds many of the small furnishings used in her boxes in flea markets around Europe, with many pieces hailing from the 1940s and 1950s.

Her box “Ai Weiwei” is both a tribute to the Chinese artist and activist and a depiction of the constraints that the repressive Chinese regime has levied on him, through house arrest, jailing, and the destruction of his studio. The “Blue Vanity” in the box of that title is a very feminine doll house furnishing, juxtaposed with a collection of black and white photos of female actresses, and a man in a blue sweater watching a Western on a television. What has become of the owner of that vanity? The sadness and loss in the piece is palpable. Fried’s “Anne Frank” includes a miniature kitchen, a well-known photo of Frank, and books dropped before a refrigerator. A baby doll and a replica statue memorializing Frank make the piece both reverential and haunting. Fried expresses the fact that Frank is memorialized now, a lighting rod evocation of the Holocaust, but often not remembered as the vulnerable child she was as well.

A native Austrian, Fried is an international traveler, mother of four children, and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.“I keep re-creating the feeling of what it was like growing up,” the artist says, “the box captures the claustrophobic feeling a painting can’t.” Her layered collages and complex boxes tell stories with sweeping implications, stories that through their profound meaning to the artist, have the ability to create a ripple effect of deep connection with the viewer.

Born in Vienna and now residing in Los Angeles, Fried has exhibited worldwide, including solo exhibits last year in Venice, Italy at the Museo Ebraico and Vienna, Austria. Fried has recently shown work at Chicago’s Woman Made Gallery, El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument and at SPARC Gallery in Venice California.

She currently has five pieces in the permanent collection at the Museum Startgalerie Artotheck in Vienna, and has exhibited at the Women’s Museum of California in San Diego, as well as at Viridian Artists in New York. The artist has also shown in numerous group exhibitions at the Los Angeles Art Association where she is a member.

From Los Angeles to London to Ojai, Fried takes her evocative and startling miniatures to a wide variety of locations where they paint a very big picture indeed.

Chenhung Chen – The Power of Lines

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What’s on the line in artist Chenhung Chen’s buoyant, powerful art? Line itself. Chen focuses her art on the formation of line in drawing, Chinese calligraphy, and American Abstract Expressionism, filling her own pieces – drawings, sculptures, and 3D installations – with the yin and yang of harmony and dissonance.

Delicate and ephemeral are not often the words associated with recycled materials such as copper wires and components, but Chen’s work provides both. In pieces like “Moment to Moment,” and “Water” exhibited at the Studio Channel Islands Art Center, Chen’s all-important lines are curved, willowy, tangled, and buoyant. Their representational shapes are less important than the feeling they evoke, or as Chen puts it “the Formless is the quintessential subject of my art, but we only know it through form.”

A good example of this wonderfully formless form is Chen’s 3-D sculpture “Constellations.” The piece has the qualities of an amorphous jelly fish and the meshed patterns of a sky full of stars and the universe itself. The copper wire she uses becomes a living entity, each fine, entwined element joined to another like the stars in the sky. There is both a vastness and an intimacy in Chen’s work; a sense of motion in the swirls, whorls, and coils. Her “How do you spin your yarn?” are eight separate “yarn” balls crafted from wire, each one seeming to swirl out of itself, ready to be born as something else – perhaps something as prosaic as a sweater, or perhaps a life force ready to animate.

Chen says “I appreciate the linear qualities inherent in nature,” and in her work, line appears to be the starting point for life and energy. She describes her work as being “about the driving force for inner fulfilment, balance, meditative process…and experiencing the inner power.” To the viewer, it’s the dichotomy between belonging and aloneness, or as Chen puts it, between “‘wholeness’ or ‘the self,’” a twin force which pulses through her visually haunting pieces.

Chen crafts much of her work from wire and wood, plastic casing, paper, paper clips and staples. Her goal is “to make sense of objects’ function or contrast them” in a vital way. She works with hard technological elements such as wire and components, yet manages to transform these objects into something fluid and almost liquid.

Now living and working in Los Angeles, Chen was born in Beigang, Taiwan, and received degrees from the Chinese Cultural University, and the School of Visual Arts in New York City where she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree. A world traveler and non-profit volunteer, thematically Chen’s art focuses on a sense of external shape, force, and inner existence. Her internationally cultural background may influence the ideas of change and fluidity so redolent in the works she creates. In short: if one line leads to the next, that line is both tangled and filled with twists and turns in Chen’s work, a weaving of cultures and emotions, the stuff of life itself.

The artist will be participating in 2015 Annual Benefit Auction for the Los Angeles Art Association on August 1st, held at Gallery 825, in Los Angeles. This Summer National Juried Exhibition, is juried by Nancy Meyer, of the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, in Novato, Calif.

The artist recently participated in Art of Our Century at the Woodbury Art Museum at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, featuring the work of western regional artists.
Other recent exhibitions included her Blackboard Gallery Studio Channel Islands Art Center solo exhibition, Dancing with the Formless; Kuwento Engkuwentro: Angeleno Folklore, Legends and Sidewalk Stories, held at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument; the 53rd International Exhibition, at the San Diego Art Institute, San Diego; and Fusion, held at the Arc On-Line Gallery in San Francisco. As a part of a wide variety of group exhibitions in New York, California, and abroad, Chen’s art has been showcased in dozens of venues since beginning her career.

Chen describes her art overall as “about harmony and dissonance, peace and chaos, the beautiful and the grotesque, the subtle and the powerful. It’s also about the driving force for inner fulfillment, balance, meditative process, human internal structures, the transitional human condition, and experiencing the inner power.”

She began her art career formally in 2010, and attests to the fact that the desire to create art “must come from within. If one wants to be an artist, it’s because he or she needs to be one.”

An admirer of Cy Twombly’s paintings, Chen began painting in 3rd grade . Trained as a painter, she now works in diverse materials, and enjoys the challenge of working three-dimensionally, finding inspiration through a process of internal discovery, meditation, and life experience.

Currently working on her “Entelechy” series of sculptures, Chen recently moved into the Brewery Arts Complex in Los Angeles, where along with her own work and involvement in the art community, she enjoys cooking, gardening, and family time. And finding lines, lines, everywhere a line.