Joy Ray is Ghostly and Gorgeous at MOAH Cedar

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Literally and figuratively haunting – the iconic MOAH Cedar building in Lancaster, Calif., itself is said to have a resident ghost or two – Joy Ray’s gorgeous, ghostly, somber, yet uplifting exhibition A mirror with breath like stone possesses the viewer’s spirit.

Filling all three gallery spaces in the building, transparent archival images cover the windows; strangely broken words cast a spell on black textiles; heirlooms culled from Lancaster’s history archives are displayed in cases; and wavering black banners trail ceiling to ground with images and words that compel close viewing.

Ray has often had an interest in the spiritual and otherworldly, using tactile materials and often textile. Here, that interest is allowed to fully express itself in an entirely immersive setting that can’t help but move viewers and hijack the soul as she  elegantly offers the spectral its full due.

 

Using textile sculptures that resemble gravestones, she depicts historic news from the Antelope Valley Ledger-Gazette, adding layers of charcoal and sand in “Spectres,” in which fabric on armature shapes these suspended, eerie worlds and words. Other works, less floatingly ephemeral, are created from paint, twine, and fiberfill on fabric with impressions from the newspaper’s front page, such as in “longtime companion” and “to dream, to fall.”

Her “hall of shadows, hall of mirrors” is created from silk modal, utilizing markings from historic microfilm the artist poured over to uncover.  There are hand painted words, sentences spoken by voices of the past.

The glass plate images on the gallery windows include photographs of families and children such as those shown in  “Lancaster Hotel New Year’s Day.”

In another gallery room, the lustrous, long-gone landscape of an undeveloped Antelope Valley is represented with “Lancaster looking toward ‘Old Baldy’ after a heavy snowstorm” covers the existing view. Masking and utilizing the shifting light through the gallery windows is an inspired element of the show, casting a mysterious light and illuminating, literally and figuratively, the haunting past. The entire exhibition is cast in a sepia light, adding to the honestly transfixing nature of experiencing the artist’s works. Perhaps it is the power of ghostly attraction, or most likely, the alchemic miracle of her art. Audio tracks such as 1922’s “I’m Gonna Get You” by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds and other thematically edited musical riffs support the immersivity of the exhibition and add an additional layer of experience.

Joy Ray, like the spectres and shapes, history, hopes, loss, and small miracles of the past that she depicts, is a force to be reckoned with. This is a major show that captures the brevity, fragility, and enduring nature of human life – and the eternal of the great hereafter.

MOAH Cedar is located at 44857 Lancaster Blvd. in Lancaster. The exhibition runs through November 19.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis 

 

Gay Summer Rick Illuminates Los Angeles – Osceola Refetoff Elegaically Depicts Climate Change

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Bergamot Station in Santa Monica is presently hosting two incredible exhibitions – both on exhibit until early November.

At bG Gallery, Gay Summer Rick’s glorious color palette and precise oil painting using palette knife morphs the impressionistic form with a gauzy realism of seascape and landscape. Lighter Than Air, her latest series of richly rewarding works, glow with Southern California light. The transcendence that light creates is the force within her work, which here touches on the lyrical and metaphysical as well as the contours of the coast. “Somewhere Above” is a burst of golden sky reflecting on cloud or water, Heaven as a visual portal, perhaps. “Buoyant” gives us a woman floating on a yellow inner tube against a sun-kissed sea, an almost child-like bliss. “Cadence” offers a pale periwinkle sea suffused with bits of pink light, the pink line of the horizon or a distant shore all a-glow.

“The Golden Sun” is just that, with a small figure bobbing on a surfboard, watching a bold pink sky slowly fade. “Fly” is also a pink and gold gem, as an airplane comes into a pink LA surrounded by palms; while “Good” is a view of homecoming as seen from a plane, the grand grid of lights below an airplane window spread out against a fine canopy of Cerulean blue. “Distant Light” is a shimmery, mirage like view of distant houses, illuminated against a shoreline.

Taking a direction new to this viewer, Rick offers a series of trapeze artists, in her series “The Fliers #1-#4.” Here pale, almost abstract figures outlined in a gold/pale mustard shade reach for, connect, or glide past each other on aerial rigging. There is the quality of a dream about this work – but all her work here is dreamy – disconnected from a known reality, it suggests our ability to tenaciously, with assistance, take to the sky the artist so admires.

And speaking of sky, in “Lustre” it is difficult to tell where sea and sky meet and merge, as minute golden figures on surfboards float among the waves as if reaching for the sky itself. As with a number of the paintings here, Rick replaces here past preference for blues with pinks, ethereal, hot, or paling like cotton candy dissolving into mist. As peaceful and lush as each work here can be seen, beneath that is a vision that can only be considered emotionally transcendent. The exhibition’s final beautiful day at bG Gallery is November 4th.

Walk across Bergamot Station’s parking lot to Building Bridges Art Exchange to take in another series of ocean-centric images, but with an entirely different message and medium. Curated by Marisa Caichiolo, under the scientific auspices of Dr. Eric Larour, artists Guillermo Anselmo Vezzosi and Osceola Refetoff offer a stellar exhibition on climate change and global warming in their Summer Artists and Scientists Residency, Shifting Landscapes: Sea Level Rise in Los Angeles and Beyond.

Refetoff’s visionary photographic and projected video images compel and entrance. Producing his first video in over a decade as a large-scale projection, Sea of Change (edited with Juri Koll) offers intense and beautiful images that include drone footage from the near-North-Pole community of Svalbard, California’s Central Valley fracking operations, and images of the distressed Salton Sea, as well as NASA satellite images, and AI prompts based on Refetoff’s own infrared photographic images, projected to imagine future scenarios. The 8 minutes video is both entrancing and heartbreaking, as we contemplate the rising likelihood of planetary change. Refetoff also created his first sculpture, representing potential projected rise in sea level at Santa Monica Pier based on the future of human C02 emissions.

In the same exhibition, Vezzosi also shines with work that includes a mysteriously translucent series of some 165 transfer photographs on recycled plastic food containers in “Melted Memories,” with the photographic images collected from NASA Observatory, the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the Glacier Repeat photo project from the Glacier National Park Montana.
From his “Offerings to ask for forgiveness” series, a large wall work resembles glacial ice, and is also constructed from recycled plastic from food containers collected from trash. He relates that the “ice” is made to “ask for forgiveness for the traces of our civilization…forcing [nature] to arrive to the present.”  The exhibition closes November 4th.

While Rick’s beauty will soothe, Reftoff’s and Vezzosi’s will jolt. Both exhibitions are profoundly lovely and of this moment.

Bergamot Bonus: on Sunday November 5th, you may want to hurry back to the same Santa Monica location. bG is presenting an exclusive one-day exhibition, curated by artist A.M. Rousseau. Titled Small Pieces We’ve Collected Over the Years, the exhibition pays tribute to the passion for art shared by A.M. Rousseau and her late husband, Duvall Hecht and their support for both artists and the thriving Los Angeles art community. There are some 67 Los Angeles area artists represented in the show, including work by Rick.

Building Bridges is located at 2525 Michigan Ave. #F2 at Bergamot in Santa Monica; bG is located at #A2.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artists and by Genie Davis

 

 

 

 

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Spiderman Would Love It Here

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The Spider Pavilion at the Natural History Museum has done the seemingly impossible – created an engaging, magical walk-through space to see spiders crafting their lacy webs, making a visit just as appealing as a visit to a butterfly pavilion. You know – the kind where you walk by and butterflies land on your shoulders and everyone oohs and ahs?

Well, these spiders don’t land upon you – never fear – but you can get up and personal with red, white, and patterned arachnids as they weave their zig zag, circular, truly stunning orbs among flowers and plants. Misters moisten parts of the mesh-enclosed walk-through experience, because some of these amazing creatures are more at home in jungle weather than what Los Angeles can provide.

In an enclosed space, behind glass, you can take a look in at enclosed spider homes that house the kinds of spidery personnas you wouldn’t want to walk under, such as jumping spiders or tarantulas.

Museum educators are standing by to identify types of spiders and webs and arachnoid habits. It’s incredibly fun and engaging all around – but sorry to report to all you Spiderman wannabes out there – no radioactive arachnoids here.

Be sure to roam inside the museum, too, to experience the beautifully revamped and welcoming dinosaur exhibition, an interactive, well-curated display that include a massive triceratops, the only pregnant plesiosaur fossil ever discovered, and a trio of T-Rexs, another “only at NHM” exhibit, featuring a baby, juvenile and sub-adult alongside other prehistoric predator companions. You can also view informative displays, view dinos from the mezzanine level above, and watch techs at work on uncovering dinosaur artifacts.

A new multimedia exhibition packed with fossils, video images, and plenty of history explores LA Underwater, locally-discovered fossils the define the topography of the city’s past and present.

And of course – the magic of classic animal diaramas, birds, bugs, and lustrous gems both cut and raw are also on exhibit, providing a full day of experiential pleasures. Exploring the natural world has always been a personal delight; the museum’s thoughtful curation makes it even more so.

Visit this wonderful resource any time, but The Spider Pavillion at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum is one more excellent reason to visit the museum this fall. If you’d like to experience a Halloween two-fer, come see the friendly spiders, stay for the whimsical Halloween fun at Boney Island.  The spiders alone are so worth web crawling your way over for a visit.

The Spider Pavilion is open for viewing until November 26th. NHM is located in Exposition Park at 900 Exposition Blvd.

  • Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis

The Season for Spells – And a Special Incantation

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Now at OCCA through October 28th, Incantation, curated by Chenhung Chen is a pure delight of an exhibition, converting this bright and airy gallery to a mesmerizing space filled with joy and wonder.

Featuring astonishingly lovely work by Marthe Aponte, Chenhung Chen, Annie Clavel, Catherine Ruane, Jane Szabo, Nancy Kay Turner, and Lisa Diane Wedgeworth, in the curator’s words,  “the artists in this exhibition are the vessels that channel this [ritual] energy from one place to the other while using traditional or non-traditional materials and often blending craft techniques with industrial materials. Using photography, installation, mixed media, picote, paint, graphite and electronic waste, their works are a bridge between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the remembered and the forgotten. Moving effortlessly between past, present and the future, the very creation of their art is as mysterious and intriguing as an incantation.”

Each artist weaves her own distinct and seductive spell, through the use of inventive materials and masterful image-making. The show vibrates with textural components, as well as color, light, and shadow, weaving a potent portal to the magic that can find us if we are open to it – as open as these artists have become.

Nancy Kay Turner‘s use of unusual – yet often mundane – materials belies the fact that her works are encompassingly evocative, enchanting the viewer with their complexity and poetry. Using materials as prosaic as ordinary wax paper and crumpled journal pages, antique wooden shoe forms and vintage photographs, feathers, and pins, and a dusting of silver leaf or curve of gold she creates startlingly immersive, riveting works such as “The Secret Life of Shards.”

Catherine Ruane‘s lustrous, delicate, perfect drawings of trees and other flora are created in detailed graphite and charcoal. Her large-scale “Witness at Antietam” is a fully branched wonder, one that has born witness and watchfully shaded many a human foible and battle. Other smaller works are taken from the same Antietam series, still others, sepia toned, reveal the heart of flowers. Each work revels in a compelling grace.

Exuding equal but quite different precision and delicacy, Marthe Aponte exhibits a display of stunning picote works, shields emblematic of protecting us from the vicissitudes of life, the spells cast at us by others, and at the same time weaving their own shimmering, sparkling protective magic. Aponte’s entirely exquisite works dazzle in their intimacy and intricacy, compelling us to look inward and see the world through her eyes.

Voluptuously vivid swirls of color soar through Annie Clavel‘s vibrant watercolor works. A mix of large scale and more diminutive pieces, her images are like liquid captured motion, as svelte as they are visually kinetic. They form clouds and winds, waves, sunsets and flora, wings in flight, and always evoke a sense of profound mystery and beauty, like flowers half-formed but still bursting into bloom.

For Jane Szabo, photography is the medium she “paints” with. Here it is landscapes, a portal to worlds both intensely real and mystically realized, serving as doorways into spiritual places even as they represent realistic territory. Her use of color and uneven printing combine to conjure a realm that is neither of this world or the next, but somewhere fascinating inbetween. The works are from her Damaged series.

Curator Chenhung Chen offers both freestanding sculptures such as “Entelechy” and lustrous butterflies and cocoons of wall work, each crafted meticulously from materials such as wires, cables, and found objects. Their symmetry and sensuality abound, whether exuded from suspended waterfalls of wire or assembled with the skill and perfection of mosaics, as in “I Ching in America.”

Last but not least, Lisa Diane Wedgeworth gives us shadows that hint at light and deep mauves within her primarily monochromatic abstracts,  hidden symbols and shapes fleetingly visible within her painted canvases. Elusive and illusive, Wedgeworth fascinates with ghostly, grand gestures.

Closing reception is October 28th from 3-5 p.m., and oh-so-worth the drive to Orange County. In fact, Incantation places its magical journey in the heart of any art map.

OCCA is located at 117 North Sycamore Street in Santa Ana.

  • Genie Davis, photos by Genie Davis