Can You Fear and Adore Flowers? Artist Susan Melly Provides Answers in New Work at LAAA

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   In a way, who isn’t afraid, just a little bit, of flowers? We may fear their incredible fragility, of losing them to an all-too-quick death, to knowing their perfection is ephemeral and their beauty so temporary – an aching reminder of our own mortality.
   However, for artist Susan Melly in her new Emerging Fear of Flowers now at LAAA ‘s Gallery 825 in West Hollywood, her emerging fear was something different, risen from over two years of COVID-19 pandemic isolation. During that time period, Melly’s husband brought her a weekly bouquet of flowers from an open air market. As her own statement informs viewers “As my anxiety blossomed, my art making changed and became more abstract and colorful to ward off my dark feelings. Each work is embedded with a hint of humor – and the number 19 – as an homage to coping mechanisms, even as familiar sources of comfort counterintuitively transform into a strange beauty that is tinged with the edge of the unknown.”
   After about a year of receiving the flowers, despite the loving intention of bringing beauty and romance to her life, she began to ask hereslf if she would be “condemned” to receiving the flowers every single Friday for the rest of her life, indicating that the pandemic would never end. The blossoms blossomed – into increased anxiety, alleviated through her art. As viewers we can witness this progression in her new body of work, and revel in its layers, as fragile-seeming as flowers themselves.
   The works of course make use of Melly’s signature use of vintage tissue paper dress patterns, something that she terms an “integral part of my practice and personal history…” As a mixed media artist, the LA-based Melly creates work that includes paintings, assemblage-based sculptures, and installations. In this latest body of work, there is a powerful new energy as these flowers morph with the artist, spin discs on an old Victrola record player, weep, rail in anger, whine in frustration, sing, and seethe.  Do flowers mourn their entrapment in bouquets? Do they discuss day to day travails as they grow in the garden, rage and wish to curse those who pick them? While we may never know, here Melly certainly posits that they might.
   Within the primarily paint and mixed media on canvas works are a variety of sculptural pieces.  While some stand alone, a vintage sewing machine, a male figure bearing flowers, “Hanging Out,” is a wall scupture. It emerges like a being encased in and protruding from the wall itself,  a partial mannequin entrapped despite a glowing heart and uterus at its center, sheathed and layered with the dress patterns.
   The titular “Emerging Fear of Flowers” is a colorful mix of the tissue patterns, acrylic, and art paper on canvas.  While a hand holds a cocktail glass in the right corner, center stage is an alien looking three pronged flower that seems to have grown eyes, and one prong is looking and leaning and reaching ominously toward that hand. The viewer can’t help but think of Little Shop of Horrors and Audrey, that musical’s violently sentient plant.  It is a large work, vibrant with indigo and burgandy; the human hand, however, is so white it could easily belong to a person confined from the sunlight in which these flowers gained a robust if menacing vitality.
   Melly’s “Cut Stems” also makes use of the tissue dress patterns combined with acrylic.  These highly geometric flowers have sharp edged like wind mills and are exhibiting just emerging facial features.
   With “Enter Covid,”  what’s blossoming here appears to be the shape of COVID itself, entering via a kind of conduit into an abstract human vessel.  Layers of white on white recall bandages, sheets, and fog, as if a ghostly landscape now enveloped us all.

   Quoting Charles Baudelaire with the title “Evil Comes up Softly Like a Flower,” Melly uses acrylic, charcoal, and dress patterns to make one of the most ominous, yet still amusing, paintings in this series. Here, flowers have teeth and raging faces.

But they are comfortably more relatable in “Dandelion Wine,” in which a dandelion tears out its seeds in frustration.

And we can feel intense empathy for the sad blooms in works such as “Un-Still Life,” in which a lavendar, daisy-like flower has thorns and weeps purple blooded tears.

   In another work, the artist herself melds or morphs into a flower, a pale periwinkle and peacefully meditative one, in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Lotus.” Surrounded by a geometric abstract patterns, the figure is part statue, part flower, absorbed fully in the act of blooming, yet trapped in stillness.

   Perhaps, we can hope that our time in pandemic shut down can allow us to achieve a similarly mesmerized state. Viewing Melly’s delicate, lovely, and unsettling works may just have that effect.
   Melly’s work is beautifully paired with the light-based blend of Richard Slechta’s photography and art, Incompressible Flow; Chris Madens’ glowy dimensional assemblies, The Covid Kiss; and a group show, Felicitious,  an all-media compilation depicting the current zeitgeist.
   The exhibition is on view through June 24th. Gallery 825 is located at 825 N. La Cienega.  Melly is offering curated visits; the gallery is also open by appointment at other times, reach out at gallery825@laaa.org.
Genie Davis – images provided by the artist

Susan Spector Offers Words of Wisdom

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Susan Spector’s Sticks/Stones, which just closed at TAG Gallery, is a delightful collection of text-based work filled with wit and exuberance.

Simple painted figures are featured with phrases that are inspired by a question she asked during the COVID pandemic lockdown. That question being “What is a phrase from your past that has stayed with you forever?” She was still soliciting responses on Post-It Notes at the gallery – which we can hope leads to a part two for this smart work.

It isn’t just an illustrated reproduction of these phrases that Spector is after here. Rather, she has gathered and compiled ideas that are intrinsic to our way of life, refining and exploring social issues, mental health, cultural mores. The exhibition also touches upon the way we each speak to ourselves,  and the ways in which society encourages specific forms of self-talk.

From loving advice to harsher words, the collection both charms and rivets, exposes and encourages.  The work is a significant departure from the artist’s past abstract figuration. These are simple, easy to see visualizations accompanied by text that punches both a visual palette and an emotional one.  Despite deceptive simplicity, this crowdsourced, text-based art is presented in a variety of visual ways.

Simple, heartfelt phrases such as “I matter,” “I am Enough,” and “I am at peace with who I am,” are presented on a solid colored background. The black type of the words, created in a variety of different type-faces including a cursive flourish on some words, is presented on a layer of gold leaf overlaid on the solid colored background. The viewer’s impression is that these words are especially valuable, and should be taken to heart.

Other phrases are accompanied by her unique, yet simple illustrations – a curly haired individual, holding a red heart against an outlined chest features text at the bottom of the image that reads “Always come from love not fear.” While most of the words are in black type outlined in white, the word “love” is outlined in red to match that heart; the word “fear” is simply written in black.

There are hilarious images too, including one of a screaming red face is matched with “Caution! I’m in retrograde,” highly appropros for the conclusion of a long Mercury retro just ending as the exhibition was viewed.  A female figure, chest proudly displayed, stomach sucked in, is accompanied by bold text which reads “Tits out” in pink, and “Belly in” indicated in blue, both with arrows pointing to the way in which the body should be positioned.

 

“Spend it foolishly” looks as delightful as the advice written in thick silver letters. Here, a bent-figured grandma reaches to hand two eager children dollar bills stacked in both her hands.

Nearby, a blue-skirted, wide-eyed figure perches demurely on a chair while pink letters spell out “Be A Lady” in a long line beside her,  an invisible, internalized authoritarian instructing her behavior.

Precariously balanced items plugged into a wall socket are the accompaniment to “Don’t Do Anything Stupid,” written simply in black.  In another work, a large figure points to a screen which smaller audience-member figures look up to view.  On the screen are written “3 Rules: Show Up, Speak Your Truth, Don’t Die Wondering.” Meanwhile, an aggreived looking stick figure is accompanied by a text bubble reading “Before you decide you’re depressed, make sure you’re not surrounded by a bunch of assholes.” And indeed, in close proximity all around her are what appear to be small outlines of just that – literal assholes.

 

One of the most visually beautiful works is a primarily black on black work. Written against a dense black sky, the words “It’s always darkest before the dawn” are just discernable over a gorgeous rising line of pink, orange, and gold sunlight.

Additionally fascinating were the Post-It’s added by viewers on the wall next to Spector’s work at TAG. There was “Why can’t you be more like your cousin,” next to the excellent advice “Don’t wait for everything to be okay to be happy.”  “Life is a bitch, “Brush your teeth,” and “Nobody’s Perfect” nestled close to “Take a long walk on a short pier.”

Instead, take a long look at Spector’s work, and enjoy.

Along with this exhibition, fine solo shows by David Klein, Justin Prough, and Skut were also on display, but that’s a different story.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

 

Oceans Has High Tide Appeal – Shana Mabari at Porch Gallery in Ojai

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Running through May 23rd at Porch Gallery in Ojai, Shana Mabari’s new Oceans solo exhibition glows and shimmers like sun on the sea. Mabari previously presented artwork at the gallery that resulted from her NASA SOFIA space mission; the current exhibition is an outgrowth of her residency aboard Sea Shepherd Global off the coast of Africa.

Referencing the horizon, and its visually magical fusion with the sky, or depicting luminous sculptures evoking coral, her work evokes the light and ambiance of the sea, and its eliptical calling to humankind.

Mabari is the first artist-in-residence aboard on a Sea Shepherd Global maritime mission. The direct-action ocean conservation organization brought the artist on a five-day sailing off the west coast of Africa, in a clandestine effort to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in the waters of Benin. The mission resulted in the arrest of of an illegally fishing trawler; and brought the inspiration for Oceans. 

Mabari’s ethereally lovely sculptural works are created as two separate series within the exhibition. There are elongated cylinders of the  “Korāl” sculptures, and her circular “Horizōn” pieces. Created from all acrylic material,  the “Korāl” installation contains over 60 free-standing sculptures beteween 7″ and 14″ tall, in varied colors that range through a rainbow spectrum of red, blue, violet, yellow, and orange. These works were not only inspired by coral reefs, but positioned for exhibition as such as well, highlighting awareness of the coral reef devastation throughout the oceans, as well as their beauty underwater.

Her sculptural works in “Horizon” are wall-mounted. Eight, 15″ disks each contain a horizon line that recalls the meeting of sea and sky, and both that line’s call of exploration, and its use as a measurement tool by early mathematicians and astronomers.

Mabari has also created a new book featuring images of the “Koral” sculptures and essays about her Sea Shepherd residence, produced in collaboration with Sébastien Montabonel of the London-based Alaska Editions.

From the skies, flying aboard NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, to the seas on the Sea Shepherd mission, Mabari works to create comprehension of the vast and incomprehensible wonder of the world, and the risk that humans pose to it. Both as calls to action against ecological disaster, and as expressions of humankind’s connectivity to nature and the universe itself,  Mabari’s work engages the spirit with her color, light, reflection, and form. Melding scientific inquiry – and it’s importance – with her art, Mabari offers viewers the chance to engage with sea and sky through her fluid geometric forms.

Ten-percent of the proceeds from exhibition sales will benefit Sea Shepherd Global. Gallery is located at 310 E. Matilija St., Ojai, CA 93023.

 

 – Genie Davis, photos provided by Porch Gallery and the artist

Susan Ossman’s In the Wash is Beauty in Motion

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Beautiful and evocative, Susan Ossman’s exhibition In the Wash is as vibrant as it is graceful.

Made up of three large-scale works, each of which is comprised of four to six canvasses, the works depict laundry drying in the open air, stretched across multiple canvases like sheets strung on a clothesline.

Each piece follows a progressive color palette, as alive with the changing seasons as the sheets are with movement of the breeze, and the generations-long ritual of pinning freshly washed objects to clotheslines. The works are also a reflection on waiting, according to the artist.

Like all Ossman’s art, these pieces suggest movement and light, emerging from her use of lines. Clotheslines, and the action of hanging laundry are intrinsic in the gestures of the paintings, but the lines also seem to represent a kind of kinetic energy running through the works. The undulating sense of motion is hypnotic in these pieces, as is the artist’s use of rich color and soft texture.

The first painting in the exhibition, “Christo’s Laundry,”  above, uses a classical style of oil painting that recreates the soft, gentle movement of the fabric on a spring day. There’s a sense of calm in the subtle movement she depicts. The colors are those of spring flowers, lavender, pale blue, deep purple. The yellow of the sheets is soft and pale, like the spring sun.

Ossman’s style veers more toward the modernist in the expressionistic “Winter Wash,” which evokes a sense of haste in the more rapid wintery movement of the wind, and her depiction of the environment in which the laundry lines are strung. It is a tangle of swirling lines and the curls of blue and orange seem to be a visual depiction of motion itself. The palette is darker, with a stronger emphasis on the burnt umber quality of winter light.

The lively, vivid “Caught in the Sheets,” edges into the abstract, the energy and sense of movement it exudes are almost palpable. We see the sheets in intimate perspective, tangled up with them, forming a relationship with them. The sheets fit together like the pieces of a large puzzle or mosaic; and while the oranges and yellows are dominant in hue, they are paler, the light blue in the right canvas component drawing the eye the most.

Each work requires contemplation, or rather demands it, both to take in the full long strokes of the artist’s brush, and the enormity of the canvases as well as their details. The humble nature of the subject – and indeed, the context of it as a fundamental, necessary, and unappreciated part of life itself, imbues the paintings with a subtle grace, a sense of gratitude for simple rituals.

The exhibition also includes a video depicting the artist’s process and the context of her paintings within a broader overall project, On the Line, that also included anthropological research and historical research on laundry lines, as well as reflection on her own past art practice and the creation of an environment to inspire an extension of the work into other art forms, including performance. Ossman has worked with dancers interpreting her works. “In the video you see the connection between the movements and the paintings and the movements of the bodies of the dancers. Showing these and telling the story of the project expands viewers’ ways of thinking about these paintings and painting more generally… perhaps these works encourage attention to these movements more than some others. The multiple panels, the compositions and in some cases the brush strokes encourage this,” Ossman explains.

The video, which runs approximately six minutes, explores how poets, dancers, and musicians picked up on the movement and rhythms with sound, words, and their bodies. “It was like an extension of my own movement, almost as though the movement of my arm and body painting created a momentum and a direction that they picked up on with their arm or leg or the way several dancers intertwined their own bodies,” she says. The dancers took on the dynamics of her painting, using actions that indicated bodily movement, the sense of wind, and the sense of the seasons passing, which are all visually revealed in the paintings themselves.

Also available at the exhibition, for further insight into Ossman’s work, are two publications: one about her art, and one that discusses both her work as an artist and as an anthropologist, Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fields, A Memoir of Anthropology and Art.

The generosity of Ossman’s collaborations and insight into the ebb and flow of natural life recently took a different bent in an early March exhibition on the steps of the Museum of Riverside, in which her 22-foot collage “One and Many,” inspired by California poppy fields, invited a reflection on “the relationship of the part to the whole, the individual, the group, the community.” Participants were invited to take a small piece of artwork from the layered collage and fill in the blank space on the canvas with work of their own.

 

That same sense of inclusivity, universality, and movement, is what drives In the Wash. Like the wind, change is constant yet the wind itself stays as an eternal force. Ossman goes a long way to expressing the constancy of change itself, and the collective consciousness of those who are a living part of it. And, these large works are, in and of themselves, separate from any choate meaning, simply visually dazzling.

Also on exhibit at Gallery 825 are (left to right) the thought-provoking textile flag works of Sol Hill, in State of the Union; James R. Lane’s EYECU, a delicate series of acid-washed images of animal art viewed from their perspective that’s both haunting and wise; and the tragic beauty of the looming destruction of our planet in the photographic work of Matricide – Destiny Manifested, from Don Porter.

These fine exhibitions, along with In the Wash, are on display until May 13th, and are visible both online at https://www.laaa.org/4-solo-shows-at-gallery-825 and in person at Gallery 825, located at 825 N. La Cienega Blvd. in West Hollywood. Call or email the gallery for hours.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and provided by Susan Ossman