Diversions LA

Snezana Saraswati Petrovic is ready to immerse viewers in her own wildly wonderful, tactile world with the opening of her solo show Collateral Damage Recall at LAAA’s Gallery 825. The exhibition will be on view from January 15 – February 18, 2022.

The exhibition will take viewers into a living room and a bedroom constructed installation, with the intention of bringing awareness to climate change, and specifically the destruction of the ocean, coral reefs, and other water resources.

While playfully constructed in a realm comprised of post-apocalyptic plastic to shape a futuristic home environment, the complexity of the work is rooted in Petrovic’s own discourse on prescient environmental issues. As compelling as it is beautiful, the installation will evoke the balance between what most frightens us about the potential destruction of the planet and the ever-present beauty of the natural world. Both ideas captivate the artist.

Petrovic notes “Our most natural human habitat is a home.” Because of that she recreates a family room that utilizes principles of sacred geometry. “The room divisions applied the golden rule principle for placements of objects. The numbers of objects are also evocative of certain symbolism, such as 30 corals in the infinity mirror, shaped as the smallest island from the Great Barrier Reef. When multiplied by mirrors, 30 3D printed corals became 300 coral reefs within the parameters of these islands.”

Her use of color also reflects the dichotomy of beauty and aching loss. “The choice of a specific blue color that the space is saturated with, is a color that exists in nature: evening sky, deep water, night forest, ocean, or distant mountains. It is calming and soothing. The sound of nature is coming from a blue marlin over the fireplace. An invitation to connect with nature is even more present in the bedroom [than the family room portion of the exhibition.] The waterbed creates a feeling of floating on the water’s surface [as one is] surrounded by video projection of the underwater world of Huatulco, Mexico.” Petrovic recorded the video images while diving in that area.

The installation is also interactive. Augmented-reality photos are designed to free bleached white corals entangled in zip ties through use of the downloadable ARTIVIVE app.

Viewers can listen to the sounds, touch, read, engage in a conversation with others, or even view a Black Carbon video that presents the spread of Covid-19 related to soot.

Petrovic notes “The post-apocalyptic overarching metaphor is the amount of the plastic in the installation space. 94% of microplastic is floating in the ocean at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. My goal with installation was to use 94% of plastic to create the otherwise inviting space.” She adds, “The scientific projection indicates that by 2050, the ratio of fish to plastic will be 1:1. As a reflection to this predicament, I have made true to size a plastic zip tie Blue Marlin as a grim counterbalance to real taxidermized fish.”

In each aspect of the exhibition, Petrovic realizes the power of the global community. “We are all part of it, connected to and affecting each other. That makes us one family.”

The exhibition is comprised of some 136 individual art pieces, assembled into one cohesive installation. These include four video projections, four augmented-reality photos of plastic-trapped corals and the use of the ARTIVIE app to release them; forty-eight colorful 3D printed, miniature corals; a memorial wall of white corals; a family-tree mind-map showing the progression of Petrovic’s Collateral Damage project, which has grown over the years since its inaugural form at MOAH several years ago. Additional features include found objects, more than ten zip tie sculptures; printed vinyl images; and a 13-foot-long taxidermized blue marlin, along with repurposed furniture pieces and a fireplace mantel.

There is even an aromatherapy experience that can be triggered in the bedroom portion of the exhibition; viewers will get a scent of ocean breezes, in yet another component of what is a dazzling compilation of individual works, as astonishing and delightful to view as they are profoundly urgent.

The delicate, even ephemeral appearance of her materials belies their longevity, Petrovic attests “The zip tie netting feels fragile and ephemeral, and that is my intention, where the true properties are hidden, much like in our daily encounter with the plastic… we use it and discard it, but it does not go away.”

Petrovic hopes that viewers will take from the installation a sense of  “Hope, empowerment to take action, and that we are not alone. We are all family. The plastic abundance is intended to make us open the eyes to our own everyday lives and plastic overuse.” She notes “I also hope that people will have fun, be engaged and intrigued to find their own answers.”

How could they not be? The gallery, refurbished and re-painted in blue with blue plastic grass as a carpet, will create an environment at once familiar, cozy, and non-traditional, one that the artist is moving and creating in just a six-day period.

The playfulness inherent in Petrovic’s work is always captivating. “Creating and sharing art is about communication and connection. My artwork is about hope and what makes me smile… A little bit of whimsy and intrigue makes any grim subject more bearable, while giving us a hope and necessary distance to see that healing or solutions are at our own disposal.”

LAAA is located at 825 N. La Cienega in Los Angeles. The opening is January 15 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. no reservations necessary, mask required; after the opening, through February 18th by appointment.

• Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist

Prepare to get in a Scramble just in time for the New Year. At the dA Center for the Arts in Pomona through January 2^nd, artist Atilio Pernisco offers a mysterious and dreamy collection of works that are as layered and edgy as they are beautiful.

According to Pernisco, the exhibition is a culmination of ten years of work that represents his response to “the strange in the familiar while living in suburban LA. These were gestural, wet on wet, very painterly.” The works he created for Scramble began during the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic and he says used limited materials. His source was “a bank of personal images and digital references of a more universal relevance in order to paint.”

The chaotic beginning of pandemic times and the charged political climate were both incorporated into this body of work. Pernisco notes “I was trying to make sense of these absurd times by contemplating a narrative from a collage of images and reorganizing thoughts to paint.”

Many of these images come from cell phone photos that the artist took, using them as some painters draw. “I consider the cell phone photograph as a way of making a sketch. I need a couple of photographs to establish some kind of association, making a collage of images…Just as in dreams, where the images have symbolic power and keep coming back, the photographs on the floor in the studio are mixed and re-contextualized with each juxtaposition…I use the initial image as a pretext to experiment formally. The image is the origin, painting is the action of matter over representation.”

Impressively, he created more than 55 works, including paintings, drawings, and monotypes as he tried to make sense of the chaos and express the inchoate thoughts of this time period. He says he was “painting by reorganizing sort of pictorial sentences by adding and subtracting paint on canvas.”

The process worked elegantly, producing rewarding, thought-provoking works that are a landscape into the mind and soul as well as the physical world. The exhibition reflects the artist’s belief that “Painting is where materiality and immateriality mix—the mind and the body, the rational and the irrational.”

In many of the works, Pernisco makes marks on the canvasses, that could appear as if they were scratches from another dimension or an underworld. He says the process of mark-making is usually a response to the last mark for him. “Usually, I start with the drawing of the image I want to make, sometimes the canvas has some strikes of colors. Later I render areas and I erase faces, arms.”

The result is something that mixes real and surreal in an evocative, immersive flow. He describes the process as that between “Memory as the image, and experience of the moment now – paint stains. The painting surface fluxes between figurative and abstraction at times. [In this] way I’m trying to create poetic associations between colors and textures using intentionality and chance.” In other words, much like in life itself, his images coalesce and shift between the unexpected and the planned. The paintings also reflect a sense of immediacy and imminent possibilities to the viewer.

Pernisco wants viewers to bring their own interpretations and connections to his work, reacting in the most personal manner possible to the paintings. But the images also have a universal, even classical feel in terms of approach, even when deep in surrealism. They exhibit a true sense of place, even if that place does not seem entirely recognizable. Pernisco says the images “delve between two places: childhood memories of Buenos Aires, Argentina and adult life living in Los Angeles.” He adds that each work juxtaposes fiction and reality and blurs the thin line between them.  

In his Pomona exhibition, Pernisco exhibits several different mediums. While his painting is what he says best expresses his work as an artist, at times he needed a break, drew some larger works using charcoals as well as creating monotypes with a small press. “These monotypes influenced the later paintings and began using a monochromatic palette, a painterly execution.”  

Scramble appears to represent a vital interior landscape of the mind and soul. Pernisco explains “These [paintings] are poetic gestures, a possibility of a new language perhaps…[of] the mind, the memories, the stories told.  All that is the perfect brew to experience a new sensation perhaps. I’m in search of the experiential aspect of painting, its poetic distortion of a stroke, of a certain speed, an omission of a torso.”

In each of his paintings there is always a tension between something that has just occurred, is currently happening, or about to take place. Some of that visual tension arises from the fact that whatever is leading to that event, or caused it, is kept hidden from the narrative of his art. There is a sense of imminent revelation, even anticipation, but that is for each individual viewer to determine for themselves.

Pernisco’s mix of narrative, his combined use of figurative painting and abstraction/elements of the surreal take viewers into a world as rich and strange as a dream but more rooted in the collective, material consciousness. The title of the exhibition serves as its description, referring in part to the diversity of the works, mediums, the figurative characters’ states of mind, and the artist explains, his own. “Scramble can mean to construct or deconstruct… my state of mind between fiction and reality…past and present and all the untold stories in between.” 

The dA Center for the Arts is located at 252-D, S. Main Street in Pomona. To schedule a visit, go to www.dacenter.org. The closing event for Scramble will be January 2^nd from 3-6 p.m.

Pernisco will also have work featured in an upcoming exhibition Momentous Occasions, an exhibition of six figurative painters, at Durden and Ray at the Bendix Building, with an opening reception on January 8^th. Durden and Ray is located at 1206 Maple Ave., #832 Los Angeles, CA 90015