Dias de Los Muertes at Hollywood Forever: Art and Altars that Transcend This World

Posted on by Diversions LA

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Hollywood Forever’s Dias de Los Muertes event has become a true staple of LA life. The gorgeous, large-scale celebration features musical and dance performances on stage and on the grounds; sculptural installations; art installations, elaborate and witty costumes on visitors and participants, and moving, poignant, and sometimes amusing altars.

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Gotta catch ’em all.

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There were drummers, dancers, and multiple stages offering soft ballads and strong beats. And quiet, contemplative spaces honoring the departed.

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As a link between this life and the next, as a celebration, as an opening of the heart, mind, and soul to global cultures, the event is both lively and exciting. 

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Hollywood Forever was packed this year, as performers wove lush musical interludes and wild, mythical dances; attendees wrote messages to the departned on paper butterflies and tied them to a tree; and at another altar, attendees were encouraged to write the names of loved ones on colorful wooden sticks and plant them in sand.

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Thematically, this year, the festival’s 20th, was about the mariposa, or butterfly, specifically the orange and black monarch. It was a graceful, hopeful theme, one that resonated on a variety of different levels.

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The monarch butterfly winters in the Mexican state of Michoacán. Michoacán is also one of the two cultural heartlands in Mexico where the ancient traditions of Dia de los Muertos have been celebrated the longest and most vibrantly. The butterfly also represents the immigrants whose personal journeys echo the migrations of the butterflies between the U.S. and Mexico.

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Several of the altars offered moving commentary on the difficulty immigrants face entering this country.

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Inside the mausoleum, a bevy of terrific artists offered everything from carved wood to evocatively lit sculptures, paintings, and even stained glass. Arists included Eva Malhorta, Juan Solis, and Lore among many others.

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On the grounds, large scale artworks dotted the landscape.

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Taking place on Saturday the 2nd this year, this vibrant, transcendent cultural and spiritual event is as much an epitome of Los Angeles life as the pink and orange sunset pooling across the sky at twilight.

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As lights sparkled on altars, the sunset, the towering palms, skeleton sculptures floated in Hollywood Forever’s small lake…

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…sugar skulls and fairy lights glowed…

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and the cemetery’s resident peacocks settled into cages for the night.

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And one vibrant peacock-themed participant showed her plumage on the grounds.

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Missed it this year? Pay homage to your ancestors, your city’s culture, and the magic of Dias de Los Muertos at Hollywood Forever in 2020.

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  • Genie Davis; photos: Jack Burke; supplemental shots, Genie Davis

Stepping into New Frontiers

Posted on by Diversions LA

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In a time with the word “border” fraught with intended socio-political context, to have a show that exceeds conventional borders is inspiring both artistically and thematically. Opening October 26th at Jason Vass, Frontiers, from artists Tadashi Moriyama and Rachel Pease is a dramaticly lovely series of works created in ink.

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Both artists create highly detailed drawings, Moriyami’s, above, edging on the more surreal. Pease and Moriyama describe their work as a version of meditative mandala making, requiring both close observation and an appreciation of mysterious, contemplative visual narrative.  

The rainbow colors of Moriyami’s works are aglow, and seem to shift and shimmer. They have the look of a tapestry, one woven of ink.

The artists are married, and moved to Los Angeles from New York,  the quintessential journey to a Western frontier. But while the images could be taken as a look at their new physical landscape, it also revolves around their own brave new world in parenting, and a destination as yet not fully realized — the ongoing discovery process – of their art.

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According to Moriyama “We look for the unknown and unexplored, and attempt to make images that are new to us, and give us unexpected and serendipitous surprises.”

 Moriyama’s ink works are stretched on wood, and created with acrylic as well as ink. Their are buildings and ubran grids as well as seemingly interstellar environments. He references, subverts, and transcends images of Tokyo and New York, traveling into dreamscapes and a realm of other planets and space. A background in Japanese calligraphy is evident, as is the transcendent spirituality in his practice of Zen Buddhism. His otherworldly images are in part an outgrowth of meditation.

They swirl and spin, taking the viewer on a journey infused with movement, into which some figurative elements appear as if seeking a place within this brilliantly colored, seething world.

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Pease focuses her India ink on frosted mylar works on elaborate, magical riffs on the land and forests that surrouned her as she grew up in rural Indiana. Many of her works begin with an image of a tree that she uses as a kind of portal into a landscape that is mystical and fantastical.  There is both grace and elegy in her work, a tribute to a landscape that perhaps never was, or is in danger of disappearing from imagination and reality.

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The grace and stillness of Pease’s work is captivating; it compels viewers to enter into a forest of great beauty and strangeness.

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Canyon of the Distant Land, from Pease, above. The moonrise and mountains evoke images of Yosemite and Zion, while taking viewers into nature previously uncharted, a special, secret place. Both artists’ works surge beyond the prosaic and past common boundaries of location and imagination. They are futuristic and fantastical, yet grounded in a reality of landscape and cityscape; of dreams and desires, of the metaphorical and metaphysical.

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Viewers will find each work an immersive experience, and find a sense of the alchemic in each of these intricately realized and vibrantly alive images.

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The exhibition opens October 26th, reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Jason Vass is located at 1452 E. 6th Street in DTLA.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by gallery

Night Windows Offer an Illuminated Look Inside at CMay Gallery

Posted on by Diversions LA

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South Korean artist Hwang Seon Tae’s remarkable Night Windows is his first exhibition in Los Angeles, and it is a stunner. At CMay Gallery in mid-city through November 30th, the luminous new works from his Lightbox series are truly astonishing.

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Using literal illumination through images of windows, we are invited into perfectly designed, innately architectural rooms and spaces, through which we can see outdoor views or portals of light. In some cases, we see shadows from trees cast in light spilling onto walls. The result in each work is something incandescent.

Hwang Seon Tae, The Sunshine Room, 2019, Plastic Plate, LED, 29.9 x 22.4 x 3.5 inches , 76 x 57 x 9 cm

Asked if the works were representative of a Zen-like or meditative state, the artist demurred. Tse related that the works are to be taken “however you wish to take them, as long as you enjoy them and feel pleasure from them.”

Blissfully free of humans, while several pieces feature a peacefully sleeping cat or dog, the spaces are primarily pristine, well-designed living spaces. The emphasis on the domestic creates the sense of a place of being at rest, a true home.

Demur as he will, there is a highly spiritual component to the work, an emotional peace that vibrates through the observer.

Tse also explained that he views each of his precise lines as a kind of representative, visual language, and that each line has meaning and resonance for him as an artist.

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The use of light is enormously appealing, drawing the eye of course, but also engaging the mind and heart. It feels both transcendent and sweet, balming and beneficient.  His work is also concerned with simply the use of light, dimension, and space.

His line drawings illuminated by LED create an aura of stillness and restfulness, but also the provide a way for the viewer to step into that illumination and feel awash in its brightness. The dimensionality welcomes the viewer to step within each work.

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Some images include bright spots of color, as in the work above.

Tse’s manipulation of the physicality of the acrylic plate is a testament to his art, and in its perfection, also pulls viewers into the contemplation of simplicity, beauty, and minimalism.

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There are a number of other pieces from earlier series also on exhibit at CMay: a glass sculpture representing a rumpled newspaper; soft, out of focus photographic images of objects.

In an art talk Saturday night, the artist said “I am most interested in the objects themselves. In giving them meaning, attaching importance to them.”

Hwang Seon Tae, The Sunshine Room, 2019, Tempered Glass, Sandblast, LED Backlit, 86.6 x 34.4 x 1.6 inches , 220 x 62 x 4 cm

In a sense, he makes the objects – sofa, lamp, chair, window – into a character in his visual narrative.

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Above, a view of one of Tse’s works taken through a gallery window, a perfect introduction to the exhibition.

Born in Korea, trained in sculpture and Glass Art at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle in Germany, the exhibit is mesmerizing and involving. And it would be difficult to overstate the sense of calmness, the sense of joy which the viewer feels when “coming into the light.”

Hwang Seon Tae, The Sunshine Room, 2019, Tempered Glass, Sandblast, LED Backlit, 40.2 x 31.5 x 1.6 inches, 102 x 80 x 4 cm

CMay Gallery is located at 5828 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, 90036.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis, and provided by gallery

Rise Soars and Spins

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With live music, a lush sunset, and a desolate but lovely desert setting just outside Jean, Nev., the Rise Festival captivated from the moment the music began.

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Above, the Zack Gray band performs music that fit the site – a bit ethereal, a bit Coldplay-esque, the songs seemed perfectly timed to match the darkening of the sky. Other musical acts included Agina, Exes, and Ry X, taking the stage before the sun went down with lovely sets of their own.

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While the event describes itself as a music festival that also includes the release, at three timed intervals, of biodegradable lanterns, it is the lantern release itself that creates the true sense of magic, and draws the crowds. We attended Sunday night – the other two nights featured fireworks and a crowd of up to 10,000; Sunday was a smaller group of attendees – a little over half 10,000 – but nonetheless a truly spectacular release.

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The initial release was also a learning process: lighting the igniteable square in the center of the lantern and keeping the delicate paper that shapes it from also igniting while it inflates, is a two-person experience – even three; which makes it all the more delightful once mastering the technique is accomplished.

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Once dusk fell, and crowds gravitated away from the tasty collection of food trucks and craft brew purveyors…

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…once the sunset photos by the iconic “Rise” sign and colored moons and translucent colored columns were taken, attendees were asked to assist in lighting the rows of tiki torches laid out by sections — ticket holders were assigned to a section in  a circular grid from Northwest to Southeast.

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Following the torch lighting, and time to write any messages on the paper lanterns, there was a countdown to the actual lantern launch – and they were aloft. Some skittered too low, needed to be recaptured and reheated; others had first-time-mishaps as ours did; but in the end, they all went soaring into the sky, some seeming to pass in front of the moon.

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It was glorious. It was beyond worth the drive from LA into the desert. The visual spectacle, the sheer art of the event was terrific, but it was the spiritual element of release, fire, prayers and wishes and names on lanterns, the ephemeral nature of the lanterns as they transition to ash, sink, and fade into the desert sand that made the Rise Festival as special as it was.

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We saw participants of all ages – from children to the elderly, enjoying the event.

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Side note: the lanterns are biodegradeable, but even as we were leaving, the Rise Festival staff was waiting on horseback, foot, and cart to collect lantern detritus when the flames burnt out and gravity did its thing.

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Before it did, thousands looked up, enjoying the light, flight, and spiritual flames — Rise Festival is both a participatory performance art event and a meditative experience rolled into one.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Jack Burke