ArtBarLA is Just Where You Want to Be

Posted on by Diversions LA

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Welcome to ArtBarLA, the creative, comfortable, hip spot to quaff a craft beer or kombucha, experience some highly original and witty décor, and view LA-based artists’ work in a bright, contemporary space. It’s also the spot to hear live music and D.J.s or see performance art of all kinds.

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Warm, eclectic, and just plain fun, the idea of an art bar was the brain child of artist Lauren Mendelsohn Bass and L Croskey, a.k.a. LC, gallerist, artist, and D.J. Joined by partners Demetrios Mavromichalis and Pete Panos, the four have conceptualized and opened what Mendelsohn-Bass calls “a cool way for all kinds of artists to show the work they do.”

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Croskey is head preparatory and co-owner of Thinkspace in Culver City, and has long supported local artists in the most inclusive ways possible, Mendelsohn-Bass explains. “He did portfolio views and gallery shows under the name Cannibal Flower, and I was one of his artists. At one show, we were speaking about how I would like to do something interesting in LA for artists and for Cannibal Flower, and how I wanted to create a space where we could show any kind of art, a place for visual artists and performers. And he said, whatever you do, I’m on board.”

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After a six-month hunt to find space, Mendelsohn-Bass was about to give up when Mavromichalis told Croskey he’d just leased a bar in Mar Vista that had enough room for a gallery and stage. Mavromichalis owns the Mar Vista Restaurant and the Wood among other properties and knows the restaurant and bar business well. He, too, was on board to create a space for art.

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The advantage of being able to sell beer and hard kombucha – and likely coming soon,  wine – is, as Mendelsohn-Bass notes, a way to relieve the pressure to sell more art. “We can sell drinks whenever we are open, instead of having to provide them at an opening which costs the gallery space.”

Panos, who owns a mixed martial arts studio next to Art Bar LA also wanted in; his hyper-local support has assisted in the bar’s creation and operation.

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Above, left to right, Mavromichalis, Mendelsohn-Bass, Croskey, Panos

“LC and I are the most hands-on about creating the space, based on ideas we’ve been throwing around for a year that became part of the décor, like the fun house mirrors and the patchwork sofa design,” she explains. Croskey will handle booking gallery shows and performing talent; Mavromichalis handles the bar aspect, bringing in LA-based craft beers, and dealing with licensing, ordering, and staffing. Panos is also involved in staffing and many business aspects of the operation.

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As for Mendelsohn-Bass, “My role is kind of everything. I assist LC all around, and I contributed to décor down to the light bulbs selected by LC and I together.” She adds “People say this place looks like it was made for me, but the reason it does is because LC and I have had the same vision, and we really created what we set out to do.”

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Above, current exhibited work includes this piece from Robert Nelson; below, a variety of other works from the current exhibition

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New gallery shows will appear once a month, and for now, focus on group shows. “For now, our criteria is just good art. LC has many people who want to be a part of exhibiting here, who just want their work to be seen.” Upcoming is an exhibition titled Made You Look, opening October 6th.

Performing talent will include Saturday night D.J.-ing from LC, a burlesque show, live body painting, and a wide range of musical acts. The bar’s regular operating days are Thursday through Saturday for now; gallery openings are reserved for Sunday afternoons. Hours may be added in the days to come.

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The bar will also soon offer some small bites for purchase at the bar; for events like gallery openings, ArtBarLA will have food trailers set up beyond the patio space. On October 6th the trucks will focus on BBQ.

“The food and the beer and other beverages will all be from LA makers,” Mendelsohn-Bass attests. “There’s so much local talent here in all ways to draw from.”

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The bar is geared toward the art world, but it is also very much a part of the neighborhood itself, with local residents, artists, and nightlife-seekers all a part of a mix that ranges in age from 21 to 95, she reports.

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From the gorgeous murals Mendelsohn-Bass has painted on the walls, to bicycle bar stools, outdoor sculpture, and even the most fun bathroom signage you’ll ever see, this is a bar where you’ll definitely want everyone to know your name.

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ArtBarLA is open Thursday-Saturday 7 p.m. to 2 a.m., with more hours planned ahead. It is located at 12017 Venice Blvd. in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles – where else but LA?

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis, Kristine Schomaker, Cheryl Henderson, and Lauren Mendelsohn-Bass

Douglas Tausik Ryder Reveals Rich Body Language

Posted on by Diversions LA

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Running through October 19th at the DTLA art district’s Jason Vass Gallery, Douglas Tausik Ryder’s Body Language expands upon a sculptural topic he’s worked with in the past, creating an abstract, sensual, and richly geometric view of the female body.

Ryder’s language is a kind of code that bridges technology and nature. The artist creates his smooth, highly textured works using industrial geometric code in a CNC machine, encompassing 3D modeling to create these large-form wood sculptures.

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The works are towering, even monumental. Using computer models, he creates his sculptures into assembleable parts, forms wooden maquettes, carves, sands, shapes, and then adjusts his digital model as the work progresses. Once he moves into the machine room, Ryder is using an industrial machine he’s rebuilt, utilizing a digital cutting tool to carve individual portions of his works. He does it all himself with no assistance from an outside source.

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The result is a sleek, voluptuous series of works that is abstract in nature but obliquely figurative. Viewed as part of a group show held at Vass several years ago, his “Venus,” which was inspired by his wife’s pregnancy,  is a strong introduction to his work, seemingly entirely smooth, as if it sprung whole cloth after gestating in the artist’s vision.

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“Reclining Nude” is just that, both alien and familiar, a ribbon of wood that reaches out to the viewer in compelling curves.

His work is filled with texture, texture enhanced by the technnology he has long been devoted to, making mysterious, even poetic works with precise tools and machine techniques that he taught himself.

 

The work is seductive and dream-like. It is neither body nor soul entirely, but embodies both. Similarly, his high-tech process belies an instinctual state of grace in his forms. There are no harsh lines or jagged constructs, and yet each work is essentially an elaborate seies of puzzle pieces fit neatly together. They are smooth, yet filled with a raw power that seems to undulate just beneath the surface of his wood, and slips within the curves of his figures.

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The Body Language sculptures in this five-work series are enormous in scale, large in their passionate use of form, and sinuous. They have a liquidity to their creation, a washed-smooth take on a geometric form which in and of itself seems born of the body but elevated by the mind and heart. 

The works are cool, clean,  and connected – both within each individual work’s components and between the sculptures that make up the exhibition. Playing off the white walls of the gallery, Ryder’s pieces stand like fluid creatures, captured and frozen within their lustrous wood.

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Seeing these works in one sweeping show is a pleasure, and considering how they were shaped is fascinating and yet entirely irrelevant. However they were crafted, they stand as reflective meditations on both the physical and the spiritual.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by Jason Vass Gallery

 

Formulae & Fairy Tales: Sublime Dance from Invertigo Dance Theatre

Posted on by Diversions LA

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When one looks at the word sublime in the dictionary – assuming we still look at dictionaries, of course – an illustration of the work of Invertigo Dance Theatre should accompany it.

Now at The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage in Santa Monica for one more night, September 14th only at 7:30 pm., Formulae & Fairy Tales tells the heartbreaking story of the life of Alan Turing, the mathematical genius and World War II codebreaker.

Using the ideas and images from his favorite film, Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the brilliant choreography of Laura Karlin, Invertigo Dance Theatre’s Founding Artistic Director, creates a dream-like, fascinating world of mathematics, artificial intelligence, and cryptography that is also a love story, and a tale that expresses great loneliness and injury.

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Making strong use of the troupe’s floor-based dance movement and sinuous contemporary style, Formulae & Fairy Tales was one of 20 nationwide works selected for a prestigious New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project production grant. 

Invertigo will continue to tour Formulae & Fairy Tales during the 2020-21 season, starting with a performance at the University of Florida Performing Arts’ Phillips Center on February 5, 2020. Seriously, if you miss it in LA, it’s worth a plane ticket. 

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For those unfamiliar with the story of Alan Turing, considered the father of artificial intelligence and the computer, this genius of  a computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist basically broke German code and turned the tide of World War II. Despite this heroic victory, following the war, he was cruelly persecuted for being homosexual, convicted of “gross indecency” by the country he helped save, and in 1954, he died by eating an apple laced with cyanide, a desperate act that was likely inspired by Snow White. 

Karlin describes the dance performance as “a rejection of tragedy in favor of hope, redemption, and an implacable desire that our world be better for the people living in it,” which not only sums up Turing’s life and Karlin’s telling of his story, but also the troup’s truly give-back philosophy, with its Dancing through Parkinson’s program and various school programs.  And it just might sum up the palpable joy that vibrates through this Invertigo performance and those we’ve had the pleasure of seeing in the past.

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During the show, much witty, trenchant, and loving use is made of Turing’s love for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first animated feature to be produced in English and in Technicolor©. The muse of fractured film images as well as numbers, letters, and binary code is projected behind the dancers as they leap, writhe, soar, and collapse onto the stage. 

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Karlin has managed to embody Turing’s creativity, his mathematical world, his hidden meanings, his secret love life. Throughout the 80 minute performance, the dancers’ movements often play on computational systems, on the known and unknown.

The end result is both magical and precise, story telling crafted from motion. And that motion often  mirrors the decoding of classified information in that dancers and viewers alike are bound to the mystery and resolution.

Karlin created the choreography in collaboration with the dancers: Cody Brunelle-Potter, Hyosun Choi, Jessica Dunn, Spencer Jensen, Corina Kinnear, Dominique McDougal, and Luke Dakota Zender. Composers Toby Karlin, Julia Kent, and Eric Mason’s music are also featured in the piece.

Karlin was compelled to create the work after hearing an NPR broadcast about Janna Levin’s book on Turing,  A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines;  the end result is both a beautiful tribute to Turing and a fresh representation of Levin’s fascinating material. Unlike the rather staid film about Turing’s life released in 2016, The Immitation Game, Karlin’s work gets into the heart, soul, and sensuous bones of her subject.

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The joy, defiance, and anguish in a final dance featuring Turing and his lover, meeting not lip to lip but with an apple clenched in their teeth between them, is absolutely brilliant. Like the production itself, this is an incredible, richly memorable moment in dance.

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When Karlin joined the dancers tonight for a final bow, the company received a well-deserved standing ovation.

 

Tickets are now on sale at www.thebroadstage.org or by calling 310.434.3200.

The Eli & Edythe Broad Stage is located at 1310 11th St. Santa Monica CA 90401. Parking is free.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Joe Lambie, George Simian – provided courtesy of Invertigo Dance Theatre

 

Experiencing Eric Thaller

Posted on by Diversions LA

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Eric Thaller describes himself as “inspired by the human experience. The brilliant, the profound, the sad, the unimaginable. There is so much to learn.  And to share. I like to share and re-share through my work. I think this is the essence of art.”

And the essence of Thaller’s complex, asethetically thrilling work is experiential. According to the artist “I don’t want people to view my work.  I want them to experience my work. I endeavor to create imagery that is compelling on its own, but this is not enough.  I will have failed if the viewer simply glances at the visual composition and walks on. I want the viewer to engage in the piece.”

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He describes messages in his work as sometimes explicit, other times hidden to reveal the context behind them and the human experience they contain. He asks viewers not to judge the work merely from a distance, but to get close to it. When one does, Thaller’s work grabs the viewer, and surprisingly won’t let go visually or emotionally, as is surely intended.

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He notes “There is always some other dimension to the work that I hope will draw in the viewer. This secondary element could be the process itself, an embedded message, or a visual surprise when up close.  My last series, Rebirth of the Pixel, incorporates all three.”

His process of creation is entirely unique, beginning with the message or information he wants to convey.

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“Once I’ve figured this out, then I plan the execution of the works. In Rebirth of the Pixel, each of the images required a translation into the 4 colors of the palette.  This allowed me to visualize where the individual pixels – Legos in this case – needed to be placed one at time.”

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The monochromatic palette in no way diminishes the deep visceral imact of the work, the detail and precision of which is mind-blowing.

Thaller asserts “For the full series I individually placed hundreds of thousands of Lego pieces.  It took me 2 years.” 

He chose his current palette so that the work would “permeate with a sense of history and time. From far away, I’m aiming for a very detailed image. Up close I want people to see the pixels and appreciate the process.”

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In his Rebirth of the Pixel series, he relates that the 4 pixels range from black at the weakest intensity of the spectrum to white at the strongest – with just two pixels in between.  He describes the chosen palette as selected in order to “emulate the effects of black and white photography.”  Using Legos as a construct injects a sense of fun and accessability to images that are filled with gravitas.

The overall sensation when viewing is that of entering into a black and white photo, a realm more dimensional than could be conveyed in conventional photographic art. The palette, though limited, vibrates, as if the image could plunge from the work and into real life. The viewer experiences a kind of futuristic noir from this series: there’s a poignant history to each image, and the sense of seeing it from an almost sci-fi perspective.

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Thaller says that his work has undergone a lot of changes over the years. “Mostly around the medium though. I’ve experimented with a lot of different techniques.  But I would say my focus around creating experience hasn’t changed at all. And I don’t think it will.” 

Upcoming for the Los Angeles-based Thaller is a series of pieces contemplating the impacts of social media on younger generations, family, and culture in general. 

“I truly believe in technology as a positive force, but also think it is important to be cognizant of the negative externalities that result from overuse and dependence,” he explains. “The irony in these pieces is that I force the viewer to use technology itself to access the explicit message I want to convey. ” 

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist