Four Times the Art at Gabba Gallery

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Now through January 27th at Gabba Gallery, four strong solo shows in a range of mediums offer a bold beginning to the new year.
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With Give and Take, Cyrus Howlett offers a bright, vivid palette of red, yellow, and aqua against raw and uncoated wood. His images are of hands.
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Powerful, graceful hands are enigmatically suspended in an undefined space, offering images that have overtones of AI and VR and reveal the potential for understanding through gesture.
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With Evolution, Dytch66’s lush, hyper-realistic style is a beautiful outgrowth of his street art. The LA-based artist uses spray paint to create these detailed images, shaping resonant, graceful works with amazing precision.
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Above, Dytch66’s “The King.”
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Spacegoth creates a world here inhabited by playful devils and those humans who have left this mortal plane. There is a sense of the ominous and the playful coexisting side by side in these works, which at times feature words as well as images. In short, she’s filling The Void. 
Some images emerge from that void with a delightful sharp touch of the whimsical, as below, with “Nobody.”
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Above, “Nobody wants to talk to me, but everyone wants to walk with me”
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Other images, such as the above “I Spent a lot of time in the background,” have a darker resonance.
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With ARTSTAR, Kate Kelton uses acrylics on found and assembled woods, in an exploration of immortality and stardom.
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Her gorgeous black and white works have a throwback quality, as if they were created in another time or another realm. Beautifully evocative, her work is both romantic and fully alive, a celebration of the past and the promise of eternity.

The uniqueness of each artist’s work gives Gabba a strong start to 2018, with four fully-realized solo shows all in one fun space.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by Gabba Gallery

Gabba Gallery Wishlist 5 – Art Wishes Granted

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Gabba Wishlist

Opening this Saturday, November 18th, Wishlist 5 at Gabba Gallery is a holiday cash and carry show that promises its annual eclectic mix of amazing local artists. There’s a sentence you’d best not say too quickly, but what should be done quickly is go to the opener. The show runs through December 16th, but you won’t want to miss the hot-on-the-walls works of artists curated by gallerists Jason Ostro and Elena Jacobson. Including the work of over 70 local to international artists, works are all priced under $1000, and buyers can take the art home immediately – something new and artistically amazing will appear in its place.

IMG_6504 IMG_6505 IMG_6506 IMG_6507The evolving exhibition includes works by:

8333, ÷–x+, Alex Achaval, Douglas Alvarez, Balloonski, Allison Bamcat, Cody Bayne, Terri Berman, BIOWORKZ, Nicholas Bonamy, Clinton Bopp, Nicole Bruckman, CANTSTOPGOODBOY, Kate Carvellas, J. Scott Chapman, M. Christy, L. Croskey, Bibi Davidson, Dcypher, Keith Dugas, Carly Ealey, Joey Feldman, Jaq Frost, Rene Gagnon, Anyes, Galleani, Peter Greco, Mike Habs, Patrick Haemmerlein, Cloe Hakakian, Mary Hanson, Hero, Cyrus Howlett, Warren Jacobson, Jspot Jr., Nagisa Kamae, Kate Kelton, Leah Knecht, Jennifer Korsen, Andrea LaHue, Leba, Stephen Levey, Lauren Mendelsohn-Bass, Moncho1929, Morley, Mr. Melty, Max Neutra, Henry Niller, Jeremy Novy, NvrAlone, Jason Ostro, Judy Ostro, Phobik, Valerie Pobjoy, Olga Ponomarenko, Patrick Quinn, Christina Ramos, Christine Rasmussen, Red Dahlia, George Rivera, Roaming Elephant, Phil Santos, Septerhed, Shawn Sexton, Jeffrey Sklan, Amy Smith, Bisco Smith, Mable Song, Spacegoth, Hannah Streety, Skye Amber Sweet, Matthew Steidley, Ten Hundred, Tatiana Tensen, Toshee, Gilberto Ulloa, Vakseen, Em Wafer, Sebastien Walker, Christine Webb, Pastey Whyte, wrdsmth, Mimi Yoon, Erin Yoshi, Meg Zany, Essi Zimm, among others.

We know this work will be mind-blowingly cool – we’ve attended all four previous iterations of Wishlist. And, we were thrilled by the exciting, visceral work in the gallery’s October-November four-solo show exhibition, which is now closing, featuring Hero, Collin Salazar, Lucas Raynaud, and Dcypher. 

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Above, Lucas Raynaud

Raynaud described his dimensional work, Growing Up, as an escape from today’s social and political reality. “My last show was very political, but I felt like this could be an escape, something fun, something that brought back memories of a better time, when I was a kid in the 80s. It’s my way to escape what’s going on right now.”

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Above, Hero

Casey Courey-Pickering, who goes by the artist name, Hero says, that in the last eight years of political “hope,” shadows have come to the surface “much like how forging steel brings the metal’s imperfections out.”  Here, he is melding those shadows against hope for the future. Hero’s thoughts on his street-art exhibition of stenciled paintings, Shadows of Hope: “When I created these pieces, for a long time I knew the images but not the messages. The title of the show highlights my own personal experience. The shadows have always existed, but particularly now, I wanted to have inspiration.”

Hero will also have work in the upcoming Wishlist 5.

Gabba Salazar

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Above, Collin Salazar

Collin Salazar’s Outer offers a visual equivalent of lucid dreaming – semi-psychedelic images in lush dripping colors, as in “Electric Feel.” He is looking to create “an expression of self-awareness…impactful abstract portraits.”

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Above, Dcypher

Dcypher’s Fiction City 2 gives viewers a beautifully detailed rendering of a dystopia that is both delicate and tragic. Influenced by both graffiti and architecture, the artists notes “This is a series of work built from the understanding that nothing lasts forever. From destruction comes creation… everything comes full circle.”

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Gabba Gallery also recently released their first print in collaboration with Judy Ostro and Sugar Press. In short: Gabba is growing.

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Wishlist opening night reception: Saturday, November 18th from 7-11pm. DJ Jonathan Williams spinning. Bar sponsored by Original New York Seltzer. Free parking at 3000 Beverly Blvd (enter off Reno) or street parking or Uber/Lyft. Gabba Gallery is located at 3126 Beverly Blvd. Wishlist 5 will be on view through December 16.

Val Kilmer: His Latest Role as an Artist in Gabba Gallery Pop-Up

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Most people know Val Kilmer for his film and theater roles, but there’s a new part in Kilmer’s dramatic quiver that is less familiar to his fans – that of artist.

“I’ve developed strong and nuanced themes in my art from acting and performance that relate to iconic images or ideas – so there’s a thread of the icon and the Iconographic throughout the exhibition,” Kilmer said of his four day pop-up at Gabba Gallery in late July.

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While the artist’s renown certainly piqued interest in the exhibition, the power of his work more than stood for itself. In Icon Go On, I’ll Go On, Kilmer creates a series of icons – iconic characters he portrayed; icon-like abstract images with a strong spiritual bent, and words representing and directed at the icon that is “GOD.”

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The exhibition title itself refers to lines in Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel, Unnamable — “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Kilmer, who resides and has a studio in New Mexico, is making his own existential declaration, having survived and healed from a run in with oral cancer. While healing, he created art.

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Divided into three main sections, the work was highly spiritual in nature. Using metal panels as canvas for his acrylics and laser cut works, some images are representational, some abstract. All in all, there were over 100 works on display, including sculptural pieces.

According to gallery owner Jason Ostro, “There is a lot of meaning to his work. Val is a very deep guy.  Super kind and extremely creative, it’s been a pleasure to work with him,” he notes.

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First up were a series of representational works with himself as a character  – Doc Holliday, Batman. Using stencils, he depicts these mythic images in an easily recognizable way, yet somehow the images are deeper than what we see on the surface. There is something otherworldly about them, as if the person who was portraying these figures were hovering just beyond the visual frame.

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Kilmer’s abstract works were beautifully colored, evoking images of the universe seen through a telescope, the stuff of ethereal, vivid dreams. Painted on metal with a black background, the shiny base of these layered, richly colored works pulls the eye deeper into the painting. Described as having a “blackhole” quality by Kilmer, there is the sense of seeing into another dimension. If the artist’s depiction of his character personas felt as if another being was hovering “off camera,” here, the viewer feels as if a different spiritual plane was floating just out of reach.

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The third section of the exhibition featured large laser-cut metal panels of the word “GOD.” Individual panels were grouped together, inviting viewers to viscerally see and connect with the word and the meaning of God. Groupings of some sixteen of these panels were paired with individual panels; others featured personal, handwritten thoughts, meditative exercises.
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There was even a neon piece created by Kilmer, a kindly commandment.
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Ostro relates that the show came about when a patron of the gallery who loved the energetic vibe of the space brought the gallery to the attention of Kilmer’s staff. “One of Val’s ‘people’ came to initially see the gallery, and after a few hours of talking and laughing, they loved it. I was told if Val was interested, he would be at the gallery sometime the next day.  I opened the doors at noon, and he was standing there eager to check out the space.  After talking for a few hours he said he’d get back to me, and a couple days later, we were planing his art show for July.”
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Above, gallerist Jason Ostro.

Kilmer fans and art lovers take note: the new exhibition opening Saturday August 12th at Gabba, Cratedigger 2, features several works by Kilmer in the second iteration of a terrific show that pays homage to the art of the record sleeve. Over a hundred international and local artists will be exhibiting.

Ostro adds that a smaller, solo show of Kilmer’s is already being planned for 2018.

  • Genie Davis; photos: courtesy of Gabba Gallery and by Genie Davis

 

Gabba Gallery: Can’t Shake the Bunnies

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Gabba Gallery will be opening a new show, Wishlist, November 12th, and you mustn’t miss it. There is always a fresh take on art and the meaning of art as discourse at this east side location.

We hope you caught the terrific four solo exhibitions that ran late September to mid-October here – if not, these are artists you should or will know, and most have appeared at Gabba in other shows.