Prime Territory at MOAH Cedar

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Through January 22nd at MOAH Cedar in Lancaster, Dani Dodge holds forth with an installation that soars as widely and wildly as a desert sky. Prime, like many of the artist’s exhibitions, is immersive. So much so here, in fact, that viewers might almost catch a whiff of desert sage andthe fragrance of a Joshua Tree in bloom.

The exhibition, which fills all three galleries at Cedar, is comprised of three parts.  The main room is layered with translucent panels, on which Dodge has created gold leaf and delicately painted acrylic work depicting an ephermeral, mirage-like shimmer of desert images. The experience is a walk-through installation, with viewers able to walk behind and within the panels. Adding to the experiential nature is a soundtrack of cello music the artist created herself and recorded sounds of desert animals at dawn.

Along with the gauzy painted panels, a sculptural form created from a twisted mattress spring hangs in the center of the gallery, with the panels waverying around it. It stands as a kind of monument to how human inhabitants intrude on the quiet grace of the desert, and how the desert itself may banish that habitation in its own good time. 

The artist has provided pencils and slips of paper on which to write what types of places bring them peace – as the desert brings piece to Dodge. Safety pins are also provided so that viewers can pin what they’ve written, adding them to their thoughts to the exhibition itself.

 

Across the hall,  Dodge displays images from three separate bodies of work, as seen above. These include a quite wonderful video installation of desert animals captured during her 2019 artist-in-residence stay at the Prime Desert Woodland Preserve in Lancaster. Here we see animals from jackrabbits to coyotes and desert mice as they come and go during the night.  Also on display is a wonderful, glowing collection of painted gold leaf and photography that was part of an earlier exhibition held at Black Rock Gallery in Joshua Tree.

The artist’s love for the shape, form, and fragility of the Joshua Tree is resurrecting. Dodge is intent on helping to preserve the land, creating a sense of hope that with her passion directed at preserving them, these wonderful living flora can survive man’s worst intentions. There is also a second recovered metal mattress spring displayed in this gallery, its form twisted by nature and time after being discarded in the desert.  

If you love the desert, love immersive finely wrought art, or simply want to experience desert wonder without trudging through the sand, Dodge’s exhibition is a must-see. The fine spiritual sense of her work here is both uplifting and poignant, speaking to the ruthlessness of human contact on the desert, the fragility of the desert itself, and the ways in which we can help to preserve it, if we love those aqua skies and golden sands, those brown hills and small brown creatures that inhabit them, those glorious, uplifted arms of the Joshua, and the land’s spectacular, raw sunrises and sunsets.

Above, Dodge with MOAH’s Robert Benitez (left), and Jason Jenn (right).

Like the artist does herself, we can come visit the desert every  January and pay tribute to it, and this year, we can also head to the Cedar galleries to see how Dodge has done so. The exhibition runs through January 22nd.

It also includes a series of lovely desert images created by children participating in activation classes the artist provided at the Preserve throughout her residency.

MOAH: CEDAR Center for the Arts

44857 Cedar Avenue, Lancaster, CA 93534

Open Tuesday and  Wednesday  |   11 AM  – 6 PM

Open Thursday – Sunday   |    11 AM  –  8  PM

  • Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis

Ornitomancy – Omens Add Up to Beautiful Art

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As always, infused with poetry, spirit, and magic, the works by Vojislav Radovanović in his new solo exhibition assuredly dazzle. Curated by Jason Jenn, Radovanovic’s ORNITHOMANCY, now at Diana Berger Gallery through the 29th, is a resonant and rather astonishing blend of despair and joy. 

Overwhelmingly, joy triumphs, but there is acknowledgement of the precariousness of the natural beauty the artist celebrates, a poignancy to the hope in his shining stars and soaring birds. 

The title refers to these birds, as ornithomancy is the ancient practice found in numerous global cultures of reading omens from the actions of birds.  And the portents they present on the wing here are richly wrought, acknowledging both troubled times and the ways in which we, like Radovanovic’s avian messengers, have the chance to fly through them, and choose a new route through the world. But it’s our choice. We may accept and embrace this chance or discard it.

Unfolding in a beautifully laid-out series of gallery rooms, ORNITHOMANCY is a fully immersive exhibition offering a throughline of wonder despite the bleak urbanity that also surfaces in this show. But that bleakness is one which Radovanovic encourages the viewer to both acknowledge and transcend. 

In “Wasteland,” a free-standing mixed media installation encompassing paint and ink, barren trees, paint cans, cement, broken glass, broken mirror, paper, and a collection of found wire, feathers, glass jars, and shells, as well as miscellaneous thrift store finds, the viewer is presented with a conundrum. These are desolate objects contained in this installation, but nonetheless they’re beautiful, graceful, and moving to observe. 

Curated in at an angle but still in juxtaposition, “Rising from the Ashes III” brings us the hope culled from our observation of that eloquent “Wasteland.” This is a flat out beautiful piece, combining acrylic paint with elements ranging form ink and feathers to silver thread and plastic beads, creating a rich tapestry both fanciful and alchemic. Wings spread wide, stars trailing across the wall like the discarded flowers of a celestial garden, there’s a struggle here, as well as an ultimate sense of rising victory.

Directly behind the mid-gallery “Wasteland, ” the fierce blue and lustrous silver of “Ancient Wanderers,” is also a mix of acrylic paint, silver leaf, and peaslescent push pins. The work also features beautiful paper stars created from old road maps, as if showing us the way through our struggle. These birds are leading us somewhere that the sky is still clear and the air is sweet, and the road ahead literally papered with stars.

Delicately painted, the ribbons crisscrossing the sky and trees of “Migrations” leads us to believe that we may have to move our nests to find succor. This is such a beautiful work, a hinged canvas surface that is reminsicent of an unfolded icon in a 13th century church. This may be meaningful: birds are also angelic here, highly spirtual in their visualization. As a side note, many of the rounded tops of canvases, backgrounds, or cut-out materials throughout the exhibition recall vestibules for saints in ancient churches.  This may be a factor in the reverential quality that the viewer can feel in these gallery spaces.
It’s hard to convey the strange and liquid loveliness of “Prophecy,” works contained in glass aquariums, with water, ink and acrylic on paper. They are literally and figuratively submerging. Behind these small, wet dioramas, rises a large scale projection of a beautiful video installation, “Parable (The Wanderers), ”  images by Radovanovic and music by Joseph Carrillo.  The two installations are located in the gallery’s projection room.
Moving out of the projection room, our feathered friends reveal a far darker cast in “Omen,” in which a red-eyed bird  – his eye splendidly beaded – carries a pen in his talons,  that pen dripping ink. What has been written, and what can still be erased?
The large-scale “Sublimination” is almost a resolution of the dark and light elements here. Working with materials including paint, plywod, abandonded tires, thorny branches, and even a deer antler,  here the road-map-stars seem to have led us as far as we can go. Still, the winged figure behind the tire appears haloed, perhaps offering a kind of harsh salvation.
And yet — is this really our pre-designed, foretold path?
There is so much luminosity here – the use of silver leaf, thread, and other shiny materials, the anguish of a reaching, doll-like child clutching a feather in “Oracle,” with a bird flying above the silver-leaf covered portal, feathers cast across it; aching with a sorrowful meaning. Equally glowing, and far brighter is the innocence of a visually dynamically colored child on a trike riding on a path through the stars in “Starry Ride.” Has the child, in his innocence, found the way out of the wasteland?
Ask yourself questions, trace the enigmatic and beautiful paths in the exhibition. Truly the best way to describe the experience – and it is that, an experience – of viewing this exhibition, is to return to the idea of wonder.
We may wonder dark thoughts, hope for good omens, rise like the birds, cast feathers to ritual, but the inherent wonder in simply being alive, the magic of foretelling, prophecy, and prayer – is embedded everywhere in these astonishing, utterly fresh works. Perhaps noone but Radovanovic could create so much of a passion play, a tour-de-force visual theater in which the viewer is waiting, waiting for something to uplift, to resonate. And the wait will not take long.

There is such an enormity to both the quality and quantity of the work here. It’s grand and gorgeous, at turns ominous and even doomed. But in the end there is a sense of glory, the possibility, at least, that by listening to the visual song of these beautiful birds, we too shall rise and head skyward, migrating to Radovanovic’s winged Heavens. A big bravo to both Radovanovic and to Jenn’s powerful curation that shapes the story of these works.

Go on, drive out (or fly) to Walnut and see for yourself. Diana Berger Gallery is located at 100 N. Grand Ave., Walnut, CA 91789 on the Mt. San Antonio College campus.

Gallery hours are limited: Tuesday & Wednesday: 11am-2pm, Thursday: 1-4pm.

Curator & Artist Walkthrough: Thursday, September 8, 1pm;  Special Hours: Saturday, September 24th: 1-4pm

​Gallery contact: (909)274-4328 / (909) 367-4586; to schedule an exhibition tour, please email Phoebe Millerwhite, pmillerwhite@mtsac.edu

  • Genie Davis; exhibition photos provided by the artist and curator

 

Sanctuary of the Aftermath – A Dazzling Exhibition of Land, Sea, and Spirit

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Now through June 12th, both virtually and in person by appointment, Sanctuary of the Aftermath at Angel’s Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro brings viewers to the ocean, the earth, and heavenward. It’s a beautiful exhibition featuring the work of ten visual and one audio artist: David Hollen, Ibuki Kuramochi, Jason Jenn, Rosalyn Myles, Vojislav Radovanovic, Allison Ragguette, Kayla Tange, Nica Aquino, Jeff Frost Anita Getzler, and an audio work by Joseph Carrillo.

Color palettes are muted, natural materials are featured, and motion-filled images predominate – whether a mutable, participatory Zen garden, an astoundingly lovely video, or the dream-like sense of floating induced by audio soundscape. Within that motion is a sense of connection – between earth, ocean, heaven; between humans and the environment; between the living and the dead. It powerfully evokes the senes of connectedness long missing during the preceding year, and as the title implies, what sanctuary and relief we are now able to find. Art itself seems key to provide both.

Raguette’s large scale sculptural wall art, “Cross Section Eclipse” is glorious and eerie, a magical view of an underwater kingdom, a fragile yet fierce connected ecosystem.

Tange’s interactive Zen garden and woven “The Rise and Fall of Decadence” have an equally sea-centric appearance, meditative and peaceful, with the woven work reminiscent of fishermen’s nets.

It is an island of family that forms Aquino’s “A 2020 Reflection,” shaped from a window of video, flickering LED candles, flowers, and fruit – all creating a personal altar of healing, but one that seems rooted in the culture of an island home.

Hollen’s “Indra’s Net” reminds the viewer of sea-grass or driftwood, revealing the viewer examining the work, the reflective glass balls placed within the piece add to the sense of finding a cluster of objects washed up from the sea.

Partially hidden behind blackened branches from a recent wildfire, a speaker plays Carrillo’s hypnotic auditory composition. As the music trembles, rises, and falls, the listener is reminded of the tidal pulse of the sea and the rush of a flaring fire; it seems to speak of the transitory nature of time, change, and life itself.

Fully rooted in the earth but offering an almost hallucinogenic and soaring vision is the large screen video that pulls viewers into the gallery space behind it. Jeff Frost’s “Circle of Abstract Ritual,” takes viewers on a journey through 300,000 still photos which shift and spin through a 12-minute work that leads from the Slabs beyond the Salton Sea and desert ruins to the city and back again.

The works unfolding beyond the film include pieces by curators Radovanovic and Jenn. Radovanovic’s “Descent of the Holy Spirit,” takes us from our own temporal realm to heaven, with a ladder serving as a sense of passage from the heap of Angel’s Gate park soil in which it is rooted past glittering stars hung on the gallery wall, and up a ladder past rungs tied with jewel-like glass jars bearing flames on a transcendent journey.

Likewise site-specific is Jenn’s “Angel’s Gate Leaf Mandala” which uses dried leaves plucked from the grounds of Angel’s Gate Park to form a meticulous, spiritual spiral transformed by the use of gold and copper leaf and a sparkling royal purple.

Myles’ “Pieces of Us,” rejoices in an abundance of harvest with careful compositional placement of collecting baskets and dried peas. But above these hang ghostly, lacy shapes that that recall the passing of those who gathered past harvests.

Getzler’s work ties land and sea, the living and the dead, with a series of works, “Evocation 1, 2, and 3.”

Dried rose petals are kept in bottles, stored in a drawer, and the central focus of a video elegy filmed by Radovanovic and Jenn.

In the video work, filmed with the glow of Magic Hour sunset around her, the artist honors the dead by tossing handfuls of petals into the ocean, as the Jewish prayer for the dead is performed on the soundtrack.

Kuramochi’s “The Memory of Physicality” (above) links viewers fully back to the vicissitudes and the tenuousness of life with a galvanizing video work essentially framed by rivulets and drifts of human hair that speak to loss and growth and an essential, soul-healing shearing.

Speaking to both the spirit and the strength of sea, earth, and human survival, of this life and the afterlife, Sanctuary of the Aftermath is an exceptional show, one that dances with passion while remarkably exuding a sense of welcoming peace. Don’t miss.

Ann Weber, above

And while you’re at Angel’s Gate, definitely take in the exhibition of studio artists’ work, re-adaptations, which also explores connection, reinvention, and relationship. Exhibiting in this lovely show, in a variety of mediums, are Phoebe Barnum, Delora Bertsch, Lynn Doran, Beth Elliott, Henry Krusoe, Vanessa Madrid, Tim Maxeiner, W.S. Milner, Lowell Nickel, Michelle Seo, Nancy Voegeli-Curran, and Ann Weber.

The exhibition is located at Angels Gate Cultural Center,
3601 S Gaffey St, San Pedro.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis