Metaphor for Magic: Stunning Work from Vojislav Radovanovic and Museum-Wide Exceptional Exhibitions at the Museum of Art and History  

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Metaphor for Magic: Stunning Work from Vojislav Radovanovic and Museum-Wide Exceptional Exhibitions at the Museum of Art and History  – Genie Davis

The Museum of Art and History’s Metaphor, which runs January 31st through April 19th is a dazzling series of exhibitions featuring solo shows and installations from Nathan Huff, Sharon Kagan, Diane Briones Williams, Frances C. Robateau Jr., Brian Singer, Bachrun LoMele, and Vojislav Radovanovic.

MOAH curator Robert Benitez, Heber Rodriguez, and curatorial assistants Clara Baxter and Jaushua Rombaoa have presented a rich cornucopia of works which each resonate with poignancy and visual poetry.

Each show is strong and beautiful, although my focus here is on the work of Vojislav Radovanovic, who always creates mystical, magical worlds in his exhibitions. Here, with gallery walls painted in electric hues that tie in with his work, his Fables from the Valley in Between is especially alchemic. Enriched with an exuberant palette, with intricate bead work and applique, and a sublime attention to detail, the artist entrances the viewer into experiences that are rapturous and transformational.

Three-dimensional swans float across a shimmering lake; a sculpted frog and lily pad perch nearby. Paintings of birds are perfectly rendered, representing multiple meanings in serendipitous settings. Childhood play-monsters come to life; a video installation ties together elements of play, nature, pain, and passion amid natural landscapes; fairy tale characters and delightful animal figures inhabit special places in large scale works. These works are dream-like fanciful, fabulous, and deeply moving.

Integrating both human figures and animal life, weaving a tapestry of rich storytelling, Radovanovic creates a galvanizing and lovely exhibition that leads viewers through a land of connected gallery rooms. In the first, the room is populated by paintings of childhood toys and deserted Lancaster-area locales that tie into the artists own experience of turbulent unrest and warfare in eastern Europe.

Segueing into other series, “Portrait of a Painter,” gives the viewer a look at an artist as chimpanzee, paint palette in hand, paper jester’s crown on his head. It serves as a transition point from the conjoined images of warfare and play to the freedom and sense of hope in richly nuanced paintings featuring the symbolism of birds.

These paintings are a part of the artist’s Bird Circuit series, which refers to a network of mid-20th-century gay bars. The birds themselves are symbols of sanctuary and safety, indicating the location of gathering places for the gay community despite laws discouraging congregation. These images exude a powerful sense of energy, purpose, and resistance. Within the artist’s avian world there are anthropomorphic creatures, playful scenes, loving couples, and sculptural images that both charm and delight. A cut out of three “Small Birds” with beautiful green and lapis lazuli blue plumage stands above a doorway, leading into the next gallery rooms.

One of the most gorgeous images here is “Bejeweled Finch,” featuring a brilliant blue bird with a strawberry in his beak; lush, jeweled appliques sparkle in floral bursts, and the entire piece is set on a gold light reflector. It recalls both traditional religious icons and shields carried by medieval knights in battle. A very different avian image haunts the imagination in the mixed media “Omen,” featuring a silvery bird clutching a fountain pen between his teeth, ink trailing from its tip.

Across the gallery, a large video installation plays titled similarly to the exhibition itself as “The Valley in Between and Other Fables.” A variety of experimental film segments play created through poetic collaboration with the late Robert Patrick Playwright, Jason Jenn, Chuck Hohng, and Joseph Carrillo.

Having moved from childhood toys engaged in news media chaos and warfare to the fraught but free sanctuary of Radovanovic’s Bird Series, the final and largest room of the exhibition, moves into a series of works that speak to fairy tales, fantasy, and pure magic. Here viewers will meet the heavily floral image of a “Frog Prince” whose hair is landscaped into the fecund branches of a brilliant green tree. At the base of the painting, within the flora, an actual frog wearing a small gold crown, blows a kiss.

A suspended sculpture, reminiscent of Alexander Calder in shape is described by Radovanović as a “self-portrait.” The multi-armed figure has a head in the shape of a painter’s palette, while multiple arms and hands hold paint brushes. This piece also recalls the many-handed figures of Greek mythology, the Hekatonkheires.

Moving deeper into fairy tale mythology is “Fable from the Valley in Between,” which includes the “Three Little Pigs” dancing by a roaring fire while a wolf’s shadow lurks, a charming owl, a musical squirrel in a tree, and a painter’s palette moon.

Dreamy and also lightly ominous, here the magical and the sublime eclipse the possibility of dread.

“Journey Down the Stream” in this same gallery is exquisitely wonderful, depicting a curious bird watching a small paper boat carrying a dragonfly as it sails down a small, moonlit stream. This piece speaks to hope and promise, including the promise of another world. Dragonflies, after all, represent many things, including change, transformation, self-realization, joy, light, and even a connection to the spirit world — all of which are a part of Radovanovic’s work.

The other exhibitions in the museum are also potent and lovely. Nathan Huff’s Heavy Hope mixes natural beauty with elements of domesticity, creating a delicate and complete balance that includes installations and sculptures, paintings and drawings. Like Radovanovic, but completely different in style and tone, Huff deals with magic. Located in the expansive first floor gallery, the exhibit gives the viewer upended boats, chairs and flowers and stones, table tops with golden, hovering flowers.

There are perfectly nuanced gouache and watercolor works that glow with inner and external light, installations that upend expectations and move toward delight. This, too, is a fairy tale, but one steeped in the alchemy of nature and the ache of the human heart.

Sharon Kagan’s Bearing Witness is also woven with deep meaning, both literally and figuratively. Working in both mixed media painting, drawing, and textile work, her exhibition is finely wrought. Her knitted, linked, conjoined, and wonderfully sinuous sculptures explore both pain and compassion along with a profound sense of strength.

That strength and deep emotions is carried in both her use of seemingly fragile materials and through an indomitable subject. Her beautiful work explores both her own experience of human connectivity and her connection to the trauma of the Holocaust as a survivor’s daughter.

Other MOAH exhibitions include the expansive sculptural installation by Bachrun Lomele, Burn Pile/All Kinds of Murmuring Here and There which includes anonymous phrases and statements made by residents of the San Joaquin Valley, reconfigured to serve as symbols for the disjointed and ever mutable world we live in today. The installation towers between the two floors of the museum.

Francis C. Robateau Jr.’s Halftone Histories: Memory, Erasure, and Belonging is a hauntingly lovely mix of screen printing, collage, and painting. There are Mayan ruins and Lamanai sites in Belize as well as images from the LA area depicted here, each adding not only accumulated visual layers but a sense of the layers of history and ancestry, self-discovery, and communal heritage.

Also evoking a sense of heritage and cultural reimagining is artist Diane Briones Williams in her The Precarious Life of the Parol, where mixed media and textile works examine not just sculptural weavings but the memories and past history of her Filipinx identity.

Jubilantly colorful and bearing the weight of collected detritus, each image is complex and carefully rendered.

In contrast, it is a loss of heritage that makes the focus of Brian Singer’s It was a pleasure to burn.

In this exhibition, the artist examines the power of words, utilizing the text of banned books and the Bible to create beautiful, muted mosaics made of compressed book pages.

Taken together or individually, the museum’s Metaphor is a beautiful mix of the representational and abstract, of deep meaning arising from stories writ large and luminous. Experience the joy and absorb the stories: you will be wiser and happier for making the drive.

MOAH is located at 655 Lancaster Blvd. in Lancaster.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and provided courtesy of L.A. Art Documents 

Fabulous and Photographic – Before You Now at MOAH and Multispectral at Von Lintel Gallery

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Fabulous and Photographic – Before You Now at MOAH and Multispectral at Von Lintel Gallery – by Genie Davis

Just closed at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, Before You Now: Photographic Transmutation, dazzled with brilliance of idea, color, and technique. The exhibition was a tour de force of both traditional and more experimental photographic form.

The exhibition featured work in separate solo shows by five outstanding photographic artists: Ellen Friedlander, Naida Osline, Brad Miller, Osceola Refetoff,  Andrew K. Thompson.

In Brad Miller’s Water Shadows, lush black and white patterns are hypnotic and delicate, a beautiful mix of nature’s ability to create the abstract with the photographic eye’s immersion in symmetry.

The images present three different types of water: waves, ice, and bubbles, and makes of them resonant and rich captures of light and its luminous prisms on water that are as exciting and involving as they are filled with a visionary grace.

Rightly named, Botany of Transcendence: Mythic Plants through the Lens of Naida Osline provided a lush merger of intimate images of nature with vivid color in a startlingly heightened palette. The exhibition brings together 51 pieces of the artist’s compelling botanical work from 2007 until the present, each image a revelation of wonder. Within the collection on view were five different series, each layered, mystical, and dream-like.

Her focus is primarily on fungi and plants, presenting a still, almost-sacred beauty. Her use of light makes vibrantly colored images dance. In only one of the exhibited series, Chasing Clouds, do people appear, consuming plants by smoking them, surrounded by haunting and ephemeral patterns of smoke that remind the viewer of human souls exhaled.

Speaking of the soul, The Soul Speaks from Ellen Friedlander turns photography itself into a sculptural form with brilliant, bisected images that use pin hole photography and long exposures, creating intimate and highly personal portraits. The artist then cut and divided the images she shaped, reassembling them as if the emotional puzzle that makes up all our souls was fitting itself together through the revealing eye of a camera lens.

Friedlander’s result is visionary and alchemic, a transformation of self into something graceful, elliptical, and alchemic. Always a dazzling photographic artist, here her work builds an exciting new way of looking at human subjects.

Andrew K. Thompson’s A Sky Full of Holes gives the viewer exactly what his exhibition title describes: holes within images, taken from the artist’s Chemical Landscapes series. The result is both edgy and moving, speaking to climate change, humans’ often futile attempts to change nature, and the creative impulse to both alter what appears unalterable, and press our shapes into the world.

Mysterious and compelling, Thompson’s work vibrates with an intensity enhanced by his use of two-sided, standing frames for some images, each of which are a single, intense hue altered by bleach and thread.

Osceola Refetoff’s work in his Magic and Realism, previously reviewed on this site, blends documentary subjects with surrealistic elements, taking the viewer on the road and into regions as diverse as the Mojave Desert and the Arctic Circle with galvanizing results.

2023 (from the series Chromatopia)





A large collection of Refetoff’s work is now on view at Von Lintel Gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station. Multispectral runs April 26th through June 7.

From the startling and textural color compositions depicting Palm Springs to the artist’s stunning black and white images of road and desert, Refetoff’s images edge into the surreal and dreamy while creating potent portraits of the environment as seen through a visionary eye. He utilizes a variety of approaches to shape these startling depictions from pinhole photography to infrared photography to the use of non-contemporary analog filters. Multispectral exposures combine infrared and visual spectrum light using filters in front of the lens to control the recorded wavelengths.

One of the most fascinating aspects of his work is the mix of recognizable, relatable subjects with shimmering, surreal technique. The viewer is suspended between the realistic world of architectural forms, everyday objects, wide-open desert skies and roads, and a dream that merges the past and future, a dramatic reshaping of scene into something unexpected, startling, and utterly riveting.

His is a world of shapes, shadows, vibrancy, and empty spaces. With a background in filmmaking, Refetoff’s work always provides a strong narrative vision, making stories from his images, and commanding the viewer to “read” them deeply. His optical, in-camera approach to shaping his work creates a sense of the immediate in each diverse image.

Always searching for interesting subjects, he doesn’t rely on a single setting or project, but rather moves between interrelated images that provide viewers with a fresh, new approach to seeing the world around us, from ice flows to the human form.

The Von Lintel exhibition offers a rare treat for LA-area viewers, as only one of the works has ever been exhibited in Los Angeles. It will be on view through June 7th.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and provided by the artists

Magic and Realism at MOAH

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Before You Now: Capturing the Self in Portraiture and Before You Now: Photographic Transmutation, now at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History through April 13th is a wide ranging exhibition presented in partnership with Local Access and LACMA as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program. The compelling exhibition features the works of Naida Osline, uncovering the plant world with Botany of Transcendence; Andrew K. Thompson, with A Sky Full of Holes; Ellen Friedlander, with the exquisite portraiture of her exhibition The Soul Speaks; Brad Miller, with his shimmering Water Shadows; and Osceola Refetoff, with his dynamic Magic and Realism. Each artist has a different approach, but all of the works comprise a potent mix of the experimental and the traditional. Full coverage of the full exhibition is upcoming.

Turn Signals

Osceola Refetoff’s Magic and Realism, presented on the museum’s mezzanine gallery, features the artist’s stunning use of both infrared and pinhole photography. Dreamy and surreal – while also staying firmly in tune with a sense of place,  Refetoff deals with subjects as diverse as climate change and the lure of the open road, covering a wide range of physical territory from Anarctica and Svalbard in the Arctic Circle, to Palm Springs, LA, and the Mojave Desert.

Owners and Guests (Pink/Blue)  -
Multispectral exposures combine infrared and visual spectrum light using filters in front to the lens to control the wavelengths recorded.

There are hot pink palms and lawns in a brilliantly alien world of an altered Palm Springs, above, while in the artist’s “Proteus Rising,” below, a soft focus icy blue creates a poignant look at the changing climate in Antarctica.

Proteus Rising 


Chandelier on La Cienega Boulevard  

The diffused light of a chandelier is a perfect metaphor for Los Angeles in all its glamor and the grief of broken dreams. In  “Moon Under Virgo Bay,”  taken in Danskoya, Svalbard, a blue orb of sea, populated by a small ship, forms a reverse planet. Intense blue water beneath snow and ice swirls around a darker ink blot of deeper water – like a black hole beyond the Milky Way, ready to consume the known-world from the center out.

Moon Under Virgo Bay – captured during The Arctic Circle artist residency aboard the tall ship Antigua 

Throughout Magic and Realism, in the many different series that the exhibit pulls from, Refetoff’s meticulous technique includes modified digital cameras, analog filters, and pinhole devices. But, his perfection of technique takes a back seat to the lustrous colors and compelling pull of his subjects. With a background in filmmaking, Refetoff brings to the photographic art world a keen sense of visual dynamics, a stroke of noir, a hint of the Fellini-esque, and a bold design asethetic that lifts the most common of vistas into a higher realm.

Mirror Truck

Through his lens, we observe the mirrored sheen of a truck on an empty highway; a spin of white clouds down a long, linear, vanishing point of a road; a whirring section of an amusement park ride; and a row of mustard yellow golden palms.

Rock-O-Plane



These are among the many startling, significant images on display.Two of Refetoff’s artworks that already have a home in MOAH’s permanent collection, the pinhole exposure of “Blue Hopper,” shot in the Mojave, and the LA-set “Day Tripping” are also a part of the wide-ranging exhibition.

Duplexity  (from the series Chromatopia)

More of the MOAH exhibition ahead. Keep one eye turned to your cameras, and the other to this site.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist

 

 

 

Sages Marks a Grand Return for MOAH

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The word Sages connotes great experience and wisdom. A sage herself, Betty Brown beautifully curated this exhibition along with MOAH’s Robert Benitez.  As the main reopening exhibition for the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster after its year-long closure, the 19-artist show makes a perfect tour de force of beautifully created “wise” art. Along with their consummate skill as art creators, the artists featured in the exhibition have taught and mentored others, influencing and nurturing a new generation of emerging artists. In short, their commitment to community dovetails that of MOAH’s own.

All Southern Californians, the artists exhibiting include: Judy Baca, Bruce Everett, Suvan Geer, Gilah Yelin Hirsch, Connie Jenkins, Ulysses Jenkins, Sant Khalsa, Suzanne Lacy, Andrée Mahoney, Jim Morphesis, Catherine Ruane, Ruth Weisberg, John M. White, Kay Yee, and Hiroko Yoshimoto. Additionally, presenting artist solo exhibitions include Joanne Julian, Alexander Kritselis, Gerri McMillin, and Tom McMillin.

The works are laid out graciously and with space around them, allowing each artist’s work or group of works, to breathe and be seen and savored.

From the triumphant runner in Judy Baca’s big mural “Hitting the Wall,” which jubilantly greets visitors to the museum from both gallery levels, to the exquisite span of delicate leaves in Catherine Ruane’s glorious graphite “Witness Tree,” and Bruce Everett’s dazzlingly detailed quintessentially California landscape, there is a wide mix of work and artistic wonder here. Sant Khalsa’s light-filled sculptural work is mysterious, recalling an orb from another dimension or plucked from the sea. Ruth Weisberg creates a figurative, fascinating narrative that pulls the viewer into the unfolding of its story. Ulysses Jenkins’ video work shapes a vibrating musical call to action. Andree Mahoney’s work is pure Zen bliss.  John M. White’s lustrous work spills abstract flora and fauna.

Each piece is honestly a perfect artwork, a portal to the precision and profundity of excellence in art, work that excites and enligtens.

Along with the compelling group show, museum visitors can enjoy four small solo shows of Sages artists, including Joanne Julian’s work in “Starry Skies,” which gives viewers a sense of magic and wonder in varied landscapes that ache with longing. Gerri McMillin’s delicate hanging sculptural work in “Mystery Beneath” evokes Moroccan nights and the work of celestial looms. Tom McMillin’s clay wall sculptures in “The Way of Clay” is as brown and beckoning as earth. Alexander Kritsilis “Travels in Blocks of Time, Spooky Actions at a Distance,” taken from his series Descendent Dialogues is excitingly immersive in its storytelling.

Besides presenting the continuing living legacies of these artists, MOAH also honors departed art sages with Sages in Memoriam.  Serving as an elegy to these masters, this is also a varied and lovely mix of work by artists Craig Antrim, Bob Bassler, Hans Burkhardt, Carole Caroompas, Bee Colman, Dave Elder, Rachel Rosenthal, June Wayne, Roland Reiss, and Charles W. White on display in a smaller downstairs gallery.

Joining the three fine separate groupings of works curated by Brown, the museum also features strong solo work in Marsia Alexander-Clarke: Llamando, a gorgeous, vibrant, and dream-like video work that reflects both nature and aspects of cultural transition; and the reclamation of embroidered work far beyond domestic craft applications in Orly Cogan’s rich Threads of Entanglement. Cogan uses vintage fabric as a backdrop for highly of-the-moment art.

Combined, the museum’s reopening exhibitions reflect the inclusive, varied exhibitions that are MOAH, and mark a terrific welcome-back for the museum. Brown’s compassionate quest for and support of the best in at is sage indeed. The museum is open Tuesday-Saturday, and these opening exhibitions are up until August 20th. Make the drive!

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis and provided by MOAH