TAM Creates Magic with Three Potent Exhibitions

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TAM Creates Magic with Three Potent Exhibitions by Genie Davis

There are three powerful art exhibitions at Torrance Art Museum now through May 24th. Each is exciting in use of material, form, and a message at once inclusive and emphasizing both the diversity and promise of human interaction and differences.

In the main gallery, Body Counts adds up to something special, presenting a wide variety of media that highlights figurative art, while also reflecting on  representation, trust, group dynamics, alienation and the effects of these on today’s democracy, structure, and civil rights. Artists offer realistically figurative – and less so – paintings as well as more eliptical images through kinetic sculptures that rivet with mysterious motion. Artists in this fascinating group show include Alison Blickle, Danie Cansino, Amir H. Fallah, Lanise Howard, Justine Otto, Duane Paul, Jose Sanchez III, Meghan Smythe, and Haena Yoo, whose sculptural works are richly involving.

In gallery 2, a solo show is visually – and literally – electrifying. David DiMichele’s Envirotechnology is startling combination of technology and nature.

Artist David DiMichelle

Utilizing LED light tubing, DiMichelle literallly and figurative entwines light strips with oak branches, creating what looks like a lightning strike on a tree, while emphasizing the metaphorical idea that nature and technology can co-exist harmoniously.  The space shimmers with light as the gallery transforms into one immersive sculpture.

In the museum’s Dark Room, Erin Cooney’s video installation Aire Libre draws viewers into a haunting depiction of environmental disharmony and injustice. Filmed in South LA and made collaboratively with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, a community advocacy group based in Commerce and Long Beach, the images swirl and seethe. At the exhibition opening March 29, a live performance based on elements of Aire Libre was held in the museum’s courtyard, in which dancers performed live choreography also rendered on screen merging into a collective experience.

Each of these exhibitions are joyous, while offering questions about the importance of community, collective alchemy, and bodily independence. Don’t miss these three wildly inventive and rewarding shows. On view now through May 24th.

Torrance Art Museum hours are 11-5 Tuesday-Saturday; the museum  is located at 3320 Civic Center Drive in Torrance.

  • Written by Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis

 

 

 

 

 

MAS Attack – A Mutual Appreciation Society Art Pop Up for Our Times

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Community. Caring. Loads of love and sharp, social commentary art.  Conceived and curated by Torrance Art Museum director Max Presneill, this was one special evening at TAM, radiating with a sense of support and jubilant joy even in the face of uncertain (at best) times. LaLena Lewark-Presneill DJ’d; Jorin Bossen and Mark Fisher assisted; docent Katherine Orlin manned the desk.

While art on the wall might suggest “the end” times “…and scene,” this was the start of a really big scene of terrific art – over 300 artworks in all, from sculptures to paintings, photography, mixed media, and everything in between – and phenomenal art loving support with between 700 and 800 attendees. In three short, super fun hours on a very lucky Friday the 13th for all who came, a feast of art and happiness was on the table.

I didn’t get to say hi to all of you – and I missed some works – but here is somewhat of a compilation of terrific art.

If you were there, relive the glorious experience; if you were not, now you can pretend you were.

And share this story! We have no pay wall – so spread the love on and around.

  • Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis

Color, Light, Shape, Magic – Risky Business at TAM

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Artist Fatemeh Burnes, above

Through May 4th, the Torrance Art Museum is vibrating with a rainbow palette and exceptional non-figurative paintings. This is a don’t-miss show, alive with brush stroke and texture, a tribute to the art of painting and the risk of creating work that requires both contemplation and jubilation.

These are evocative, deeply felt, and entirely unique human works,  a response, as curators Marie Thibeault and Max Presneill note, to the “concerns and expectations of AI” dominating the artistic landscape today. These often large-scale, always immersive works are highly personal, and yes, risk taking in the aptly named RISKY BUSINESS: A PAINTER’S FORUM.

The unique and wonderfully painterly world the artists create here are each special, unpredictable, and fresh. In short, they are everything that AI is not. This overflowing cornucopia of fruitful art is created by an impressive selection of creators including Nick Aguayo, Sharon Barnes, Michael Bauer, Fatemeh Burnes, Galen Cheney, Mark Dutcher, Barbara Friedman, John Goetz, Zachary Keeting, Robert Kingston, Christopher Kuhn, Annie Lapin, Michael Mancari, Ali Smith, Vian Sora, Marie Thibeault, Liliane Tomasko, Chris Trueman, Suzanne Unrein,  and Audrey Tulmiero Welch.

In a contrasting but vivid and exciting installation, the museum’s Dark Room is concurrently showing The Reflecting Pool: Emergence of the Third Eye. Here artist Kenneth Salter employs the technological to create an interactive device that generates mesmerizing, neo-psychedelic, fractal images and sounds. Responding mysteriously and marevlously to movements of the viewer’s hands, it’s an immersive and hypnotic work that surrounds and soothes.

Not to be forgotten – although admittedly not to my personal taste – is a traveling exhibition in Gallery 2. The Marvels of Old Masters: Rembrandt, Goya and Dürer brings local viewers over 60 artworks on loan from the Park West Museum in Southfield, Michigan.  These are impressive wood carvings, engraving, and woodcuts from three giants of art history: Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), Francisco Goya (1746-1828), and Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). It’s a terrific art inclusion for TAM, and don’t pass it by – however, for us, the truly riveting work is the living color shining in the main gallery and the dark room.

TAM is located at 3320 Civic Center Drive in Torrance, and is open 11-5 Tuesday-Saturday.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

Art as Medicine at Torrance Art Museum

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If medicine is an art – can art be medicine? The answer is a resounding yes at Torrance Art Museum where two exhibitions are also about medicine.

Provocative, healing and thoughtful both the museum’s galleries feature art that literally and figuratively dissects medical intervention and practice, the body’s capacity to heal and be healed , chronic illness, pain and acceptance, and the state of American medical care.

Gallery Two presents a vivid, compelling exhibition created by patient artists in Art and Med.

Curated by Ted Meyer, the show features work by Ellen Cantor, Ayin Es, Rose-Lynn Fisher, Siobhan Hebron, Cathy Immordino, Rachael Jablo, Daniel Leighton,  Krista Machovina, J. Fredric May, Bhanva Mehta, Dylan Mortimer, Kathy Nida, Alice Marie Perreault, Jane Szabo, Susan Trachman, James T. Walker, and Meyer himself.

Intense and beautiful, viewers see beautiful, heart wrenching and beautiful photographic images of a complicated pregnancy from Cathy Immordino in “Cry for Help;” “Two Mirrors,” a wall sculpture offering a look inside Alice Marie Perreault’s role as advocate and caregiver; and Daniel Leighton’s vivid iPad painting radiating pain and healing – and the admission of same – in “Opening Up.”

Also on exhibit is the delicate mix of Ayin Es’ “Inherited Shock,” a woven wonder of oil, pencil, embroidery, thread, wire, paper, and pins on canvas; Dylan Mortimer’s zen garden and glitter reimagining of an ambulance ride in “Gates in Proximity to Paradise;” and Meyer’s own sinuous skeleton figure in “Structural Abnormalities” among so many other fine works, including dream-like photography from Jane Szabo, and terrific sculptural work from Krista Machovina among more.

For over a decade Ted Meyer had curated art shows focusing on artworks by patient-artists as a means of teaching future doctors and current medical workers about the lived experience of chronic pain and illness.

These patient-artists create work that depicts the myriad of ways their illnesses affect day-to-day living, physical health and mental well-being.  Like all important art, patient artwork makes strong statements about the human condition.  These works are personal in their creation yet universal in their scope. They make up some of Meyer’s favorites from his times as Artist-in-Residence at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.  Over 10 years he has curated some 40 different exhibits tied to the school’s core curriculum, producing beautiful exhibits that are also both compelling and informational ones.

In Gallery One, the medical world is both personal and more political in Body Politics. Curated by Max Presneill and Sue-Na Gay, this potent exhibition examines not only the disabled body, but how it is seen both socially and politically. The presenting artists include Panteha Abareshi, Emily Barker, Yadira Dockstader, Mari Katayama, Katherine Sherwood, and Liz Young.

Emily Barker’s witty and scathing “Good Medicine is Bitter to the Mouth” offers pithy commentary on health in the U.S.

There are heartbreaking installations dealing with medical billing, how the physical body is treated,  specimens and body parts, and the general treatment of those with disabilities or infirmities. It’s an achingly strong show.

View these two powerful exhibitions through September 9th, along with videos in the museums screening room, featuring Surrealist Vacations In The Subconscious 2023— a video art exhibition, curated by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne / The New Museum of Networked Art, inspired by the Manifesto of Surrealism by Andre Breton.

TAM is located at 3320 Civic Center Drive in Torrance, Calif.

  • Genie Davis;  photos: Genie Davis