We Are All Under One Roof – Genie Davis
Opening Sunday, February 22nd at Santa Monica Studios at the Airport Arts Center, Under One Roof is a sweeping exhibition featuring 32 artists. The show is located in a space managed by LA’s Community Arts Resources and is curated by Peter Frank. The title speaks not just to the artists who are in the show, who work in the Airports Arts Center complex, but to the zeitgeist of today’s world. Despite the many fissures, cracks, and divides, we all live in one world, under one roof of sky.
The works are as varied as the artists creating them, ranging from painting to sculpture, photography, drawn images, ceramics, and textiles. Exhibiting artists include:
Melinda Smith Altshuler, M Susan Broussard, Barbara Carrasco, Gregg Chadwick, Claudia Concha, Lola Del Fresno, Alexandra Dillon; Wendy Edlen, Nina Girvetz, Elizabeth Gorcey, Deborah Lynn Irmas, Sara Issakharian, Sheila Karbassian, Annette Miae Kim, Susie McKay Krieser, Sally Lamb, Makala Lee, Luigia Martelloni, Patrizia Martiradonna, Crystal Michaelson, Mobina Nouri, Margaret Oakley, Sabine Pearlman, Elham Sagharchi, Gwen Samuels, Daniela Schweitzer, Pamela Simon, Doni Silver Simons, Julie Weiss, Joan Wulf, Rebecca Youssef, and Leila Youssefi.
Among the many highlights are Alexandra Dillon’s “Tree of Life,” with its ripe pomegranates and delightful flowers bursting from some seemingly withered branches, speaking to the resilience of life and nature itself.
Gregg Chadwick’s “Arrival and Departure” is a softly impressionistic blur of motion with an army helicopter hovering over the White House, an image that speaks to our time while also being quite lovely and mysterious in a wash of golden light. Is someone fleeing the scene? Is someone being protected?
Doni Silver Simon’s “Untitled,” an acrylic on unstretched canvas work, provides a lush, elusive green and olive composition that is quiet but compelling, evoking a forest, a swamp, and a sense of two possibilities, one dark, one light.
Annette Kim’s “California” is a map and grid with a black chasm in the golden center that speaks to both the potential divisiveness of the natural world – the San Andreas fault, perhaps, and our social divide. The golden state is not entirely whole, and neither are we.
Mobina Nouri offers a hypnotic, wavelike series of patterns, thin and perfect white lines undulating over a rich dark blue background amd tranforming into human figures with a mesmerizing effect.
Elizabeth Gorcy’s haunting figurative work, as softly out of focus as the dark background into which it blends, recalls both saints and sinners, Puritan ancestors and witchy women.
Joan Wulf’s “Meditations” reveals a repeated pattern of columns or books, a mind game that matters.
And most poignantly, Barbara Carrasco’s “Detained Girl” is an image of a young, vital immigrant with a wire fence behind her, and undoubtedly around her, an image that provides a clean, sharp, figurative look as real as today’s world.
And speaking of the world itself, Luigia Martelloni offers a globe precariously positioned on a wooden seesaw-like base in “Unrooted.”
Each of the works presented here are rich with heart and soul, forming an exhibition that is powerful and bold.
An opening reception is scheduled for Sunday, February 22, from 2 to 5 p.m. at 3026 Airport Arts Center, Santa Monica.
- Genie Davis; photos provided by the exhibition