Delaware Art Shows- “Fissures in the Frame” at The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
Dec 192024
 

Lillian Bayley Hoover, “a planet swayed by breath”, 2024, oil on Dibond panel

Lillian Bayley Hoover, “a planet swayed by breath”, 2024, oil on Dibond panel (detail)

Marion Fink, “A mountain top full of achievements-a woman thinking of the sea.”, 2022, monotype, oil color and wax pastel on paper (left) and Lillian Bayley Hoover “here, witnessing now”, 2021, oil and pastel pencil on Dibond panel (right)

Marion Fink, “Night Sky Dreamer”, 2022, monotype, oil color and wax pastel on paper

Lillian Bayley Hoover, “the grass still sings”, 2019, acrylic and oil on Dibond panel, and “no ruined stones”, 2020, oil on Dibond panel

Teresa Shields, “Trending Threads”, 2016-17, embroidered felt and wool letter blocks, wood

Part of The Delaware Contemporary’s series of exhibitions exploring the intersection of art and design, Fissures in the Frame presents work from three artists- Marion Fink, Lillian Bayley Hoover, and Teresa Shields.

From the museum-

Although technology has increased the ease and availability of interaction, human connection has arguably become more difficult. Our daily lives have become reliant on those systems that enable, and even promote, us to interact. Modes of interchange have become more mediated; physical spaces and resources are afforded to those with access, while digital realms are accessible, but commandeer attention away to fabricated unrealities. The undercurrents of which reveal cracks; and fractured existences due to disconnect. Marion Fink, Lillian Bayley Hoover, and Teresa Shields probe these fissures, unveiling their nuance and paradox.

Marion Fink creates layered, large-scale monotype portraits that are rich with narrative elements in surrealistic settings. Raised in the early years of the digital age, Fink’s portraits allude to moments of fragmented realities; the paradox of actual, lived experiences conflated with their existence through the internet. Figures are isolated within fabricated spaces, revealing the parallels between emotion and circumstance. Fink beautifully captures these moments through competing perspectives and complex feelings.

Lillian Bayley Hoover paints landscapes that reveal features realistically while omitting others. These visual fissures that bar the viewer from accessing the remaining painting reflect the perceived separation between nature and the “human world”; one that frequently feels disconnected even though we are all of one world. Hoover investigates how nature is a witness to human life; the designed spaces that shape our world, but also those that we have inherited and how nature acts as a historical record of us.

Multimedia artist, Teresa Shields, presents an interactive installation consisting of 140 individual wooden panels that represent the maximum characters of a post on X (formerly a Tweet on Twitter) and are meant to be moved to form a message. Shields explores our relationship with language; the contradiction between the immediacy of a digital post versus that of a physically crafted message. The activity is simple but offers the opportunity to slow down, collaborate with others, and make new meanings entirely.

This exhibition closes 12/29/24.

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Lumen: The Art & Science of Light” at The Getty Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Glasswork, Illustration, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture
Dec 062024
 

As part of their programming for PST: Art & Science Collide, Getty Museum is showing Lumen: The Art & Science of Light. The exhibition includes a collection of European medieval artwork, along with several contemporary works, that focus in some way on the science and concept of light.

From the museum about the show-

Through the manipulation of materials such as gold, crystal, and glass, medieval artists created dazzling light-filled environments, evoking, in the earthly world, the layered realms of the divine. To be human is to crave light. We rise and sleep according to the rhythms of the sun, and have long associated light with divinity. Focusing on the arts of western Europe, this exhibition explores the ways in which the science of light was studied by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers, theologians, and artists during the “long Middle Ages” (800-1600 CE), when science and religion were firmly intertwined. Natural philosophy (the study of the physical universe) served as the connective thread for diverse cultures across Europe and the Mediterranean, uniting scholars who inherited, translated, and improved on a common foundation of ancient Greek scholarship.

This story is equal parts science, poetics, and craft. By bringing together a variety of media that materialize light and objects that communicate how medieval people understood the lights of the heavens and of the eye, this exhibition demonstrates how science informed the artistry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. To convey the continuing sense of wonder inspired by starry skies or moving light on precious materials, the exhibition includes several contemporary works of art placed in dialogue with historic objects.

Below are a few selections-

“On the Construction of the World”, in “Book of Divine Works (Liber divinorum operum)” (text in Latin), Rupertsberg, Rhineland, Germany, about 1210-40 CE by Hildegard of Bingen (German, 1098-1179 CE), Tempera, gold, and ink on parchment

About this work from the museum-

The nun and philosopher Hildegard of Bingen is known for her deeply religious visionary experiences in which she communed with the fiery “living light” (lux vivens) of God. Yet her evocative spiritual imagery reflects the language of science and cosmology. Shown at lower left, Hildegard, an illuminator as well as author, recorded her dazzling vision of the human at the center of nested elemental spheres. The figure is ringed by heavenly bodies, the clouds, and the winds, all encircled by the figure of flaming Caritas, or Divine Love. As a way to understand humankind’s relationship to the Godhead, Hildegard’s imagery emphasizes the correspondence between the body and the cosmos; just as the four humors affected health, the four winds controlled the earth, and the vivifying power of divine light nourished both.

“The Glorification of the Virgin”, attributed to Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Haarlem, northern Netherlands, about 1490-95 CE, Oil on panel

The painting above by Geertgen tot Sint Jans has so many fascinating details and was part of a section titled Divine Darkness.

The wall text from that section-

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all associate God with light. In the Creation story told in Genesis, when light was created, so too was darkness. As medieval optical theorists understood that sight was contingent upon light and that bodily vision was not possible in darkness, theologians of the time equated the unknowable, invisible aspects of God with darkness. According to a medieval “negative theology,” God exists beyond human perception and poses a challenge to vision itself. The fifteenth-century Christian theologian Nicholas of Cusa wrote that “God is found when all things are left behind; and this darkness is light in the Lord.” Such contradictory associations between God and both light and darkness were fundamental to the verbal and visual expressions used to elucidate the nature of the divine.

And about the painting-

Golden light surrounds the glorified Virgin Mary and Christ child at the center of this intimate and absorbingly detailed devotional painting as a luminous host of angels fills the heavens with eternal music. Their brightness contrasts with the dark perimeter that envelops this apocalyptic vision to suggest the ineffable darkness in which God dwells.

Constellations from a Hebrew Translation of Ptolemy’s “Almagest”, In an astronomical anthology (text in Hebrew), Catalonia, about 1361 CE, Tempura, gold, and ink on parchment and Astrolabe (with Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic Script), Iberia (Spain) or Italy, 1300s CE

From the museum about these two items-

In the Muslim and Christian courts of Europe, and particularly in Iberia, highly educated, multilingual Jews held important positions as physicians and astrologers. Jewish practitioners of these related fields contributed original works on astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy, drawing from and improving on Greco-Arabic sciences. At left, the Hebrew translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest (a work that was little known in Europe before 1200) updated the ancient text with the addition of astronomical tables that guided religious observance. Only a small number of European astrolabes with Hebrew inscriptions survive. This exquisite example lists the names of twenty-four stars in a combination of Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. The centermost circle marks the ecliptic, or the sun’s path, and is labeled with the zodiacal signs in Hebrew.

“Untitled (Mugarnas)”, 2012, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Mirrors, reverse-glass painting, and plaster on wood

One of the most impressive contemporary pieces in the show was the sculpture pictured above, by Monir Sharoudy Farmanfarmaian, which captured and reflected light so beautifully.

About the work from the museum-

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian was deeply inspired by a visit to the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz, Iran. The vaulted domes and walls of that site are covered in dazzling, intricate mirror mosaics that fracture and dematerialize space while reflecting light and amplifying movement and activity in the shrine below. Farmanfarmaian began exploring these mosaic techniques, eventually collaborating with master artisans to produce sculptural and wall-mounted works that incorporate mirror mosaic and reverse-glass painting. Untitled (Mugarnas) adopts the sacred and decorative forms that are common in Islamic architecture, and expresses the perfection of creation.

This exhibition closes 12/8/24.

 

Ohio Art Events- Cleveland Art Spaces-78th Street Studios- Third Friday

 Architecture, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Cleveland, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Illustration, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Performance Art, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture, Sound Art, Video and Film
Nov 152024
 

78th Street Studios, located in Cleveland, is the largest art and design complex in Northeast Ohio. The building is home to several art galleries, artist studios, performance spaces, and businesses, and is a great place to see local art.

Tonight, 11/15, the complex and several of its creative spaces will be open from 5-9pm for its monthly Third Friday event.

Below are some selections from April of this year.

Work by Mark Yasenchack and paintings by Jenniffer Omaitz

“Love Triangle” by Jenniffer Omaitz

Gallery 202 has a variety of work from local artists for sale and also hosts exhibitions. Above is work from Jennifer Omaitz’s exhibition Where Love Lives and mixed media work by Mark Yasenchack.

Sculptures and installations can be found throughout the building like the light sculpture pictured above by Dana L. Depew.

Rebecca Cross’ installation Rock Cloud, was part of her exhibition Mapping the Sensorial at HEDGE Gallery. The gallery focuses on promoting contemporary artists from Northeast Ohio.

Susan Snipes’ work, pictured above was part of a group exhibition at Understory.

You can also see artists at work in their studios. Above is work by Jessica Mia Vito.

Dawn Tekler encaustic wax paintings like the one pictured above, are on view in her studio.

The painting above is by Laurel Herbold, located outside her studio.

Walking through the halls you can also find artwork hanging outside several of the spaces- like the two paintings below.

David King, “Snow Day”, Oil on aluminum

Scott McIntire, “The Birds”, Enamel on canvas

Los Angeles Art Shows- Art Share L.A.- “Plateaus: Art That Resonates”

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Glasswork, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Music, Mixed Media, Music, Painting / Painters, Performances, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 152024
 

Sculptures by Emily Sudd

Sculptures by Kyung Boon Oh

Photography by Kate Turning

Pictured above are some selections from Plateaus: Art That Resonates, a multisensory group exhibition at Art Share L.A. exploring the dualities of life that artists bring into their work.

From the gallery-

Art Share L.A. is pleased to present Plateaus: Art that Resonates a multidisciplinary and multisensory immersive art exhibition that explores dualities: art and craft, death and life, grief and love, and activity and stillness. These contrasts exist with an interdependent bond, reminding us that bonds are intrinsic and often intertwined partners. In multiple materials, processes, and scales, monument-like creations are revealed through thoughtful burnishing of passion.  The exhibition curated by Stacie B. London features seven visual artists: Amanda Maciel Antunes, Kyong Boon Oh, Hadley Holiday, Soojung Park, Emily Sudd, Kate Turning, and Cheyann Washington, along with additional contributions of ikebana by members of Sogestu Los Angeles, music by Rocco DeLuca, perfume by Lesli Wood (La Curie Eau de Parfume), and seating by Hunter Knight. Through a shared refinement of intentional experimentation with their mediums – acrylic panels, clay, glass, ink, photography, scent, sound, stone, thread, tree stumps, and wire– these artistic achievements reveal work that is brave, meditative, resilient, and vulnerable.

Our five senses inform our experiences and knowledge and assist us in ordering the world. In Plateaus: Art that Resonates the traditional forms of visual art of painting, photography, and sculpture are broadened to include aural art — via music and sound — and olfactory art. These multisensory and immersive pieces enhance the experience of viewing visual art and introduce additional dualities: sight with smell, smell with hearing, and hearing with sight. The expanded human experiences in an art gallery switch the expected experiences and invite the possibility of a familiar experience in a new way, or a breakthrough!

Breakthroughs often occur after long periods of what often seems like stagnation, or a plateau. It’s instinctual to want growth to be a continual upward trend, but instead it’s usually a series of long, flat periods (plateaus) of work with few visible results. Seemingly out of nowhere the plateau makes space for a breakthrough of creativity or growth—an intermittent moment when everything comes together. Instead of focusing on the result, it’s good to get comfortable in the plateau.

The artists and artisans of Plateaus: Art that Resonates use a broad range of approaches and techniques towards creative creations that are examples of how to grapple dualities, navigate the plateaus of life, and share breakthroughs that transmute our awareness of mortality into loving engagements with life and it’s contradictions and opposing perspectives that inspire and infuse life with meaning, immediacy, awareness, and appreciation.

Below are two of the ikebana created by members of Sogetsu Los Angeles.

This exhibition closes this Saturday (11/16) with a closing reception from 6-9pm.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Lisa Williamson at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 142024
 

“OoOoOo”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer

“New Wave”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood, aluminum, and lacquer

“Ray”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood (left) and “Wavy Earth”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer

“Chimera”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood, aluminum, and lacquer (left) and “Fields”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer (right)

“A Bird and a Bud”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood

“Trace”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer

“Pool”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood, aluminum and lacquer

Shapes create a visual language in Lisa Williamson’s exhibition Hover Land Lover at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles. The hand painted colors accent forms that feel both familiar and strange at once.

From the press release-

With an interest in forming a language through concise material abstraction, Lisa Williamson creates works that are visually precise, physically resonant, and often attune to the spaces in which they are exhibited. For Hover Land Lover, the artist presents a series of painted wall reliefs and sculptures that convey language as a series of formal compressions — of landscape, of architecture, and of figuration. At once systematic and intuitive, Williamson tunes and calibrates material space, in that of her individual works and in their relationship to one another within the gallery.

Central to the exhibition is a series of machine-carved basswood relief sculptures that are mounted to aluminum and painted by hand in layers of semi-transparent shimmering metallics, contrasted by surfaces of densely saturated color. Shifting in scale from vast horizontal expanses to modest head or page size abstractions, each work punctuates space and impresses an energetic chromatic charge. Wrapping around the galleries, the artist relates the installation of these works to the structure of a sentence or to that of an imagined morse code. Installed with “room to breathe”, Williamson carefully considers the sculptures’ relationship to the walls and connection to the surrounding architecture, rhythmically creating a conversation between each form and the space they occupy.

In the metallic silver-blue relief, New Wave, the sculpture echoes a long and narrow wave, a line drawing, a curtain, or a vibration. In juxtaposition is the compact relief, Fields, a concentrated bolt of color in which three horizontal bars of vivid green float before a gold infused bronze-metallic ground. Inventing subtle color associations and complex painted surfaces through her incorporation of glass and metallic particles, Williamson’s sculptures catch light and perceptually shift as one moves around each work. Groover is a direct nod to this act of tuning as a pattern of black dials reminiscent of stereo knobs protrude from a glimmering cream block. Hovering in the galleries, Williamson’s reliefs each convey a particular optical frequency — autonomous forms that hold space — at once expressive in their physicality while also maintaining a certain level of interiority, opacity, or resistance.

In a series of vertical sculptures, the artist draws from leveling or navigational tools such as plumb bobs, fishing bobbers, and pins. Human in scale, each upright form personifies balance and the demarcation of space. Situated in conversation with Williamson’s reliefs, these works disrupt the horizontality of the exhibition and instead “drop in”. Ray is a tall and tapered pin that is bifurcated by warm and cool tones, with alternating sections of opacity and luminosity. Drawing from a ray or beam of light, this work exemplifies the active nature of Williamson’s painted forms as glass particles reveal a non-static and light-responsive surface. In the diptych, A Bird and a Bud, Williamson inverts two identical forms and reorients her approach to color within each. Standing together, these animated sculptures conflate nature and figure, as an after-image of color casts against the wall to activate the surrounding space. Regarding precision as an expressive gesture and calibration as a mode of production, Williamson imbues her forms with character and locates a distinct formal resonance, softening the line between painting and sculpture, language and object.

This exhibition closes 11/16/24.

Delaware Art Shows- “Awakening” at Chris White Gallery in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Delaware, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Illustration, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
Nov 012024
 

Work by Jani Duerr (left) and Yarissa Luna (right)

Work by Jess Slavic (left) and Andy Vible (right)

Work by Andy Vible (left) and Seth Pala (right)

Work by Roderick Hidalgo II

Tonight is the closing reception for Awakening at Chris White Gallery in Wilmington, Delaware, curated by Seth Pala of Alone Time. The exhibition included 27 artists and 141 pieces of art.

Below is a list of the artists from the gallery’s website-

This event is part of Wilmington’s First Friday Art Loop, an event highlighting the city’s arts and cultural scene.

 

 

 

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Against Dystopia” at Diane Rosenstein

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 312024
 

Adrienne Elise Tarver

Cara Despain

Cara Despain

Ashanti Chaplin

Ray Anthony Barrett

Ray Anthony Barrett

Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan

One room of the gallery with Margaret Griffith sculpture (center)

Jane Chang Mi

Andrae Green (paintings) and Phoebe Collings-James (sculpture)

Andrae Green

Margaret Griffith

Margaret Griffith (detail)

Against Dystopia, the group exhibition at Diane Rosenstein curated by niko w. okuro, presents a variety of interesting work that speaks to the times we are living in.

The exhibition includes ten international artists representing twelve cities across the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and all five regions of the United States-  Ray Anthony Barrett, Ashanti Chaplin, Phoebe Collings-James, Cara Despain, Andrae Green, Margaret Griffith, Jane Chang Mi, Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan, Esteban Ramón Pérez, and Adrienne Elise Tarver.

From the gallery-

Presented on the eve of the 2024 presidential election, Against Dystopia is ‘a far-reaching exhibition, both in terms of the diverse backgrounds and approaches of its featured artists, and the social, cultural, and geographic ecosystems those artists represent and critique,’ writes okoro, who is based in New Haven, CT. The exhibition ‘features artworks that inhabit a spectrum of anti-dystopian thought, from mobilizing conceptualism to overcome historic traumas and the precarity of the present, to envisioning future utopias against seemingly insurmountable odds.’

Against Dystopia transforms fear and anxiety surrounding the uncertainty of our shared future into a tangible site of hope—one where collective memory reminds us of our agency to enact change today, and rich cultural traditions empower us to imagine alternative futures. Of significance is the inclusion of artists who identify as multi hyphenates, playing numerous social roles within their communities, such as advocate, change agent, chef, documentarian, educator, father, filmmaker, mother, musician, oceanographer, researcher, and too many more to name.

Artworks are grouped into three thematic sections, each of which explores creative strategies of resistance and works against dystopia at all costs: field research, symbolic interactionism, and speculative fiction.

Ray Anthony Barrett (Missouri), Ashanti Chaplin (Oklahoma), Cara Despain (Utah/Florida), and Jane Chang Mi (Hawai‘i/California) use field research to map histories of frontierism, settler colonialism, and land politics onto ecological and socioeconomic systems today. With a focus on listening to the land and sea to both unearth and atone for difficult truths, these artists name and dismantle dystopian practices on the path to reconciliation. Embracing an appreciation for both hyperlocal traditions and the tenets of global citizenship, each underscores our shared duty to ensuring ecocultural sustainability and Earth’s habitability for future generations.

While Margaret Griffith (California), Olivia Morgan (New York), and Adrienne Elise Tarver (New York) work through markedly different mediums and styles, they share a fearlessness in addressing ongoing tensions and questions surfaced amidst the political firestorm of 2020. Embracing tenets of symbolic interactionism, or the theory that individuals shape and are shaped by society through daily interactions and the co-creation of meaning from symbols, these artists remind us of the power of human connection to bridge difference. Each steers towards social cohesion by processing collective grief and the enduring impacts of the 2020 presidential election, the proliferation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement respectively. Whereas Morgan and Griffith subvert symbols that often polarize rather than unite us within physical space—such as fences, face masks, and smartphones—Tarver reaches into the past to pull forth reimagined symbols that speak to our spiritual interdependence.

Phoebe Colling-James (United Kingdom), Andrae Green (Massachusetts/Jamaica) and Esteban Ramón Pérez (California) boldly envision alternative realities by using speculative fiction and symbolic allegory to sew threads of connection across time and space. Each resists linearity and subverts narrative tropes to instead materialize the fluid spiritual dimensions of lived experience. Through their layered ceramics, paintings, and sculptures, these artists mine the depths of their respective Jamaican/British, Jamaican/American, and Chicanx heritages to comment more broadly on social conditions today, prompting us to dream beyond what’s readily visible or knowable.

Against Dystopia opens concurrently with The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA, which similarly explores, “opportunities for civic dialogue around some of the most urgent problems of our time by exploring past and present connections between art and science.” By convening an international group of visionary artists to help initiate these dialogues, Against Dystopia prompts viewers to pursue deeper understanding of shared challenges and solutions, on both the micro and macro levels.’

This exhibition closes 11/2/24.

 

 

Los Angeles Art Shows- Brian Rochefort at Sean Kelly

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Ceramic Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 302024
 

Brian Rochefort’s ceramic sculptures for Staring at the Moon at Sean Kelly gallery are an incredible mix of textures and colors. Based on his travels to several natural environments around the world, the work combines the familiar with the unusual to form fascinating results.

From the gallery-

Brian Rochefort’s mixed-media sculptures incorporate a variety of different textures, surfaces and colors to create rich, otherworldly forms. Referencing his travels to some of the most remote parts of the planet, such as the Amazon Rainforest, the Galápagos Islands, and the Ngorongoro Crater, in Tanzania, he internalizes and translates his experiences in these secluded, ancient landscapes into potent sculptural forms.

Rochefort’s sculptures are built up in a unique process of layering, wherein the initial form undergoes multiple firings. Between each firing, he airbrushes the works and applies glazes, many of which he has developed himself through extensive experimentation. This process pushes the technical limits of ceramics in pursuit of evocative, otherworldly new forms. As he states, “Some of the most successful pieces that I’ve done in the past have been works that I’ve built up too fast… but somehow I’ve managed to save the form, and it turns into a different monster.” He works intuitively to build a composition, not unlike an abstract painter, and cites artists such as Albert Oehlen, Joan Mitchell, Franz West, and even photographer Aaron Siskind as influences for their daring deployment of color and texture. His virtuosic control of his medium is tempered by the element of chance inherent to the process of firing the sculpture. In this way, the completed works are the result of a dynamic interplay between his highly developed technique, the distinctive character of each sculpture, and ultimately chance.

Rochefort is equally inspired by his travels to remote and untouched ecosystems, such as barrier reefs and rainforests. A vital form of inspiration for him, the rare and vibrant natural forms found in such locations are apparent in the works. His intent, however, is not to directly represent the landscapes that he visits, a task he describes as “nearly impossible to do.” The sculptures take on the formal qualities of the landscapes through an almost volcanic layering of form upon form, color upon color, and texture upon texture, ultimately blooming into vivid, texturally sumptuous works. His larger freestanding works, which he refers to as Craters, evoke the fundamental quality of his sculptures: a powerful moment of contact with something deeply elemental and otherworldly.

The gallery also posted the video below where he discusses the work.

This exhibition closes 11/2/24.

Los Angeles Art Shows- The Harrison Studio at VSF

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 172024
 

“Seventh Lagoon”, 1979

VSF gallery is currently showing The Harrisons’ Survival Piece #1: Air, Earth, Water, Interface: Annual Hog Pasture Mix, 1970-1971, part of The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art & Science Collide.

On Thursday, 10/17, a local pig will enter the grow box to turn over the pasture in an iteration of the 2012 performance that took place at The Geffen Contemporary at MoCA.

From the gallery-

The first in their visionary series of Survival Pieces, “Hog Pasture,” as it is known by Harrison’s fans, emerged from a direct dialog with the most visionary and boundary pushing artists of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The impact of the Earth Day movement and the nascent cultural awareness that human beings were rapidly depleting the planet’s natural resources ignited a deep and sincere conversation within the art world about the stakes of art-making in the post-war, post-1968 world.

While later survival pieces highlighted a culminating harvest feast, Survival Piece #1 is focused on growth. The rectangular form of the raised planter bed and the grid of grow lights above echo sculptural innovations by artists like Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Richard Morris;  however, Newton Harrison had by this time decided that a sculpture or a painting was not enough. His artwork needed to not only have a moral purpose, it needed to strive to restore the earth and protect the abundant future of humans on our planet.

In 1971, shortly after their first foray into ecological art, Making Earth (which VSF exhibited earlier this year at Frieze LA and is now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) Newton and Helen heard from David Antin that Virginia Gunter at the MFA Boston was curating a show titled Earth, Air, Fire, and Water: Elements of Art and wanted to include their work alongside contemporaries including Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Hans Haacke, and others. Exploring ideas of growth and change, Gunter’s vision for the exhibition was meant to challenge conservative, formalist, Greenbergian ideas about art as well as expectations of the museum as an institution that primarily collected unchanging pictures and objects that somehow articulated the best ideas and techniques of the time in which they were made.

Interested in building on his use of artificial lights, Newton decided that he should actually grow something. He commissioned one of his painting students to look through seed catalogs to find a mixture that was “totally singular,” eventually landing on R.H. Shumway Seedsman’s Annual Hog Pasture Mix. In Boston, a large raised planter bed was built in a basement gallery of the museum, agricultural grow lights were installed in a parallel grid from the ceiling, a potent mix of manure, compost, worm castings, and other rich grow media were added to the planter bed, the seed mix was added, and a small pasture grew there with alarming speed. While Gunter wouldn’t allow a hog to come and graze the original hog pasture, subsequent exhibitions of the work, including Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 curated by Miwon Kwon and Phillip Kaiser at MoCA in 2012, have brought the work to its natural conclusion and invited a pig in to enjoy the rich, velvety mix of legumes and grasses. Similarly, VSF has invited a hog to harvest the indoor meadow during the exhibition’s closing ceremony on October 17, 2024. The remaining pasture, earthworms, and soil mix will be gifted to visitors.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Lita Albuquerque at Michael Kohn Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 162024
 

Lita Albuquerque’s exhibition of new work for Earth Skin, on view at Michael Kohn Gallery, includes several dramatic blue paintings and a huge installation piece on the floor of the gallery that grabs your attention the moment you enter the gallery.

From the gallery-

Beginning her career in the 1970s with works that intimately connected her to the earth, Albuquerque’s artistic evolution envelops the cosmos and the space between it and us. Her work emanates from years of practicing the exact science of Kundalini breath technique as well as automatic writing; both drive a deep investigation and scientific inquiry of who we are as individual beings on this planet. Albuquerque further connects to the exactness of physics by a meditation she, and astronomers, call the cosmic address. These daily practices are at the root of her art, precisely positioning self to cosmos. It is those discoveries she embeds in works of art that permit us, the viewer, to experience the connections she has made between these internal and external worlds.

Thinking about the exhibition, Albuquerque writes:
Feet dancing above the earth, dancing with fervor, drumming, the increasing drumming of the feet not fragile on the fragile earth.

The wisps of bodies, like skins falling off their frames leaving the planet, the planet strong and our forms ethereal, the strength of us, our feet, on the fragile earth, the wispy lightness of us, detached from the earth, transforming into space.

The earth strong behind us, propelling us upward, giving us her strength, throwing us in the air, while we fly, never falling, the fierce intensity of our rhythm while alive, and the freedom of release from the earth.

Experiments of intensities of emotions and colors, whirling dervishes’ cyclones, Earth Skin is whispered, “Earth Skin” she whispered.

For PST’s Art and Science Collide, Albuquerque transforms the gallery with a titular installation, Earth Skin. A membrane of decomposed granite fills the space creating the illusory sensation of the earth being revealed below the gallery, as if the concrete floor has been meticulously removed. Accompanying this installation is a new series of paintings revolving around the gestures of the body and ancient marks, like a hieroglyphic code only the artist has a key for. With each gesture, Albuquerque embraces the tactile intimacy of painting, reminding us of the power of capturing and transforming the elusive into the material. This installation invites viewers to explore the shared fragility of humanity and earth.

Two of the paintings, picutred below, include poems referencing fellow artist Ana Mendieta, who was known in part for her “earth-body” work and who passed away tragically in 1985.

“Propelling Us Upwards, She, The Earth, Throwing Us In The Air While We Fly, Never Falling, A Poem for A.M.”, 2024, Pigment on Canvas

“Desire and Memory, A Poem for A.M.”, 2024, Pigment on canvas

This exhibition is part of The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art and Science Collide an arts event taking place in various venues around Southern California.

For more information on Lita Albuquerque and her work Red Canary Magazine recently published an excellent article that is worth a read as well.

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