Dec 272024
 

This is the last weekend to see the interactive installation Pixel Promenade Remix by Radiance (Erin Barry-Dutro and Kyle Steely) at The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington. The work, located in its own room, is activated by body movement and creates fun multicolored light shows for participants.

From the museum-

Baltimore-based artist duo Erin Barry-Dutro and Kyle Steely, known as Radiance, construct site-specific installations that merge technology with active sensory participation. Their individual practices inform the ultimate collaboration; Erin Barry-Dutro is a visual artist and Kyle Steely is a designer/maker working with coding programs. Together, they envision products and environments that are aesthetically dynamic through functionality. Largely, the resulting projects have responded to music, movement, and the senses, ultimately addressing our humanity and how we interact with our environment.

In response to the theme of “Design”, Radiance proposed an interior version of the Pixel Promenade, which was originally installed for the Baltimore Light City Festival in 2016. Based on the original concept, Pixel Promenade Remix invites visitors to move within the installation, acting as the catalyst for oscillating color and light. Participant body movement is captured and tracked to orchestrate a light show orchestrated and centered on the individual. This simple gesture enables a sensorial experience; a direct connection between our bodies and a reactionary force.

This revitalized installation offers not only an elegantly crafted encounter but additionally initiates a dialogue about the nature of technology-based art forms and their inevitable decay. When invited to re-create the installation, Radiance took the opportunity to reflect, update, and consider the space with new possibilities. In doing so, they sought to answer questions about design innovation; what does it mean to reuse and recycle these materials? How can artwork that relies on technology be adapted to more closely resonate with contemporary topics and ideas? Pixel Promenade Remix presents the conceptual argument that “the new” is not always necessary, rather the importance lies in its relevancy and ability to reflect its participants.

This exhibition closes 12/29/24.

Dec 252024
 

“Lilies of the Field #1, Bethlehem, Christmas Day”, 2019–2020

“Lilies of the Field #1, Bethlehem, Christmas Day”, 2019–2020 (detail)

“Lilies of the field #1, Jerusalem, Mosque El-Aksa”, 2019–2020

“Lilies of the field #1, Jerusalem, Mosque El-Aksa”, 2019–2020 (detail)

“Lilies of the field #1, Jerusalem, Jews’ Wailing place”, 2019–2020

“Lilies of the Field #1, Jerusalem, Mount Olives”, 2019–2020

The images above are from Jerusalem-born artist Dor Guez’s Lillies of the Field series, part of his 2023 exhibition Colony at Princeton Art Museum’s Art@Bainbridge gallery project.

From the museum about the exhibition and this series (by curator Mitra M. Abbaspour) –

Guez, whose family are Palestinians from Lydda on his mother’s side and Jewish immigrants from North Africa on his father’s, has developed a practice of engaging historical objects, especially photographs, to reveal unwritten and overlooked pasts. Colony / Dor Guez brings together works that resulted from the artist’s years of research in the archives of the American Colony, a charitable Christian community established in Jerusalem in 1881 by American expatriates. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the artists of the American Colony created hundreds of photographic views of the locations described in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious texts that collectively came to be known as the Holy Land. These photographic prints, albums, and picture postcards, which attracted an international audience, form a substantial visual record of the region from this era. In this exhibition, the contents of the American Colony archive and the vision of the Holy Land that they produced are, respectively, the source materials and subject matter for Guez’s artistic exploration…

Two of the arrangements pictured in Lilies of the Field are captioned “Mosque El-Aksa” and feature delicate pressed-flower arrangements as stand-ins for this site of spiritual significance. Built on an elevated point in the Old City of Jerusalem, the El-Aksa Mosque is adjacent to the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount, understood as the point of departure for the Prophet Muhammad’s night journey or the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, depending on one’s faith tradition. Captions for another pair of floral arrangements draw associations between the pictures and Bethlehem on Christmas Day and to the Grotto of the Nativity, the day and site of Jesus’s birth. Through their design and presentation, the botanical samples pressed into the album pages take on the qualities of a reliquary, carrying the trace of a holy site through space and across time.

Turn-of-the-century photography relied on devices such as albums and glass-plate negatives to create photographic objects that would transport their viewers—not just visually but experientially—to the significant sites pictured. It is notable, then, that in the creations of the American Colony, pictures of early twentieth-century Jerusalem are layered with symbolic weight, metaphoric meaning, and set into the viewer’s imagination. Guez’s artworks extend the metaphors to the present—reminding us that as the American Colony constructed an idea of the Holy Land and its inhabitants to meet the desires of international audiences, the idea of Jerusalem as a place continues to accrue meaning over time through the images we create and the stories we tell about it.

 

Dec 202024
 

Work by Carl Durkow (cloud chair), Trish Tillman Wood sculpture far left and sculpture far right pictured below) and Langdon Graves installation (blue walled area)

Installation by Langdon Graves, mixed media sculptures and framed drawing

Trish Tillman, “One Last Drink”, 2018, vegan leather, tweed, ultrasuede, chrome edging, wood, foam, thread, and glass

Trish Tillman, “One Last Drink”, 2018, vegan leather, tweed, ultrasuede, chrome edging, wood, foam, thread, and glass (detail)

Trish Tillman, “Candy Cigarettes”, 2024, hand-dyed leather, UV print on leather, thread, leather buttons, wood, foam, and metal hardware

Trish Tillman, “Giving Space”, 2023, hand dyed and UV printed leather, wood, foam, thread, polymer clay, and acrylic

Carl Durkow (left to right) “Cloud Side Tables”, 2023, MDF, formica, aluminum; “Diced Pineapples”, 2021, fiberglass, pigmented resin, polystyrene; “Musque Benches”, 2023, fiberglass, pigmented resin, polystyrene; “Peek Lamp I”, 2023, MDF, formica, aluminum, fabric, and “Peek Lamp II”, 2023, MDF, formica, aluminum, fabric, neon

“Musque Benches”, 2023, fiberglass, pigmented resin, polystyrene; “Peek Lamp I”, 2023, MDF, formica, aluminum, fabric, and “Peek Lamp II”, 2023, MDF, formica, aluminum, fabric, neon

Langdon Graves, Trish Tillman, and Carl Durkow all bring a distinctive vision to their sculptures for The Dream Expedition: A Design Exhibition, currently on view at The Delaware Contemporary. The intriguing works combine the familiar with the enigmatic to capture the viewers imagination.

From the museum-

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist movement. Introduced by poet and critic André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto (1924), Surrealism reaches beyond reality to explore dreams, unconsciousness, and absurdities of the human condition. The movement greatly influenced the future landscape of design through the phenomenon of Surrealist Objects–exemplified by the work of artists like Méret Oppenheim or Man Ray. The Surrealist Object, and other surrealist sculpture, presented three-dimensional manifestations of unconscious symbolisms offering introspective and reflective opportunities.

Over the last century, the field of design and the concepts of surrealism have consistently informed one another; design objects were often the focal point of surrealist sculpture or assemblage, while designers incorporated surrealist processes into their design work. Today, contemporary artists and designers continue to draw inspiration from surrealist concepts to reflect a diverse range of emotions, ideas, and experiences. The Dream Expedition aims to celebrate the elements of surrealism that influence contemporary design and sculpture to further bridge the divide between “Fine Art” and “Design.”

Each of these three artists pushes preconceived notions of sculpture and design to their limits. Carl Durkow’s works are fully functional design objects, yet they venture into the surreal through their abstraction of forms and aesthetics. Langdon Graves’ sculptural works engage familiar design and organic objects in new, unexpected ways questioning our relationship to memory and the world around us. In her work, Trish Tillman incorporates materials that we typically associate with design–vegan leather, cushions, wood, or upholstery–creating sculptures that seem to morph and bend with dreamlike movement.

This exhibition closes 12/29/24.

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.

Nov 272024
 

Photographs from two projects by photographer and author Peter Menzel, are currently on view at The Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art (formerly Polk Museum of Art), in Lakeland, Florida- Hungry Planet: What The World Eats, and Material World: A Global Family Portrait. Taken in the early 2000s and early 1990s, respectively, they provide a fascinating look at what people in various parts of the world were buying and eating at the time.

For Hungry Planet, Menzel and his wife Faith D’Aluisio visited families around the world to observe, photograph and record what they eat during the course of one week. They worked with twenty-five families in twenty-one countries. The two families in pictured above are the Revis Family from Raleigh, North Carolina and the Casales Family form Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Below is some additional information on the families pictured, including the cost of food for the week and their favorite items.

For Material World, a project created in the early 1990s, Menzel assembled a team of photographers who spent a week living with families around the world who then photographed them outside their homes with everything they owned. Pictured are the Hodson Family, from Godalming, England, and the de Goes Family, from São Paulo, Brazil.

 

Nov 232024
 

Both Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Palm Springs Art Museum are showing prints from Henri Matisse’s Jazz. It’s interesting to see the same work but in two different contexts based on the curation.

At Hammer Museum they are part of the group exhibition Sum of the Parts: Serial Imagery in Printmaking, 1500 to Now, on view until 11/24/24.

From the museum-

Printmaking’s capacity for serial imagery was recognized during the Renaissance in Europe and has continued to be explored by artists across centuries and geographies to creative, oftentimes experimental ends. Print publishers had a hand in issuing series, which could be conceived complete from the start, expanded from shorter sets, or even formed from existing bodies of related works. Diverse organizing principles have shaped the serial format, including pictorial narratives, iconographic groupings, formal innovations, thematic variations, and sequences measuring time and marking place, as well as structural, modular, and conceptual progressions. Importantly, the creative act itself is an open-ended serial pursuit, with each gesture, idea, and decision interacting with or informing the next.

While we can appreciate an individual print extracted from a series as a work in its own right, our visual perceptions, intellectual interpretations, and emotional responses shift when we view multiple images collectively: the whole becomes greater-or other-than the sum of its parts. New meanings surface as commonalities, patterns, or differences emerge. Selected from the collection of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, this exhibition presents prints conceived as sets or series and further considers artists’ informal serial procedures and approaches to printmaking across five centuries.

At Palm Springs Art Museum they are part of Art Foundations, which places different works together in from their collection into groups organized in different themes. Matisse is paired with Ellsworth Kelly in a section devoted to “artmaking through the angle of a given concept, with each wall dedicated to a single concept: pure color, automatic painting, text as a motif, or ready-made.”

From the museum about the exhibition-

Art Foundations explores how various art forms have been produced throughout the last two centuries. It presents a succession of artwork groupings across multiple media and disciplines, bringing together works not usually shown in the same space. Meant to be visited clockwise, each gallery provides a different angle on what we consider art, with each grouping questioning how art is made, why, where, and by whom.

This presentation shifts the lens through which we look at art, allowing us to explore gallery after gallery, the conception and the material of artmaking, and the spaces where it is created. Art Foundations brings together academically trained and untrained artists as well as visual arts, architecture, design, and glass, displaying the breadth and interconnectedness of the museum’s collection.

For more on Matisse’s Jazz, The Metropolitan Museum of Art provides detailed information on its website.

 

Nov 202024
 

“Untitled”, 1930s-40s, Osamu Shiihara, photogram

The Getty has gathered several innovative photo works made from the 1920s to the 1950s for Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography, part of their PST ART: Art & Science Collide series. The exhibition also includes several experimental films and a room dedicated to Thomas Wilfred’s  “Lumia Instruments” that produce colorful moving abstract forms.

From the museum-

Light abstraction emerged after the First World War as a preoccupation of photographers and filmmakers in international centers of art production. Many artists began seeing light as something that could be manipulated, then photographed and filmed, like any other physical material. This exhibition offers a selection of works, dating from the 1920s onward, that reveals these artists’ fascination with the formal qualities of light as well as their innovative methods of projecting, reflecting, and refracting its rays to liberate their media from traditional modes of representation. They emphasized the novelty of their varied approaches by inventing new terms-including “Rayograph” (Man Ray), “Light Drawing” (Barbara Morgan), “Luminogramm” (Otto Steinert), “Photogenics” (Lotte Jacobi), and “Lumia” (Thomas Wilfred) -to characterize their work. “More and more artists of our generation have begun to contemplate light with the eyes of a sculptor gazing upon a block of marble,” noted Wilfred, “seeing in light a new and basic medium of expression with unlimited possibilities.”

Below are a few selections.

Edward W. Quigley, “Untitled (Light Abstraction)” 1931-39, and “Vortex”, 1933, Gelatin silver prints

Nathan Lerner, “Car Light Study #7”, 1939, and Hy Hersh, “Untitled (Abstraction)”, About 1950, Chromogenic print

Man Ray, “Untitled (Sequins)”, 1930 and “Untitled (Corkscrew and Lampshade)”, 1927

Francis Bruguiére, “Untitled (Design in Abstract Forms of Light)”, About 1927

This exhibition closes 11/24/24.

Nov 202024
 

Deana Lawson, “Black Gold (“Earth turns to gold, in the hands of the wise,” Rumi)”, 2021, Inkjet print with embedded transmission hologram in beveled-mirror frame

Detail from the image above- this hologram is of Ron Finley, an LA based food activist and farmer

Matthew Schreiber, “Bowie 1-8”, 2016-23, a series inspired by David Bowie’s death in 2016.

As part of their programming for PST ART: Art & Science Collide, The Getty is showing Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography. The exhibition explains the process and presents the unique ways several contemporary artists experimented with it in their work.

From the museum-

Holograms produce the magical illusion of three-dimensional objects floating in space. They were made possible by the invention of laser technology in the 1960s, and since then, many artists have experimented with the art form. This exhibition presents holograms by John Baldessari, Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, and other artists who were invited by the C Project to explore the creative potential of the medium in the 1990s. Deana Lawson turned to holography to expand her photographic practice around 2020. The master technician in both instances was artist Matthew Schreiber, whose work is also featured.

Ed Ruscha, “The End”, 1998 reissued 2016

Louise Bourgeois, “Untitled”, 1998, reissued 2014

This exhibition is on view until 11/24/24.

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.

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.