Landscapes of the Mind – Thresholds at Gallery of Hermosa

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   Landscapes of the Mind – Thresholds at Gallery of Hermosa

                                                                   Nancy Kay Turner 

Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything.
Albert Einstein

The earth has music for those that listen.
William Shakespeare

Thresholds, thoughtfully curated by Genie Davis, brings together five artists, Eileen Oda Leaf, Hung Viet Nguyen, Angelica Sotiriou, Linda Sue Price, and Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, whose artworks reference the elements of air, water and earth. Working across different mediums such as oil and acrylic painting, mixed-media drawing, neon and 3-D printed sculpture, these artists create landscapes that take us from the depths of underwater reefs to gently rolling hills, jagged mountains, and aerial views of land both icy and green, moving engagingly from the micro to the macro. These five artists present landscape as a state of mind rather than an actual place by creating romantic dreamscapes that are idealized versions of nature.

Both Hung Viet Nguyen and Eileen Oda Leaf invent inviting scenarios, jam-packed with flowers, trees and plants with highly textured surfaces. While Nguyen literally sculpts and incises thickly applied oil paint, creating ridges and crevasses that illuminate his forms in his Sacred Landscape series, Oda Leaf adds actual painted materials to her pieces, as in “Desert Plateau,” laying them out in a regular simplified pattern that recall embroidered Folk Art hangings. Both painters present bucolic unspoiled scenes where the sun always shines, the grass is green, the water is pure and there are rarely people visible. While Nguyen’s paintings focus on the majestic and mysterious, bringing the viewer on a spiritual journey, Oda Leaf’s work focuses on recognizable spots such as piers, desert and forests which she transforms with her lavish color palette. Nguyen and Oda leaf are masterful colorists whose palette and paint handling echo both the Impressionists and the Symbolists.

The sculptors Linda Sue Price and Snezana Saraswati Petrovic use industrial and technological materials such as neon, 3-D printing and augmented reality to create compelling works that challenge our perceptions of the environment. Price’s jaunty neon works evoke both the down to earth world of plants in “Snake Beans” and “Kapeeno,” and aerial views of cities and freeways in “The Other Side of the Story. ” The festive colors and the surprising movement of the neon itself suggests cars moving on a freeway or even the gurgling equipment of a mad scientist, making these works especially lively.

Petrovic’s tiny, jewel-like 3-D printed “Pas De Deux” and “Coral Song” are poetic recreations of coral reefs that the artist not only imagines or re-imagines but ones that she has seen on her many dives. Each delicate translucent piece looks lit from within glowing, lace-like, and seeming to sway. Petrovic, whose works are conceptual, continues her use of 3-D printer technology along with augmented reality in her Sprawling LA series. These two pieces paradoxically look both macro (aerial view) and macro (view of the ocean floor). If one downloads the ARTIVIVE app on one’s smartphone, one can view the AR image that appears over the physical 3-D digital print. A frenetic Los Angeles freeway appears over one landscape and a serene ocean view with a seagull flying in the sky appears over the other. Petrovic alludes here to man’s destruction of the ecosystem and what is being destroyed.

 

Angelica Sotiriou’s works on paper and canvas are highly abstracted and poetic. Her large- scale mixed media painting “Scala, Divine Ascent,” highlights striations between earth and the heavens that are delineated, moving from earth tones to blue sky and to a glowing beyond. A simplified gold leaf tree reaches upwards towards the stars, perhaps a symbol of growth and transcendence.

Nature is clearly the star in Thresholds – bountiful, fecund, benevolent, a treasure to behold. Humans rarely appear and when they do, they are tiny specks in the immense universe – small and insignificant. They seem newly formed and not yet dangerous to the planet. There are no cars, planes, buses, cruise ships or tourism. This earth is still a paradise, unspoiled and pristine. Clearly a balm for a troubled soul.

And what is the threshold suggested by the title? Is it the precipice we find ourselves on? The tipping point or moving from the now to the point of no return? Is it the portal one steps through from the present into the future, from the known into the unknown? From what could be into what is? Uncertainty swirls about us daily but in this exhibition, Davis offers us beauty, serenity and abundance. Perhaps this is also a gentle call to action – a reminder of what might be lost if we don’t preserve what we have while we still have it.

– Nancy Kay Turner; photos: Nancy Kay Turner, Genie Davis, Dani Dodge 
Pasadena, CA.

Blandine Saint-Oyant Surges With Color

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Awash in color and geometric patterns, Blandine Saint-Oyant’s This Is It, now at Gallery 825 in West Hollywood, combines a mix of spray painted lines, riveting colors, and varied gemoetric shapes both cut out and drawn. Her vibrant geometry sings, just as her pallette resonates with chromatic intensity.

Saint-Oyant says she uses a painting process that she’s developed over a period of the last 15-20 years to create this visually galvanizing work. “I pour liquid oil paint on a painted background on canvas or paper. When I pour different batches of colored paint and rotate the canvas back and forth, the pigments intermingle into visually striking patterns and shapes.”

It’s an alchemic process that allows for a fusion of the planned and the experimental..”Things happen when the colors mix and shapes form,” she relates, calling her work often improvisational. “I like the fluid and organic result.”

However, her work in This is It is a progression from her past work and processes. She considers it to be a transitional show that includes her large titular painting, which stands at an impressive 58″ by 70″, a series of paintings that are 38″ x 38″ called “Ecclectics,” and two smaller framed collages that she titles “Misfits.”

All of this work is an outgrowth of what she terms a “gloomy two year period” during the pandemic. “This is It” was set to be her last painting ever, she explaints. “This painting was a first for me in all aspects, technically and conceptually. It was the first time that I included painted letters and used so many straight lines and gradations of colors. It was a difficult piece that took me several months to complete. But this long process gave me with the time to think about the next phase.”

Despite her decision to be done with painting, after completing the ambitious “This is It,” she found she had a strong urgency to create new work. “I began working on a series of collages. My intention was not to restrict myself to one single technique or range of colors but to explore and juxtapose them as freely and unconventionally as possible, in a completely eclectic manner,” she says.

With this in mind, she combined “geometric and organic shapes, cut out and drawn lines, gradations of colors, and the use of spray paint to provide a strong new element. I call the collage series ‘The Misfits,’ and two are in this show. ”

These images, shown above,  are precise and fluid, the textures popping out of their vivid backgrounds, creating an astonishingly tactile and meaningful 3-D effect. There is a liquidity to both works, as if a splash or drops of water were caught in time and added to the layered collage.

Her work with collage led her to create her newest body of work,  her series “The Ecclectics,” below, which she developed using planned geometric shapes that she juxtaposes to one another.  This pre-planning differentiates her work in this exhibition from previous projects. “What makes these paintings different from my other work is the addition of free-floating spray-painted lines, patterned geometric shapes, and an adventurous color range that I have not used before,” she attests.

Each of these works once again exhibits a rich texturality that captures movement both in line and through color gradations. The paintings are like watching the shifting contours and colors of a sunset sky,  but instad of those colors changing due to the passage of time, they shift from engaging in deeper contemplation of the works, which manifest light and shadow in varied strands to create a sense of luminosity and depth.

Saint-Oyant continues to work with oils, drawn to the range of color and the infinite subtleties of color that oil offers her. She describes the medium as providing her with a “greater range” of color and texture than acrylic or other mediums.

Despite having once considered putting painted work aside, she finds that painting today is “still an exciting and innovative medium that has a lot to offer. I want my work to make people curious and inquisitive,” she says. “Painting is an adventurous endeavor that I will always pursue. For me it is a way to answer existential questions, to fully express myself in a completely personal and independent way. I am currently working on a series that I call ‘Les Sauvages’, which is more gestural and expressionist. “

The exhibition is on view at LAAA’s Gallery 825, located at 825 N. La Cienega in West Hollywood, through October 18th.

Along with Saint-Oyant’s lush work, also on view are three other solo exhibitions: Lousine Hogtanian’s Inside Out; Lori Markman’s Magical Landscapes; and Laura Van Duren’s Revelers.

  • Genie Davis; images provided by the artist

 

 

Heidi Duckler Dances Into 39th Year in the Light of the Harvest Moon

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With immersive magic, Heidi Duckler Dance celebrated its 39th year with a site specific dance perfomance and gala last Saturday with signature impressive original style.

The excitingly innovative dance company is known for site-specific perfromances, and this one, held the the Frank Gehry-designed outdoor space of the Loyola Law School Campus, was stunning. The performance, Dance in the Light of the Harvest Moon was an hour long extravaganza of swirling and galvanizing dance.

 

Featuring live saxophone and cello, dancers in stunning fish head costumes wove from plaza area to ascending stairwells, parking garage ramps, and beside a spectacularly lit purple and green tree. Why fish? Renowned architecht Gehry was known to love fish, and the campus was designed, Gehry himself as said, as a kind of stage set,  “…a little village of buildings around a main plaza…with character and diverse structures.” The buildings served here as a contained aquarium of sorts, aswim with lights, music, and dancers who moved, literally and figuratively “upstream” and circled vibrantly hued buildings.

Along with Duckler’s innovative hand overseeing all,  Madison Olandt, and Aleks Perez choreographed and directed. The
original collaborative piece School of Fish, created by transdisciplinary choreographer Shoji Yamasaki, was a highlight. Skilled visual artist and costume designer Snezana Saraswatic Petrovic created stunning costumes for the event, creating fish heads from plastic zip ties for the dancers, and dressing them in shiny, supple scaly-gloves, fabrics, and sparkly shoes. Costumes, music, and sinuous, ecstatic dance moves all combined with super views of the DTLA skyline for an ecstatic night of dance.

Audience members were treated to charcuterie platters and cocktails, a gala awards ceremony at which Duckler introduced her successsor as artistic director for coming years, Raymond Ejiofor, preceding the dance performance.

The performance moved from plaza to outdoor stairs, from ghostly figures in a kind of underworld to fish-head shimmring swimmers, goddess Diana-like huntresses under illuminated trees, and a final multi-level work that had audience members following the fish-head-wearing dancers up five levels of the school’s parking garage, with costumed saxophonist and bubble machines a part of the delightful finale.

That final piece ended on the rooftop amid the shimmering downtown lights with a silent auction, live band, and buffet tables.  With audience members makng their way home at last to dream of dancing fish and moonlight seranades.

 

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and Jack Burke

 

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind

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Tate Modern London Feb-September 2024 – Nancy Kay Turner

Yoko Ono’s immersive retrospective at Britain’s Tate Modern is a joyful, poetic, prophetic, sprawling exhibition that is as fresh, pointed and poignant as ever, highlighting Ono’s tremendous influence on conceptual, video and performance art. Ono’s biography is instructive here as she was only 12 when Japan was embroiled in World War II, an event that cast a long shadow over her work and life. Ono and her younger brother were sent to the countryside for safe keeping. There they would lie on the grass watching the clouds and invent food menus, as food was scarce. Ono claims this as her first art piece. Healing acts of imagination and a focus on peace have long been central tenets of her varied art practice for over 70 years.

 

Always a trail blazer, she was the first female philosophy student at Tokyo’s Gaushuin University before moving to the United States and studying poetry and music composition at Sarah Lawrence College. This exhibition begins at the beginning with Yoko Ono and her first husband, Juillard-trained composer Toshi Ichiyanagi’s loft at 112 Chamber Street, where they would host performances and events with everyone from Marcel Duchamp, Robert Morris, Isami Noguchi, Robert Rauschenberg, Peggy Guggenheim, John Cage, Charlotte Moorman and Le Monte Young either in attendance or performing. There are wonderful films and photographs here detailing this fecund decade with all these revolutionary artists and musicians fomenting magic and making history together, clearly cementing Ono’s role as a leading force in both Fluxus and Conceptual Art – while also delineating her uniqueness. Even earlier, in the mid-nineteen fifties, Ono created Grapefruit, a book of instruction where Ono has the reader create paintings in their mind. The original framed works of instruction on display here are on simple typing paper and are handwritten in ink by Ichiyanagi, with an English translation on the bottom. Poetic and weirdly compelling to read, they are hung in a grid and quite absorbing.  Here’s one example:

PAINTING FOR THE WIND

Cut a hole in a bag filled with seeds

of any kind and place the bag where

there is wind.

1961 summer

Each page is dated with the season of its origin duly noted which gives it even more specificity. The difference between Ono’s instructions and Sol Lewitt is that his instructions like a composer’s sheet music annotations, result in a particular concrete work albeit with some room for interpretation, while Ono’s remain in the mind of the receiver.

Ideas came to me like I was tuning

                                                      Into some radio from the sky…

                                                      I couldn’t realize most of my

Ideas…In the conceptual world

You did not have to think about

how an idea could be realized physically.

I could be totally daring.

The exhibition then moves the viewer to Ono’s mesmerizing durational performative work. In 1965, she performed Cut Piece at Carnegie recital Hall in New York City. Here Ono is seated on her haunches, on a bare stage, in a demure black boucle long sleeved front button suit – very 1965. Nearby is a long fabric scissor. The audience is invited to cut a piece of her clothing. Filmed by the Maysles Brothers in black and white, this Is a nail biter to watch. At first, a woman comes up and carefully cuts a small piece from Ono’s shoulder which she takes with her. But eventually a man comes up and slices Ono’s sleeve from wrist to shoulder exposing her white skin, taking nothing. Meanwhile, she is motionless, her face impassive. Then another man, now empowered it seems, cuts the front of her jacket, exposing her slip, which covers her bra. Another man comes up and snips the straps holding up the slip and bra. She then crosses her arms over her bosom preventing the bra from exposing her, and the event is over.

I held my breath for the entire time. Her fearlessness is astounding. The idea of an artist letting the audience decide what to take and what to leave is incredibly brave. Perhaps this originates from the Japanese concept of “kami” that says all things in the world have a spiritual essence especially clothes. So Ono is sharing her essence with the unknown audience members who are invited to take a piece. One could ruminate on the layers of meaning behind this idea in view of classic song lyrics like “all of me, why not take all of me.?” though Ono is clearly an empowered woman. For me this was a deeply disturbing video to watch, which only speaks to its enormous staying power and relevance sixty years after its inception.

Ono has a playful side as well. Her Film No.4 (‘BOTTOMS’) shows 200 images of buttocks strung together in the most unremarkable way, which is her point. The audio contains parts of conversations with participants (some famous) and her second husband filmmaker Anthony Cox. Her film score for the film states “Strings bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace.” This was of course, banned at first, although it is the very opposite of erotic with all these behinds looking quite plain. Ono’s passion for peace, a legacy of her childhood experience in war time shaped her at a very young age.

What I was struck with as I walked through this vast exhibit was the wide range of community engagement opportunities. Folks were hammering a nail into a painting as per Ono’s instructions as I did as well; they were playing “chess” with Ono’s all white chess boards  White Chess set 1966 arranged  on white tables with white chairs. Perhaps a nod to chess playing Marcel Duchamp, the granddaddy of Surrealism.? But ironically there can be no winner if all pieces are the same. Peace and community are always on her mind. They were inhabiting her black bags to recreate her Bag Piece 1964 in which participants are enclosed in black bags and try to move around while being deprived of vision. When photographed it is quite beautiful (originally photographed June 7, 1965). There was plenty of laughter as ordinary folks inhabited the black bags. I can’t remember any exhibit that I have ever been to that so captivated, energized and engaged such a diverse audience.

Ono also made physical sculptures that are witty and seemingly simple but quite thought provoking as in Apple 1966, acrylic pedestal with brass plaque, which does indeed have one apple on it. Reminds one of Rene Magritte’s iconic painting of a pipe “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. While Magritte’s message to us is that this is not a pipe merely a flat two- dimensional depiction of one, Ono’s apple is indeed an apple. Her sculpture delves into language, categorizing objects, food, mythology, religion (THE famous Adam and Eve apple) and is also a send up of pretentious sculptures on pedestals.

Another thought provoking and stunning piece is Add Colour (Refugee Boat) concept 1960, first realized 2016, wooden boat, paint, instruction, brushes, size variable. The museum goers are invited to color the white walls, floors, and boat with text and or image. In the Tate Exhibition blue markers replaced paint. Eventually every reachable surface is densely covered over with peace signs, slogans, drawings and graffiti creating a gorgeous and moving environment as many images are buried and essentially erased – a metaphor surely for all the lost lives. There are many pieces that were conceived in the 1960s but realized later in her career. I would argue that most of Ono’s seminal work was created in the nineteen sixties and revisited in new iterations in the next several decades, morphing but ever important and timely.

Ono’s collaboration with her famous third husband John Lennon is almost a footnote in this show, though their work together is documented mostly in film and photographs. She was 31 when they met at her exhibit in London and 39 when they married and had their famous weeklong bed-in for peace in Amsterdam. He was tragically murdered in December 8, 1980 and Ono never remarried.`

Music of the Mind at the Tate Modern is a testament to Ono’s unique contribution to contemporary art and one of a string of recent museum retrospectives seeking to honor her vision. Yoko Ono’s works stand the test of time becoming even more pertinent, universal and meaningful in 2024 than when they were conceived by her some 60 years ago. Ono continues to work for peace.

After unblocking one’s mind, by dispensing with visual, auditory and kinetic perceptions, what will come out of us? Would there be anything? I wonder. And my Events are spent mostly in wonderment.

Yoko Ono January 23, 1966

     — Nancy Kay Turner; photos by Nancy Kay Turner