Springtide is Surging Save the Date

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Springtide is Surging Save the Date – Genie Davis

Opening March 14th at the brand new Diversions Fine Arts Gallery in Manhattan Beach, Springtide is a verdant collection of spring, sea, and seasonally sweet dreams bursting with beauty and energy.

This inclusive new gallery space opens with a group exhibition featuring a wide range of local, national, and international artists working in oil, acrylic, watercolor, mixed media, neon, sculpture, and photography.

The beautifully immersive waters of Springtide include artists:

Linda Sue Price * Dave Clark * Jeffrey Sklan * Kaye Freeman * Danielle Eubank *  Scott Trimble * Bernard Fallon * Karen Doyle * Jennifer Chan * Rebecca Hamm * Glenn Waggner * Michael Stearns * Karen Hochman Brown * Stephanie Sydney *   Judy Herman * Nurit Avesar * Dellis Frank * Nancy Mooslin * Skye Amber Sweet * Esperanza Deese * Linda Stelling * Annie Marini-Genzon *  Beth Elliott * Caron G Rand * Lydia Nakashima Degarrod * Christina Shurts 

 The exhibition explores each artist’s vision of spring, its colors, its flora and fauna, its textures, and the promise of resilience and rebirth this season carries from sea to shore, from perfect petals to wild wind.

                                     Maybe it is the springtide. I am so happy I am afraid.

                                    The sense of living fills me with exultation. I want to sing,

                                    to dance; I am dithyrambic with delight.

— Robert William Service

 

Danielle Eubank brings a vibrant painting of calm, aqua Santa Barbara waters to gallery, while Scott Trimble exhibits a wildly surging green sea.

Jeffrey Sklan’s photographic flowers dance besides Glenn Waggner’s painted blooms.

A dark blue pool surrounds ecstatically floating flowers from Annie Marini – Genzon; a dazzlingly abstracted blue “Bloom” unfolds from Linda Stelling, and an electrifying bouquet shimmers from Skye Amber Sweet.

 

Sculptural works include delicate orbs from Lydia Nakashima Degarood…

Intensely alive and motion-filled forms arrive from Dave Clark, while neon dances from Linda Sue Price’s glowing abstract.

 

There is a jubilant image recalling a Greek spring from Christina Shurts, vibrant and edgily floral work from Kaye Freeman, and enchanted swirls of emerald from Jennifer Chan.

Karen Doyle takes viewers to a fecund purple and blue landscape while Bernard Fallon directs us to a serene seaside coffee shop.

Rebecca Hamm and Michael Stearns each offer unique, lustrous abstract depths filled with watery wonder.

Karen Hochman Brown takes viewers on the wings of a lush butterfly, while Nancy Mooslin leads us in the sunlit Irish woods.

Esperanza Deese playfully expores the Palos Verdes shoreline, and Judy Herman dreamily takes us on a starlit train ride.

Dellis Frank and Nurit Avesar each bring viewers into very different abstract worlds that pulse with color.

Stephanie Sydney creates an entirely new dimension in her glowy mixed media work, while Caron G Rand offers a circular twinned image that dazzles with complexity.

To truly experience all these unique images, each explosive with the energy and passion of spring, be sure to join us for the arrival of Springtide. Isn’t it time to explore the beauty of art that grows and gives joy all year long?

The exhibition opens Saturday, March 14th from 4-7 p.m. (pies for pi day not forgotten!) at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery, 1069 N. Aviation Blvd. just off the 405 in Manahttan Beach. Disclaimer, I had the pleasure of curating this gorgeous show.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artists

 

 

Artist and Gallerist Joanna Garel Moves On

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Artist and Gallerist Joanna Garel Moves On – Genie Davis

Artist and gallerist Joanna Garel has brought her own unique art vision to Manhattan Beach for the last two years through her eponymous Garel Gallery.  Now, she’s moving on to explore new ways of expressing her love of art and art creation.

She relates that several years before establishing her gallery, she saw a contemporary art “void that needed to be filled in the South Bay.” Having begun her foray into the arts as a collector, she wondered at the lack of fine art galleries in the eclectic beach towns just south of the airport, and decided to do a long pop-up to prove that a contemporary gallery would be viable in the area.

That pop up turned into her several-years-long gallery commitment and a desire to embrace her own artistic heritage by bringing “more diversity and championing under-represented artists, and to bring more Filipino artists to the forefront of my programming. The mission was to educate through experiential exposure.”

Along the way, she relates that she herself gained experience, knowledge, and “dynamic connections and opportunities.”
Now,  she plans to close the brick and mortar Garel Gallery space.  However, she says that she plans to  “explore different ways of presenting art to the community.  Whether it be through more pop ups, collaborations, art salons, [or] a podcast on YouTube and social media” she still intends to chamption the artists she had on her roster, and “continue on a project by project basis.” 

She plans to split her time between the Los Angeles area and the Philippines.  “The main driver is for me to spend more time with my mother by building a house in Dalaguete,  Philippines.  My natural instinct, of course,  was to build an art community within the area and in the process of sharing this idea,  many of my artists expressed an interest in an art residency. And of course I thought this would be a natural extension to continue my connections.”

She sees herself as having an online gallery, an artists residency, and a pop up in the Philippines, as well as her podcast, which she is calling Art B*#tch. She is also looking forward to taking on curatorial projects and collaborations when she’s in the LA area, such as curating a show with Hamilton Selway Fine Art in West Hollywood later this year, and hosting art salons at various artists home studios. Hamilton Selway is well known for offering collectible works by Andy Warhol.

As to her own work as an artist, that too will continue. She relates that in the past she “tended to play it safe. And now I am being more bold with colors and especially texture. Right now I have been working with wood sheets cut out to create more texture and layering while keeping within my Southern California landscapes as the subject.”

As to her exuberant exhibitions at Garel Gallery in the past two years, when asked her favorite, she demurs. “It’s like picking a favorite child,” she explains. However she admits to “special love for the group shows at the gallery,” especially her exhibition featuring Filipino artists, Not Your Regular Chicken Adobo, and a solo exhibition by artist Kiley Ames, Chasing Sleep.  Throughout her Manhattan Beach gallery years she served as her own curator, with the only exceptions being a group exhibition curated by Robin Jack Sarner, The Other Side: Art, Recovery, and the Human Condition last August,  and myself with the recent First Foot: Landscapes for a New Year group show.

She describes her overall experience as a gallerist and curator as “one of the most fulfilling and exhilarating experiences. I truly found my calling in championing the works of under represented artists.  It’s a win-win for everyone – I’m happy, the artist is happy, and the collector is happy.  Art is a natural mood enhancer, and I met the most inspiring people with a common passion for creativity,” she says.

To conclude her years at Garel Gallery, she will be holding a disco party along with a performance art experience as her closing. See Ya Later Aligator will take place Saturday February 28th from 6-8 p.m.

Genie Davis; photos provided by the gallery and by Genie Davis

Large and Delightful – Robert Therrien at The Broad

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Large and Delightful – Robert Therrien at The Broad – Genie Davis

The encompassing and frankly enchanting exhibition of Robert Therrien’s work, This is a Story, is now at The Broad through April 5th. It’s a lot of fun and its playfully revelatory, the largest museum presentation of the late artist’s work to date, featuring more than 120 pieces spanning five decades of of creative evolution.

It’s an immersive and tranformative exhibition: start by walking in and circling Therrien’s towering sculpture of white ceramic plates, which seem to reolve with you. Each piece seems to take a surreal delight in reshaping the viewer’s approach to the world, inviting us to reconceive how we feel about the every day objects that inhabit our lives.

Among the oversized and reconceptioned subjects are the artist’s magically mammoth “No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown),” which may make viewers feel as if they dropped in from the set of Honey I Shrunk the Kids.  

There is the whimsically twisted “No title (black beds)” a sinuous twist of plastic and enamel; a steel and enamel series of shadows and phone cords, a sculpture of looped wire, an oil can and a steeple with similar slender points and peaks. Work is untitled as the artist is more concerned with connecting themes and common objects writ into meticulously towering poetic forms.

Can work be both surreal and comforting? Therrien appears to have it both ways, never more evident than with his recurring theme of the Underwood deviled ham logo of a red devil and pitchfork, found on large paper works, silkscreens with random tiny devils, and on a massive panel of red dots that the artist is said to have envisioned after using his own asthma inhaler.

Working in his own massive studio space in Los Angeles, the artist retooled his childhood memories and sensations to create them writ large in both form and imagination.

His “Untitled (room, pots and pans I),” spills cooking items from a mammoth pantry with a dutch door,  while his “Red Room” offers a mixed media work featuring 888 red objects stuffed into a space the size of a closet. More open, and allowing viewers to intimately explore this “set” is Not title (room panic doors) which resembles a space in an institution – hospital, jail perhaps, with bare walls and an unattractive florescent light.

In some ways, Therrien’s work resembles being perpetually on a movie set or having stepped down into Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole.

There are snowmen and chapels, dishes and doorways, reflective pitchers as sleek as they are the overpowering, all the enormity of domestic objects in an oversized childhood imagination reenvisioned as art. The Broad’s encompassing show allows viewers to feel a sense of wonder in the everyday, to dance through a wild world of memory as vast as its scale.

It invites viewers to essentially reconsider how even ordinary objects can shape our inner lives, or perhaps more to the point, how our inner lives can reshape the everyday into something quite wonderful. Referencing both memory and personal history, Therrien’s work is tactile, energetic, and conceptually elegant.

And as to the exhibition itself, it is, pun intended, a monumental show, both accessible and thoughtful, enlightening viewers on the artist’s history, and providing outsized delights. Go enjoy.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis 

Echoes of Gen X Resonate

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Echoes of Gen X Resonate – Genie Davis

There’s a treat ahead for both music and art lovers at Gabba Gallery in DTLA. Opening February 21st, the gallery presents Echoes of Gen X: the Art of the Filmore. 

Gallerist Jason Ostro says the exhibition was inspired by “A love of music and art and meeting the right person [along] with an incredible historic collection of the dead stock to the Fillmore. There will be over 700 concert prints along with a historic representation of how gig prints began with Bill Graham and his music scene, which grew and grew but always had art associated.”

Ostro notes that the “right person” he met is Dana Marver, the original collector of all this material who has decided to share and sell his astonishing collection. Marver was a rock and roll producer and musician who found “great happiness within himself in creating this collection.”

There are over 1,000 concerts in this vast collection, with dates ranging from the 80s to the 2000s. Bands include acts from Tom Petty to Santana, Blues Traveler, Green Day,  Weezer, and Red Hot Chili Peppers among many others.  As to the artists creating these works, they include among them Chuck Sperry, Chris Shaw, Christopher Peterson, Frank Kozik, Harry, Rossit, Lee Conklin, Randy Tuten, Rex Ray and Todd Slater.

Asked for some of his personal highlights, Ostro calls them too many to list, but adds that among his favorites are classic prints by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jamiroquai, Medeski Martinand Wood, “so many Grateful Dead side projects,”  Bob Weir, and STS9 among many bands in all genres, acts that the gallerist attests he’s either seen “or wish I could have seen.”

Gabba is also displaying and selling images of all Bill Graham’s venues online as well as in the brick and mortar gallery. Ostro curated along with Gabba’s Elena Jacobson.

And speaking of the gallery itself, Gabba has always had both a welcoming vibe and cutting edge exhibitions. Ostro explains that the act of creating these shows is fairly seamless. “We create ideas that we love together. We have a very special team at Gabba Gallery and we’re always open to each others ideas. This has kept us fresh and [allows us to be] ever changing to show all forms of art.”

The large and welcoming gallery moved from a smaller space in Fillipinotown to downtown a few years ago, and the new space has allowed Ostro to create “larger and more thought-out productions.”  These include offering occasional Los Angeles community shows working with groups such as Cannibal Flower.

As to the upcoming Echoes of Gen X, he describes the exhibition as a “love letter to the music Gen X truly appreciated in our younger days. The Fillmore is one of those classic venues with so much history that being able to share it in an art show feels like a museum exhibition.”

The encylopediac collection is both impressive and galvanizing, and the enthusiasm with which the gallery is presenting it, and creating specialized exhibition walls to display it exciting. For Ostro, the experience is also deeply moving.

“Just going thru the art has brought up so many emotions,” he says. “One great facet of this show is seeing all the early work done by some of today’s biggest names in gig prints.”

Both poignant and passionately presented, this exhibition both rocks and rolls, making it a don’t-miss.

Echoes of Gen X: the Art of the Filmore opens February 21st at 6 p.m. Gabba Gallery is located at 235 S Broadway in Los Angeles.

  • Genie Davis, photos provided by the gallery