At Chinatown’s Automata, a fascinating steam-punk meets high tech vibe has long been an earmark of the exhibits displayed. With “Light in the Dark,” a single night exhibition, curator and artist Alexis Macnab may have created the ultimate combination.
“It’s a mechanical and metaphoric exploration of the camera in al its forms,” Macnab said of her jam-packed show. “The goal was to make something informative but also fictional. I really want people to learn something about how a camera works by walking in the door, and at the same time, experience the magical qualities of it.”
Photo by Jack Burke
Eleven different artists and four live performers contributed to the show, which was presented with detailed notes about the individual pieces and subjects. “I’m really interested in museums. In the idea that you’re supposed to learn something in a designed event. I feel very strongly that we should, in gallery shows, be working in that model, creating a specific learning event,” Macnab explained.
Artist Thadeus Frazier-Reed co-curated and exhibited at Automata as well. His “Make Your Own Zoetrope” allowed guests to create a spinning animation piece from construction paper and digital images which they could keep. “I’m personally interested in combining the digital with the antique. We did that a lot in many pieces here, using a lot of technology, but allowing those attending to bring home a physical artifact that harkens back to early ideas in motion pictures.”
Frazier-Reed noted that the gallery often uses “crafts tables so people can create something they can walk away with. We want people to learn something kinesthetically.”
Photo by Jack Burke
However the knowledge is imparted, the projected images, antique cameras, crafting of animation, and pin-hole viewing provided an illuminating look at not just the workings and origins of cameras, but that of human imagination as well.
“Art, at its best, reminds us that we are human,” visual artist Cie Gumucio says. And certainly, her art brings the spiritual components of our existence into clear focus. Gumucio, a resident of Redondo Beach, Calif., mixes media the way writers mix metaphors and similes – creating, in the artist’s own words, “images that when brought together in surprising juxtaposition often show a hidden doorway to the subconscious, sometimes whimsical, at times profound, ultimately reflecting a greater interior truth.”
Her recent solo installation of “Writers in Search of the Sacred” was exhibited at Studio 347/ Michael Sterns Gallery San Pedro, Calif. earlier this summer. This large-scale multi-media exhibit is a cavalcade of images and emotions, featuring Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” and the collected poems of Emily Dickinson. Gumucio focused on these authors and these particular works due to a shared thematic component in their writing that surprised the artist, a “yearning for the transcendent and sacred.” From that place of redemption, Gumucio created a mixed media assemblage comprised of a veritable artistic kitchen sink: sculpture, photography, large-scale video, collage, mobiles, found art, painting, and pastels. Each writer is presented with a full world of objects and art that resonate with their subjects and styles.
photo by Jack Burke
In the section of the installation devoted to Kerouac, the artist shapes a feeling of momentum and infinite possibility. A video installation creates the sensation of the viewer sitting behind the wheel of Kerouac’s car, looking through the windshield. Road maps form the textured background of a portrait of the author. A narrow highway is divided with cigarettes serving as the lines in the road; coffee cups along the shoulder stand watch as mileage markers or roadside memorials. Separately, a manual typewriter holds a sheet of paper imprinted with a broad tire track. The overall effect is perpetual motion, the pull of the road and the pull of something deeper within the author and the viewer.
With each of the authors depicted, Gumucio uses images culled from their writing to express the soul of the writer – an open bird cage for Dickinson, a fishing pole for Hemingway – and takes those images one step further, into a place where viewers can identify not just with the writer’s craft and soul, but into the spiritual longing in their own hearts. In short, Gumucio gets it: words paint a picture in these writers’ works, a sacred picture. In turn, she paints sacred pictures based on their words. “Through this exhibit I hope to deepen an understanding of these writers’ writing through art,” she notes. And in the process, she also deepens the viewers understanding of art itself, whether it’s found in the written word or on a painted canvas.
While this powerful installation is Gumucio’s most recent, the artist has created a wide variety of dynamic art forms over the years, including video installations embedded in canvas, and singular installations such as “Visible Light” which shimmers with green, blue, and gold orbs caught in a wire mesh reminiscent of a fishing net. The viewer gets the sense that Gumucio is indeed fishing: for meaning, form, color, and the spiritual. Her mixed media photo assemblage “Wedding Toast,” with a partially burnt wedding invitation and pearl necklace emerging from a toaster is another case in point. With the frame partially singed as well, Gumucio seems to be revealing what can happen when love becomes forgotten “toast,” while playfully mocking the concept of the classic champagne toast to the bride and groom. The artist also creates stellar travel photography, revealing haunting and vivid images such as a slightly bent figure of a woman in black walking down an alley in Greece, that portends mystery.
In short, the road to the heart-filling “Writers in Search of the Sacred” has been well-trod by the Gumucio. In other forms and mediums, the artist has served up images that couple a sense of longing and a lust for life. This is an artist driven to find the core in all art forms, and the viewers who experience it. She distills the essence of creativity and shares it in “art that provokes a conversation about the meaning and mystery of being human.”
As well as Studio 347, Gumucio has exhibited recently at the Downtown LA Art Walk, the Torrance Art Museum, the South Bay Contemporary in Palos Verdes, Calif., and the R. Blitzer Gallery in Santa Cruz, Calif.
Currently a part of the incredible collection of art that is CA 101 at The Industrial Cathedral, a.k.a. AES Power Plant in Redondo Beach, artist Cie Gumucio should be one of many reasons for a visit to the exhibition.
Craft brewing is getting to be a real thing in Los Angeles. Breweries are scattered throughout the city from Pasadena to DTLA to Torrance. With a high concentration of stellar micro-brews in the South Bay, start there for a day’s leisurely sipping and snacking.
Absolution Brewery
Torrance
Seats are made of church pews and beers feature monikers like Cardinal Sin Crimson and Purgatory Hefeweizen. Add a bowl of pretzels from behind the bar, or check out the food trucks in the parking lot.
Phantom Carriage
Carson
Taking its name from a 1921-era horror film, with beers named for classic horror performers, sour beers are the order of the day. Try the Lugosi or Rathbone, served in stemmed tasting glasses. A screening room runs old horror classics and soccer matches. On-site, the cafe offers small plates and organic choices.
The Dudes
Torrance
Picnic tables, board games, and Big Lebowski quotes, along with intense flavors from brews like Grandma’s Pecan brown ale and the Blood Orange Amber Ale with cocoa and citrus notes.
Smog City Brewery
Torrance
Smog City was among the first brewers to stake a claim in town. Along with its wide selection of beers ready for tasting flights in a comfortable warehouse setting, the brewers offers some experimental choices like a wine and beer hybrid.
King Harbor – Redondo Beach
Cozy ambiance, high top tables, and a low key strip mall location. Try the Abel Brown cold brew coffee brown ale.
In a well deserved extended run at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, the mixed-media exhibition “thread/bare” features a stunning collection of work by six women artists.
An expansion of an exhibition with the same name held in Camarillo last year, the show combines traditional mixed media style with sculpture and two large-scale installation pieces.The exhibition includes work by artists Nurit Avesar, Elana Kundell, Susan Kurland, Janet Neuwalder, Sigrid Orlet, and Peggy Pownall.
Each artist’s style is unique, but the six are all thematically joined in an exploration that lays “bare” the power of creativity.
Peggy Pownall’s work uses circular patterns, collage, and photographs in a study of self-reflection. Pownall says “To me, the special nature of this exhibit lies in its strong thread of continuity based in the artists’ similar perceptions. My work draws its content and character from internal sources, personal memories and an almost compulsive need to sort through life’s chaos to create order and clarity. My methods and materials are born out of the need to find an expression of my themes, and as with all the artists in this show, they are unique to my work.”
Susan Kurland creates plexiglass pieces and sculptures that pay tribute to detailed needlework, a traditional female art. “I’ve come to realize and embrace the materials I now use and draw from my training and practice as a seamstress which continues to influence my practice as an artist.” Kurland combines conventional and domestic materials in her art. “To a certain degree being an artist does change how I see things. In training to be an artist, one learns to look at art with a discerning eye, comparing and evaluating; but all humans perceive our world differently even given the same situation.”
Sigrid Orlet uses burlap, dried plants, and traditional painting to convey a deeply dimensional quality in her art. Orlet notes “As a human being, I discovered that I could visually express that which I can’t ‘language’ in any other way. Creative process is the exploration of a pathless land. This exhibit is unique in that a group of women committed to a process of honest creative inquiry. Acting individually, we returned a body of work that vibrates with the colors, textures, and forms of living life on familial, societal, and global levels.” To Orlet, being an artist is “all about committing to the creative process. And, just like any other serious commitment, this relationship challenges us on many different levels. Art-making is one big life lesson, a lesson that fills me with wonder and humility.”
Elana Kundell creates stunning abstract landscapes that are rooted in the concrete. “My work stems from a fascination with color – its luminosity, instability and relationships, and especially its emotional immediacy. In recent work, I’ve been thinking about the nature of experience, memory, and creativity. These paintings are a sort of meditation in which layers of experience form a visceral and sensual new reality.” Working in oil paint and charcoal, Kundell says her work “alludes to the threading of experience, emotion, relationships and memory, and to the process of making the imaginary real.”
Nurit Avesar creates patterned figurative paintings and portraits, layering mixed media. She describes her work as being “about migration and the effect of cultural legacies. I start each piece by painting on paper. Next I paste the painting onto a canvas, sand it, tear apart some of it and than collage over the stressed surface fragments of old paintings. I also apply rust, thread, cheese- cloth, paint, and graphite. I use destruction as a means of creativity. The final image is very different than the original painting.” She essentially recycles her painting into new images.
“I express the ideas of the interaction of history with the present, as well as my experience as an immigrant, piecing together a multilayer new identity.”
Artist Janet Neuwalder uses clay and mixed media in her pieces. “I see my contribution to the exhibition as showing how the specific media of clay combined with mixed media materials, parallels nature’s and our own growth and transformation.” She says that her art “allows me to take in every part, every moment of the world we live in on all different levels, engaging all senses. For me all of the sights, sounds, smells become potential seeds, or stars, beacons that at any time may co-mingle.”
Curator Yoram Gil, describes “thread/bare” as “maybe the best collection of mature raw and new talent to emerge into the LA art scene in recent years. The diversity and uniqueness of each artist is profound and stunning. You can really sense the friendship, care, and affection of all the participating artists. There is something very special about this show.”
