“Before the Bridge” at the Jason Vass Gallery succinctly and beautifully sums up images of change – perfect for the gallery’s location in the shadow of the soon-to-be-no-more 6th Street Bridge. This is only the third exhibition at the gallery space, which opened January 30th, but it’s not to be missed.
Featuring the work of six artists, Deborah Brown, Dan Callis, Mark Dutcher, Cynthia MacAdams, Douglas Tausik and Gene Vass, paintings, sculpture, and mixed media are the mediums for some dazzling art works about transition.
Above, Douglas Tausik with the two creations his wife’s pregnancy inspired.
Douglas Tausik’s “Venus” is the artist’s tribute to his wife’s pregnancy. “I changed my approach to the work in this piece,” Tausik says. “While the idea of traditional sculpture being exhausted is premature, this piece came out a little differently, a personal narrative, thought and emotion united,” he says. The flowing curves of this piece seduces, the feeling of birth is present in every soft line, even had we not heard the story of the work’s inspiration.
Dan Callis say his multi-layered paintings reflect light beneath darkness. “I wanted to build up these very dense layers to create intentional space, then subvert it, and build it again. That may be emblematic of my own aging,” he laughs. “I want my paintings to be beautiful but not in a traditional way, rather in a way that comes out of going down some difficult roads.” Delicate and translucent colors create a translucent effect; there’s a sense of reflection, light, water, glass in each of his pieces that pull viewers in as if floating in a wave of color.
Mark Dutcher’s abstract paintings include stark but sensuous lines weaving through flows of color. His “I am Hart Crane,” is blue with black graphite lines. It could be a river or a highway, something that courses on, as mutable as time.
Deborah Brown’s “I Thought I Could Handle It” is hilarious, sexual, and simply captivating, an interweaving of female legs and bodies with a mushroom head with which Freud would have a field day. This too is a piece about transformation, as desire, as feminism, as identity. Both surreal and whimsical, her work dovetails nicely with photographer Cynthia Macadams, who presents iconic photographs of men and women that delve beneath the surface of the skin. Also beneath the surface: the swimmingly dark monolithic forms of Gene Vass that offer fine cracks of light breaking through these seemingly immovable shapes.
Yes, it’s all about change. Check out this exhibit which will change after June 12th. The gallery is located 1452 E. Sixth Street in DTLA.
Fire, air, water, earth. At Loft at Liz’s “Elements,” the gallery’s annual nature themed exhibition, six potent artists create this year’s entry in an annual show that focuses on nature. Six artists, Doron Gazit, Michael Giancristiano, Moses Hacmon, Luigia Martelloni, Jeff Frost and Joan Wulf re-create these natural elements as something profound and poetic.
Environmental artist Doron Gazit has worked with inflatables for thirty years, and his kinetic wind sculptures here potently visualize the unseen. Using nature as his canvas, he has worked with plastic tubes that are hundreds of feet long.
Writ on a smaller scale here, “Frozen Flow,” take up substantially less space, white and illuminated from within, they channel air currents and pull viewers into a world both haunting and beautiful. It’s not hard to visualize Gazit working on his next upcoming projects in Iceland and in the Amazon forest.
Artist Luigia Martelloni takes on the element of earth in an installation that fills the smaller exhibition room at the Loft. Luigia’s work involves crystals, earth, organic materials, and paper prints.
“It’s a very personal journey, that goes back to the vastness of the land that I explored in 1986. I’m translating to the audience not information about finished objects, but about recovering and salvaging materials and translating ideas. The crystals are about a trip I took from the Colorado mines to Utah. There is salt from Salt lake City, dirt from Monument Valley. I prepare my paper in an organic way, and I use papers that are a collection of years and years.”
Joan Wulf “fell into” her own burning ring of fire – she was painting on wood panels, and found a particularly beautiful wood grain that she did not want to gesso, instead using the panel to burn rather than paint her work.
Now this pyrographic artist is creating art painted with flame rather than brushes, burning canvasses, crafting images that resemble ancient cave paintings or conversely, modern patterns that just happen to be burned into shape rather than conventionally painted.
Moses Hacmon uses a liquid film technique to render images of water on aluminum. His eco-friendly project creates images that evoke both the depths of the ocean and the earth from space, watery images that shine over aluminum that could merely be representing the crystal clear waters of a distant cove.
Michael Giancristiano says his art in this show, featuring air plants, was “inspired by melting ice caps and what’s under them. Scientists have reanimated organisms, a rebirth,” he notes. He wanted to use “organic materials that are alive and growing. The air plants are held onto functional handbags and panels by fasteners. They can be interchanged, removed, and watered.” The air plants he uses here come from the pineapple species.
We did not have the opportunity to talk to Jeff Frost, whose images of fire are seductively palpable in his photographic and video art works.
Find the element that moves your spirit through June 20th at the Loft at Liz’s, 453 S. La Brea Ave.
Film buffs should head to the mountains this memorial weekend, as May 25 through May 29, The Mammoth Lakes Film Festival is serving up a bevy of unique films and festival favorites.
The annual fest is opening for the second year in a mountain setting perhaps a little reminiscent – there is a ski season, and there are independent films on screen – of the Sundance Film Festival, but with a more intimate vibe.
Festival director Shira Dubrovner, above, is currently the artistic director of the Mammoth Lakes Repertory Theatre, but spent 17 years working in film here in Los Angeles. After successfully producing theater in Mammoth Lakes, with the help of her programming director, LA-based filmmaker and film programmer Paul Sbrizzi, Dubrovner started her film festival last year. Sbrizzi has programmed for Slamdance, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and Outfest.
“I picked an amazing programmer who has programmed for fifteen years. He really knows how to identify amazing films and find raw talent,” Dubrovner says.
After moving to achieve a “more community-based lifestyle,” she worked exclusively producing theater in Mammoth Lakes. But Dubrovner says she missed working in independent film, reached out to Sbrizzi, and the fest was born.
Mammoth makes a great location for a festival. As a ski resort just five hours north of LA, many industry pros have second houses here, Dubrovner notes, resulting in a solid support system of filmmakers.
“Since we put on the festival, people have started coming out of the woodwork in terms of contributing to the idea and giving back to the community,” she says.
One such local, cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen, connected Dubrovner to her first sponsors, Red Digital and Panavision.
This year, the festival is showing over 50 films, including Saturday morning indie cartoons for children, 17 feature films, and 40 shorts.
“Around 20% of our films are world premieres. After the first year, Movie Maker Magazine named us as one of the top fifty festivals worth the entry fee, and that helped us to create a nice balance between festival favorites and obscure films that have not been seen. We’ve grown in the number of films we’re screening this year, but I like to not bite off too much more than I can chew, and become a well-oiled machine rather than growing too quickly,” Dubrovner explains.
One new addition is the festival’s Spirit Award, which this year is going to director Joe Dante. “He came out of the indie film world, starting in Roger Corman’s camp. We thought he would be the perfect recipient. He’s never been to Mammoth, but I think he’s going to fall in love with the area,” Dubrovner laughs.
Photo by Unimedia Images/REX Shutterstock (2586013a)
The Spirit Award event will screen Dante’s classic film Innerspace, followed by an award presentation, an in-depth Q & A with Dante and actor Robert Picardo, and a lively after-party.
The festival hosts all of its attending filmmakers, and some 26 films are sending directors, producers, and actors to the festival. Along with accommodations and festival passes, these filmmakers will be taken on excursions in the area, including a private tour to the ghost town of Bodie.
“It’s kind of like giving a party, you want all your guests to have a good time. I really want them to leave revved up, ready to move on to the rest of their career, and reconnected to nature. That does something to the spirit that is undeniable. I’m excited and proud to be a part of that experience for them,” Dubrovner reports. “Our filmmakers come first. We like to screen risk taking, unapologetic films made by creative, artistic people.”
But the festival director wants not only to inspire filmmakers, but her audiences as well. “I want them to leave still thinking about the stories and images they’ve experienced, so that it is a continuing process for them that doesn’t end when they leave the theater.”
Operation Avalanche
Among the festival’s top picks are the quirky, engaging, opening night offering, Operation Avalanche, set in 1967, and involving the moon landing, Soviet spies, and stunning conspiracies; the intense Beware the Slenderman, the story of an Internet bogeyman; and closing night, Sonita, an inspiring story about Sonita Alizadeh, an 18-year-old Afghan refugee in Iran.
Beware the Slenderman
“We have a mix of all different styles of filmmaking which support the indie film world,” Dubrovner says. “We schedule many films that haven’t been seen elsewhere, films that are edgy and push the limits.”
All but one venue are within walking distance of each other, making the festival’s logistics as personal as its warm director. Dubrovner has created a festival in which attendees can easily interact with filmmakers, and vice-versa.
“We want to create an intimate and accessible experience for everyone. We kind of leave Hollywood at the entrance to the town, and just get back to everyone’s creative roots. When you’re inspired in a natural setting, the walls come down, it’s just artist to artist, filmmaker to audience. Accessible and intimate, that’s what I love,” she says.
As do most filmmakers and film lovers. So get ready to hit Mammoth mountain – where a still-new film festival is offering cinematic marvels alongside the region’s natural ones.
At Lora Schlesinger Gallery through June 4th, “Abstraction” features the immersive abstract works of Miya Ando, Richard Bruland, Sophia Dizon Dillo, Mark Steven Greenfield, and Maxwell Hender. Acrylics, oils, and mixed media comprise a show that pulls you into a world beyond this one, and that invites viewers to plunge visually into the images depicted.
Miya Ando’s “Forest Green Meditation Mandala,” is both primitive and delicate, using dyed bodhi skeleton leaves and microfilament mounted on archival ragboard to create an almost tribal image. Her dye printed “Clouds” are infused with light, reflecting and refracting their aluminum surface.
Sophia Dizon Dillo’s creates ethereally translucent works that play with light and shadow; Richard Bruland, below, uses more opaque techniques.
Richard Bruland says his work is all about putting on texture, sanding it off, and then painting on top of this already layered and nuanced surface.
“I take a trowel and evenly spread out the paint, then I take a flat stick and push it into the acrylic gel, lift it into peaks and valleys, drag one color out. I create entire detailed surfaces first, but I want them to have depth. So then I sand it, then I go over it with a brush and paint.” The artist digs deep, and so does the viewer, absorbing this work.
Also on exhibit: minimalist pieces crafted in resin from Maxwell Hender; delicate patterned pen and ink works from Mark Steven Greenfield.
Abstraction offers a very concrete look at some beautiful, non-figuarative works.
