The Indefatigable Dulce Stein

Posted on by Diversions LA

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It’s rare that the DiversionsLA tag line of “art, food, fun…” etc. gets used in one story, but that would be the case here, at a vibrant dinner hosted by Dulce Stein, curated at The Gallery Presents in Hawthorne. The Gallery Presents will be a memory by the end of this month, urban renewal taking its toll for now on the South Bay art scene.

However, Stein, above second from the left, and flanked by chef Leo Munoz on her left,  with the lovely kitchen helper and server (as well as artist and musician) Elisa Garcia on the far right, will keep on bringing art, cultural experiences, and plenty of fun to artists and art lovers throughout the Southland at other venues from Silver Lake to Manhattan Beach.

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DiversionsLA was included in a beautiful dinner of traditional Mexican cuisine as part of the closing for Stein’s The Frida Show.

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Above, Stein with Munoz, who created Sabor Mexicano soul-full food that included a rich Sopa Tarasca, a fragrant bean-based soup from Mexico’s Michoacan; Mole de ciruela con Guajolote y arroz al cilantro – or turkey in plum mole, which for vegetarians was replaced with a delightful zucchini-based stew, Calabacitas Poblanas. Main dishes were followed by bread pudding with fruit, known as Capirotada. Served alongside were homemade horchata, Agua de Jamaica aka hibiscus tea, and sangria.

Below, a tribute to the artists who contributed to both The Frida Show and The Boobs Exhibit, both hung at the gallery and providing a terrific backdrop to a dinner fit for a Frida.

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Above, artist Vicki Barkley.

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An installation piece recreating Frida’s bedroom, above, created by Janet Gonzalez.

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Above, photographer Fred Prinz gets the front-of-the-camera treatment.

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DiversionsLA author with artist Charisse Abellana-Williams

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Above, artist Gabriela Malinalxochitl Zapata.

Below, music by The Furious Seasons, whose dynamic playing set the mood for a lively evening. f23c1134 f23c1141 f23c1142 f23c1148 f23c1155 f23c1158 f23c1159 f23c1162 f23c1163

So here is a toast to Stein and her creative team – a delightful evening of art, music, and food – and most of all to a spirit that keeps on keepin’ on. You’ve seen the word that best describes this prolific curator in its most proper context: indefatigable.

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Jack Burke

Trio of Delights at KP Projects

Posted on by Diversions LA

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What is one gallery with an incredible fan following, one worth braving the crowds on opening night to view stunning exhibitions? That would be KP Projects, and as an extra incentive, upstairs is the smaller and equally well curated Launch.

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Above, Edward Walton Wilcox creates spooky, light drenched abstracts that resemble chandeliers or crowns lit with candles. Melting, thrumming with color, and with a dimensional aspect that makes the work seem to leap off the wall, Wilcox creates a memorable signature look in this exhibition, Haunted.

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The Rube-Goldberg contraptions and fascinating visual play of Wendy Marvel & Mark Rosen’s Momentoscope led viewers into a miniature wonderland of animated magic. Combining marvels of engineering and steam punk design with a richly voluptuous landscape of images is no mean feat.

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Hope Kroll’s delicate, disembodied visuals in her Looks Good on Paper created the perfect contrast, with images as layered and connected, as ritualistic and divine as they are surreal homages to life itself.

We are offering up this review a tad late, post closing, but just in time for a new opening at the gallery, on Saturday October 8th. Surely you’ll want to join us in exploring these works:

TRAVIS LOUIE – VIEWS FROM A NETHERWORLD (MAIN GALLERY)

SALLY DENG – WOMEN WORK (SQUARE GALLERY)

and don’t forget to check out the always innovative and exciting works one floor above, at Launch. Both galleries are located mid-city at 170 S. La Brea Ave.

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Jack Burke

 

Groundspace Explores Fantastic Feminist Figuration

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Above: artists and curators at Groundspace.

Closing with an artist talk on October 8th, Fantastic Feminist Figuration offers the stellar work of seven SoCal artists, all female, all unique in their perspective on women, humankind, and yes, figures. Be sure to catch this beautiful show, well-curated by Betty Brown and Wendy Sherman at Groundspace in DTLA.

The artists: Jodi Bonassi, Bibi Davidson, Enzia Farrell, Laura Larson, Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman, Tslil Tsemet, and Lauren YS weave a tapestry of often magical properties, depicting women, children, animal muses and familiars, the feminine as a force both powerful and persuasive.

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Jodi Bonassi’s complex, incredibly riveting universe of characters spill from their canvasses. “I’ve been working ten hours a day, for two days at a time not sleeping for months now creating these pieces,” Bonassi relates. “The smaller pieces I used my sketches. Each person depicted is not just one photo reference, it is a mixture of people, and some live sketching, some photography. My pieces are all about the experience, the communal exhcnage that happens with people,” she explains. “They’re about the convesrations that happen and the stories people tell you. Paintings are a free hand stream of consciousness.”

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In “Monkey Business,” Bonassi represents “the inner work of how people are communicating” with her charming depictions of friends in the art community.

In “Small Ones,” Bonassi bases her work on a real life encounter with children eating ice cream. She asked their parents permission to include them in a photograph on which she based her work. “There were in real life questionable guys on the corner, the homeless. I integrated that with the children. With alien scared monkeys and a clown with a knife, with animals that look violent and represent people.”

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In her “Edge of the World,” the animal/human imagery blends together, creating both loving and fearsome analogies to the precarious state of our present environment. In this large, oceanic-themed painting, Bonassi expresses her “feelings that come from our current election, from bitory, from being led down a river of uncertainty. Women are on the crossroads, on the edge of the world.”

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Bibi Davidson’s bright and bold colors stand out in her signature style, presenting her own frequent persona, The Girl in paintings with razor sharp looks and plenty of passion. Owls, rabbits, women – each are totemic figures, icons in a way. Davidson says her work depicts this sentiment “It’s so hard to be a woman, but thank God I am a woman and not a man.”

Enzia Ferrel’s paintings take Edgar Allan Poe and turn the stories into feminist fantasies, surreal and riveting, with animal friends passing into an ethereal other-world, and imparting their spirits here.

The bronze sculptures of Laura Larson depict animal figures at a funeral. Their beloved, perhaps human, has passed on and yet remains as a kind of counterpart to Ferrel’s take on the afterlife, to comfort. Perfectly shaped, the pieces are weighty and charming at the same time.

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Tslil Tsemet’s work features snakes, breasts, cats, and sunlight – icon-like images that serve as totems against the vicissitudes of modern life.

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Dierdre Sullivan-Beeman dreamy aesthetic binds humans and animals in her paintings crafted in “14th century oil and tempera mixed technique. I play off feminine innocence, and mix realistic ideology,” she asserts.

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Her “Zebra Girl” is a very female take on Greek centaurs. Her “Balloon Girl” is, she says, “about dharma, the path… as opposed to karma.” Style and subject fuse into a mix of classic style and colors with a modern and subversive aesthetic.

Lauren YS’s watercolor, acrylic, and ink pieces have a dark underbelly poised on the edge of the magical, with skeletons and witch-like women taking viewers into yet another aspect of magic, dark and rich. There’s an interestingly surreal, fairy-tale like look to her work.

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Regardless of the differences in their works, each of these artists presents a strong female sensibility, a connectedness to earth, light, darkness, magic, fate, roads traveled and those not taken, friendship, connection and alienation. In short: the humane experience embraced by the feminine divine.

Curator’s Talk/Closing Reception on Saturday, October 8 from 4-6 p.m.

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Jack Burke

 

Disruptively Tasty Blueberry Toast at the Echo Theater

Posted on by Diversions LA

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We had a sense of what to expect from Mary Laws’ Blueberry Toast, at the Echo Theater through October 29th. Laws, after all, is a writer for the incredibly dark, subversive, yet exceedingly well-written Preacher on AMC. Comic-book based characters and taste for the very morbid are a highlight of her work on that show – and morbid events and humor are also a keynote of Blueberry Toast.

The four character play also has a bit of a comic-book sensibility, with its candy-colored suburban set, it’s broadly drawn characters who are certainly not the cheerful mom, dad, and two kids contingent they appear when first on-stage.

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Directed by Dustin Wills,  the play is as scabrous as it is hilarious, the tale of disgruntled Walt (Albert Dayan), a middle school poetry teacher; his long-suffering and deeply angry wife, Barb (Jacqueline Wright), and their two children, Jack (Michael Sturgis) and Jill (Alexandra Freeman), who are hell-bent on performing a bizarre play within the play for their parental audience.

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The action gets started when Barb offers to make the likely having-an-affair and anxious to get on with it Walt breakfast. He says blueberry toast, she makes it, he says he meant blueberry pancakes, and a power struggle ensues with drastic and bloody results.

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Splaying their vitriol everywhere they can, the adults make love, war, and twisted commentary their compulsions; the kids are clearly twisted in their own way from their exposure to mama and papa’s war.

Fresh and crazy, shocking and idiosyncratic, Blueberry Toast entertains in a vibrantly depraved fashion, encouraging the audience to immerse themselves in a world all the more bleak for its sunshiny set and seemingly comfortable middle class home.

 

Both brutal and highly amusing, this is one piece of toast audiences will enjoy crunching, while delighting in the fact that whatever dysfunction they may have in their own home lives, it ain’t nothing like this.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the Echo Theater.