October 2018 – Diversions LA

Brewery Art Walk October 2018

Posted on October 30, 2018October 31, 2018 by Diversions LA

The Brewery Art Walk is a special occasion. Twice a year, artists open their studios, their homes, their hearts, and their creative souls to the general public. With such intimacy, attendees gain insight into their artistic process, see works that they may not otherwise see, and have an amazing opportunity to purchase artworks often at significantly below gallery prices.

It’s a process of discovery and joy – certainly one that we’ve been participating in for many years. I had a child the age of my grandson when I first visited this space 20 years ago, and if you missed experiencing the artwalk this fall, look for it in the spring.

Where is the beating heart of the art scene in Los Angeles? Surprise: it’s not in the latest gallery with ties to the international scene, it’s not in the major museum show you’re planning to visit before the holidays. It’s right here where the artists literally and figuratively live through their work.

Here’s a brief look at some of the work we viewed this month.

Route, Rut, Lane: A Karkhana Collaboration at Shoebox Projects, a mixed-media project co-curator Nancy Kay Turner describes as inspired by the historical Mughal workshop is a truly collaborative exhibition – each piece has elements created by all eight of the contributing artists.

The layered, intricate pieces resemble tapestry; the works have descriptions of each artist’s contribution written on the back. The sense that these artists wove disparate elements into a cohesive whole is one impressive aspect of the exhibition, but perhaps best of all is the feeling of discovery inherent in each piece.

Viewers can pull the visual threads apart as they examine each work, gaining insight into how they came together; they can analyze who did what and why; they can see how a collective community can shape a greater whole than one alone.

It was the perfect way to start the day at the artwalk. The show’s location at Shoebox Gallery was also a great introduction to the cutting edge, fresh exhibitions the small but powerful gallery offers.

Helmed by artist, curator, and general art guru Kristine Schomaker, the gallery offers exhibitions that are primarily the result of a month-long residency where artists create or mount bodies of work or installations.

In the gallery’s The Closet, a compact installation space to the rear of the main room, Kate Carvellas’ sensational cabinet of curiosities – found art sculptures that absolutely inhabited the space – is a riveting tour de force.

Dani Dodge opened her studio to reveal glowing works in acrylic and mixed media from three different series, including a lush Paris-set selection of paintings, a series featuring heart rendering canines, and one focused on the circus life.

It was an exciting glimpse into the artist’s wall art; Dodge is well known for creating powerful installations and sculptural work.

Chenhung Chen’s sculptural art and drawings may be shaped by wires, cords, and crocheted copper but they feel inherently alive, as if they could, after dark, shift through time and space and shimmer into another realm.

Ceramicist Skyler Bolton shaped stunning and practical art with unusual oxblood and periwinkle blue bowls, vases, cups, and plates.

Randi Hokett’s mineral-based art involves the formations of crystals; new works were created on paper, both delicate and surreal, like intricate, sparkling, gem studded land masses being shaped before your eyes.

Emily Elise Halpern offered shining abstracts and smaller works with vibrant words of wisdom inscribed on them.

Teale Hatheway’s vivid, illumined works burst from the walls with light and life.

Todd Westover’s blossoming floral works have evolved to include landscapes with houses and hills and trees; he experimented with prints of his work on scarves and bags and pillows, too.

Jorin Bossen’s portraits are unusually evocative, suggesting so much more going on beneath the surface of each piece, as if we were invited into the subject’s personal intelligence.

Jane Szabo’s photographic art is a mix of still life and portraiture each unique and poetic. Her still life work stands like a visual short story, full of rich detail that one wishes would expand into a novel of images. Faceless portraiture may seem an anomaly but for Szabo it is not; her specially crafted dress images are perfect stand-ins for the aspects of the human spirit they represent.

At the Jesus Wall Gallery, a group of artists each displayed their work. Lena Moross’ large-scale nudes are watercolor dreams, lush and just this side of surreal; smaller works sold like proverbial hotcakes unframed from a table Moross manned, tributes to her prolific output and graceful style.

Kristine Augustyn exhibited a wide range of work: female figures on newsprint, abstracts, minute landscapes.

Her sense of color vibrates; each of these very different bodies of work are created with a striking palette and textural contrast.

There was so much more of course, but this is a sampling of the bright artistic lights ready to shine for you when the Brewery Art Walk rolls around again in the spring. Don’t miss.

Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis, Teale Hatheway and Kate Carvellas photos courtesy of artists

Jeffrey Sklan Offers a Fine Elegy

Posted on October 28, 2018October 26, 2018 by Diversions LA

Floral images are a blossoming thing for photographic artist Jeffrey Sklan. With Elegy, which he terms his last botatnical series, he is “paying tribute,” but perhaps his work always has, regardless of subject.

“The floral images in this series were the result of two discrete events, a decade or so apart. First, a few years ago, I wanted to do a project that would not require other people, in any capacity. Second, there was the ‘rediscovery’ of film negatives that had been processed but never printed,” Sklan remarks.

The negatives were taken immediately after a memorial service for Sklan’s mother in 2001.

“Everyone had gone and it was quiet in a way that is almost always preceded by great loss. There was a bunch of tulips in an art nouveau vase that I had given her, years before. They were both beautiful and lonely,” he relates. Restless and seeking an artistic and stylistic change, he found these negatives 13 years later; the result was an initial image titled “Beverly’s Tulips,” after the artist’s mother.

The Elegy series reflects both beauty and loss. The initial image “Lily for Orlando,” was “literally created as the crime scene from the Pulse Nightclub was playing out. A black lily on green background resulted. It was June, 2016 and there was no intention of it being anything but a one-off.”

But in July of 2016, 87 people were killed celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. “The enormity of it resulted in another image. And that was that – a project took form,” Sklan says.

Then a classmate of his daughter’s was murdered by a white supremacist in Portland.

“Things shifted, and rapidly, from that point. I had met a victim. The image created for this boy, whose name was Taliesin, was strong and nuanced. For the first time ever, I did a giclee print as a fundraiser to commemorate him and accumulate scholarship funds for his alma mater. The response was positive and humbling.”

Profits from the print sales were forwarded to Reed College in Taliesin’s name; a scholarhsip was created, and a handwritten note from the first recipient remains on the artist’s desk, as tangible proof that his work is powerful enough to make a difference.

“The exhibition is designed to be a traveling show. The prints are relatively small. Their sales are the sole source of funding for travel and exhibition costs. There are no sponsors to date. There is absolutely no profit motive for me. It has been its own reward, thus far,” Sklan asserts. “The message is simple: we are each, in our own way and according to our capacity, capable of effecting change.”

Sklan terms this work a labor of love. “When I was shooting it, ten hour shoots seemed like ten minutes. The process is straightforward and comports with my aesthetic of ‘nothing extra.’ One camera and one 30-year-old lens were used, in a small studio that was once my dining room.”

There’s a strong spiritual component to his work – not only the floral images here, but in earlier floral works; portraits of artists – a new series which he calls The Brush Off; and in other incarnations of his work, including an image of a lonely roadside restaurant abandoned in New Mexico, or in mixed-media collaborations that celebrate musical artists. That component comes from within: it is a ribbon of light, a moment of solitude, the sense of longing for connection – to life, to beauty, to being.

Sklan says “The most successful images reflect what I was feeling or intuiting in the moments surrounding the shutter’s release. Whether person or flower, capturing emotional content or portraying a sitter in such a way as to spark a visceral reaction is the intention. I am seeking to memorialize the essence of what is before me. This is a search for the spiritual.” He says that his eye rejects that which is coarse or crass, and is not distracted by “whatever lays on the surface. If you’re around me for any length of time, your truth will make itself known,” he attests.

His rich color palette originated with a fascination and admiration for artists such as Velasquez, Rembrandt, Titian, and Caravaggio. “My sense was that if I could ever take just one photograph that had those artists’ strength and tonal qualities…that would be a triumph.”

With the colors of the Renaissance at play, Sklan has triumphed repeatedly. He creates depths to his work regardless of subject, with foreground dimensionally riveting, background shaping the unknown depths of an entire world. He creates works that have a resonate, inner light, in part by acknowledging the light within his subjects, whether plant or animal.

“A sitter’s light and the artist’s sometimes collide and sometimes merge seamlessly. When it works, there is transference going on. Many people, despite showing up, are reluctant or apprehensive. I just flood them with my own inner glow until they relax and trust the process. Then, their own can come out to play. At that point, I disappear. Whether spoken of or not, there has been an energy exchange.” One of the ways in which Sklan exchanges energy is with “real joy” he says, and indeed his delight in working with his human subjects is more than palpable.

Perhaps the flowers feel his joy too, as well as his sense of life’s fragility, it’s passions and sorrows.

“There were two separate bodies of botanical work that preceded Elegy. The first was a nod to the 60s and the sun-drenched, color saturated South Florida of my youth. The flowers were shot on white with an emphasis on translucence and detail. photoLA 2016 featured them and they made people very happy,” he says.

“That was immediately followed by work that was more reserved. More like myself. I called them Black and Bloom.

The next 5000 images were shot in a darkened studio. Light was added back in a stingy fashion. Shadows and hinted-at detail became the norm. Coincidentally, my sense was that we were entering some dark times as 2016 progressed. To that degree, the art reflects the times,” Sklan suggests.

The darker images opened at photoLA2017, setting off many questions among viewers, who were encouraged to examine the works slowly, to search the meaning in the shadows.

“The comments were so thoughtful and thought provoking that it stunned me. People got it,” Sklan says.

PhotoLA2019 will be the official debut of Elegy. To be held in Santa Monica at the end of January, the show will serve as a proving ground for an exhibition which Sklan hopes will travel to various cities including some where the events memorialized occurred.

These works are special indeed: as with every petal of a flower, there is perfection. Here is a captured moment of beauty in mourning, of growing things even through and after death. Sklan’s Elegy is an affirmation of the meaning in a life, even after that life itself has slipped away.

Mark photoLA2019 on your calendar for the debut of Sklan’s latest body of work.

– Genie Davis; photos: courtesy of artist

Here’s Looking at You Kid at Loft at Liz’s: Collaborative Curation

Posted on October 26, 2018 by Diversions LA

Here’s Looking At You, Kid, now at Loft at Liz’s through November 5th, puts the gallery’s best face forward: the collaborative curation focuses on portraiture as subject and form. And this week is the time to take a look at the subjects and their artists, with an artist talk scheduled October 23rd, featuring Justin Bower, Alejandro Gehry, Annie Terrazzo and Jane Szabo.

Co-curated with galleriest Liz Gordon and Cynthia Penna, it marks the pair’s third collaboration. Along with a stellar collection of portraits in a wide range of mediums, one of the most exciting elements of the exhibition is an artist in residency that allows individual artists to interact directly with anyone who’d like to have their portrait done. The gallery’s Project Room is the space in which artists create this work.

Gordon notes “Each week during the portraiture show, The Projects Room will become a 1-2 week residency for you to choose among the participating artists to create your own portrait. You can contact the artist directly for scheduling and pricing.” Through the 29th, the artist is Alejando Gehry; October 30 through November 6th, Alex Schaefer.

Portraiture here carries so many different facets, but Gordon found the show difficult to curate only from the standpoint that “there are so many artists to choose from who do wonderful portraiture. We wanted portraiture that told a story… for example, Alejandro Gehry’s portraits encompass an in-depth study of World War 1 and the countries that fought in it. Jane Szabo’s photographic portraits of people in their own environments gives us a glimpse into their lives beyond their faces.”

She adds: “We also chose artists whose work and mediums are vastly different from one another, with two exceptions: Carl Grauer from the East Coast and Alex Schaefer from the West Coast – it is uncanny how similar their palette and stroke are, and it is exactly for this reason I wanted to show them together.

What is amazing is that neither one knows the other and yet when their work arrived, at least 10 of the portraits resembled one another.”

Penna describes the show as focusing on the idea that “I exist, because I am in the picture,” noting that photography revolutionized the world of painting. “When the photograph was introduced, the possibility of being immortalized became accessible to everyone, something which represented a social vindication, an economic means of assuring a slice of immortality.” Unlike the raw immediacy of a cell-phone selfie with its disposable artifice, Penna posits that the painted portrait – or photographic art form as portrait “slowly fixes an existence and a personality…something that lays one bare for all time and that cannot be cancelled…”

The gallery’s exhibition is described by Penna as “a kind of portrait that seems to look back at the observer: it looks and it seems to say ‘take care, I am the one who does the looking, I am looking straight through you and laying you bare: you cannot hide from me because it is me who controls the play of the gazes.’”

Each of the artists participating in the show give viewers this unblinking insight into the subjects they’ve shaped and documented and the viewer’s perception of them. Those exhibiting include: Carl Grauer, Justin Bower, Mary Cinque, Alex Schaefer, Annie Terrazzo, Alejandro Gehry, Antonella Masetti, and Jane Szabo.

It’s a wonderfully mixed bag: Masetti creates female figures that mix “the fragility and strength that represents the essence of femininity. I try to represent, through my paintings, our challenge: we do not fear you,” she says.

Gehry works with a long held interest in the history and decorative nature of military uniforms. “I wanted to paint the figure, and also incorporate the significance of historic military wardrobe by using the post Napoleonic ornate headwear of the First World War. I began making these paintings in 2013 with the intention to lead up to the centennial of the beginning of World War I. On January 24, 2013, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta removed the military’s ban on women serving in combat. This gave me the idea to adapt the series and swap the gender of the figures I was painting. The women represented in these paintings are wearing designated helmets of the countries that fought each other during the war.”

Szabo gives the viewer insight into person, place, and the individual’s place in their world. Her photographic work here brings an intimate look at the portraiture subject in the “wild” of their own environment: their homes. Providing a look at the life a person inhabits, the result is both an artifact and an exploration.

Schaefer offers fully alive portraits that seem to have flowed directly from the subject to brush to canvas. It is a kinetic connection to be savored.

Each of the artists create portraits that are immediate, visceral, and filled with character and contemporary style. They look at you, they meet you, they see through you – as the viewer sees into them.

Coming up November 2nd, Loft at Liz’s offers viewers the chance to participate in An Evening of Self-Expression, celebrating diversity and individuality. Attendees can have Schaefer paint their portrait in just 20 minutes.

Lilli Muller invites visitors to bring a piece of clothing to be painted to reflect personal style. Pick up a DIY henna tattoo kit or have one applied by a skilled artist; or arrange a portraiture session in your own home with Szabo.

The event takes place from 7 – 10 p.m. on Friday Nov. 2nd; the exhibition itself closes 11/5.

– Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis

Maya Kabat: Exploring Through Art

Posted on October 18, 2018 by Diversions LA

Everyone, in one way or another, wants to explore the world. What that exploration means is different, of course, to every person – both in scope and in scale.

As an artist, Maya Kabat is vast and adventurous explorer, using two different mediums – paintings and mixed media – to examine the world she perceives around her. This results in varied, fascinating work; layered in concept and construction; colors that shift like sunset reflected on water or within the depths of clouds.

“My paintings and mixed media work evolve from very different places and fill different needs I have as a person and as an artist,” Kabat says.

Her paintings are large and lovely, overlaps of texture and palette that feed one another.

“My paintings are very physical and my whole body is involved with massaging a painting into being. For me, painting is very much like playing sports. I’m playing and collaborating with the paint and responding and moving with the flow of the piece. I’m trying things and then backing off. I’ll pull paint off if it’s not working.”

She notes that when she plays sports she’s interested in the beauty of the game, not winning or losing; she follows the flow.

“I’m interested in…the timing and flow of everything, and the feeling of having a body in space that moves and moves beautifully when everything is right. It takes practice, but it’s the potential for beauty the drives me back to the court or field. My painting is similar as I’m very much in collaboration with the paint; the color, the shapes, the textures, and the structures. All of these things are driving me as I go, and I’m moving and engaged physically and responding to it all in the moment. Sometimes you hit it just right and sometimes you don’t! But the potential for beauty drives me along and drives my desire to practice painting.”

There is a fierceness and a sense of intrinsic movement, shifts of light as it were within her paintings. They are bold and deep. Her mixed media work is more delicate, even transitory.

“My mixed media work on paper evolved from my need to draw and explore language – for me holding a pencil is inseparable from writing – and to explore other materials, and conceptual ideas. I work in series, and each series has lasted about 6 months,” she relates.

Her mixed media pieces seem measured, studied, and very much tell stories, even if they are mysterious tales to the viewer, who is invited to create their own meaning from them.

“In my mixed media drawing practice I’ve explored botanical themes, sickness – I was very ill for a period in my early 40s, binary code, war and the physics of time and space. Right now I’m exploring imagery derived from my trips to the Arctic, and another series about gender relations.”

She works with a wide variety of techniques and uses materials that range from stencil to water based paints, to acrylic pens to playing with freezing and melting ink.

“Working on paper is more flexible and transportable and so I’ll bring this work on trips and residencies where I could never bring oil paints. The dry time that oil paints require is so limiting. So the drawing/mixed media practice allows for me to digest lots of materials and ideas and conceptual themes. My oil painting on canvas is really one long, ongoing and evolving series.”

Her work has an overriding feeling of perfectly planned geometry, combined with a truly spiritual quality that Kabat says is intentional.

“The painting process for me is very much about the physical nature of being a human being. We are human beings with minds, eyes and bodies. I feel that the haptic nature of our reality is really being subverted right now with our cultural obsession with screens. Our minds and eyes are stimulated incessantly while our bodies lie dormant.”

In a sense, Kabat’s work is exploring not just the world around her and the viewer, but the world inside us.

“Spiritually, there is a connection with touch and our bodies that’s being ignored and lost. That’s why I meditate and do yoga and play sports and paint – so I can get out of my head and into my body. My paintings with their thick, visceral textures and pushing and pulling spaces are intended to be viewed with the eyes, but also felt with body. I really hope that people don’t just look at my work, but really feel it as well. The sculptural nature of my painting is hard to see in photographs, but it’s essential to the work.”

There is a quality to her work which makes viewers want to dive into them, to touch them at least metaphorically; their textures seem real, as real as water, light, sand, soil. She’s conceptulaized and created the techniques to shape her aesthetic based at least initially on her interest in texture.

“I was a knitter as a child and quilted,” she notes, explaining that she attened UC Davis for textiles and received an MFA in fiber. But despite that, she gravitated to painting “for the speed and immediacy it offered; again, like sports, speed and immediacy are essential to my creative process,” she asserts.

When she couldn’t build the kind of texture that truly interested her from using brushes, she turned to other tools, eventually discovering the scraping tools intended for laying drywall compound.

“The tools changed everything from that point on: the movement of the tool and learning how to wield it to create lines, slabs and textures drove the development of the work from there. Compositionally, my interest in quilts and quilt makers like the improvisational quilt makers from Gees Bend always provided inspiration, as did artists like Richard Diebenkorn. Trips to Iceland, Greenland, and Machu Picchu also have had a big influence on my work and vision.”

Her color palette is also highly experiental, vivid and alive, what she describes as a push and pull of color. “I think that push and pull of color and form in space expresses another way we relate to the world, and the landscapes that surround us, with our bodies, not just our minds and eyes,” she explains. “When I was in Eastern Greenland on a boat sailing through the fjords and surrounded by icebergs and glaciers, scale and perspective were all askew. Since there were no typical scale markers like buildings or trees in that landscape, your only context is your own body in relation to the objects around you and it’s very disorienting.”

She found it was difficult to tell the size of an object if she couldn’t tell how far away it was.

“It’s exhilarating and powerful to feel like your body is so out of context, and it forces you to question your experience in the world in a very existential way, and to question your body in relationship to the landscape in a way we often take for granted. It’s very profound and overwhelming to be confronted by a glacier.”

Kabat says that she’s trying to recreate that sense in her work, pulling viewers into the works, and recreating the intricate dynamics of body, scale and space.

As to her use of color itself, she calls her work in that area evolving. “Mostly I’m trying to find interesting and unexpected combinations of colors. I think unexpected color combinations help us think differently; to see things with fresh eyes and maybe to open our minds to new possibilities. Each new series of paintings seem to require a different set of rules with regard to color. Every time I get comfortable I try and toss it all up and engage with new ideas…”

To truly experience the colors, textures, and the physical and emotional depths of Kabat’s work, she wants viewers to experience it first hand. “In this age of computers I think we really miss out on the direct experience of art. It really does need to been seen and experienced first hand to be fully understood and appreciated,” she stresses.

And viewers will may have a chance to do so soon. In the past year, she moved from a residency at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation in New York to LA’s StArt Up art fair in LA in Venice, exhibiting around the Los Angeles area at a variety of galleries over the summer. “In November one of my binary code drawings will be in a show at Root Division in San Francisco, 140 Characters, curated by Margaret Timbrell and Lauren Etchells. Next year I’ll have a show at SLATE Contemporary, my gallery in Oakland, and also at The Sam And Adele Golden Foundation Gallery in New Berlin, New York.” She will undoubtedly show again in the LA area, too.

And when she does – that will be the time to take a dive inside her work, to feel the shifts in her work, much as the tides shift, or metamorphic rock forms. You can see photographs of the outcomes of course, but being there to experience it, to explore the world – that’s the best of all.

Genie Davis, photos provided by Maya Kabat

Stevie Love October 30, 2024 at 8:52 am on Visionary Delight: The Images of Carl Baratta – A World in Both Plein Air and Fantastical LandscapesThanks for this, Genie!
JJ October 22, 2024 at 10:23 am on Carved Slices Up Artistic Halloween Fun at Descanso GardensSo wonderful to experience another fun adventure through your writing and photos!
Lori Markman September 22, 2024 at 7:37 pm on Yoko Ono: Music of the MindI really liked your article. It made me want to see the exhibit.
Catherine L. Ruane September 21, 2024 at 12:42 pm on Yoko Ono: Music of the MindAmazing review/art history essay. Thank you Nancy.
Cathy Breslaw September 21, 2024 at 8:22 am on Yoko Ono: Music of the MindNice article Nancy, Cathy Breslaw

Month: October 2018