Stepping into New Frontiers

Posted on by Diversions LA

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In a time with the word “border” fraught with intended socio-political context, to have a show that exceeds conventional borders is inspiring both artistically and thematically. Opening October 26th at Jason Vass, Frontiers, from artists Tadashi Moriyama and Rachel Pease is a dramaticly lovely series of works created in ink.

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Both artists create highly detailed drawings, Moriyami’s, above, edging on the more surreal. Pease and Moriyama describe their work as a version of meditative mandala making, requiring both close observation and an appreciation of mysterious, contemplative visual narrative.  

The rainbow colors of Moriyami’s works are aglow, and seem to shift and shimmer. They have the look of a tapestry, one woven of ink.

The artists are married, and moved to Los Angeles from New York,  the quintessential journey to a Western frontier. But while the images could be taken as a look at their new physical landscape, it also revolves around their own brave new world in parenting, and a destination as yet not fully realized — the ongoing discovery process – of their art.

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According to Moriyama “We look for the unknown and unexplored, and attempt to make images that are new to us, and give us unexpected and serendipitous surprises.”

 Moriyama’s ink works are stretched on wood, and created with acrylic as well as ink. Their are buildings and ubran grids as well as seemingly interstellar environments. He references, subverts, and transcends images of Tokyo and New York, traveling into dreamscapes and a realm of other planets and space. A background in Japanese calligraphy is evident, as is the transcendent spirituality in his practice of Zen Buddhism. His otherworldly images are in part an outgrowth of meditation.

They swirl and spin, taking the viewer on a journey infused with movement, into which some figurative elements appear as if seeking a place within this brilliantly colored, seething world.

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Pease focuses her India ink on frosted mylar works on elaborate, magical riffs on the land and forests that surrouned her as she grew up in rural Indiana. Many of her works begin with an image of a tree that she uses as a kind of portal into a landscape that is mystical and fantastical.  There is both grace and elegy in her work, a tribute to a landscape that perhaps never was, or is in danger of disappearing from imagination and reality.

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The grace and stillness of Pease’s work is captivating; it compels viewers to enter into a forest of great beauty and strangeness.

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Canyon of the Distant Land, from Pease, above. The moonrise and mountains evoke images of Yosemite and Zion, while taking viewers into nature previously uncharted, a special, secret place. Both artists’ works surge beyond the prosaic and past common boundaries of location and imagination. They are futuristic and fantastical, yet grounded in a reality of landscape and cityscape; of dreams and desires, of the metaphorical and metaphysical.

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Viewers will find each work an immersive experience, and find a sense of the alchemic in each of these intricately realized and vibrantly alive images.

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The exhibition opens October 26th, reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Jason Vass is located at 1452 E. 6th Street in DTLA.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by gallery

Night Windows Offer an Illuminated Look Inside at CMay Gallery

Posted on by Diversions LA

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South Korean artist Hwang Seon Tae’s remarkable Night Windows is his first exhibition in Los Angeles, and it is a stunner. At CMay Gallery in mid-city through November 30th, the luminous new works from his Lightbox series are truly astonishing.

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Using literal illumination through images of windows, we are invited into perfectly designed, innately architectural rooms and spaces, through which we can see outdoor views or portals of light. In some cases, we see shadows from trees cast in light spilling onto walls. The result in each work is something incandescent.

Hwang Seon Tae, The Sunshine Room, 2019, Plastic Plate, LED, 29.9 x 22.4 x 3.5 inches , 76 x 57 x 9 cm

Asked if the works were representative of a Zen-like or meditative state, the artist demurred. Tse related that the works are to be taken “however you wish to take them, as long as you enjoy them and feel pleasure from them.”

Blissfully free of humans, while several pieces feature a peacefully sleeping cat or dog, the spaces are primarily pristine, well-designed living spaces. The emphasis on the domestic creates the sense of a place of being at rest, a true home.

Demur as he will, there is a highly spiritual component to the work, an emotional peace that vibrates through the observer.

Tse also explained that he views each of his precise lines as a kind of representative, visual language, and that each line has meaning and resonance for him as an artist.

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The use of light is enormously appealing, drawing the eye of course, but also engaging the mind and heart. It feels both transcendent and sweet, balming and beneficient.  His work is also concerned with simply the use of light, dimension, and space.

His line drawings illuminated by LED create an aura of stillness and restfulness, but also the provide a way for the viewer to step into that illumination and feel awash in its brightness. The dimensionality welcomes the viewer to step within each work.

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Some images include bright spots of color, as in the work above.

Tse’s manipulation of the physicality of the acrylic plate is a testament to his art, and in its perfection, also pulls viewers into the contemplation of simplicity, beauty, and minimalism.

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There are a number of other pieces from earlier series also on exhibit at CMay: a glass sculpture representing a rumpled newspaper; soft, out of focus photographic images of objects.

In an art talk Saturday night, the artist said “I am most interested in the objects themselves. In giving them meaning, attaching importance to them.”

Hwang Seon Tae, The Sunshine Room, 2019, Tempered Glass, Sandblast, LED Backlit, 86.6 x 34.4 x 1.6 inches , 220 x 62 x 4 cm

In a sense, he makes the objects – sofa, lamp, chair, window – into a character in his visual narrative.

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Above, a view of one of Tse’s works taken through a gallery window, a perfect introduction to the exhibition.

Born in Korea, trained in sculpture and Glass Art at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle in Germany, the exhibit is mesmerizing and involving. And it would be difficult to overstate the sense of calmness, the sense of joy which the viewer feels when “coming into the light.”

Hwang Seon Tae, The Sunshine Room, 2019, Tempered Glass, Sandblast, LED Backlit, 40.2 x 31.5 x 1.6 inches, 102 x 80 x 4 cm

CMay Gallery is located at 5828 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, 90036.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis, and provided by gallery

Rise Soars and Spins

Posted on by Diversions LA

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With live music, a lush sunset, and a desolate but lovely desert setting just outside Jean, Nev., the Rise Festival captivated from the moment the music began.

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Above, the Zack Gray band performs music that fit the site – a bit ethereal, a bit Coldplay-esque, the songs seemed perfectly timed to match the darkening of the sky. Other musical acts included Agina, Exes, and Ry X, taking the stage before the sun went down with lovely sets of their own.

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While the event describes itself as a music festival that also includes the release, at three timed intervals, of biodegradable lanterns, it is the lantern release itself that creates the true sense of magic, and draws the crowds. We attended Sunday night – the other two nights featured fireworks and a crowd of up to 10,000; Sunday was a smaller group of attendees – a little over half 10,000 – but nonetheless a truly spectacular release.

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The initial release was also a learning process: lighting the igniteable square in the center of the lantern and keeping the delicate paper that shapes it from also igniting while it inflates, is a two-person experience – even three; which makes it all the more delightful once mastering the technique is accomplished.

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Once dusk fell, and crowds gravitated away from the tasty collection of food trucks and craft brew purveyors…

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…once the sunset photos by the iconic “Rise” sign and colored moons and translucent colored columns were taken, attendees were asked to assist in lighting the rows of tiki torches laid out by sections — ticket holders were assigned to a section in  a circular grid from Northwest to Southeast.

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Following the torch lighting, and time to write any messages on the paper lanterns, there was a countdown to the actual lantern launch – and they were aloft. Some skittered too low, needed to be recaptured and reheated; others had first-time-mishaps as ours did; but in the end, they all went soaring into the sky, some seeming to pass in front of the moon.

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It was glorious. It was beyond worth the drive from LA into the desert. The visual spectacle, the sheer art of the event was terrific, but it was the spiritual element of release, fire, prayers and wishes and names on lanterns, the ephemeral nature of the lanterns as they transition to ash, sink, and fade into the desert sand that made the Rise Festival as special as it was.

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We saw participants of all ages – from children to the elderly, enjoying the event.

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Side note: the lanterns are biodegradeable, but even as we were leaving, the Rise Festival staff was waiting on horseback, foot, and cart to collect lantern detritus when the flames burnt out and gravity did its thing.

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Before it did, thousands looked up, enjoying the light, flight, and spiritual flames — Rise Festival is both a participatory performance art event and a meditative experience rolled into one.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Jack Burke

 

 

Heavy Water Digs Deep

Posted on by Diversions LA

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At La Luz de Jesus Gallery through October 27th, Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman invites viewers to step inside her dreams.

Her new exhibition Heavy Water is pure vision, a deepening of her work,  in which the viewer literally and figuratively can wade into an alchemic world awash in portent. Her characters are girls caught in a perpetual, magical youth, suffused with golden light. Sullivan-Beeman explains her paintings as a “dive headfirst into the soup of the collective unconscious. There, in the most ancient realm of the mind, I inherit stories. Like water, I draw my girls up from the deepest well.”

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The title of this exhibition refers to what the artist describes as “the rarest and most dangerous substance on Earth… made from ordinary tap water.” She posits that no one would notice the difference should the material replace the water coming from one’s tap, H20 turned to the lethal D20, “a stepping stone towards the atomic bomb.” First produced in 1932 and used in nuclear energy research, in Sullivan-Beeman’s dream world, her girls use the material for creation instead of destruction.

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Each painting is created in the artist’s signature style, using egg tempera, the time-consuming artistic process once employed by the Old Masters. The medium she uses, as well as being unique today, inherently carries a quality of luminance. Her most delicate images seem to glow with power.

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Viewers are encouraged to begin their journey through Heavy Water with Sulllivan-Beeman’s installation, in which she makes use of both stencils and sculptural elements to take viewers to the bottom of the sea, where jelly fish swim and kelp beds sway. The immersive quality of her laser-cut giant 6-foot seahorse, still-dressed skeleton, glittery treasure chest, and giant rabbit are pulled straight from her paintings; some elements of the installation were collaborated with artist Gina M. “I really want the viewer to experience the whole show and ‘swim’ through the art,” Sullivan-Beeman relates.

Somehow the oversized 3D sculptural images feel perfectly natural, as if they’ve emerged from within the paintings; this is due at least in part to the fact that the paintings have a depth in technique that makes them feel richly dimensional.

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The paintings lead viewers through images that traverse the natural and fantastical world, through history and daydreams, all alight from within. While it might seem unlikely to create work that takes the figurative to the edge of surreal, Sullivan-Beeman has done so, shaping a narrative not unlike a sci-fi Beatrix Potter. Mystical, magical and powerfully practical, the girls in Sullivan-Beeman’s works represent the artist’s own subconscious, a world of fairytales and innocence, of struggle and resistance, of wisdom and self-realization.

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In “Alchemy Girl,” a smoky-eyed, pink-haired girl reclines on a desk pouring heavy water into a beaker, while a human-sized rabbit somewhat frantically writes atomic equations on a blackboard behind her. She is clad in a blue dress with white pinafore reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland; perhaps Alice and the White Rabbit now exist in an alternate universe. Her intense, forthright gaze challenges the viewer: she has the power.

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With “Finding Marilyn Girl,” we also see echoes of Alice. There’s a white rabbit of sorts – with a skull face – tucked under the arm of a girl wearing the Mad Hatter’s headgear. She peers into an opening in a tree, through which Marilyn Monroe’s visage floats – a search for something lost, aspects of powerful gain. Who controls life’s game here? Alice has bested both hatter and rabbit, and has exhumed the ghost and grandeur of a fairy-tale movie star. There is also an Alice-like vested rabbit steering the boat of a languid “Lotus Girl.”

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The wild-haired, haunting “Gas Mask Girl” has a perfect bird perched on the hose to her mask; she may be at risk, but she has secured herself, and the bird – a promise for a brighter future, perhaps – has aligned with her.

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“Ascending Girl” arises from water in a beam of holy light, as UFOs fly overhead, a toucan watches, and another girl, clad in a bathing suit and clutching a beach ball, looks on. From this fecund, tropical world, a girl chooses to fly upward and onward, heading to a place few of us can imagine, much less aspire, to go.

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The entire exhibition is filled with beautiful, loving images – butterflies and sea life, a squirrel interested in a fallen Snow White’s discarded apple, an adorable hedgehog, a minute giraffe, a glorious pink flamingo. And of course, Sullivan-Beeman’s fascinating, complicated, magical girls.

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If art is a realized dream, then Sullivan-Beeman’s works a dream within a dream. It’s time to take a deep dive into her Heavy Water.

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72303078_10218435719871495_5522971554859712512_nLa Luz de Jesus Gallery is located at 4633 Hollywood Blvd.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by  Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman and Genie Davis