Talk of the Trees – Catherine Ruane

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It is an overpoweringly beautiful tree. A tree that has survived storm and history, hurt and war, human suffering and tyranny, the vicissitudes of life itself. Catherine Ruane’s “General Sherman” captures that hard-won grace in a vast work that, at present, arcs from floor to ceiling on the wall of the Yiwei Gallery in Venice.

Ruane’s work, which I’ve previously observed shown in a more horizontal construct at the Brand Gallery some months ago, is an awe-inspiring presence here, as alive in every detailed individual charcoal and graphite leaf as if it grew into this space, creating it’s own forest. The General Sherman’s fraught history aside, the most overpowerfing sensation in observing the artist’s recreation of it is of a blessing – for the continuation of life, the ways in which trees talk to the earth, among themselves, and through their whispered rustlings, to us.

The artist has constructed this beautiful work in multiple layers that evoke those rustlings. She’s described assembling the  large-scale piece as something similar to “creating a paper doll” of massive proportions, with each leaf and limb a separate, delicate piece mounted on the wall, shaping a stunningly dimensional image.

Long a capturer of trees and nature, working at present in primarily the nuances of grey and black, Ruane offers a living world reimagined, a sensorial recreation of the natural one. Also on exhibit among her works are several sepia toned floral images, including the beautiful “Left Behind Rose,” above. The coloration resembles a dried and pressed flower, an old memory preserved.

Along with the multiple works by Ruane in this exhibition, Wanderland’s sweet, contained gallery show also features the work of Lynn Hanson and Elizabeth Orleans. Their work, too, features a peacefully monochromatic color palette, one that dovetails well with Ruane’s lustrously, luminously created flora and fauna. Each artist has shaped an almost mythological sense of meandering through a dream-like, yet resilliant universe in which color lives more in the mind’s eye than in the artworks themselves, rendering them, if possible, even more alive.

Ruane’s massive tree is a seminal work within a group of beautiful works. Don’t miss it.

Yiwei Gallery is located in Venice at 1350 Abbott Kinney; the show runs through early December. Settling in among its branches is highly recommended in our own turbulent times.

  • Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis

Gold Soul – the Art of Amrta

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Gold is a grand metal, long lasting, luminous, profoundly durable. It is a precious substance. It is mined and treasured, and used to create valuable jewelry and works of art. Emblematic of something even more precious, the resilliance of the human spirit, artist Amrta takes an event that was a negative cataclysm in her life, and reshapes it as a tribute to her own power, her own gold. In disIntegrated  at Shockboxx Gallery in Hermosa Beach,  Amrta offers a moving and utterly beautiful series of work.

As artwork, the show simply dazzles. Rooted in the expression and expulsion of the darkest heart of trauma, its depth is as rich as its visual surface. Along with the individual paintings, Amrta offers a swirling, galvanizing video dance performance; evocative poetry accompanying each work; and a visceral, heart-hurting series of exhibits in the backroom that explore the traumatic event that led to the creation of this work. The expression “spinning gold from dross” has never been more true.

The work is multi-layered and complex, with the bottom, virtually unseen layer adding textures and a swirl of emotions, with the occasional brief excavatory revelation to the careful viewer. It is dark, that layer, indicative of all the stress and trauma Amrta overcame to reach the point of creating this evocative series of artworks. The final layer is the astonishing gold, each piece of art an individual, some more bronze in color, some light; some with delicate floral drawings on them; some with thick markings beneath the gold that remind the viewer of a geographic map, or emotional Braille.

If we do indeed negotiate our deepest fears, darkest emotions and situations in the midnight of our souls and hearts, then, forged by these experiences, it is our choice whether to blacken with them or become purer, more golden, like a stormy riven sky after the sunset. It is enormously clear the path Amrta has taken, and it is a glowing one.

It is also a valuable one to peruse.  Treasure yourself, viewers, heart and soul, and revel in this stunningly original artistic reminder that what glitters here is indeed pure gold.

While closed in-person at Shockboxx Gallery in Hermosa Beach, the exhibition is up on Artsy and you should mine t’s lush and passionate images now.

  • Genie Davis ; photos Genie Davis and also provided by the gallery

Come to Lake LA with Daniela Garcia Hamilton

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Offering a rich and evocative, deeply personal look at life in Antelope Valley’s Lake Los Angeles, Daniela Garcia Hamilton takes viewers with her on a visit to Sundays in Lake LA.

The exhibition is a warm, visually lovely body of work which focuses on Garcia Hamilton’s childhood, as well as on the idea of what makes the idea of “home “- a home. The images seem bathed in a sunny, Southern California light, one washed with a soft patina from the dusty high desert landscape of the town.

Paintings depict the artist’s extended family at gatherings, and the nature of her family home as a safe space for children and other family members when first arrived from Mexico.

Infused in color, a brightness that is resonant and uncompromising, this is narrative painting at its finest, infused with the refined story telling of memory. Because of that infusion, these works are galvanizing. While the art itself is graceful, even languid and dream-like, the depictions of everyday life and the profound meaning those small, perfect slices of existence make are quite visceral. Poignant, hopeful, and masterfully painted, in a lush style that is nonetheless vividly realistic,  Garcia Hamilton takes us on a journey in which we are all travellers through the intimate migration that is life itself.

In “Hasta aqui llegamos, gracias a tí pa (Thank you dad, we made it this far), we see the artist’s father looking slightly upward, as if toward dreams for the future – the future of the child in his arms and the child seated next to him.

“In Between” takes viewer and artist on a more fraught journey toward the future, with a young child kneeling on a serape, a toy truck by her side, a dog in front of her. She is clearly a traveller, undoubtably crossing the border from Mexico to the U.S., but also crossing a different sort of border, from childhood to adulthood. The toy truck she plays with has become a real truck containing her on her journey north.

“Ofrendas de fronteras” or “Border offerings” seems an even harder journey, as wrapped in a serape, a boy lies sprawled over what could be a field of flowers and plants; a woman curled at his side, discarded toys beneath and behind him, as if this passage –  with the image of a wall at the left bottom of the canvas – was particularly difficult, a passage in which the innocence of childhood was left behind in a quest for survival beyond that wall.

Repeated subjects appear in various works, such as dogs, children, colorful serapes and cloths; while each are unique, they shape a connected story of childish innocence and joy, growth, and a vision of a brighter future despite the difficult journeys in which the subjects arrived in Lake LA. Now that they are here, they were seemingly born to move into the dry high desert light and infuse it with their own bright hopes.

Also repeated throughout the exhibition are elaborate, colorful patterns as backdrop for these works.  The patterns are used as wall paper, shadows, floor tiles, carpet patterns, all an intricate and delicate lace that recalls papel picado or perforated paper, the traditional decorative craft banenrs created by cutting precise designs into thin paper sheets. The decoration is often used for parties and celebrations such as birthdays, Christmas, and Dia de los Muertos.

In this art, the celebration is based on homecoming, and the formation of a home, a family, a life in a new land. Forged in the fire of difficulties, Garcia Hamilton’s family shapes a solid, lasting bond between past and future, Mexico and America, the old and the new. That bond is as eternal as an unshakable faith in a better future, a child’s promise, familial love.

Visit Garcia Hamilton’s rewarding family of art at Luna Anais at the IVAN Gallery, located at 2709 S Robertson Blvd. In the back, the studio work of resident artist Barbara Mendes should also captivate.

Garcia Hamilton will be conducting an Artist Walkthrough at noon on Saturday, 11/12; the exhibition closes on November 18th. Don’t miss.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and provided by the Luna Anais.

Linda Smith is the Cat’s Meow at bG Gallery

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With Power and Pattern now at bG Gallery, Linda Smith has created a lively, joyous and vibrant exhibition that’s as much fun as it is beautiful art.  As a major feline fancier, the pieces I was most drawn to were her alive, witty, fairy-tale-like cats.

Color and texture are the big takeaways from this well-curated show, which serves as a retrospective of sorts, moving seamlessly from acrylic on canvas works created in the 1980s in brilliant oranges and reds, intercut with ribbons of perriwinkle blue, to her massive high-fire ceramic cat totems from 2022.

In all of her works, whether small figures of humans, women’s faces, those delightful cats, yellow dogs – whatever the image may be – along with their inherent sense of joy and celebration, there is a sense of the totemic, as if these figures reprsented something truly powerful in the real world.

Indeed, the best of all art is a totem of sorts, a way to show our humanness, ward off evil, offer up beauty to the gods of light with which to sanctify our souls. Smith’s work embodies these magical, fantastical qualities while presenting images that are deeply grounded in the beautifully mundane images of life, the things that we do and experience as humans.

This sense of the experiential, warm and welcoming, yet mythologizing the recognizable, is present in all Smith’s work here. It is in the quilt-like pattern surrounding the titular “Mother & Child” acrylic work (at the top of which the letters “Mom” seem to shape a mountain peak pattern in pink). It is palpable in her “Small Cat Totem” shaped in four pieces, a cat head topping a work that includes two other images of cats painted on separate cast pieces of the totem; as well as in Smith’s wonderful mosaic “Woman, Cat & Dog.”

Color of course is key to Simth’s work as well, in the dazzling turquoise of her tattooed “Woman with Turquoise Shirt”  scuplture, and in the many hued human, bird, adn dog faces intersepersed with big blue polka-dot like patterns on her “Totem #5.”

Each work also seems to contain a sense of homage to the spirits of animals (including the human animal.) This is due in part to the massive size of the some of the totem ceramic works, “Totem #5″ for example is 72 x 16 x 16, the ceramic stacked carefully over steel rod and base.  Smith’s art is reverential in a way, that reverence illuminated with a sense of whimsy and wonder, of the magic of life itself, the colors that shadows can cast on many hued faces, on the furs of our feline and canine companions, in the harsh but vivid red, black, and white of her diminuitive but powerful 6 x 6” “Political Paintings” series.

Charming, beguiling, but also intense, Smith’s art commands attention, requires an awe-fused respect, and most of all, above all, engages the senses with the wonder and spirit of play. That’s the true power in her many-hued patterns.

Commandingly exhibited with her totem work in the foreground of the gallery, Smith’s exhibit lights up the bG space with a delighted passion in her subjects, and for her viewers.

Be empowered yourself. The exhibition is at bG through November 14th. The gallery is located at 2525 Michigan Ave. Space #A2 in Bergamot Station, and is open Tuesday through Saturday.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis