Get Your Zen On

Posted on by Diversions LA

With Zen Psychosis: Anatomy of a Dream, at CSULA’s Ronald H. Silverman Gallery, the lustrous pinhole photography of Osceola Refetoff melds with the theme and written words of Shana Nys Dambrot’s lyrical book of the same name.

Curated by Mika Cho, the exhibition makes strong use of Refetoff’s hypnotic pinhole images, many of which were published in the book Zen Psychosis, whose poetic/surreal dream memoir aesthetic is aptly brought to real life (is it real? Or just a dream) in the exhibition. The book mutably blends Refetoff’s evocative visuals with Dambrot’s prose.

Both ask you to recall what do our dreams look like – both in the hidden world of sleep and if they should appear in the waking world. Perhaps they most closely resemble Refetoff’s large-scale Kinematic pinhole, “Whale Spotting,” shot in Antarctica, or the mix of Claymation and live-action stop motion animation swirling through the artist’s short film, “The Savage Sleep.” Also the stuff dreams are made of: sculptural images culled from the photographic artist’s collection of found objects, including an adorable black cat; and of course, the hypnotic words that propel readers into a dream state when reading Dambrot’s book.

Like Refetoff’s mysteriously magical pinhole images themselves, the exhibition is blissfully seeped in surrealism and respectful wonder at the natural world, of which dreaming is an intrinsic part. The pinhole process requires long shutter times, as images are shot thru a tiny pinhole instead of a lens; likewise, both exhibition and book require of viewers a slow survey of the strange beauty that surrounds us – the stuff of dreams.

Just as the Eurythmics sang in the fever dream years of the 1980s, “Sweet dreams are made of this/ Who am I to disagree/I travel the world and the seven seas/Everybody’s looking for something.”

Should that something be a trippy beauty, or a porthole to some other ArtWorld (or even this one), get your Zen on while you can.

The gallery is located on the CSULA campus in the Fine Arts Building. The exhibition will have a closing reception with a reading and book signing by Dambrot Tuesday November 14th from 6- 8 p.m.; it runs through the 16th.

  • Genie Davis; images provided by gallery

Artist A.M. Rousseau Offers Tribute

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Exploring a Lifelong Passion: Small Pieces We’ve Collected Over the Years is a tour de force of lovely art shared and curated by Southern California artist A.M. Rousseau. The works presented in an impressive single day exhibition at bG gallery November 5th, are part of a collection that she and her late husband pursuied as a part of their enduring, shared passion for art.

Their assembled collection reflects their deep committment to art and fellow artists – and to their belief in nurturing a sense of community within the art world. The tribute paid to artists is joined with another sort of tribute – that to Rousseau’s late husband Duvall Hecht.

Displaying over 50 distinctive artists, each serves as part of an engaging art tapestry that offers insight into the artists and the spirits of their collectors, as well.

According to Rousseau, the timing for this exhibition was “about community, the artist community.  I think like many of us, I have a lot of works of art that my husband and I purchased or that came to us through gifts or trading with other artists. It has been a joy to collect this work, and while it can hang in my house, after my husband passed, I had the impulse to share it with the other artists and anyone else who might be interested. ”

The single day extravaganze of art began as what she envisioned to be simply a “small fun project. Maybe I would have a dinner party and invite the artists. It daily grew larger when I realized there were over 65 pieces, and if I wanted to show the pieces I would need to find an exhibition space – which led me to bG Gallery in Santa Monica.”

As to the collection itself, Rousseau reveals that to assemble it “my husband and I looked for things we loved that fit within our budget, but we would also try to support wonderful work in shows where things otherwise did not sell. Of course, we could only ever buy small pieces, but we wanted to support artists when possible. We found many works on paper which we always meant to frame but ended up sitting in drawers for too long.” This formed part of the impetus for the show, when she says she decided it would be meaningful to have “all of them framed and put them together for an exhibition in memory of all the great times we had looking at art together and going to shows. It gave me a lot of happiness just knowing how much he would have loved this project.”

Rousseau has also assembled an inclusive, intimate catalog about the works. “The catalog was put together by myself, and I wrote the text in it. That was also a really enjoyable part of putting this show together. I loved looking closely again at many of the pieces and writing what I felt about the work.”

Despite the large scale nature of the exhibition, she relates that she has no other plans after the show regarding the works. “I don’t plan to sell anything. It might be nice to have it travel. I really would love to give it away somewhere to an organization or a place that would want it.”

Asked to select a favorite work, she stresses that “It’s hard to say what either of our favorite pieces are as really, we loved them all. It’s like having a favorite child. How could you pick?”

But that said, when pushed she relates “I have to choose the one called “Our kitchen, Peck Dr., Beverly Hills, CA.” by Virginia Sackett. As I wrote in the catalog, this is a work that was in my husband’s mothers’ possession for 50 years, and I have now owned for 30 years. I think it is an exceptional piece, and I have looked at it many times thinking about the person who created it.”  Making this piece exceptionally personal, Rousseau adds “It was made by my husband’s mother’s maid who worked in the kitchen that is portrayed in the picture. Obviously, if is possible to decipher the essence of this painting, it’s a kitchen the artist appeared to love. She was a woman whose artistic abilities were likely entirely unrecognized during her lifetime, excepting this one picture, framed by her employer, and preserved by her employer’s children, finally coming into my possession. I can’t say enough about how much I love this painting and I know my husband did too. While the talent of this artist might not have been acknowledged, I am grateful for this painting that allows us to know her.”

As both an artist herself and a collector and curator, Rousseau asserts that what she most wants readers to know about the exhibition and her view of collecting art, is this: “There is great joy in creating collections of work on very small budgets, and sharing work with the community of artists is an honor and a privilege. Supporting artists in whatever way possible can have lasting importance.”

Don’t miss seeing this lovingly collected, cherished, and well-curated exhibition. There will be an opening reception Sunday, November 5th from 4-7 p.m. at bG gallery, and Rousseau will be present to offer her own insights and experiences, as well as offering her comprehensively compiled catalog of the artworks for viewers.

bG is located at 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica #12 in Bergamot Station.

  • Genie Davis; images provided by A.M. Rousseau

Joy Ray is Ghostly and Gorgeous at MOAH Cedar

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Literally and figuratively haunting – the iconic MOAH Cedar building in Lancaster, Calif., itself is said to have a resident ghost or two – Joy Ray’s gorgeous, ghostly, somber, yet uplifting exhibition A mirror with breath like stone possesses the viewer’s spirit.

Filling all three gallery spaces in the building, transparent archival images cover the windows; strangely broken words cast a spell on black textiles; heirlooms culled from Lancaster’s history archives are displayed in cases; and wavering black banners trail ceiling to ground with images and words that compel close viewing.

Ray has often had an interest in the spiritual and otherworldly, using tactile materials and often textile. Here, that interest is allowed to fully express itself in an entirely immersive setting that can’t help but move viewers and hijack the soul as she  elegantly offers the spectral its full due.

 

Using textile sculptures that resemble gravestones, she depicts historic news from the Antelope Valley Ledger-Gazette, adding layers of charcoal and sand in “Spectres,” in which fabric on armature shapes these suspended, eerie worlds and words. Other works, less floatingly ephemeral, are created from paint, twine, and fiberfill on fabric with impressions from the newspaper’s front page, such as in “longtime companion” and “to dream, to fall.”

Her “hall of shadows, hall of mirrors” is created from silk modal, utilizing markings from historic microfilm the artist poured over to uncover.  There are hand painted words, sentences spoken by voices of the past.

The glass plate images on the gallery windows include photographs of families and children such as those shown in  “Lancaster Hotel New Year’s Day.”

In another gallery room, the lustrous, long-gone landscape of an undeveloped Antelope Valley is represented with “Lancaster looking toward ‘Old Baldy’ after a heavy snowstorm” covers the existing view. Masking and utilizing the shifting light through the gallery windows is an inspired element of the show, casting a mysterious light and illuminating, literally and figuratively, the haunting past. The entire exhibition is cast in a sepia light, adding to the honestly transfixing nature of experiencing the artist’s works. Perhaps it is the power of ghostly attraction, or most likely, the alchemic miracle of her art. Audio tracks such as 1922’s “I’m Gonna Get You” by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds and other thematically edited musical riffs support the immersivity of the exhibition and add an additional layer of experience.

Joy Ray, like the spectres and shapes, history, hopes, loss, and small miracles of the past that she depicts, is a force to be reckoned with. This is a major show that captures the brevity, fragility, and enduring nature of human life – and the eternal of the great hereafter.

MOAH Cedar is located at 44857 Lancaster Blvd. in Lancaster. The exhibition runs through November 19.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis 

 

Gay Summer Rick Illuminates Los Angeles – Osceola Refetoff Elegaically Depicts Climate Change

Posted on by Diversions LA

Bergamot Station in Santa Monica is presently hosting two incredible exhibitions – both on exhibit until early November.

At bG Gallery, Gay Summer Rick’s glorious color palette and precise oil painting using palette knife morphs the impressionistic form with a gauzy realism of seascape and landscape. Lighter Than Air, her latest series of richly rewarding works, glow with Southern California light. The transcendence that light creates is the force within her work, which here touches on the lyrical and metaphysical as well as the contours of the coast. “Somewhere Above” is a burst of golden sky reflecting on cloud or water, Heaven as a visual portal, perhaps. “Buoyant” gives us a woman floating on a yellow inner tube against a sun-kissed sea, an almost child-like bliss. “Cadence” offers a pale periwinkle sea suffused with bits of pink light, the pink line of the horizon or a distant shore all a-glow.

“The Golden Sun” is just that, with a small figure bobbing on a surfboard, watching a bold pink sky slowly fade. “Fly” is also a pink and gold gem, as an airplane comes into a pink LA surrounded by palms; while “Good” is a view of homecoming as seen from a plane, the grand grid of lights below an airplane window spread out against a fine canopy of Cerulean blue. “Distant Light” is a shimmery, mirage like view of distant houses, illuminated against a shoreline.

Taking a direction new to this viewer, Rick offers a series of trapeze artists, in her series “The Fliers #1-#4.” Here pale, almost abstract figures outlined in a gold/pale mustard shade reach for, connect, or glide past each other on aerial rigging. There is the quality of a dream about this work – but all her work here is dreamy – disconnected from a known reality, it suggests our ability to tenaciously, with assistance, take to the sky the artist so admires.

And speaking of sky, in “Lustre” it is difficult to tell where sea and sky meet and merge, as minute golden figures on surfboards float among the waves as if reaching for the sky itself. As with a number of the paintings here, Rick replaces here past preference for blues with pinks, ethereal, hot, or paling like cotton candy dissolving into mist. As peaceful and lush as each work here can be seen, beneath that is a vision that can only be considered emotionally transcendent. The exhibition’s final beautiful day at bG Gallery is November 4th.

Walk across Bergamot Station’s parking lot to Building Bridges Art Exchange to take in another series of ocean-centric images, but with an entirely different message and medium. Curated by Marisa Caichiolo, under the scientific auspices of Dr. Eric Larour, artists Guillermo Anselmo Vezzosi and Osceola Refetoff offer a stellar exhibition on climate change and global warming in their Summer Artists and Scientists Residency, Shifting Landscapes: Sea Level Rise in Los Angeles and Beyond.

Refetoff’s visionary photographic and projected video images compel and entrance. Producing his first video in over a decade as a large-scale projection, Sea of Change (edited with Juri Koll) offers intense and beautiful images that include drone footage from the near-North-Pole community of Svalbard, California’s Central Valley fracking operations, and images of the distressed Salton Sea, as well as NASA satellite images, and AI prompts based on Refetoff’s own infrared photographic images, projected to imagine future scenarios. The 8 minutes video is both entrancing and heartbreaking, as we contemplate the rising likelihood of planetary change. Refetoff also created his first sculpture, representing potential projected rise in sea level at Santa Monica Pier based on the future of human C02 emissions.

In the same exhibition, Vezzosi also shines with work that includes a mysteriously translucent series of some 165 transfer photographs on recycled plastic food containers in “Melted Memories,” with the photographic images collected from NASA Observatory, the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the Glacier Repeat photo project from the Glacier National Park Montana.
From his “Offerings to ask for forgiveness” series, a large wall work resembles glacial ice, and is also constructed from recycled plastic from food containers collected from trash. He relates that the “ice” is made to “ask for forgiveness for the traces of our civilization…forcing [nature] to arrive to the present.”  The exhibition closes November 4th.

While Rick’s beauty will soothe, Reftoff’s and Vezzosi’s will jolt. Both exhibitions are profoundly lovely and of this moment.

Bergamot Bonus: on Sunday November 5th, you may want to hurry back to the same Santa Monica location. bG is presenting an exclusive one-day exhibition, curated by artist A.M. Rousseau. Titled Small Pieces We’ve Collected Over the Years, the exhibition pays tribute to the passion for art shared by A.M. Rousseau and her late husband, Duvall Hecht and their support for both artists and the thriving Los Angeles art community. There are some 67 Los Angeles area artists represented in the show, including work by Rick.

Building Bridges is located at 2525 Michigan Ave. #F2 at Bergamot in Santa Monica; bG is located at #A2.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artists and by Genie Davis

 

 

 

 

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