Bryan Ida – New Exhibition at Billis Williams Gallery Goes Visually and Emotionally Deep

Bryan Ida, left, with galleriest Tressa M. Williams, right

Bryan Ida creates art that sings with meaning. It comes as no surprise that he once majored in music composition before turning to fine visual art.

His astonishing use of minute and meaningful words to shape fascinating, rewarding images of people – such as several such works recently exhibited in the group exhibition Bridging the Pacific at Torrance Art Museum, is just one way in which the artist expresses rich feeling and creates compelling work. Ida’s intensely detailed, powerful, and meticulous ink on panel works there depicted a very personal story, that of his mother and father, being forcibly “evacuated” from the San Francisco area in 1942, when Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods due to World War II-fueled, race-driven paranoia. The delicate and precise nature of that work is that of an artist both empath and activist.

In his new exhibition, his fifth solo show at Billis WIlliams, Ida’s exhibition DEEP is entirely different, yet equally suffused with understanding, compassion, and purpose. Here, he goes to the heart of the human relationship with the natural world. Works are from two separate series,  one of which is filled with vivid color and geometric lines, the other is muted in palette, yet glowing, in  intimate, moving depictions of animals in a twilight sky.

The work takes on the complex beauty of the natural world,  and how human existence – as currently exercised – direly effects it.  Ida’s landscapes feature sliced images, as if viewed through slatted blinds, or seen through the limited vision that humans are presently capable of viewing the natural world. Vivid orange leaves are dissected by slats, as are startling emerald and chartreuse grasses and trees. Some images include intensely touching depictions of animals, such as the orangutan above or tiger below. The colors are vibrant, blunted only by their dissection.

The “broken” images spell out the dichotomy between how humans view and treat the natural world, as well as the earth’s innate lovliness.

With the artist’s Fading Light series, above, depicted animals emerge gradually to the viewer, as if transcending a twilight fog or thick, moonless dusk. The lack of illumination speaks to endangered species, extinction, and man’s disregard for other creatures. Yet, within each image, within each sensitive and almost angelic animal face, there is a glow, as if a facet of light had permeated a black diamond. There is still a ray of hope, if we will catch it.

 

Both series are not only masterfully beautiful but brimming with both sorrow and the ecstatic. Nature stands at the brink of a cataclysm caused by human carelessness and greed. As Ida says  “In the name of human advancement and expansion the cost to animal species and the environment is deep and irreversible. The true measure of a civilization is in its compassion and empathy, not in its ability to consume.”

In the face of loss and adversity, the flora and fauna, the creatures that share our world, are waiting for us to act and end the destruction our relentless quest for conquest has wrought. Ida presents the message without prosthelitizing, creating lush and poetic works that give viewers both thoughtful pause and thrilling beauty.

Experience the empathy and ecology and the consummate wonder in this exhibition – and let its meaning resonate.

Also at Billis Williams, see Stephen Wright’s liquid luminosity, in Beach Break in Gallery 2, all euphoric mid-sea sunshine and light in motion.

Both DEEP and Beach Break are on display through June 3rd; the gallery is open Wednesday-Saturday 10 a.m. -5 p.m.

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