MAS Attack – A Mutual Appreciation Society Art Pop Up for Our Times

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Community. Caring. Loads of love and sharp, social commentary art.  Conceived and curated by Torrance Art Museum director Max Presneill, this was one special evening at TAM, radiating with a sense of support and jubilant joy even in the face of uncertain (at best) times. LaLena Lewark-Presneill DJ’d; Jorin Bossen and Mark Fisher assisted; docent Katherine Orlin manned the desk.

While art on the wall might suggest “the end” times “…and scene,” this was the start of a really big scene of terrific art – over 300 artworks in all, from sculptures to paintings, photography, mixed media, and everything in between – and phenomenal art loving support with between 700 and 800 attendees. In three short, super fun hours on a very lucky Friday the 13th for all who came, a feast of art and happiness was on the table.

I didn’t get to say hi to all of you – and I missed some works – but here is somewhat of a compilation of terrific art.

If you were there, relive the glorious experience; if you were not, now you can pretend you were.

And share this story! We have no pay wall – so spread the love on and around.

  • Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis

Days of Reverie Entrances at Stuart Haaga Gallery

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Days of Reverie, carefully curated by Vojislav Radovanovic, is a compelling exhibit that brings together four visual artists who work in different mediums – drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, along with one composer. All these artists lift the viewer out of the ordinary “here and now” existence into an extraordinary meditative and otherworldly state of mind. The four visual artists – Catherine Ruane, Jill Sykes, Jason Jenn and Debbie Korbel — were tasked with creating new work for the exhibit at Stuart Haaga Gallery at Descanso Gardens using actual materials sourced from the gardens or inspired by the gardens, while musician and composer Joseph Carrillo was asked to create the soundscape that accompanies the exhibition. The results are astounding, and though each room is decidedly different from the next, each artist seems to work at the threshold of the real and the artificial with surprising synchronicity of color and materials.

Debbie Korbel’s two sculptural pieces are the only ones that are outside the gallery and immediately greet the viewer. Outdoors, her bare trees, painted a ghostly, wintry white, stripped bare of their original colors and foliage, speak to a mystical winter’s tale. The two trees in the front are populated with Korbel’s sculpted Lazuli Bunting Songbirds, some caring for their eggs in a nest, others just perched on a branch.

The other trees become wish trees where viewers are encouraged to write their intentions and messages on paper tags and affix them to the branches, thereby repopulating the bare trees with leaves of desire. This concept was popularized by Yoko Ono in 1996. She modernized a Japanese custom started in the 17th century of writing wishes on tanzaku (small strips of paper) and attaching them to bamboo trees.

Debbie Korbel

Visible through the glass window is Korbel’s striking life-like and full -sized mixed-media deer mule, looking alert yet relaxed in a painted nightscape that references natural history dioramas. The flowers and plants entwined around the antlers speak to rejuvenation amid winter’s thaw a theme echoed throughout the exhibition. A beautiful short poem is written on the wall she illustrated behind the deer.

Jill Sykes

Inside we enter the room filled with Jill Sykes’ radiant botanical paintings of roses, poppies, calla lilies and agapanthus which all grow in the gardens here. If Korbel’s work harkens to a wintry thaw, then Sykes work simulates spring with new growth visible on slender branches.

Sykes’ plants and flowers are undifferentiated in color and instead are recognizable by their flattened outlines and their shape. All parts of the plant, leaf, flower and stem are the same color, as if a shadowy presence seen on a wall, ground, scrim or window shade. Paradoxically, her specific yet highly abstracted imagery captures the very essence of the flowers, distilling the image like intimate poetry. In the five large gold leafed works, Sykes delineates flowers with delicate, white lines over a faint grid of gold. Like Byzantine painters who generously used gold leaf to symbolize divinity and otherworldliness, Sykes’s luminous paintings, highlighted against the pale pink wall, glow magically while inviting quiet contemplation.

Catherine Ruane

While Sykes’s luminous paintings are hushed and meditative, Catherine Ruane’s dramatic site-specific installation is operatic in scale and concept. Composed of painstakingly detailed and lovingly rendered Sycamore leaves and branches, Ruane’s achromatic pencil and charcoal drawings are cut out and rearranged to soar around the gallery. Looping and swooping gracefully, their rich robust darks are highlighted against the white of the gallery walls, creating wonderful negative spaces. Included in the installation are clusters of realistic rose drawings – portraits if you will.

Historically, roses are a potent symbol of beauty, divine love and spiritual enlightenment, which is the subtext of all the work on display. Each rose drawing is in a round gold frame that is painted red on the back, casting a surprising pink almost neon aura on the wall. These are grouped close together as they would be in a rose garden. This series of drawings became a sort of unintentional memento mori as the very roses Ruane was drawing were shortly torn out. Unbeknownst to her, they had come to the end of their twenty-five year cycle – once more reminding us that there is a season for all things.

Jason Jenn, left, with author Nancy Kay Turner

Autumn is the time when deciduous trees shed their leaves. Depending on one’s geographic location, the red, orange, yellow colors which the leaves turn are truly spectacular. Jason Jenn began sourcing his materials of fallen leaves at Descanso Gardens for his installation a year before the exhibit opened. The vast collection of organic materials employed is impressive in scale, shape, variety and color, highlighting the infinite visual complexity of nature.

Jenn treats the leaves which he gathers so that they can be handled without becoming brittle, thereby allowing him to paint and gild them transforming the multitude of leaves into glittery, golden-hued mandalas that ring four walls. Mandalas, a Buddhist 4th century tradition, represent dreamers in search of spiritual enlightenment. Mandalas, sacred circles, are thought to transform suffering into joy, healing the world. Jenn’s immersive installation is the most interactive with a large round low table filled with plants that visitors, mostly children can sit around (handmade pillows are provided) and create their own versions of the art. There are pink painted trees at the corners of the room, their branches reaching overhead, creating a cozy, womb-like feeling of protection. Stumps from fallen trees ring the installation covered with festive tree ring pillows stitched by Jenn. This continues Jenn’s longstanding interest in the healing power of art.

Joseph Carrillo provides not only the soundscape that accompanies the exhibition which is his own composition, but also provides the score of the piece. He has artfully arranged the sheets of paper (also called leaves) letting them cascade and slide down like a waterfall of musical notes. Those who read music can engage with the visual notation while also listening to the score that is played by Carrillo himself and a group of musicians he generously acknowledges. This exhibit is a balm for the soul as it addresses universal truths about life, death, resurrection and offers valuable lessons learned from listening to and valuing Mother nature.

  • Nancy Kay Turner; photos by Nancy Kay Turner and Genie Davis 

Come into the Light at Norton Simon Museum

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Art lovers do not commonly associate neon and other electric/electrifying art mediums with the Norton Simon Museum, whose more classic art forms are what the lovely Pasadena museum are well known to embrace.

However with Plugged In: Art and Electric Light, curated by Maggie Bell in conjunction with PST Art: Art & Science Collide, takes viewers on a new and enlightening journey.

Above, Laddie John Dill

The exhibition examines the use of electric light as an art medium in the mid-20th century. Eleven works of art are exhibited, featuring 8 different artists:  Walter Askin, Laddie John Dill, Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, Jess, Robert Rauschenberg, Allen Ruppersberg and Andy Warhol.

Each artist utilized electric light in their work. The star of the show is in the final of three connected, lower-level gallery spaces: an enormous work by Robert Rauschenberg, titled “Green Shirt.” Rising some 10 feet by 20 feet in length, multiple neon images, including an eponymous green shirt are illuminated. While based on the artist’s images, the work was created with Artkraft Strauss, which manufactured neon signage. It’s a lively, fun work, hissing with color and recognizable, figurative images such as a man’s tie, a woman riding a horse,  two pigs.

Also on view: Dan Flavin’s prefabricated fluorescent lights to create somewhat sterile and mysterious installations utilizing what the curator notes as “factory floor lighting.”  One such piece commemorates the historical figure and personal friend of his friend’s mother in law,  a “Mrs. Reppin,” during World War II as an ersatz monument.

Jess, aka Burgess Collins, uses art with incandescent light bulbs and salvaged objects. The artist’s “Assembly Lamp Eight” combines glass langer with images of families, landscapes, and busy harbor scenes with decoupaged magazine clippings. This collage of visual images is lit with electric candle light to create a sort of light box of layered and not quite understandable images.

 

Andy Warhol’s controversial “White Painting” is another fascinating and not quite discernable piece, presenting a naked female torso that is activated through the use of ultraviolet light.  Allen Ruppersberg’s large-scale “Location Piece” uses ambient lighting to bathe the viewer in an uneasy wash of illumination in a haunting space, while Robert Irwin’s “Untitled” combines sythemtic polymer paint on a metal disc and arm with a glowing light that’s half shadow-maker behind it.

Walter Askin’s “Polyplanographs” feature decals applied to layers of plexi. Per the late artist’s wife, artist Elise Anne Doyle, Askin wanted “the viewer to come closer and engage his “Polyplanographs” in order to discover forms and details which seemed to float in a dreamlike space – the light strongest at the bottom of the scene as if coming from stage lights to enhance a sense of mystery, play, surprise, expansiveness and discover the subtle fade to the top of light – and atmospheric float…the ethereal laying of forms floating and fading in color and shadow…” These are indeed intriguing works.

The exhibition is compact but well worth experiencing, given the unusual, even rare, use of electrically illuminated media by these artists.

 

Plugged In is illuminating the Norton Simon Museum until February 17, 2025. The museum is located atT411 W. Colorado Blvd. at Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena; admission is $20 for adults, $15 for senior, 18 and under admitted free. Admission is always free the first Friday of the month from 4-7 PM; the museum itself is open Thursday through Monday.

Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

Descanso Gardens Blossoms with Holiday Light

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Now through January 5th, catch a glimpse of the illuminated trees, gorgeous stained glass houses, and waves of color shifting tulips that make up Enchanted Forest of Light at Descanso Gardens in Pasadena.

This fairytale of a holiday light show uses elements of the gardens as part of its tableau. The singing tulip fields are first on view, charming as music shifts and colors change in waves; they are a returning favorite.

We pass through a tunnel of stars followed by a series of beautifully patterned lanterns colored in fushias and gold. Created by HYBYCOZO, these are delicate and astonishing, seemingly as ephemeral as the delicate woven shadows they cast.

Visitors move into a section of tall, coast live oak trees with musical steps around them – tap your feet to summon a bell-like sound.

Afterwards, illuminated “park benches” provide a rest and the chance to take in an entire field of stained glass houses created by artist Tom Fruin. Some are large enough to enter; some are themed with illuminated playing card patterns, four leaf clovers and the like, while others present orderly geometric patterns, or collage like colors. One floats like a lilypad of light on a small lake.

A field of golden light filaments wavers near by; wire fencing holding swirly abstract flourescent tubing rise adjacent to real, headily scented roses. Fountains glow; a large full faux moon rises above and reflects in a royal blue-lit pond and waterfall. In the Japanese garden, red lanterns cast a seductive glow.

Finally, there’s a wonderful and hushed magical forest, with soft sound effects played live and echoing through speakers in the woods. Here, fairy-like sparks flick between the higher branches, a chandelier is suspended from a towering limb; and in the “sacred sanctuary,” the final stop on the walk, the scents of fecund forest and recent rain petrichor add to the magic.

Carolers, classical quartets, and solo cello players appear at intervals create additonal aural pleasures. Guests can purchase hot chocolate, coffee, or tea or headier adult fare along with sweet treats and snacks in several different food areas.

Advance ticket purchase is required.  Discounted admission of $10–$22 tickets on Dec. 2–3 and Dec. 9–10;  other dates, adult ticket prices range from $15–38 (members) to $22–45 (non-members) with children’s tickets (2-12) priced at $10–23 (members)
$17–30 (non-members); prices vary by date. The exhibition is held from 5:30-10 p.m. nightly,  closed Nov. 28 and Dec. 24–25.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis