Hyde Park Gallery LA Opens March 4th with Stunning Glass Art from Nao Yamamoto

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Glass and sculptural artist Scott Slagerman is opening the new Hyde Park Gallery LA, an exciting addition to the Los Angeles art scene and one he calls “spontaneous…I had no intention of making a gallery when I bought this building,” he explains. “I was renovating the space for my studio, and realized the front area was the perfect space for a gallery and showroom.” Slagerman says Los Angeles has  a dearth of new spaces for young, talented artists, and a lack of exhibition locations for glass artists in particular. Slagerman works in metal, wood, and glass, and has sculpture in the permanent collection of the Decorative Arts Museum in Paris.

For the first exhibition at his new gallery, Slagerman is presenting a solo show from glass artist Nao Yamamoto, titled The Altar. The artist appeared on season 2 of the Netflix series Blown Away.  At Hyde Park Gallery LA, her exhibition is highly pertinent for the space: the renovated building was once a church, and Yamamoto’s work is placed where a religious altar once stood.

“Nao represents a very major part of the LA glass scene, so it is exciting to have her here. She’s never shown in Los Angeles before,” Slagerman relates. “Her art fits the location perfectly.”

 

Yamamoto says her work for The Altar is comprised of three major wall installations with multiple pieces involved in each. “I have been shifting my ideas to think about the function of art, and why it exists. I am here to create an experience where the viewer is a real part of the show, where the viewer completes the show.” She adds, “I was really focused on creating a whole new coherent space, making new work made just for the gallery.”  The artist encourages viewers to experience their sixth sense, and engage a connection with inner peace. Works include lustrous lotus flowers, emerald leaves, natural crystals, and representations of candle flame, as well as geometric pieces that evoke representations of the “third-eye” and cosmic intuition.

While subsequent exhibitions will focus on the Los Angeles area glass art scene, the gallery will also feature exhibitions that include other mediums and artists as well, according to Slagerman. The LA-native asserts that glass art has a history in the city, and that the form is part of a burgeoning community. But with glass galleries of the past such as the Kurland-Summers Gallery long gone, it’s more than time for a new exhibition space.

“Our plan is to help people rediscover this under-represented and under-appreciated art form for both established and up-and-coming artists,” he says. The gallery will host artist receptions, art talks, special opening weekends, and tours of Slagerman’s own glass studio.

Born in Japan and working in the U.S., Yamamoto creates artwork that’s inspired by both the beauty of glass itself and the artist’s passion for nature. Her rich, colorful, and varied textures offer a resonating beauty that goes beyond the material of glass, creating inspirational works that soar with varied patterns and glowing light. For this exhibition, her works inhabit an almost ethereal, spiritual approach to glass work.

The Altar will open March 4th, with gallery hours from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; e 1-7 p.m. Sunday, March 5th, and 11-5 Tuesday-Friday. On Saturday, March 11th, hours are 11- 7, and a closing reception for Yamamoto’s work will be held from 5 – 9 p.m. on Sunday, March 12th.

Hyde Park Gallery LA is located at 2618 W Florence Ave, LA, CA 90043 in mid-city. For more information visit https://www.hydeparkgalleryla.com or call (310) 413-6493.

Gina Herrera’s Sculptures Survive War with Art

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Artist Gina Herrera has fought many battles in her life, having served a tour of duty in Iraq. But she transforms war into art, as she does with her three new sculptures on display in the exhibition Surviving the Long Wars.

 

While the triennial itself is just three days in March, the art exhibition will run March 4th to June 4th in the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, and the Newberry Library. Surviving the Long Wars focuses on the histories that shape our understanding of warfare as well as visions of peace, healing, and justice.

Herrera’s work here is a continuation of her signature sculptural line of metal and found materials. Drawn to using mixed media, she says “We have an abundance of discarded materials we throw away daily. I feel everything has some kind of history or message.” In her piece “The Liberty Master,” above, Herrera creates a beautiful metal work blossoming in vivid color, curling like a flower whose bud is shaped like a heart.

The message of the Chicago exhibition overall is to explore the alternatives to and repercussions from war, and Herrera’s work certainly fits that exploration. Kinetic energy fills every line of her metal work, as if the sculptures were captured and briefly frozen in mid-motion. They also express Herrera’s native ideology and beliefs, envisioned through her consistent art style and practice.

 

The Whimsical Diva, above

She welds her recycled materials into sinewy, almost hieroglyphic shapes, wrapping them fabric and discarded jewelry and buttons. She goes treasure hunting for society’s discards, transforming them into jubilant, lively creations that encompass a vast array of tossed-aside items, from lost property to plastic bubble wrap. “I look at everything as a possibility,” Herrera says. “We throw so much trash out, plastic stuff, which lands in the oceans, hurting the earth. It’s almost a sin to buy new things.”

Herrera describes found items as having character and energy, and adds that she is “partial to stuffed animals, [there’s a] living entity in them,” yet all the same they’re discarded. She gives used items the “opportunity to have a new life, continue the energy of the item.”

The artist feels that our discard of objects is like the way in which we discard people, and the lack of respect we have both for older, used items and our own elders. “Once you get to a certain age, you are useless, a burden to society.” This attitude discounts knowledge, including oracle language, and native culture, which is then forgotten, Herrera attests. “People don’t have a desire to look into their own history, [they] want to avoid history.”

As a Native American artist, she takes her current Native experience and uses that to make “commentary on the planet and future. We are still very contemporary, we are still fighting for the land, the soil, the earth.”  Thematically, Herrera work with time, the past, present, and future, and a connection to the earth.

 

A Virtuous Warrior, above

For the three sculptures the artist is displaying at the Chicago exhibition, she wanted to make sculptures with mannequin parts, and found a mannequin for use at a flea market.

“I want my viewers to think about the sacrifices that the U.S. armed forces have endured to uphold democracy. Maybe I subconsciously decided to use a mannequin [to] represent the masses of veterans who returned back home without limbs,” Herrera says. She also wants viewers to consider how fortunate they are to live in a country where they’re not afraid of losing their lives. “Many people in this country take for granted all the privileges we have…. How can anyone who served this country want to overthrow democracy?” She notes, “We…uphold the values and sacrifices of their brothers and sisters before them. This is the reason why we stand at attention when we are raising and lowering the flag.”

Along with a strong belief in upholding these freedoms, Herrera seeks to present, through her art, a focus on Native American history and its role in the present, for contemporary artists.  Her art presents the issue of discarding items, and infiltrating “our land, rivers, oceans, sea, forest, mountains, and air with our negligent behavior. We take and destroy our world but never give back with respect to all the gifts of Mother Earth.”

Herrera’s use of color and form is visceral, created through what she terms as a “very intuitive” process. “I do not pre-plan… I let the items or materials speak to me. As I am wrapping yarn, string, underwear, or fabric, I am conscious of my materials and do my best to use different patterns, textures, [and] materials so there is no repetition. I want each sculpture to look different from one another, to have their own identity and feeling,” she explains. “I go with the flow and make it a playtime – like when I was a child. I like to create voices, especially if I am using toys or stuffed animals, as I feel they still have a soul.”

Herrera’s sculptural approach is rooted in what she describes as “the aesthetics of the everyday.” Having served 25 years in the Armed Forces, she experienced, amid the devastation of combat, “the global impact of the systematic destruction of the planet…the long-term effects of conflict/war, including the exploitative, unsustainable, careless discarding of trash by the United States Military.”

These experiences led her to question her own artistic practices, and the desire to lessen her environmental impact. Beginning by photographing “the vastness of neglected detritus that could be seen for miles,” she soon extended her art practice to the creation of her 3- dimensional forms, using discarded objects and natural resources.

Serving both as a powerful response to the military industrial complex and the often-careless approach to the environment embedded in American life, Herrera infuses her work with the spiritual, the historic, and a uniquely bold vision. Her sculptures are both a call to action, to respect the past, and the gift of motion and mobility, while also offering a rich insight into the poignance and necessity of freedom and reinvention.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist

Crossing Waters Takes Viewers on a Luminous Journey

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Crossing Waters: Contemporary Tongva Artists Carrying Pimugna, now at the Catalina Museum for Art and History in Avalon, is an exhibition filled with awe and wonder, exploring a rich cultural heritage too long unseen.

The art is a beautiful expression of the placement and interconnectedness of Pimugna, and its relationship to the greater world of Tovaangar and its people, the Tongva, as viewed through the alchemic lens of three contemporary Tongva artists.

First some background: Tovaangar is the Tongva name for whole or middle world – land, water, and the Original People. That world includes the Southern Channel Islands, including the island of Pimugna, often shortened to Pimu, or as you may commonly know it, Catalina Island. The islands, separated by the sea from each other and from the mainland are yet connected to both through paths on the water, with the underlying message being that the world and its people exist, and are still here.

The art in this exhibition has a rich palette of blues, reds, blacks, and browns. The walls themselves are painted blue, allowing a sense of immersion to occur almost immediately. It is as if one has taken a dive into the deep blue sea of the Tovaangar. The exhibiting three artists, Weshoyot Alvitre, Mercedes Dorame, and River Garza have created a stellar beginning to a partnership between the Catalina Museum of Art and History and the Tongva Community, recognizing the Tongva people as the first islanders of Santa Catalina. Creating the exhibit, under the auspices of the museum’s deputy director and chief curator Johnny Sampson, the artists had not worked together previously, but have nonetheless formed a cohesive, and highly spiritual body of work that dances with light and magic.

In the center of the semi-circular exhibition space, Dorame’s site specific installation “We Dance Across the Water – Yakeenaxre Naamkomokre Paar, 2022,” grabs the viewer’s attention upon entering the gallery space.

The installation rests on a series of six platforms that seem to hover above the floor. On the ceiling above it, surrounding a small skylight with a view of the clouds and sky, are a series of acrylic on canvas paintings that depict stars, islands, and other petroglyph-like patterns. They are suspended so that they billow outward, like sails on the ships carrying the Original People between the islands.

Sections of the same canvas materials, with less specific patterns, are spread across the low platforms aligned on the floor. On these platforms rest a variety of beautiful objects, as well as cinnamon – standing in as a substitute for the ochre with which the Tongva people created art works in earlier times; salt crystals – which are allowed to congeal and come apart again, forming new crystal patterns, and which here remind the viewer of fallen stars or snow flakes; and patterns created in red thread that serve as maps connecting the world of the past with today’s world.

 

 

There are also feathers, shells, stones, and a series of steatite carved objects from the museum’s collection, woven baskets from the museum’s collection, the artist’s cast- concrete star stones, abalone, and personal items from artists Weshoyot Alvitre and River Garza.

Dorame’s patterned pathways and billowing sails reveal the intricate pathways and knowledge of her Tongva ancestors, guided by the sky, the sea, and a knowledge of nature and spiritual life infinite and profound.

On the wall positioned to either side of Dorame’s installation, hang a galvanizing series of works by Weshoyot Alvitre, “Hi mo-yok’ mok: po-koo (No, He is not dead: #1 – #4).” The two acrylic on canvas works, #1 and #2, depict a man within a bird’s brilliantly red body. #3 and #4 are ink on board, black and white with an ochre-like circular halo of sorts behind the head of the birdman. The story behind these works refers to an incident that occurred in the 16th Century. Two large crows, alighted on rocks, having flown from a patio where sacred rituals were performed, were shot by soldiers for Spanish missionary Father Antonio de la Ascension. The birds were killed, and the people mourned them. These works are a response to that carnage and to the sacred nature of the birds that had rested on the patio. The artist focuses on a reinterpretation of this traditional western-culture narrative, successfully resurrecting and representing her heritage, and that heritage’s role in the present and future as well.

 

River Garza gives us the trickster and protector – Coyote, who fills both roles. His acrylic, marker, and spray paint  “Coyote in Red” wears dark glasses and carries one paddle; the mixed media color pencil, paint, and marker  drawing “Coyote Paddles” also explores the artist’s connection to Tongva seafaring culture, as does his human “Paddler with Hair Blowing the Wind,” and both his “Untitled (CA Indian Dreams), and “Red Basket” acrylic works, which evoke the patterns on heirloom woven baskets. The artist’s “Mo’omat (Ocean),” combines a thick and deep brown and black acrylic paint with elements of dentalium, abalone, mother of pearl, olivella shells. Here, the viewer also finds a woven pattern, as well as a face, as compelling as it is mysterious and fierce. Three smaller figures and a document regarding a voyage are a part of this stunning, layered piece. In each work, Garva uses his ancestral history and iconography, combining both with the contemporary in a recreation and preservation of the Tongva past.

Above, entrance to the exhibition; Deputy Director of External Affairs Gail Fornasiere and Deputy Director / Chief Curator Johnny Sampson

Together, artists and curator have shaped a beautiful, welcoming, and revitalizing series of images that speak to the epic past of the Tongva, respect for history of the native peoples, and the spiritual, cultural, and creative through line of Pimu. It is an exhibition of grace and wonder, of which the Catalina Museum for Art and History can be proud. Expect to see more exhibitions relating to Tongva culture and island history in the future.

Next Friday, March 3rd, the exhibition will be featured in the museum’s First Fridays presentation, Culture between Cocktails. From 5-7 pm the museum offers light bites and drinks while guests enjoy one of the last opportunities to view the Crossing Waters: Contemporary Tongva Artists Carrying Pimugna. The free event requires advance registration; a specialty cocktail, wine, beer and other beverages are available for purchase.

To visit the museum, you’ll want to catch one of the comfortable, fast Catalina Express Boats from Long Beach, San Pedro, or Newport Beach. For an even more relaxing experience, you can upgrade and enjoy a beverage and snack in the spacious Commodore Lounge. It takes approximately one pleasant hour to reach the island from the mainland; the museum is just a short and lovely stroll from the docks. Getting there to see this stellar exhibition isn’t just simple – it’s fun.

  • Genie Davis; Photos by Genie Davis and provided by the museum from James Kao Foto

 

 

Spring Break Goes for Broke

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Brittany Ryan

Spring/Break Art Fair is always THE most inventive and unique of the art fairs in Los Angeles, and this year is no exception. Charming, eclectic, witty, and strange – that can sum up any number of the different specifically curated cubicles of art at the 2023 edition, held in a former warehouse space at Adams Blvd. and La Cienega. Now in its 12th year, the fair calls itself a “curator driven” art show, and it is: each of the spaces is immersive once you take a step inside.

Take a look:

Emily Silver (below) thinks in pink…

There was also a textural desert from Nina K. Ekman and other artists …

Paintings and Sculptures by Brooke McGowen make up a “Rave Wave” …

Greg Haberny made wooden portraits…

Kathleen Henderson’s “Gummed Reverse” is a fine exhibition of evocative oil stick drawings at Los Angeles-based galleryTrack 16’s space, while curated yby Rokhsane Hovaida,  Yasmine K. Kasem creates large scale woven tapestries.

A relatively new art scene is growing in Boston, including the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, (above) who offers “In Mother’s Arms,” featuring the work of Alex MClay and Cassandra C. Jones.

Brittany Ryan’s lush, classic scultpural works were softly hued; news leadlines were the subject of Max Rippon’s smart “Save the Date.”

 

Both Dave Alexander and David Bazanova as well as Marianna Peragallow and Thomas Martinez Pilnik offered fresh and amusing, smart, engaging works.

 

Taylor Lee Nicholson’s “Yard Sale” curated by Jonell Logan and Janet Loren Hill was among my favorite exhibition spaces, fanciful, fun, and of-the-moment all at once.

“The Hidden Influence of a Rebirth”  used electrical components to create art that evoked sea life.

Spencer Gilbert took viewers “Far From Home.”

The exhibition space “Simulations of the Sacred” brought outstanding neon figurative work to the fair.

And “Connoissseurs of the Street” created a vibrant environment.

Another of my favorite spaces made me laugh out loud – meet Mark Zuckerberg holding forth, our “Beloved Leader” by artist David Howe, curated by Jac Lahav.

If you want original, reasonably priced art, fanciful settings, and the occasional scatological creation, look no farther than Spring Break. Featuring exhibitors primarily from LA, San Francisco, New York, and even one gallery from a newly burgeoning Boston scene, take a look at the vibrant colors, immersive installations. and clever, entertaining artworks here. It’s an original – and that’s worth taking a break for.

 

  • Genie Davis, Photos: Genie Davis