Carved Slices Up Artistic Halloween Fun at Descanso Gardens

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Carved at Descanso Gardens has created a gently haunted, transcendent Halloween-time experience this year, with a fresh route, hand-carved wooden spirit creatures created by Chainsaw Jenna, and more of the large, crazy-cool pumpkins visitors have come to know and love.

The garden setting is lovely and the lighting sets the mood for glowing, spooky fun.

The charming new Descanso Railroad is playfully aglow; Rhizome, an installation from Tom and Lien Dekyvere offers mesmerizing, futuristic beams of light.

And of course there are the ever changing – because they only last three days – carved pumpkins to delight young and old. The artists creating them are ready to chat about their unique designs from Beetlejuice to Pikachu.

Then there’s the delightfully haunting pumkin trail, where pumpkin sculptures offer a mix of toothy grins,  and fierce gazes.  There are pumpkin-headed scarecrows, and pumpkin families as well as a purple-lit, water based installation that depicts a storm tossed and tattered ghostly pirate ship, rainstorm periodically descending over it.

A pumpkin–filled mesh dragon shifts colors with cast light in another water spot; glowing red lanterns illuminate a tunnel in the Japanese Garden.

The garden’s tree forest features illuminated bases with touch pads that emanate spooky sounds when trod upon.

 

Wire figures of ghostly boys and girls are positioned eerily in the rose garden.

Even the parking lot attendant’s booth gets into the spirit of the event, with a jaunty skeleton ticket taker pointing the way to the entrance.

The whole event is original and delightful, and has grown exponentially in both size and charm since its first years. This is a don’t- miss for families and those who like their Halloween thrills compelling but not filled with jump-scares;  haunting in a mist-shrouded, purple-lit, leave-it-to-your imagination way.

There’s also a pumpkin house photos stop, a beer garden, snacks, coffee – and hot chocolate, and delicious cupcakes, cookies and pastries alluringly near the pumpkin carvers.

The event is open from now until October 30th. Ticket discounts for members. Non-members will pay a well-worth-it $35-45 for adults and $25-30 for kids.

Hours are 6-10 pm, with timed admissions at 6, 6:30 7, 7:30, 8, 8:30, and 9 p.m.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis and Jack Burke

Landscapes of the Mind – Thresholds at Gallery of Hermosa

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   Landscapes of the Mind – Thresholds at Gallery of Hermosa

                                                                   Nancy Kay Turner 

Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything.
Albert Einstein

The earth has music for those that listen.
William Shakespeare

Thresholds, thoughtfully curated by Genie Davis, brings together five artists, Eileen Oda Leaf, Hung Viet Nguyen, Angelica Sotiriou, Linda Sue Price, and Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, whose artworks reference the elements of air, water and earth. Working across different mediums such as oil and acrylic painting, mixed-media drawing, neon and 3-D printed sculpture, these artists create landscapes that take us from the depths of underwater reefs to gently rolling hills, jagged mountains, and aerial views of land both icy and green, moving engagingly from the micro to the macro. These five artists present landscape as a state of mind rather than an actual place by creating romantic dreamscapes that are idealized versions of nature.

Both Hung Viet Nguyen and Eileen Oda Leaf invent inviting scenarios, jam-packed with flowers, trees and plants with highly textured surfaces. While Nguyen literally sculpts and incises thickly applied oil paint, creating ridges and crevasses that illuminate his forms in his Sacred Landscape series, Oda Leaf adds actual painted materials to her pieces, as in “Desert Plateau,” laying them out in a regular simplified pattern that recall embroidered Folk Art hangings. Both painters present bucolic unspoiled scenes where the sun always shines, the grass is green, the water is pure and there are rarely people visible. While Nguyen’s paintings focus on the majestic and mysterious, bringing the viewer on a spiritual journey, Oda Leaf’s work focuses on recognizable spots such as piers, desert and forests which she transforms with her lavish color palette. Nguyen and Oda leaf are masterful colorists whose palette and paint handling echo both the Impressionists and the Symbolists.

The sculptors Linda Sue Price and Snezana Saraswati Petrovic use industrial and technological materials such as neon, 3-D printing and augmented reality to create compelling works that challenge our perceptions of the environment. Price’s jaunty neon works evoke both the down to earth world of plants in “Snake Beans” and “Kapeeno,” and aerial views of cities and freeways in “The Other Side of the Story. ” The festive colors and the surprising movement of the neon itself suggests cars moving on a freeway or even the gurgling equipment of a mad scientist, making these works especially lively.

Petrovic’s tiny, jewel-like 3-D printed “Pas De Deux” and “Coral Song” are poetic recreations of coral reefs that the artist not only imagines or re-imagines but ones that she has seen on her many dives. Each delicate translucent piece looks lit from within glowing, lace-like, and seeming to sway. Petrovic, whose works are conceptual, continues her use of 3-D printer technology along with augmented reality in her Sprawling LA series. These two pieces paradoxically look both macro (aerial view) and macro (view of the ocean floor). If one downloads the ARTIVIVE app on one’s smartphone, one can view the AR image that appears over the physical 3-D digital print. A frenetic Los Angeles freeway appears over one landscape and a serene ocean view with a seagull flying in the sky appears over the other. Petrovic alludes here to man’s destruction of the ecosystem and what is being destroyed.

 

Angelica Sotiriou’s works on paper and canvas are highly abstracted and poetic. Her large- scale mixed media painting “Scala, Divine Ascent,” highlights striations between earth and the heavens that are delineated, moving from earth tones to blue sky and to a glowing beyond. A simplified gold leaf tree reaches upwards towards the stars, perhaps a symbol of growth and transcendence.

Nature is clearly the star in Thresholds – bountiful, fecund, benevolent, a treasure to behold. Humans rarely appear and when they do, they are tiny specks in the immense universe – small and insignificant. They seem newly formed and not yet dangerous to the planet. There are no cars, planes, buses, cruise ships or tourism. This earth is still a paradise, unspoiled and pristine. Clearly a balm for a troubled soul.

And what is the threshold suggested by the title? Is it the precipice we find ourselves on? The tipping point or moving from the now to the point of no return? Is it the portal one steps through from the present into the future, from the known into the unknown? From what could be into what is? Uncertainty swirls about us daily but in this exhibition, Davis offers us beauty, serenity and abundance. Perhaps this is also a gentle call to action – a reminder of what might be lost if we don’t preserve what we have while we still have it.

– Nancy Kay Turner; photos: Nancy Kay Turner, Genie Davis, Dani Dodge 
Pasadena, CA.

Blandine Saint-Oyant Surges With Color

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Awash in color and geometric patterns, Blandine Saint-Oyant’s This Is It, now at Gallery 825 in West Hollywood, combines a mix of spray painted lines, riveting colors, and varied gemoetric shapes both cut out and drawn. Her vibrant geometry sings, just as her pallette resonates with chromatic intensity.

Saint-Oyant says she uses a painting process that she’s developed over a period of the last 15-20 years to create this visually galvanizing work. “I pour liquid oil paint on a painted background on canvas or paper. When I pour different batches of colored paint and rotate the canvas back and forth, the pigments intermingle into visually striking patterns and shapes.”

It’s an alchemic process that allows for a fusion of the planned and the experimental..”Things happen when the colors mix and shapes form,” she relates, calling her work often improvisational. “I like the fluid and organic result.”

However, her work in This is It is a progression from her past work and processes. She considers it to be a transitional show that includes her large titular painting, which stands at an impressive 58″ by 70″, a series of paintings that are 38″ x 38″ called “Ecclectics,” and two smaller framed collages that she titles “Misfits.”

All of this work is an outgrowth of what she terms a “gloomy two year period” during the pandemic. “This is It” was set to be her last painting ever, she explaints. “This painting was a first for me in all aspects, technically and conceptually. It was the first time that I included painted letters and used so many straight lines and gradations of colors. It was a difficult piece that took me several months to complete. But this long process gave me with the time to think about the next phase.”

Despite her decision to be done with painting, after completing the ambitious “This is It,” she found she had a strong urgency to create new work. “I began working on a series of collages. My intention was not to restrict myself to one single technique or range of colors but to explore and juxtapose them as freely and unconventionally as possible, in a completely eclectic manner,” she says.

With this in mind, she combined “geometric and organic shapes, cut out and drawn lines, gradations of colors, and the use of spray paint to provide a strong new element. I call the collage series ‘The Misfits,’ and two are in this show. ”

These images, shown above,  are precise and fluid, the textures popping out of their vivid backgrounds, creating an astonishingly tactile and meaningful 3-D effect. There is a liquidity to both works, as if a splash or drops of water were caught in time and added to the layered collage.

Her work with collage led her to create her newest body of work,  her series “The Ecclectics,” below, which she developed using planned geometric shapes that she juxtaposes to one another.  This pre-planning differentiates her work in this exhibition from previous projects. “What makes these paintings different from my other work is the addition of free-floating spray-painted lines, patterned geometric shapes, and an adventurous color range that I have not used before,” she attests.

Each of these works once again exhibits a rich texturality that captures movement both in line and through color gradations. The paintings are like watching the shifting contours and colors of a sunset sky,  but instad of those colors changing due to the passage of time, they shift from engaging in deeper contemplation of the works, which manifest light and shadow in varied strands to create a sense of luminosity and depth.

Saint-Oyant continues to work with oils, drawn to the range of color and the infinite subtleties of color that oil offers her. She describes the medium as providing her with a “greater range” of color and texture than acrylic or other mediums.

Despite having once considered putting painted work aside, she finds that painting today is “still an exciting and innovative medium that has a lot to offer. I want my work to make people curious and inquisitive,” she says. “Painting is an adventurous endeavor that I will always pursue. For me it is a way to answer existential questions, to fully express myself in a completely personal and independent way. I am currently working on a series that I call ‘Les Sauvages’, which is more gestural and expressionist. “

The exhibition is on view at LAAA’s Gallery 825, located at 825 N. La Cienega in West Hollywood, through October 18th.

Along with Saint-Oyant’s lush work, also on view are three other solo exhibitions: Lousine Hogtanian’s Inside Out; Lori Markman’s Magical Landscapes; and Laura Van Duren’s Revelers.

  • Genie Davis; images provided by the artist

 

 

Heidi Duckler Dances Into 39th Year in the Light of the Harvest Moon

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With immersive magic, Heidi Duckler Dance celebrated its 39th year with a site specific dance perfomance and gala last Saturday with signature impressive original style.

The excitingly innovative dance company is known for site-specific perfromances, and this one, held the the Frank Gehry-designed outdoor space of the Loyola Law School Campus, was stunning. The performance, Dance in the Light of the Harvest Moon was an hour long extravaganza of swirling and galvanizing dance.

 

Featuring live saxophone and cello, dancers in stunning fish head costumes wove from plaza area to ascending stairwells, parking garage ramps, and beside a spectacularly lit purple and green tree. Why fish? Renowned architecht Gehry was known to love fish, and the campus was designed, Gehry himself as said, as a kind of stage set,  “…a little village of buildings around a main plaza…with character and diverse structures.” The buildings served here as a contained aquarium of sorts, aswim with lights, music, and dancers who moved, literally and figuratively “upstream” and circled vibrantly hued buildings.

Along with Duckler’s innovative hand overseeing all,  Madison Olandt, and Aleks Perez choreographed and directed. The
original collaborative piece School of Fish, created by transdisciplinary choreographer Shoji Yamasaki, was a highlight. Skilled visual artist and costume designer Snezana Saraswatic Petrovic created stunning costumes for the event, creating fish heads from plastic zip ties for the dancers, and dressing them in shiny, supple scaly-gloves, fabrics, and sparkly shoes. Costumes, music, and sinuous, ecstatic dance moves all combined with super views of the DTLA skyline for an ecstatic night of dance.

Audience members were treated to charcuterie platters and cocktails, a gala awards ceremony at which Duckler introduced her successsor as artistic director for coming years, Raymond Ejiofor, preceding the dance performance.

The performance moved from plaza to outdoor stairs, from ghostly figures in a kind of underworld to fish-head shimmring swimmers, goddess Diana-like huntresses under illuminated trees, and a final multi-level work that had audience members following the fish-head-wearing dancers up five levels of the school’s parking garage, with costumed saxophonist and bubble machines a part of the delightful finale.

That final piece ended on the rooftop amid the shimmering downtown lights with a silent auction, live band, and buffet tables.  With audience members makng their way home at last to dream of dancing fish and moonlight seranades.

 

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and Jack Burke