Linda Smith is the Cat’s Meow at bG Gallery

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With Power and Pattern now at bG Gallery, Linda Smith has created a lively, joyous and vibrant exhibition that’s as much fun as it is beautiful art.  As a major feline fancier, the pieces I was most drawn to were her alive, witty, fairy-tale-like cats.

Color and texture are the big takeaways from this well-curated show, which serves as a retrospective of sorts, moving seamlessly from acrylic on canvas works created in the 1980s in brilliant oranges and reds, intercut with ribbons of perriwinkle blue, to her massive high-fire ceramic cat totems from 2022.

In all of her works, whether small figures of humans, women’s faces, those delightful cats, yellow dogs – whatever the image may be – along with their inherent sense of joy and celebration, there is a sense of the totemic, as if these figures reprsented something truly powerful in the real world.

Indeed, the best of all art is a totem of sorts, a way to show our humanness, ward off evil, offer up beauty to the gods of light with which to sanctify our souls. Smith’s work embodies these magical, fantastical qualities while presenting images that are deeply grounded in the beautifully mundane images of life, the things that we do and experience as humans.

This sense of the experiential, warm and welcoming, yet mythologizing the recognizable, is present in all Smith’s work here. It is in the quilt-like pattern surrounding the titular “Mother & Child” acrylic work (at the top of which the letters “Mom” seem to shape a mountain peak pattern in pink). It is palpable in her “Small Cat Totem” shaped in four pieces, a cat head topping a work that includes two other images of cats painted on separate cast pieces of the totem; as well as in Smith’s wonderful mosaic “Woman, Cat & Dog.”

Color of course is key to Simth’s work as well, in the dazzling turquoise of her tattooed “Woman with Turquoise Shirt”  scuplture, and in the many hued human, bird, adn dog faces intersepersed with big blue polka-dot like patterns on her “Totem #5.”

Each work also seems to contain a sense of homage to the spirits of animals (including the human animal.) This is due in part to the massive size of the some of the totem ceramic works, “Totem #5″ for example is 72 x 16 x 16, the ceramic stacked carefully over steel rod and base.  Smith’s art is reverential in a way, that reverence illuminated with a sense of whimsy and wonder, of the magic of life itself, the colors that shadows can cast on many hued faces, on the furs of our feline and canine companions, in the harsh but vivid red, black, and white of her diminuitive but powerful 6 x 6” “Political Paintings” series.

Charming, beguiling, but also intense, Smith’s art commands attention, requires an awe-fused respect, and most of all, above all, engages the senses with the wonder and spirit of play. That’s the true power in her many-hued patterns.

Commandingly exhibited with her totem work in the foreground of the gallery, Smith’s exhibit lights up the bG space with a delighted passion in her subjects, and for her viewers.

Be empowered yourself. The exhibition is at bG through November 14th. The gallery is located at 2525 Michigan Ave. Space #A2 in Bergamot Station, and is open Tuesday through Saturday.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

A Cosmic and Richly Colorful “Cosme”

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Bettina Weiß’s Cosme, exhibited at Edward Cella Art + Architecture at the Himalaya Club in Inglewood, dazzled with color and shape. Using geometric abstract forms, she shapes her own unique view of nature, one as bold as it is vivid. Using both oils and acrylics on panel, bringing in metallic elements to add an extra sense of dimension to both her neon and opaque shades, her work explodes passionately on the wall.

Like florals spun out on an abacus, she combines an almost mathetmatical precision with a joyous universe packed with energy and dynamic color.

Soleil, above

Whether creating circular, visually spin-worthy works such as “Etern #1: or a triumphant, crowded series of triangular lines that compel the eye to not-look-away, as with “Rio #2,” or her pinwheel-perfect blue “Lunium” paired with a vibratingly golden hued “Soleil,” she rivets viewers with her masterful use of line and color.

Lunium, above.

This series of paintings is as lush as it is deep; the viewer feels its energy and passion,  as well as the perfection of form that barely contains both, immediately upon entering the gallery space. While Cosme has closed, it is viewable online, here –and expect to see more from this potent artist in exhibitions to come.

You can also view several of her images in a group show at Cella’s other exhibition space, Pattern | Nature now at the Edward Cella Gallery @ The Thomas Lavin Showroom in West Hollywood’s Design Center.  Weiß’s work stood as a powerful first exhibition in a series of three solo shows  at Himalya Space through Edward Cella, with the overall trio of shows titled Berliner Fokus intended as an annual series of exhibitions. Up next at the Himalya Club is Moritz Neuhoff in his first U.S. solo show.

Above, the artist with Edward Cella

  • Genie Davis; images, Genie Davis

Harrison Love Shows Us the Way

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The Hidden Way is a a beautifully illustrated novel containing myths and legends culled from travels into the Amazon.  13 years in the making, Harrison Love’s book offers a rich understanding of indigenous cultures,  and a deep dive into the purpose of making art, which in his own words, “preserves a sense of the divine.”

That spiritual journey is what infuses the book, through Illustrations as meaningful as words. It is in all ways a lovely and lovingly told journey. The illustrations were created using lineloeum and woodblock printing, with each print colored using techniques from watercolor to spray paint and stencils. There is a sense of myth making and creating in these images as well as woven throughout the text.

As poetic as it is compelling, the book not only follows a journey, it depicts and creates its own.  “The stars returned to their daytime hiding places. Each day upon realizing that they were still alone in the wilderness, relying upon something so fleeting as a dream to guide them, the absurdity of their circumstances gave way to panic,” Love writes.

To some extent serving as Love’s doppelgange, the character of Khay traverses many places and mystical spaces.  Toward the end of the book, she is told, “You were chosen because you are a good student of the old ways, and because you value the power of myth. You seek knowledge with a clear altruism…” This is appears to be what Love hopes for the reader as well.

Along with a spiritual quest, the book also serves as an environmental one, referencing more than once the destruction of the jungle. “We cannot feel the moments of time pass until we recognize the last of them, when we have little time left. We were told that every day our own people cut into the jungle and lay waste the soil that their ancestors had tended…”

In terrible concert with the loss of the natural world, another loss hovers over the book, equally as powerfully heartbreaking. “Without our stories, we too may have our way of life lost to the deserts of time.”

The Hidden Way seeks to illiuminate those stories, retelling them in an immersive, sometimes feverish unspooling.  It reconstructs the mysths told among the tribes of the Peruvian Amazon and other Shamanic peoples. According to Love, some specific shamanistic myths were included from cultures outside Peru in order to reveal the loss of some of these traditional practices.

Shamanism itself is considered to be a study of the self, conjoined with a belief in the spiritual realm that is hidden from the human eye, but according to the author it can also be sought “in the depths of meditation or introspection,” or in the pages of this book.

The work itself unfolds as if through a meditative trance; it is a dance of words that follows a rhythm unusual in its variance between action and dream-like description. This is not to say that the book is difficult or histrionic; and while Love says it was written to pay tribute to the heritage of Shamanic teaching, a heritage too often disregarded, it is also not a history tome.

Rather, it serves as tribute and eulogy, connection and hope, revealing a culture and its stories in an immediate and absorbing fashion. Within these stories, there are spirits and quests, silence and energetic action, portents and promises. It is a kaleidoscopic story, filled with both an urgent immediacy and a profound respect for the mysterious wisdom and the practices it describes within the story.

A travel book like no other and a poem to past and future, inner being and the adventurous heart, The Hidden Way definitively takes readers on quite a journey.

Love is a painter, author, illustrator, and skilled muralist. The book he has created here is a mural of words,  guiding the reader through a search for wisdom, power, and above all else, the redemption of a new beginning. Highly unique, the book can be favorably compared to the works of Carlos Castaneda. Those with a mystic heart and a taste for adventure, read on.

  • Genie Davis; images and advance copy provided by the book’s author

 

 

Ornitomancy – Omens Add Up to Beautiful Art

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As always, infused with poetry, spirit, and magic, the works by Vojislav Radovanović in his new solo exhibition assuredly dazzle. Curated by Jason Jenn, Radovanovic’s ORNITHOMANCY, now at Diana Berger Gallery through the 29th, is a resonant and rather astonishing blend of despair and joy. 

Overwhelmingly, joy triumphs, but there is acknowledgement of the precariousness of the natural beauty the artist celebrates, a poignancy to the hope in his shining stars and soaring birds. 

The title refers to these birds, as ornithomancy is the ancient practice found in numerous global cultures of reading omens from the actions of birds.  And the portents they present on the wing here are richly wrought, acknowledging both troubled times and the ways in which we, like Radovanovic’s avian messengers, have the chance to fly through them, and choose a new route through the world. But it’s our choice. We may accept and embrace this chance or discard it.

Unfolding in a beautifully laid-out series of gallery rooms, ORNITHOMANCY is a fully immersive exhibition offering a throughline of wonder despite the bleak urbanity that also surfaces in this show. But that bleakness is one which Radovanovic encourages the viewer to both acknowledge and transcend. 

In “Wasteland,” a free-standing mixed media installation encompassing paint and ink, barren trees, paint cans, cement, broken glass, broken mirror, paper, and a collection of found wire, feathers, glass jars, and shells, as well as miscellaneous thrift store finds, the viewer is presented with a conundrum. These are desolate objects contained in this installation, but nonetheless they’re beautiful, graceful, and moving to observe. 

Curated in at an angle but still in juxtaposition, “Rising from the Ashes III” brings us the hope culled from our observation of that eloquent “Wasteland.” This is a flat out beautiful piece, combining acrylic paint with elements ranging form ink and feathers to silver thread and plastic beads, creating a rich tapestry both fanciful and alchemic. Wings spread wide, stars trailing across the wall like the discarded flowers of a celestial garden, there’s a struggle here, as well as an ultimate sense of rising victory.

Directly behind the mid-gallery “Wasteland, ” the fierce blue and lustrous silver of “Ancient Wanderers,” is also a mix of acrylic paint, silver leaf, and peaslescent push pins. The work also features beautiful paper stars created from old road maps, as if showing us the way through our struggle. These birds are leading us somewhere that the sky is still clear and the air is sweet, and the road ahead literally papered with stars.

Delicately painted, the ribbons crisscrossing the sky and trees of “Migrations” leads us to believe that we may have to move our nests to find succor. This is such a beautiful work, a hinged canvas surface that is reminsicent of an unfolded icon in a 13th century church. This may be meaningful: birds are also angelic here, highly spirtual in their visualization. As a side note, many of the rounded tops of canvases, backgrounds, or cut-out materials throughout the exhibition recall vestibules for saints in ancient churches.  This may be a factor in the reverential quality that the viewer can feel in these gallery spaces.
It’s hard to convey the strange and liquid loveliness of “Prophecy,” works contained in glass aquariums, with water, ink and acrylic on paper. They are literally and figuratively submerging. Behind these small, wet dioramas, rises a large scale projection of a beautiful video installation, “Parable (The Wanderers), ”  images by Radovanovic and music by Joseph Carrillo.  The two installations are located in the gallery’s projection room.
Moving out of the projection room, our feathered friends reveal a far darker cast in “Omen,” in which a red-eyed bird  – his eye splendidly beaded – carries a pen in his talons,  that pen dripping ink. What has been written, and what can still be erased?
The large-scale “Sublimination” is almost a resolution of the dark and light elements here. Working with materials including paint, plywod, abandonded tires, thorny branches, and even a deer antler,  here the road-map-stars seem to have led us as far as we can go. Still, the winged figure behind the tire appears haloed, perhaps offering a kind of harsh salvation.
And yet — is this really our pre-designed, foretold path?
There is so much luminosity here – the use of silver leaf, thread, and other shiny materials, the anguish of a reaching, doll-like child clutching a feather in “Oracle,” with a bird flying above the silver-leaf covered portal, feathers cast across it; aching with a sorrowful meaning. Equally glowing, and far brighter is the innocence of a visually dynamically colored child on a trike riding on a path through the stars in “Starry Ride.” Has the child, in his innocence, found the way out of the wasteland?
Ask yourself questions, trace the enigmatic and beautiful paths in the exhibition. Truly the best way to describe the experience – and it is that, an experience – of viewing this exhibition, is to return to the idea of wonder.
We may wonder dark thoughts, hope for good omens, rise like the birds, cast feathers to ritual, but the inherent wonder in simply being alive, the magic of foretelling, prophecy, and prayer – is embedded everywhere in these astonishing, utterly fresh works. Perhaps noone but Radovanovic could create so much of a passion play, a tour-de-force visual theater in which the viewer is waiting, waiting for something to uplift, to resonate. And the wait will not take long.

There is such an enormity to both the quality and quantity of the work here. It’s grand and gorgeous, at turns ominous and even doomed. But in the end there is a sense of glory, the possibility, at least, that by listening to the visual song of these beautiful birds, we too shall rise and head skyward, migrating to Radovanovic’s winged Heavens. A big bravo to both Radovanovic and to Jenn’s powerful curation that shapes the story of these works.

Go on, drive out (or fly) to Walnut and see for yourself. Diana Berger Gallery is located at 100 N. Grand Ave., Walnut, CA 91789 on the Mt. San Antonio College campus.

Gallery hours are limited: Tuesday & Wednesday: 11am-2pm, Thursday: 1-4pm.

Curator & Artist Walkthrough: Thursday, September 8, 1pm;  Special Hours: Saturday, September 24th: 1-4pm

​Gallery contact: (909)274-4328 / (909) 367-4586; to schedule an exhibition tour, please email Phoebe Millerwhite, pmillerwhite@mtsac.edu

  • Genie Davis; exhibition photos provided by the artist and curator