TAM Creates Magic with Three Potent Exhibitions

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TAM Creates Magic with Three Potent Exhibitions by Genie Davis

There are three powerful art exhibitions at Torrance Art Museum now through May 24th. Each is exciting in use of material, form, and a message at once inclusive and emphasizing both the diversity and promise of human interaction and differences.

In the main gallery, Body Counts adds up to something special, presenting a wide variety of media that highlights figurative art, while also reflecting on  representation, trust, group dynamics, alienation and the effects of these on today’s democracy, structure, and civil rights. Artists offer realistically figurative – and less so – paintings as well as more eliptical images through kinetic sculptures that rivet with mysterious motion. Artists in this fascinating group show include Alison Blickle, Danie Cansino, Amir H. Fallah, Lanise Howard, Justine Otto, Duane Paul, Jose Sanchez III, Meghan Smythe, and Haena Yoo, whose sculptural works are richly involving.

In gallery 2, a solo show is visually – and literally – electrifying. David DiMichele’s Envirotechnology is startling combination of technology and nature.

Artist David DiMichelle

Utilizing LED light tubing, DiMichelle literallly and figurative entwines light strips with oak branches, creating what looks like a lightning strike on a tree, while emphasizing the metaphorical idea that nature and technology can co-exist harmoniously.  The space shimmers with light as the gallery transforms into one immersive sculpture.

In the museum’s Dark Room, Erin Cooney’s video installation Aire Libre draws viewers into a haunting depiction of environmental disharmony and injustice. Filmed in South LA and made collaboratively with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, a community advocacy group based in Commerce and Long Beach, the images swirl and seethe. At the exhibition opening March 29, a live performance based on elements of Aire Libre was held in the museum’s courtyard, in which dancers performed live choreography also rendered on screen merging into a collective experience.

Each of these exhibitions are joyous, while offering questions about the importance of community, collective alchemy, and bodily independence. Don’t miss these three wildly inventive and rewarding shows. On view now through May 24th.

Torrance Art Museum hours are 11-5 Tuesday-Saturday; the museum  is located at 3320 Civic Center Drive in Torrance.

  • Written by Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis

 

 

 

 

 

A New Way of Seeing – The Art of Windswept

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A New Way of Seeing – The Art of Windswept – by Austin Janisch

“Every great artist gives birth to a new universe, in which the familiar things look the way they have never before looked to anyone.” – Rudolf Arnheim

 

To experience a work of art is to be momentarily displaced, invited into a new way of seeing. Windswept, Wönzimer Gallery’s latest exhibition, curated by Genie Davis, offers such an invitation. Through sculpture, photography, collage, mixed media, and video, the group exhibition interrogates our relationship with the wind: a natural omnipresent force. Windswept brings together artists whose interpretations of “wind” reflect not only diverse artistic practices but also diverse perceptual worlds.

The exhibition features 17 painted works from throughout Susan Ossman’s career, alongside contributions from Dani Dodge, Angelica Sotiriou, Beth Elliott, Linda Sue Price, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, Diane Cockerill, Bruce Cockerill, Scott Meskill, Eileen Oda, Jason Jenn, Nancy Kay Turner, and Nancy Voegeli-Curan.

Works function as invisible presence, as metaphor, as force, as memory. From a power capable of sculpting landscapes to a passing breeze felt gently on the skin, the wind is as violent as it is lyrical, as abstract as it is corporeal.

Throughout the gallery, Susan Ossman’s paintings seek to make visible the movement of the wind. Through the use of color and line, Ossman illustrates the wind’s ability to transform, uplift and carry with it the qualities of the surrounding environment. In one work, a breeze becomes a conduit for pollen and a symbol of generative force, rendered through delicate hues and swirling pink ribbons. In another, Shamal (2022), the wind acts as an agent of abrasion, a hot, dusty current moving across the desert. A tumultuous force, taking on the coarse characteristic of the sand it casts up. The piece evokes the harsh winds of the Middle East, perhaps part of a regional lexicon in which the wind, through sandstorms, is not a whisper but an engulfing presence. These dualities, fertile and destructive, soft and coarse underscore wind’s shifting character.

Susan Ossman’s work left, Linda Sue Price’s neon to the right

Elsewhere in the gallery, Jason Jenn explores the weight of wind’s influence through a symbolic juxtaposition. The work presents thirteen red bricks painted with clouds resting atop a square cushion stuffed with feathers. The contradiction is immediate: bricks, symbols of mass and gravity, paired with the ethereal imagery of clouds and the literal lightness of feathers. The piece challenges our common perception by illustrating the true weight of clouds and the enormous force exuded by wind that lifts up these visibly weightless objects. It is a meditation on unseen power, presenting what art critic and novelist John Berger might call a “new way of seeing” by disrupting the assumed hierarchies between weight and lightness, gravity and lift.

Each artist offers new, diverse depictions of the wind revealing facets of the shared conceptual element. While some works depict the result of a windswept landscape, others capture the feeling of touching or being touched by a common encounter. Eileen Oda Leaf presents a whimsical take on the idea of being “windswept,” while Nancy Kay Turner’s response is one of rupture both physical and metaphysical. Turner’s mixed media piece evokes an aerial view of a landscape being torn apart. Coupled with her use of vintage photographs, the work suggests a sense of loss or longing as if a connection to the past is perhaps what is being swept away.

Installation by Dani Dodge
Central painting/collage from Angelica Sotiriou; smaller images to the right and left, Snezana Saraswatsi Petrovic

Nancy Voegeli Curran

Snezana Saraswati Petrovic

Recalling the essays grouped within Ways of Seeing, Berger reminds us that our perception is never neutral. “The way we see things,” he writes, “is affected by what we know or what we believe.” Windswept exemplifies this principle, revealing how cultural context, sensory experience, and artistic framing shape our understanding of something as seemingly straightforward as the wind. The exhibition doesn’t offer a singular narrative but rather a constellation of perspectives—each artist conjuring their own universe, each work inviting us to re-experience a common element through their lens.

As a whole, Windswept invites viewers to consider how art can visualize the invisible not merely to represent, but to reframe. The exhibition is one that turns an abstraction into various modes of sensation.

A closing and curatorial walkthrough of the exhibition along with a selection of short films on wind from artists Dani Dodge, Jason Jenn, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, David Isakson, and Johnny Naked are scheduled for 5-8 p.m. on Thursday, April 17th.  Walk-through at 6, films at 7.  Wonzimer is located at 341-B S Avenue 17, Los Angeles, CA 90031.

Written by: Austin Janisch; photos: provided by Wonzimer Gallery; additional images by Genie Davis 

Time From Other Places – Carried by Windswept at Wonzimer Gallery

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Time From Other Places – Carried by Windswept at Wonzimer Gallery by Juri Koll

Wind is potent and prescient, bringing time to us from other places, in precious moments we feel, see, smell. With this in mind, Genie Davis has curated an excellent new show, Windswept, at Wonzimer (a great space and crew) opening on March 21.

Windswept builds on 15 works from international artist’s Susan Ossman’s career as a painter with 14 other artists’ work of equally formidable insight and acumen. These works allow us to be in the moment, to stop and look at the fleeting, illusory elements, the bits and pieces we’re all made of.

Ossman’s “Pin The Wind,” represents for this writer the origin of the concept Davis has so adeptly assembled here. Made up of 2 panels that look as if they are 3, the beautiful and momentary view of sky blue above protects the orange under it, illuminates the earthy feel of each edge, and allows us to be here with it.

Motion, flow, and lush color combine in each of Ossman’s works, creating the sensation of a wind made of color and contrasts, including the wild wind that emanates from her “Dark Winds,” an astonishing oil and linen work that was created specificially for this exhibition.

Angelica Sotiriou’s collage “The Sound of Breath,” like much of her work, brings the moment forward with her free, open command of the brush and the elements she uses that sparkle, layer, and reach toward us, while Bruce Cockerill’s photograph, “Tumbleweed Sky,” below, is fleeting, transitory and yet starkly “now” as a photograph.

Diane Cockerill’s photographic image “Flurry” uses stop-motion technique to capture an image that makes you wait to see what happens next, and gives time and voice to the birds in flight.

“The Answer My Friend (Blowing in the Wind),” is Beth Elliott’s sculptural work, which brings a challenging number of physical elements to an equally challenging subject. How do we hold the fort, and keep the sail aloft, as it were, in a windstorm? How do we remember the things that might be taken away from us when forces out of our control overtake us? The cyanotype element, like a flag, makes us hope we do remember, and that the image will survive.

Each of the other works in this show deserve study, and equally anchor the show, the concept, and the time spent with it, including newly created installations by Dani Dodge, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, and Jason Jenn, each utilizing a variety of different elements, including, in one case, an actual tumbleweed.

Clouds, also windswept, as depicted utilizing recycled plastics from Nancy Voegeli-Curran, above.

The winds of personal change are a central part of Nancy Kay Turner‘s work, below.

 

There are also neon works that relate to the recent catastrophic windstorms in LA from Linda Sue Price, along with sculptural works that seem to have arrived as if carried by the wind from Scott Meskill and Eileen Oda, among the many fine artists exhibiting. In many ways, this entire exhibition is a wind-blown surprise.

In all, this immersive group exhibition features painted works by Susan Ossman in conjunction with sculptural, photographic, collage, video, and installation works by artists including Dani Dodge, Angelica Sotiriou, Beth Elliott, Linda Sue Price, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, Diane Cockerill, Bruce Cockerill, Scott Meskill, Eileen Oda, Jason Jenn, Nancy Kay Turner,  Nancy Voegeli-Curan, and a video work from David Isakson. The show explores each artist’s own unique vision of wind, from oil and acrylic to  otherworldly mixed media.

Don’t miss the opening Friday, March 21 from 5 to 10 p.m., or the artist’s talk scheduled for Sunday, March 30 at 3 -5 p.m.  The show closes with a curatorial walk through on Thursday, April 17 with the gallery open all day and the walk through scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m. Regular gallery hours are 12-7 W-Sun, March 21 through April 20th. Go see it.

Wonzimer Gallery is located at 341-B S Avenue 17, Los Angeles, CA 90031 Website: https://www.wonzimer.com/ 

  • Juri Koll, VICA; photos by Genie Davis and as provided by the artists

The Fowler’s Fire Kinship Is Prescient and Important PST Art

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The Fowler’s Fire Kinship Is Prescient and Important PST Art by Genie Davis

While conceptualized prior to our recent cataclysmic fires, Fire Kinship, now at UCLA Fowler is an incredibly pertinent exhibition that challenges the attitudes of fear and illegality around fire, presenting a cogent and quite honestly spiritual exhibition that proposes a return to lifesaving Native practices of fire.

Hundreds of years of knowledge and expertise culled from the Tongva, Cahuilla, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay peoples, is presented in installations, poetry, craftwork, and paintings in the exhibitionn. Works highlight Native understanding of fire as a vital aspect of land stewardship, community well-being, and tribal sovereignty.

The exhibition presents a living history of communities from the past and present as told through a variety of mediums. It introduces the purpose of fire as a generative force and part of a sustainable future as an “elemental relative” creating a cycle of beginnings for all living things.

Among the works on display are beautiful items on loan from Native communities including baskets, ollas, rabbit sticks, bark skirts, and canoes. Each of these objects represents salient facts: fire tempers and hardens clay vessels used for cooking and storing food, helps to cultivate plant materials utilized to create baskets, blankets, capes, and skirts, thins out patches of juncus to allow new growth, softens tar used to make canoes seaworthy.Summer Paa’ila Herrera (Payómkawichum) has created two pieces for Fire Kinship. She displays a lovely ceramic vessel made from tó’xat (clay) sourced on traditional Luiseño lands, gathered with the help of her father, and processed at their home at Pechanga. Also on exhibit is a traditional skirt made from burned cottonwood bark that the artist herself has worn and will continue to wear in ceremonial settings.

Collaborating with key Native commuinty leaders, Fire Kinship explores a radical rethinking of our relationship with all the elements of the earth, our home: fire, water, land and air. Native ecological techniques hold vast and essential knowledge for our future survival. Co-curator Daisy Ocampo Diaz relates that “Southern California Native communities are bringing fire practices back from dormancy…Colonization, both past and present, disrupted a cycle that honored fire at the center and caused earth-wrenching ramifications. Native communities have been holding on to these gentle burns despite California’s ravaging by flames. We are all part of this story, and it is a time for listening and (un)learning.”

Along with the presentation of beautiful, hand-made objects for use and wear, the exhibition includes some vibrant and truly immersive installations, with several focusing on the vivid colors and growth of our California poppy.

Weshoyot Alvitre creates a poppy-splashed portrait series exploring the multilayered histories of several women from her tribal community who fought for their people’s rights: Narcissa Rosemeye, a Tongva language keeper; Modesta Avila, who protested the development of the Santa Fe Railroad on her family’s land and became the first convicted felon in the state of California; Espiritu Leonis, who protected her ancestral homelands by using the United States legal system in a 15-year case. The portraits are powerful, evocative, and beautifully alive, apt tributes to brave and resourceful Native women.

Alvitre’s portraits face a wall installation of a new work from poet Emily Clarke (Cahuilla Band of Indians), Womanfire. The poetry is moving and rich, written in electrocardiogram-esque lines that imitate a Cahuilla basket pattern believed to represent the mountains and valleys in Cahuilla homelands. The gloriously strong writing reflects on the fact that Native women are disproportionately at risk of experiencing violence. She intertwines this fact with another: their survival of abuse and trauma can be compared to a cultural burning, one which encourages renewal, regrowth, and abundance.

Also poetic is a multimedia installation, “The Heart is Fire.” The installation includes video, birdsong audio, and natural materials and was created by Gerald Clarke Jr. (Cahuilla Band of Indians). The piece is inspired by the Cahuilla creation story, a book about the Cahuilla by Deborarh Dozier, and traditional uses of fire. It also introduces and reflects upon the use of contemporary burns during all-night funerary ceremonies and bird-singing events within Cahuilla communities.

Admittedly my favorite installation is a room sized work by Leah Mata Fragua (yak titYu titYu yak tiłhini, Northern Chumash). The artist reclaims the narrative that the land and its people are intertwined through the use of a multitude of sculptural paper, dyed with poppies, and representing the flowers themselves. There is a small couch in the room on which one can lean back and look at the poppies everywhere in the room, their vast ability to thrive, to astonish, to regrow and regenerate. The installation looks to  land stewardship practices that have shaped the region’s landscapes, long before European colonizers arrived in this country. It is a delicate and honestly divine work, uplifting and yet tragic in its fragility, mirroring ,in a way, the fragility of humankind itself, and our ability to regrow and accept alterations to our landscape.

As astonishingly lovely as it is, the work is meant to be temporary. The artist will return its materials to the earth through fire, symbolizing the cyclical nature of yak yak titYu titYu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash knowledge. The fragile beauty and its ephemeral nature speaks not only to that of flowers and all natural things, but to the spirit, its preservation, its loss.

Another highlight is the instalaltion “Sand Acknowledgment” by Lazaro Arvizu (Gabrieleno/Nahua) that reflects traditional and ephemeral sand-painting practices. Arvizu illustrates the connections between the land, humans, the sun, the stars, and animals. Like the installaton of Fragua’s poppies, this work too will return to the earth at the end of the exhibition.

Arvizu will also be present in the gallery for conversations, facilitated meditations, and art-making activities related to her installation throughout the exhibition time period.

Fire Kinship also includes photographs and archival documents that tell the story of colonization, including journal entries from Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, whose company of Spanish settlers was the first party of non-Indians to set foot in what is now Southern California in 1542.

I would like to note that even more powerful than this graceful and knowledge-filled exhibition itself is the acknowledgement of the fact that Native communities in Southern California continue to face institutional barriers to bringing life and land-saving fire back to the the land. Reintroducing and strengthening Native fire practices requires commitment and accountability from agencies with current jurisdiction over tribal territories.

With this in mind, there is also a  section of the exhibition featuring videos and images of fire practitioners, such as Marlene’ Dusek and other members of the Indigenous Women-In-Fire Training Exchange (TREX), sharing knowledge and participating in controlled burns. The Fowler’s press materials explain that “They make a case for members of Native communities to become state-certified Burn Bosses, responsible for planning fires, obtaining permits, implementing burn plans, monitoring fire effects, and maintaining prescriptive requirements. This has been an option in California since 2018, but to date, only one Native person in Southern California is a certified Burn Boss—Fire Kinship collaborator Wesley Ruise Jr.”

The exhibition is on view through July 13th – and especially given its real-life context as well as its wisdom and beauty, is a must-see. The Fowler Museum is located on the UCLA campus in Westwood, Calif.

It was organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA and curated by Daisy Ocampo Diaz (Caxcan), assistant professor of history at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB); Michael Chavez (Tongva), former Fowler archaeological collections manager and NAGPRA project manager; and Lina Tejeda (Pomo) M.A. in history at CSUSB.

The exhibition is part of the nation’s largest art event, Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, and as such is one of the most meaningful and important in this iteration of PST ART.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis