Now at MOAH Cedar, stunning solo shows are filling the gallery spaces with color, light, and noir magic.
Gay Summer Rick’s evocative Southern California landscapes glow with sunset, sunlight, foggy mornings. A video presentation is a part of the exhibition, explaining in part her painstaking process, as well as the light spectrum that she creates. Her textured, luminous work speaks to sky and shadow, light and air. The viewer could almost float through these images and emerge again bathed in a prolific wash of color and glow. Follow the Sun is as meticulously created as Bonassi’s, but Rick’s work uses a careful application of oil by palette knife.
Her careful, poetic use of color gives us light along the sea and in the city, in mist or wildfire smoke, on a crystalline morning and in the stillness of dusk. Her paintings take us into a full spectrum of sunlight. The urban landscape of downtown Los Angeles provides the setting for a reverential sunrise gilding the summer streets of downtown in “City of Angels.” Heading west to the airport, “Into White” revels in a haunting wash of pale blue and white, as a plane lands in deep fog. The airport is again the setting for “Stand By,” as a rich pink sunset welcomes travelers to the LAX runways. While her work feels in so many ways influenced by and a love letter to Los Angeles light, Rick also depicts New York City in this exhibition. The twice-annual occurrence of “Phenomenon,” in which the sun sets precisely between iconic skyscrapers, takes on an almost supernaturally transportive loveliness in Rick’s skilled hands.
Positioned in the middle gallery space, Lynne McDaniel offers an equally evocative and stunning body of work. Unlike Rick McDaniel’s work glows without vibrant color – or perhaps just a dash of it. McDaniel’s May I Place You on a Brief Hold? flies into a chiaroscuro world, with bold dark and light contrasts creating rich dimension and light.
As she explores environmental issues and man’s fraught relationship with nature, her beautiful, shadowy landscapes haunt both with quiet beauty and the awareness that something just might be amiss. Like Rick, McDaniel also focuses primarily on the Los Angeles area, here depicting primarily the neighborhood sidewalks, streets, and trails around her home in the LA foothills near Pasadena. Elevating the ordinary elements of life to something extraordinary or worthy of deeper consideration, McDaniel gives us a brilliant orange and yellow tot’s pedal car, or a bright orange traffic cone positioned in the middle of a hauntingly curved dirt road lined with lush dark monochrome conifers. An intimate series of smaller, square works include a faint orange/gold shadow of light, as if appearing hazily from a sky grey with wildfire smoke; overhung with trees and shrubs, one bush takes on a reddish cast. As if emerging from a noir dream, the cityscapes McDaniel depicts are in palette, approach, and texture quite different indeed from Rick’s, but equally driven by the Los Angeles they love, and its light and shadow.
In contrast to these landscapes are McDaniel’s purely delightful images of her expressive black cat in “January/December 2020.” The feline’s gold eyes will rivet you, as does so much of McDaniel’s fine work. Look up above the doorway to be sure not to miss them.
Reviewed in another publication is the third, magnificent solo show now at Cedar, Jodi Bonassi’s gorgeous, color-jewel birds.
All three, Bonassi’s astounding winged creatures; Rick’s light-filled dazzling landscapes traversing the color spectrum of light; and McDaniel’s superb monochromatic and intimate depictions of our fragile neighborhoods and environment – these exhibitions are too fine to miss.
Visit MOAH Cedar through March 13.
MOAH Cedar is located at 44857 Cedar Ave. in Lancaster. The galleries are open Thursday-Sunday, 2 to 8 p.m.
- Genie Davis; Photos: Genie Davis