Los Angeles Art Association: 4 Solo Powerhouses at Gallery 825

The show was packed, and rightly so – artists Teale Hatheway, Echo Lew, Marilyn Lowey, and Sasha Raphael Vom Dorp each contributed brilliant, immersive elements to this exhibition.  Each artist’s work creates a separate mini-world within the gallery. Running through October 9th, visitors will see four separate visions of light, shadow, and self.

Teale Hathaway – Fragmented Realities: City of Dreams

The artist’s work is about memory, grounding, understanding, and experience; with beautifully detailed yet fragmented images.  Hatheway’s self-taught architectonic drawing and the ethereal nature she evokes of even the most common subjects combines the experimental with the investigative, using the often unsung history of Los Angeles architecture to enthrall viewers and advocate for the city’s preservation. The artist describes her subject matter as “a means to ground myself in a tangible environment in which an understanding of the whole is made up of an experience of the parts.”  The LAAA exhibit is made up of free-hanging paintings with layered elements of street lights. It’s a whole glowing city.

Sasha Vom Dorp – Synesthesia – Inside Sound and Light

Do we hear color? See the sound of light? Vom Dorp suggests we do with her mechanical feedback loop Sound Illuminator which quite literally translates color into sound. Constructed from a salvaged 727-jet nose cowling, rippled patterns and waves let viewers see the sounds they are hearing. While Vom Dorp’s archival pigment prints continue to show, the haunting Sound Illuminator was a unique creation viewable only on opening night. Enter a portal of light and share an otherworldly experience with Vom Dorp.

Echo Lew – Light in Space

Light drawings etched into photographs. Twenty-eight years of traditional drawing led Lew to this powerful expression of small lights and an open shutter. Printed on canvas and water-color paper, motion is trapped in the realm of light creating an ethereal and delicate pattern that seems to visually buzz like a congregation of bees. The artist says “During an exposure time of approximately one minute, I manipulate lights in front of the camera. Sometimes I invert the positive image to a negative one on a computer but otherwise the Light Drawings are not manipulated.”

Marilyn Lowey – Dark Side of Her Broom

There’s something magical here. A chimera of light created from eye glass lenses, jewelry wire, and acrylic in Levitation Ashra #1 Mom’s Shadow; projected lights, video of a burial, and more glass lenses take on aspects of an interstellar dimension in Levitation Ashra #2 The Burial. Most striking perhaps are the light curtains, with a thousand eye glass lenses refracting their own vision attached by slip rings. What we see is not necessarily what we get. Moving light and shadow, the unseen mystery of illusion, the fine line between perception and vision.

Slip inside an enlightening experience before the show closes October 9th. Gallery 825 is located at 825 N. La Cienega just shy of Santa Monica Boulevard.

• Genie Davis;  photos  – Jack Burke