LA Art Fair Sparkles and Shines

Posted on by Diversions LA

As always, the LA Art Show served up a tasty treat of art in a wide variety of mediums. There were informative talks, passionate performance, themes of climate change, a heady dose of trippy AI, splashes of neon, cool cats, and a charitable beneficiary, this year the American Heart Association, especially appropriate given the event’s opening night was on Valentine’s Day.

More than 120 galleries offered commercial art, fine art, experimental art, and some dashes of comic relief; opening night attendees glittered and lined up for Pink’s Hot Dogs, creme brulee, and champagne,  Robert Vargas live painted his “World House” on a massive, mural-sized canvas;  and street art vibes, laser cut metal work, and a manga-decorated portable tea house were all present and art-accounted-for.

DIVERSEartLA, comprising the 7 non-commercial art institutions exhibiting, offered the most excitement with a focus on cilmate change, immigration, faux mythologies, and the use of a drawing machine. AI was all around, lush and evocative and fascinating, but also, ultimately, still bringing up that giant question mark as to its impact. We have come to accept the horrors and complexities and hopes entwined in the confrontation of climate change, but have we yet to acclimate to another vast sea change in our lifetime, brought by artificial intelligence?

Let’s take a look at some of what we saw.

 

 

Andy Moses shimmered with motion at Melissa Morgan Palm art, far, left, while pink neon vibrated color, and a truly terrific, sculptural cat and dog duo pranced.

 

From golden hills to a dimensional portico leading to the sea to the pink morning water glow on resting surfers painted by Gay Summer Rick, landscapes were hardly stereotypical. Adjoining Rick’s work at bG Gallery are Linda Smith’s whimsical ceramic cats; below, bG dominated on the sweet non-edible Valentine’s treat art – far right, from Tom Pergola.

 

Emily Madigan’s magical jeweled beasts were at StartUp Curatorial; J.T. Burke also dazzled,  with his jeweled succulent image, right.

Copo Gallery fascinated with images from the apocalyptic to the whimsical.

The cool of metal abstracts meets the vibrant pop of floral color…

Kim Bareu is all bright whimsey at Gallery X2; but some neon cannabis noodles could be whimsical, too; ditto the work of Mr. Brainwash.

Quintessentially LA – the Pink Panther, the freeway dream of Dalila Vonden Stemmen at MRG Fine Art; a surreal and somehow super LA landscape and home.

Multiples…

 

 

 

 

The magic of MOAH performance artists Kaye Freeman and Amy Kaps, aka Hibiscus TV artists. More from Guillermo Bert; the immersive sculptural and film AI of “Be Water” from Chilean DIVERSEartLA exhibitor AAL Museum’s artist, Antuan.

From Antuan’s changing AI landscape, to AI assisted tapestery and sculptures far right, and below left two images, ”

 

The machines made me do it…

Above left, “Fake Memories of a True Past” curated by Moises Schiaffino; middle “Bridging Emotional and Digital Landscapes” allows viewers to interact with AI through a type-in word conversion, creating images above. My word was “child,” creation rendered in far left corner.  Image far right: sculptural indications of climate change and flooding from Osceola Refetoff and MOAH, more images from his photographic and film series below.

Above, also Refetoff,  infrared photography at Melissa Morgan Gallery.

Entirely new profiles, in paint and in sculpture.

Quintessential American seascape, left; gorgeous blooms from Paris in the middle; a performance artist becomes the subject of an artist’s detailed sketch.

 

The fabulous oil image of a house afire matches well with political-context neon, and Guillermo Bert’s laser cut sculptures of immigrant workers.

A cosmic eye, very large Zen heads, and a brilliantly vibrant urban scene converge.

Gumby says hi, a classic nymph does a pop-up.

J & J Art presents a buccolic and beautiful chicken romance while Jacobo Eid’s fascinating small plastic figures dance at a Madrid gallery booth.

Thick paint is always a draw – abstract, flower petals, and the classic richness of a wooly lamb.

Dimensional illusions delight – far right, the paper “stained glass” of Lorraine Bubar.

Feiran Wang’s Mutated Chicken brought big smiles; as did stooping inside the portable tea house of Tokyo’s Manga Art Heritage collaborators (far right, and below left).

To the right – Building Bridges Art Exchange in Santa Monica more or less encapsulated 2024 – aren’t we all the dog in the yellow booties, sticking our heads through a hole in the wall, despite meeting the resistance of our plastic safety cones? (Worn for our own good, of course.)

Glass art sparkled.

The natural world becomes slightly surreal…

Naim June Paik at Scott & Jae, a lustrous garden; mysteriously glowing abstracts.

A fresh take on naive art style and collage, left; live drumming draws a crowd, right.

Fabrik Projects Gallery’s The Soul of the City included a wide range of photographic talent, including a terrific piece from Maureen Haldeman, below.

That’s LA, for you. And that’s the LA Art Show 2024 edition. The city’s oldest art fair and still my homegrown favorite. AI’ght?

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

Earth & Ember – An Exciting Mini-Survey at CSULA

Posted on by Diversions LA

Southern California in the 1950s- 1960s was ground zero for what became a revolution in ceramics, moving clay away from a strictly functional or decorative medium towards experimental, abstracted sculptural forms that pushed clay from a craft designation to a fine art one. At the helm of this mainly macho movement was the energetic, charismatic Peter Voulkos, who came to ceramics accidentally, after being required to take a ceramic course for his painting degree. Reluctant at first, he immediately fell passionately in love with the versatile, malleable material that is clay. As a popular teacher at Otis, he treated his students as colleagues, threw out any curriculum and encouraged individuality from students John Mason, Ken Price and Ron Nagle – who got rejected from the program but was hired as an assistant anyway, and created a hotbed of artistic activity.

Earth & Ember brings together iconic work by many of the luminaries who contributed to this fertile time in ceramic history and whose work is in the canon. More importantly, this exhibition is really a paean to the teaching artists of the University of California at Berkeley and UCLA, University of Southern California, Otis College of Art and Design, and Chouinard Art Institute.

The show is also tribute to the homegrown ceramics program of California State University, Los Angeles whose alumni’s works are included in the exhibition. It’s a story of affinity and inspiration, starting with Pablo Picasso, who in 1947 began working in clay and created more than 3,500 painted ceramic objects profoundly influencing Peter Voulkos himself.

Picasso’s 1948 ceramic plate “Head Of Faun” (Courtesy of Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation), which is the centerpiece of this exhibit, is a lovely oval platter with Picasso’s hallmark jaunty and expressive line. The plate is embedded in a frame as if it were a painting, playing once more with the blurring of two and three dimensions. Nearby is one of Voulkos’s glazed porcelain plates from 1973, where he characteristically pokes holes and leaves imprints on the wet clay, clearly announcing that this is not a functional plate. John Mason, who at one time designed dinnerware but who is primarily known for his large-scale ceramic sculptures, is represented by a gorgeous series of slab plates, each with a unique geometric edge. The series of “Untitled Relief Plates, #183-186” (2008), seems to reference color field painting and shaped canvases of the 1960s-70s.

Beatrice Wood was one of the few women admitted into the all-boys club and her lusterware vessel “Dancing Ladies” (1982) is intentionally paired with Randall Bruce, who generously loaned the Wood piece from his private collection. Bruce’s “Double Bucket” from 2006 is a combination of wheel thrown and hand-built pieces, lovingly glazed with a metallic glaze. These two works are in conversation about form, function, and mystery. The pairing of Peter Shire’s meticulous whimsical, low-fire, hand- built sculptures alongside Roger Herman’s large scale, wobbly, abstract-expressionist vessels and table, are brilliant. Where Shire uses an underglaze pencil to carefully draw on the flat slab teapot piece entitled “Fallen Idol” (2005), Herman pours and brushes glazes on his vessels “Frog” (2023) and “Untitled” (2020), allowing the glazes to coagulate, run and even flake off. Shire is a multidisciplinary artist whose ceramics and furniture all incorporate the bright colors, jazzy patterns, and geometric shapes of the Italian design group Memphis. Herman, most well known as a neo-expressionist painter before turning to ceramics uses this technique to charming effect.

Thomas Muller’s “a smoke-filled room” from 2017 is a witty conceptual text- based piece, cracked and peeling, and alluding to power brokers who meet in back rooms. The phrase originated in 1920 to describe the process in the Republican National convention nominating Warren G. Harding for president. And of course, clay is also fired – though hopefully not in a smoke -filled room, though the process of Raku firing relies on smoke to create beautiful and accidental surface effects.

The variety and complexity of the techniques exhibited here is staggering, from wheel thrown to slab construction, slip cast assemblages and a combination of wheel thrown and hand-built: the clay and glazes range from secret formulas to commercial ready-made glazes to automotive paint and the clay bodies from low fire to high fire to locally harvested clay. There are too many outstanding pieces, too many compelling ideas explored here to discuss them all.

It’s a great chance to see a wide variety of approaches and works from the intimate to the grand in scale. This is a mini survey show and like a delightful appetizer leaves the viewer wanting more.

Earth and Ember: Ceramic Exhibition
January 22- February 22, 2024
Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery
Cal State LA

  • Nancy Kay Turner; photos: Nancy Kay Turner and as provided by the gallery 

 

This Cowgirl and Cowboy Invite You to Roam the American West

Posted on by Diversions LA

Packing a one-two punch of vibrant art, Anna Stump and Ted Meyer convey their own individual and unique visions of the American West in the terrific 118 Degrees, Tales from the Desert now at Roswell Space in LA.

Stump offers a fantastic, delicate, and profoundly beautiful series of desert flora on paper with 100 Smoketrees or Fuck You, Cowboy Artists of America. Providing a deep dive into a lush and continually evolving desert weed, Stump serves up her vision of natural beauty along with a delightful scoop of disdain and for the once heralded so-called Cowboy Artists of America, who excluded women from their arts association.

Along with her Smoketrees, Stump has created a series of luminous, emotionally engaging desert landscapes, depicting homesteads and skylines and desert terrain on long discarded found objects such as buckets, cans, and shovels. These are precious and precise jeweled images that ache with the longing of open skies and sweet Western homecoming.

 

Meyer provides vibrant, colorful, story-telling art, with images that rejoice in Meyer’s recent transition to desert living. There are vividly colorful and whimsical horses, guitar players, fiddlers and lariat throwers, giant jack rabbits, and big-footed beautiful women. The images are filled with joy and a sense of fun, exuding the fullness of life. With a touch of Chagall and a whisper of Rousseau, Meyer gives viewers compelling, heartfelt, and richly amusing images that shape wondrous tall tales and swishy horse tails, too. The works are both dream and delight.

The artists, who both reside in California’s Mojave Desert, together provide a complete, witty, charming, and poetic depiction of western life. Their combined solo exhibitions are alternately playful and profound, with each artist exhibiting terrific and memorable works that are as perfectly realized as they are meaningful.

The exhibition closes February 25th, with a reception from 2 to 4 p.m.; the gallery is also open by appointment most days. So, hurry on in before this rainy month ends, and capture a little desert sunshine.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

 

 

Take Your Sweet-art to the LA Art Show Opening February 14th

Posted on by Diversions LA

With exhibiting gallery spaces from New York to New Mexico, the U.K. to Peru, the LA Art Show roars into the Los Angeles Convention Center from February 14 to 18. Along with the enormous mix of galleries – over 120 of them –  offering a far reaching collection of mediums and artists, there are a variety of other offerings to engage attendees.

Among the standouts this year are 7 participating non-commerical art institutions exhibiting in DIVERSEartLA.  Exciting solo projects  explore the intersection of memory, humanity, and AI. These include:

The Museum of Art and History in Lancaster with the lustrous multi-media work of Osceola Refetoff, “Repairing the Future,”  focusing on global sea level rise. The work includes a large-scale immersive projection of the artist’s 8-minute film Sea of Change shot by Refetoff in Svalbard, Norway, near the North Pole. His visuals are paired with those of NASA satellites and AI-generated animation of possible future climate outcomes. The original soundtrack is written and performed by award-winning composer Paul Cantelon. The exhibition will be accompanied by a performance from Hibiscus TV artists Kaye Freeman and Amy Kaps on February 17.

The Nevada Museum of Art presents “The Journey” by contemporary artist Guillermo Bert, curated by Vivian Zavataro. The installation features a series of 20 highly-detailed, life-sized wood sculptures of actual immigrants employed as frontline workers. Bert’s multimedia work explores how ancient traditions and modern technology merge to create narratives of
identity, human memory, immigration, culture, and humanity.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Bogotá offers “Mythstories” by multimedia artist Carlos Castro Arias and curated by Gustavo Adolfo Ortiz Serrano. Appropriating the style and iconography of medieval tapestry, Castro uses anachronisms and the re-
contextualization of found objects to create connections across times and cultures. His work experiments with myth, history, and AI, and explores individual and collective identity.

MUSA Museum of Art University of Guadalajara, Grodman Legacy and Guadalajara Foundation (Mexico) presents “Fake Memory of a True Past” curated by Moises Schiaffino. This project seeks to create a reflection on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool to generate a historical archive. This video installation tells the same story from two different visions: the human and the artificial, making a visual comparison of the memory that the human being has preserved with the one that, through algorithms, the AI ​​has generated.

AAL Museum (Santiago, Chile) is exhibiting the visual narrative, “Be Water” from contemporary artist, Antuan. The immersive installation explores the significance of this vital element with Antuan’s creation of the Human Net, a human geometric structure,
symbolizing the symmetry of the universe. The characters within represent humanity’s urgent need to address the global water crisis, highlighting the essential collaboration between humanity and AI to create a new network of human consciousness.

Raubtier Unicus Productions (Los Angeles) presents “Bridging Emotional and Digital Landscapes,” exploring the intersection of human emotion and advanced technology to create a digital mural of individual and collective experiences. The audience engages with a touchscreen to input words or phrases that resonate with their memories. Through the utilization of AI-driven word-to-image conversion, tangible printing, and large-scale projections, the evolving correlation between personal memories and their emotional and physical manifestations is revealed.

Red Line Contemporary Art Center (Denver, Colorado) presents Laleh Mehran’s “Entropic Systems,” an immersive installation that considers the politicization of ideologies. In this work, a drawing machine inscribes a sort of memory into the mineral bed, much like a rudimentary hard drive. Each day the past is erased, but at the same time, the grains will never sit the same again, containing remains of history much in the way that AI is trained with billions of words and yet “remembers” none of them.

Celebrating Black History Month, the Tanya Weddemire Gallery will exhibit four pioneering black artists, exploring a range of themes, including identity, culture and resilience.  LP Gallery from South Korea will feature renowned artist Dain Yoon known for painting on her skin to create surreal self-portraits that trick the eye with 3D shading.

LA’s own Fabrik Projects Gallery  welcomes The Soul of Your City exhibition, the culmination of a global photography competition aimed at capturing the hidden spirit and true identity of cities through the lenses of local photographers.

The Young Masters Art Prize, presented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London, represents an international initiative committed to supporting emerging talents from diverse backgrounds, with strong representation of female-identifying artists in 75% of the works.

In a new collaboration, the LA Art Show, Expanded Learning (EXL) and Athletes for Life (AFL) Foundation—founded by former NFL running back Greg Bell– launch the Southern California Art ‘n the Schools Art Contest, inviting SoCal students to submit their artwork. The result should be fresh and exciting.

Finally, opening night attendees take note: “We’re grateful to Lucy Hale for joining us as the official host of the 2024 LA Art Show Opening Night Premiere Party,”  Kassandra Voyagis, LA Art Show Producer and Director has announced. “Ms. Hale’s support
and influence will encourage and inspire a new generation of art collectors and shine light on the important work of the American Heart Association, which funds research that improves health outcomes for heart disease and stroke patients as well as supports lifesaving CPR education.”

Hale herself adds “It’s an honor to host the 2024 LA Art Show Opening Night Premiere Party and bring further awareness
to a beautiful evening that unites the importance of art, culture and philanthropy. On a personal note, I couldn’t be more excited to celebrate Valentine’s Day with the American Heart Association whose mission touches people all across the world.”
Lucy was introduced to the LA Art Show by its inaugural charity beneficiary, the American Heart Association, which is celebrating its 100th birthday this year.

And, speaking of heARTfelt love – this publication will publish opening night photos of LA Art Show later this week.

For tickets to the event, visit here.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by LA Art Show