Guest critiquing at NYU Abu Dhabi last November, I had the pleasure of attending a presentation of art students’ works in Projects in Painting, a class conducted by Susan Ossman, artist and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies; Visiting Professor of Movements and Places, Movement and Cultural Practices.
The students’ work focused on technology and its representation in and alteration to the practice of their art. Some students were majoring in art, others in film, new media, psychology, and creative writing among others. Each displayed an intuitive and impressive ability to project their vision and shape works that encompassed various areas of technology and intimate self-perception.
Among the students presenting were Ahmed Alakberi, Abdulla AlHosani, Manal Aljaeedi, Shamma Alkaabi, Sara Alrayssi, Bruna Araujo Pereira, Ayazhan Gabitkyzy, Honey Htun, and Charlotte Hall.
The awesome work above was created as an acrylic painting based on a photographic image taken by a LEGO camera built by the artist. Fun, cool, and the ultimate in multi-media.
This sculptural work – with lushly painted images on the wooden platform, cleverly incorporated LED lighting.
A super series of interlocking fish formed this vibrant, stackable sculpture.
Here, the artist has created two separate books with fascinating painted covers. On the right is a bejeweled “Mae’r Dechreuad,” on the left, in haunting black and white, is “The Last Word.”
Beads, flowers, and a bejewled heart serves as an interconnected web representing both the artistic heart and the biological in this sharp work.
This student artist’s self-portrait contrasts vivid internal color with the external white of eyes, lips, and T-shirt for a fascinating and intimate personal expression.
Here the artist riff’s on a video game figure moving through a magical landscape of abstract paint in a richly dimensional work.
The mastery and self-awareness in these young artists’ work was impressive and exciting. See for yourself: this is the vision of tomorrow’s sharp, smart, and lovely international art world. And look for their names in the years to come!
Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis, photo of myself by Susan Ossman
States of Exception Offers Exceptional Vision: Written by Genie Davis
Moving, vibrant, and visionary, Susan Ossman’s States of Exception, at Cal State LA’s Ronald H. Silverman Gallery, serves as both a recent retrospective of the artist’s work, and as a poignant and prescient reminder of the varied circumstances and situations that affect not just our personal lives but all human life.
Artist Susan Ossman, right; curator Mika Cho, left
Ossman’s art is intensely experiential, taking viewers along with her on a ride through her own intimate experiences and those of others. Along the way she provides responses to political and social issues both timely and eternal, such as immigration and migration, health, personal freedom, the environment, the sheer wonder of the natural world, and humankind’s place in it and response to it.
As an artist, anthropologist, writer, and performer, Ossman has traveled the world and explored the various states of living in it, political, social, emotional, and geographic. Each of those subjects is conveyed through her lustrous and vivid paintings and installations.
Mediterranean Sea Scroll
The exhibition follows an emotional and palette driven path rather than a specific timeline. Upon entering the gallery, “Mediterranean Sea Scroll” unfolds, a paper and ink on organza installation created in 2024. It’s a delicate and ephemeral piece, but it comes with a sturdy sense of place and the meaning inherent in it. A bibliography posted on the wall behind the work cites works such as The Great Sea, a History of the Mediterranean; the Dead Sea Scrolls; and Through the Eye of the Needle, Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, along with Don Quixote, and works by Camus and St. Augustine.
The burnt fragments of sentences and phrases that spill from the organza, as well as the delicate writing and shape- making on the fabric itself, have never been more timely. They are emblematic of the recent destruction from the fires in the Los Angeles area, including the devastating blazes in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, reminiscent of paper bits, their edges burnt, floating on the wind during this recent cataclysmic. The work is not only meaningful and resonant, but in many ways prophetic, of both our history and our future.
What Goes Unsaid
“What Goes Unsaid” (2013), above, is a smaller but remarkable installation. In this piece, Ossman is once again working with shreds of words and the gestural mystery which tumbles within the folds of the shroud-like fabric.
Sources
“Sources” (2018) is a large multi-media work on organza that once hung partially outdoors, and bears the marks of pollution, sun, and time on its fabric. Contained on it is the beautiful mapping of locations at every zip-code in which the artist has resided over her peripatetic life. It is shimmery and enormous, a banner and an inchoate flag of sorts, as resilient as it is malleable.
Temporary Exhibition?
Also on exhibit is a series of small images of the artist herself, “Temporary Exhibition?” which was created as she underwent chemotherapy during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. These hand-colored prints tell a profound and moving story of protecting oneself in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Nearby, another hand-colored print on paper features the image of a yew tree – natural provider of a type of chemotherapy – and the text of a deeply moving poem, “Ode to If” created by Ossman. It reads, in part, “The cure destroys all that/grow in haste, ancient recipes…at times my body/ vibrates like lute strings echoed/in a slow-grown, yew-hewn chamber.” Similarly, her words and images vibrate within the viewer.
From the same 2021 time period, the artist created three acrylic and charcoal works on canvas, here unframed. “Restoration” offers a hopeful message of healing within its soaring red and orange center. The image resembles flames, branches of coral, and the ventricles and muscles of the heart. Created during the same year, other large-scale works speak to the process of cures and healing, with titles of “Infusions” and “Intoxication” that are as evocative as their carefully articulated sense of motion and flow, graceful but strong.
The artist’s “Chergui,” is something else again, a fierce 2014 oil on canvas work that sings with a vibrant, forceful red, recalling the desert wind for which it is named.
BataclanOne and Many; Twin Intensities #1; Twin Intensities #2Flower Smoke
There are works aswirl with purple and lavender filaments, as in the solemn and lovely diptych “Bataclan;” and three blossoming orange works, including 2018’s “One and Many,” and 2019’s “Twin Intensities #1” and “Twin Intensities #2” that depict poppy fields, and all they represent – their beauty, their use in creating destructive drugs, their fragility and glory. There is another reference to the floral in the dark hues of “Flower Smoke” from the same year, which could speak to the use of opium made from poppies, or fields of flowers burnt in fires.
Nearby, Ossman projects a Power Point-created video that unfolds a highly pertinent and prescient poem, “Mere Anarchy? pas de deux,” the artist’s dialog with the poem “the second coming” by William Butler Yeats. One of my favorite lines is “He feared/The world he knew was ending.” Should we fear change? Ossman bears it, rides it out, and reshapes it if she can, through her art and spirit.
Labor’s Lost
In the final room of the exhibition, there is the rather amazing, mesmerizing “Labor’s Lost” created last year. This large and uncharacteristically figurative work recalls some of Marc Chagall’s images, with its humans floating like balloons, bending in impossible positions. They move like dancers without the weight of gravity, or lean forward with dangling hair as if held by invisible strings. The horizontal oil on linen work is as filled with motion as the figures themselves, awash in golds, oranges, blues – all electric with energy.
Conclusion
Also in the last exhibition gallery, there is the aptly titled “Conclusion” (2020). It is nearly as large a work as “Labor’s Lost,” but it is vertical, with floating objects rather than people. There are shapes and buildings, writings, implements, boxes. And spread out from this mysteriously alchemic world, running the length of this final room, is a wild and wonderful runner of orange and gold, a royal carpet of paper poppies that descends from the painting in a fabulous floral trail.
Richly expressive, universal, and yet highly intimate, States of Exception is that rare, truly compelling exhibition that showcases an artist finely attuned to both the natural and unnatural world, and the political, social, and spiritual constructs in which we all dwell. Curated by Mika Cho, this beautiful exhibition is on view at the Silverman until February 21st.
Before You Now: Capturing the Self in Portraiture and Before You Now: Photographic Transmutation, now at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History through April 13th is a wide ranging exhibition presented in partnership with Local Access and LACMA as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program. The compelling exhibition features the works of Naida Osline, uncovering the plant world with Botany of Transcendence; Andrew K. Thompson, with A Sky Full of Holes; Ellen Friedlander, with the exquisite portraiture of her exhibition The Soul Speaks; Brad Miller, with his shimmering Water Shadows; and Osceola Refetoff, with his dynamic Magic and Realism. Each artist has a different approach, but all of the works comprise a potent mix of the experimental and the traditional. Full coverage of the full exhibition is upcoming.
Turn Signals
Osceola Refetoff’s Magic and Realism, presented on the museum’s mezzanine gallery, features the artist’s stunning use of both infrared and pinhole photography. Dreamy and surreal – while also staying firmly in tune with a sense of place, Refetoff deals with subjects as diverse as climate change and the lure of the open road, covering a wide range of physical territory from Anarctica and Svalbard in the Arctic Circle, to Palm Springs, LA, and the Mojave Desert.
Owners and Guests (Pink/Blue) - Multispectral exposures combine infrared and visual spectrum light using filters in front to the lens to control the wavelengths recorded.
There are hot pink palms and lawns in a brilliantly alien world of an altered Palm Springs, above, while in the artist’s “Proteus Rising,” below, a soft focus icy blue creates a poignant look at the changing climate in Antarctica.
Proteus Rising
Chandelier on La Cienega Boulevard
The diffused light of a chandelier is a perfect metaphor for Los Angeles in all its glamor and the grief of broken dreams. In “Moon Under Virgo Bay,” taken in Danskoya, Svalbard, a blue orb of sea, populated by a small ship, forms a reverse planet. Intense blue water beneath snow and ice swirls around a darker ink blot of deeper water – like a black hole beyond the Milky Way, ready to consume the known-world from the center out.
Moon Under Virgo Bay – captured during The Arctic Circle artist residency aboard the tall ship Antigua
Throughout Magic and Realism, in the many different series that the exhibit pulls from, Refetoff’s meticulous technique includes modified digital cameras, analog filters, and pinhole devices. But, his perfection of technique takes a back seat to the lustrous colors and compelling pull of his subjects. With a background in filmmaking, Refetoff brings to the photographic art world a keen sense of visual dynamics, a stroke of noir, a hint of the Fellini-esque, and a bold design asethetic that lifts the most common of vistas into a higher realm.
Mirror Truck
Through his lens, we observe the mirrored sheen of a truck on an empty highway; a spin of white clouds down a long, linear, vanishing point of a road; a whirring section of an amusement park ride; and a row of mustard yellow golden palms.
Rock-O-Plane
These are among the many startling, significant images on display.Two of Refetoff’s artworks that already have a home in MOAH’s permanent collection, the pinhole exposure of “Blue Hopper,” shot in the Mojave, and the LA-set “Day Tripping” are also a part of the wide-ranging exhibition.
Duplexity (from the series Chromatopia)
More of the MOAH exhibition ahead. Keep one eye turned to your cameras, and the other to this site.
Tijuana Triennial – Exciting International Art Just Across the Border by Genie Davis
Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT) is beautiful museum and art center, and the home to the 2024-2025 Tijuana Triennial art exhibition. In its second iteration, the International Pictorico features a wide array of stunning installations, paintings, sculptures, and more from 87 artists from 14 international locations.
Cultural promoter and plastics artist Alvara Blancarte, along with Mexico’s Secretariat of Culture, and CECUT itself brought this program into being to both support artistic talent in Mexico and abroad, and to position Tijuana itself as home to a superb exhibition and musuem. The international call to artists focused on conceptualizing artistic possibility that were fresh and creative to rpresent new artistic explorations, dimensions, and techniques, and above all, to challenge traditional ideas of “art.” Over 537 proposals were received, from which the 86 exhibiting artists were carefully culled, representing Mexico, the U.S., Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, England, Costa Rica, Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, Paraguay, Spain, and Peru.
The artists’ work runs the gamut interms of medium and subject, the latter ranging from artificial intelligence to migration, personal violence, and politcal and social strife. Per the museum’s curatorial statement, the works “contribute to the biological, literary, environmentalist, femicidal, racist, territorial, gender narratives, and more.” Curated and juried by Brazilian critic, writer, and academic Leonor Amarante, the exhibition opened last July and runs through February 2025. Viewers can engage in the exhibition as well, by voting for the works affect them the most. The winning artist receives a prize of 1 million pesos, with additional prizes for the second and third place winners.
Among those exhibiting are returning Miami-based Venezuelan artist Rafael Montilla, this time with his suspended pyramidic sculpture “Door to the Universe.”
Costa Rican artist Karla Herencia, with “What are those stains that float?”, an installation that combines paintings and sculptures shaped from plastic fragments found beaches near Cóbano, Puntarenas, that speaks to the destructive plastic waste disposed of and dispersed in our oceans.
On the politcal and social front, Mexican artist Daniel Ruanova’s “Heraldy for an Emerging Political Society,” and Yumnia Duarte (Mexico)’s “We Can’t Hold Back the Water,” also shine.
There are fabric based works including a haunting familial circle that depict ephmeral hanging dresses; a vast “room” shaped from diaphonous fabric panels of larger-than-life female figures enduring often frightening changes in “Volatile intimacy: tales from a nomadic body-house that manages to cross legal and inhuman boundaries,” a powerful piece by Venezuelan artist Sofia Saavedra.
There are light and sound works, from Argentinian/Brazilian artist TEC with his projected floor work depicting the moving outline of a body and cars in a parking lot, “Asphalt in Motion,” and the wonderfully interactive – visitors may write on a shard of pottery – black light installation replete with “flying carpet” and a celestial-appearing black urn, “Take Off Terminal” from EcoPola Art (Mexico.)
There’s a sculptural work consisting of trash found along the Tijuana border crossing with the U.S.; a black-lit room illuminating glowing paintings of men with large bottles of water; and a magenta and hot pink shiny room, which when crossed – wearing paper booties to protect the floor’s surface – reveals a soft furry magenta room, and a video depicting a wounded man.
In another space there stands a vast army of headless female maniquins clad in diaphonous skirts with vests made of leaves, on which are painted a series of faces.
The work was created by XoQue, an art group that invites viewers to “walk among the pinata dress-form to highlight the injustices occuring on the the female body where many are violantly assaulted in public spaces. Here we can reflect on how a united community can create healing change in third spaces. Which body form speaks to you?”
From a large sculptural abacus to lush fiber art that moves in multi-colored waves across a surface and Pablo Castaneda’s “The Sentinel,” spray paint on found objects, there are so many fascinating, meaningful works to view, roadmaps, as it were, to the human condition.
Among these many stellar works are an astonishing collage and series of delicate, haunting mosaic tower scultpures made of ceramic shards from Peggy Sivert (Portugese Bend Projects) “The Past Presents.” Sivert layers ceramic fragments around a central iron armature, and a concrete mastic, giving a fresh new life to castoff ceramics.
Also singularly imperssive is a large-scale, layered, and richly evocative acrylic painting from Sierra Madre-based artist Eva Malhorta, who quite literally carves into her painted works, here, the lushly intricate work, “Call to the Sacred.” Malhorta works in encaustic and carved work, oil and acrylic painting, installations, performance, and photography. The work is glowing, an intimately connected network of lines and shapes, intricate and mysterious.
Both Sivert and Malhorta are tremendously accomplished artists, whose versality and range have led to countless LA-area and international exhibitions. While completely different concepturally, both artists’ works were among the most beautiful and powerful in the vast exhibition. It’s not easy to be standouts in a collection of standouts, but these two Los Angeles artists have more than managed it.
In all, exhibiting artists include:
Alba Esperanzaaa
Alexander V Molina
Alfredo Gallegos Mena
Alicia In Spiral
Alvaro Fernandez Melchor
Ana Karen Rodriguez Sanchez
Angelica Escoto
Anirakconk
Architectural Artist Alvaro Alvarez
Armand
Azucena Leticia Gomez Rodriguez
Becky Guttin
Braulio Adrian Huerta Ortiz
Camilo Bojaca Ardila
Candor Chavez
Carolina Villanueva Lucero
Celeste Flores
Cesar Meneghetti
Christian Becerra
Claudia Casarino
Coletivo Duas Marias
Constanza Fregoso
Dalia Ortega
Daniel Ruanova
David Bucio
Julie Hermoso
Jupiterfab
Karla Herencia
Kubemanart
Leka Mendes
Leonor Hochschild
Luis Aduna
Luis Fitch
Maik Jimenez
Marcela Roldan De Luna
Marcio Almeida
Maria Belen Robeda
Maria Gloria Nieto Montero
Maria Orozco
Marila Dardot
Maru Ulivi
Mila Gross
Monica Aceves
Nereida Dusten
Omar Castillo
Oscar Ratto
Oslyn Whizar Toscano
Othon Castaneda
Pablo Castaneda
Patricia Henriquez
Patricie Gerber
David Eduardo Santillan Caicedo
Diana Olarte
Ecopola Art
Caradura Editions
Elena Parau
Emmanuel Bornstein
Enrique Rubio
Esmeralda Torres
Eva Malhotra
Evangelista
Fabiana Wolf
Felipe Coaquira Charca
Franco Mendéz Calvillo
Gabriela González Leal
Geoneide Brandão
Gerardo Mendez
German Betancur
Groom
Guadalupe Reyes
Gustavo Dalinha
Hector Zamora
Ivan Martinez
Jonathan Vasquez
Jorge A Palos
Jose Patricio
Peggy Sivert
R. Trompaz
Rafael Perea De La Cabada
Regina Silveira
Renato Pera
Rene Gomez Ome
Ricardo Pinto
Ricardo Van Steen
Rocco Almanza
Saldaña
Salgado
Samara Colina
Scott Henry Hopkins
Shuta Ruelas
Sofia Saavedra
Solis Apollon
Stephania Bueno
Suzanna Gonzalez-Revillo
Tec
Ttzarzar
Tufo
Xoque Art In Motion
Yuan Gong
Yumnia Duarte
Zaka
Do cross the border this month and experience this involving and lovely exhibition. The museum offers easy parking; if you prefer to park on the Chula Vista U.S. side, you can cross the border on foot and take a five minute cab ride to the museum for a few dollars. CECUT is open 10-7, Tuesday-Sunday. The address is: P.º de los Héroes 9350, Zona Urbana Rio Tijuana
Tijuana, B.C., Mexico, CA
