Neon artists Linda Sue Price and Michael Flechtner presented new and glowing neon works at the Fine Arts Building, in a stellar summer show. While the exhibition just closed, Price and Flechtner will be back in mid-January at the venue, one perfectly suited to their medium and very different but brilliantly illuminated aesthetics.
Price makes abstract and figuratively abstract works that seem to grow as they shimmer, an appearance perfect for many of her current subjects, imagined plants with names like “Kapeeno” and “Critacy.”
Price’s use of neon beading is riveting. Another smart touch are neon plants springing from unique planters. Making the flora and fauna seem even more alive.
Some works on display are collaborative with artist Tracey Weiss, using Weiss’s found plastic elements to shape floral images woven with neon.
Flechtner uses more traditional components of neon work than Price. There’s signage styles turned wild as in his moving “x’s” in “Dos Equis,” and a life size figure of a robotic man in “Arms Akimbo.”
Cats wave their lucky arms in “Jan Ken Pon (rock-paper-scissor); rats pursue cheese in “Hickory Dickory (Who moved my cheese?).” Wit and fun merge with superior creativity in his work, which often moves from a homage to the age of kinetic neon signs to something insanely futuristic and shot through with the whimsical.
Together, the two artists’ highly accomplished works are extremely different in approach, but each astonishingly fresh and bold, tributes to imagination, joy, and lighting up their own respective messages.
Their commitment to craft – no spoiler here, neon bending is not a simple task, is beautiful and compelling. Take a look at some of their work here, and be sure to look out for their next show together in the beautiful glass encloesd niches of the Fine Arts Building lobby come January, a just-past-the-holidays present to savor.
Styles change but art remains. For Hagop Najarian, his move from figurative to abstract to a more hybrid body of work is all about vibrant color and a dancing morph of figurative form into geometric abstracts. While his current body of work on display in his Bendix Building studio is just such a choreography, the change really showed itself in a December 2021 exhibition at Launch gallery.
“Home Turf at Launch LAwas a great opportunity for me to synthesize a lot of the ideas that I have been working with for the past decade. Home Turf meant going back to my art making roots and expanding on the formal and conceptual aspects as they relate to the work. Incorporating my technical advancements with my art historical influences. A synthesis of my visual DNA,” Najarian says.
While he began his art career painting more realistic figurative narratives for decades, in 2014, he decided to “not paint imagery, but study color, light, composition and application of paint through the format of abstraction. I think that now the synthesis happens in my current work because of the mark making and gestural forms that happened in my abstract work would almost always relate to the formal things I do when painting the figure: the curve and overlap of forms, the division of space by light and color.” He adds “With the abstract work, I specifically focused on color and sound. I made direct connections to volume, speed, texture, flow and fracture using different musical genres of Classical, Jazz, Punk, Reggae and how they translated to the emotional impact of color.”
Najarian is also a musician, finding painting and music somewhat interchangeable influences. His work at the Launch exhibition was created during the quarantined portion of our ongoing pandemic, a dark time indeed, when he says he “hoped to bring some optimism to the viewer by having the figures supporting each other in a composition made of a fractured environment. The color in the painting actually started from a trip to Palm Springs where those mesmerizing sunsets happen that glow with blue violet/ orange symphonies. I loved the tranquility of that peaceful nature setting as a backdrop to the crumbling human interaction. As the painting progressed, I enjoyed watching the colors and images transform and purposefully using gray as my unifying element.”
Those colors, combined with his palpable joy in drawing and painting his figuartive naratives define a large portion of his work, but so does “allowing myself to use the lessons of abstraction and emotive color from previous abstract paintings as an environment for the figures.”
His loved for painters such as Giotto and Michelangelo is also embedded in his work, for which his process is to “make many drawings and gouache paintings to provide variations of the outcome. I will have a theme or idea on what I want to say, but the paintings are live activities for me. I allow the structural changes and developments to determine the final outcome. So, I may have the main composition in mind, but I will keep moving things around on the canvas with each painting session until it feels done.”
According to Najarian “The Home Turf series really opened new doors to my visual vocabulary and continues to fuel the work that I am making now.”
The artist is also currently an integral part of three art collectives: Durden and Ray, Museum Adjacent, and High Beams. From community and opportunity to inspiration for installation and performance based work, Najarian keeps busy. “I curated three shows in 2020 with Durden and Ray which were all amazing experiences through a time of pandemic. Cautious Optimism I co- curated with Brian Thomas Jones and Curtis Stage , which invited artists that were making work through the pandemic to keep art alive. During the summer when the gallery was at a dry spell, we were fortunate that the members of Durden and Ray allowed us to curate a fundraiser show for the artists that lost their studios and life’s work in fire that destroyed the Little Tokyo Arts Complex. With the invaluable help of Stephanie Sheerwood, Katie Shanks and Noel Madrid, we hosted a three day fundraiser in the Durden and Ray gallery, generating over $12,000 in sales that went directly to the artists from the Little Tokyo Arts Complex.”
And then there was High Beams #3 Laser Snake held in the Bendix parking lot, where he says “I collaborated on ‘Visual and Musical DNA’ with my daughter playing live music, while my two fellow artists Tom Dunn from Durden and Ray and Surge Witron from Museum Adjacent painted live on a clear vinyl canvas in front of us until it filled up with imagery during our performance.”
More recent was High Beams #5 Night Movesrooftop event at the Bendix building, for which Museum Adjacent participated with an 8 x 8 foot free-standing wall that was a ”ZOOM Meeting.” And for the Carl Baratta, Max Presneil, and David Wiesenfeld helmed B-LA Connect, just last month, Najarian co-curated an exhibition on the 6th floor as a pop-up.
He says he most wants people to know that he is, above all else, “a story teller, a communicator, a humanist. At best we all want our work to be a true reflection of who we are. I hope that viewers who see the work and don’t know me can get a sense of my interests in color, joy, my humor and celebrating life. I think that viewers who do know me would say that I am in the work.”
Balancing his visual art with his music is important to Najarian, who describes the two types of art in this way: “Painting in the studio is a private act that we share with the public when we hang it on a wall. As a musician, I love composing and recording music, but playing it live is the most validating confirmation, which is very hard to do in painting. So the live act of painting becomes the recorder for the performance that we share with the public. I think I am at a place where the work is at a good balance for me of my love of music making and art making.”
Using color to amplify the emotional impact of his narrative, he says that regardless of whether the work is figurative or abstract, “It is that element of surprise and live painting that I enjoy most…our sense of memory, our history and life experiences are always visible in our work. As an Armenian immigrant growing up in La Mirada, the colors, smells and sounds from my house made an impactful foundation on me that I still see every time I start a painting. We are who we are thanks to our youth.”
Above image courtesty of Leah Shane Dixon; Brand exhibition
Currently, you can view some of Najarian’s prolific works at the group exhibition Abstract Generations at the Brand Library in Glendale.
Genie Davis; photo images, Genie Davis, except as noted
Luna Anais Gallery presents a luminous the group exhibition curated by Alicia Piller, Radical Dawn, a series of mixed media works which simply radiate light.
Among the pieces on display are a provocative new look at a city scape as seen from the bumper of a car – as if the headlights had eyes; a floral landscape of fabric with neon igniting behind it; and glowy sculptures and paintings. Artists include Se Young Au, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Anais Franco, Silvi Naci, Ginger Q, Jaklin Romine, Molly Shea, Sarah Stephana Smith, Linnea Spransy and Kayla Tange.
Reinforcing the Luna Anais mission to exhibit female and nonbinary artists, primarily those local to Southern California, the exhibition focuses on these ten artists meditative and spiritual approaches in many of the pieces on display.
Molly Jo Shea’s “Excited Over Nothing” is an air dancer covered in sequins and beads, hand applied during the pandemic. As the inflated figure rises and dramatically falls, wonderfully depicting the hope and despair of pandemic times, the magic of this work is not just its green and silver shine but its exuberance. Even if the face of dark depression, something glitters.
Silva Naci’s work utilizes natural elements in uniquely distinctive ways. “Untitled (Pussy)” uses an exuberantly bright color palette of vivid blue and lemon yellow in wool and natural dyes using a process that harkens back to the artist’s Albanian ancestors, and their traditional weavers. It pops with color and an almost hypnotic sense of motion.
As to Naci’s mid-fire ceramic, “Tabaka (Ass Up),” the concept of a traditional serving tray is upended by the idea of serving up a woman to suitors in a beautiful beige and brown swirling work that resembles both the sweets served to the suitors to help woo them and the open vulnerability of the women being presented.
Also working in ceramic is Anais Franco. Along with wood elements, the sculptural piece “7 C’s of Resilience” offers a delicate complexity in its poetic and symbolic approach to memory and connection. The almost impossibly detailed, beautiful work is both ritualistic and transcendent.
Sarah Stefana Smith presents a screen, monofilament, bird netting and thread weaving in “Flag to the Aybss No. 3” a surreal flag-like hanging that appears both mystical and futuristic, a kind of magical approach to time warps, black holes, and other undefinable regions of the universe, both external and personal.
More concretely delineated but no less magical are two works by Jessica Taylor Bellamy, her ethereal resin and wire “Palm Veil” suspended over “Ecology IV: Horizons of Manic Striving and Photogenic Decline,” an impressive sculpture of a repurposed BMW bumper, video projected images of city scape, and dried wildflowers. Positioned well in the gallery space with La Brea Ave. as an outdoor backdrop, the bumper appears to have come in off the street, and the viewer to be experiencing what the disembodied vehicle itself may have seen.
Wood, clay, and plexiglass are the “Vessels of Memory. Emotional bodies. Moments of loss transcend. (Haunted Scream Bowls)” created by Kayla Tange. These are delicate, even gloriously poetic sculptures about memory, sentiment, love, and pain. Impossibly fragile looking, reflective in the plexiglass elements, they are as poetic as their title.
Se Young Au takes immersion to a new level with scented elements contained in a glass covered, white porcelain flower, over which are hung poly satin blocks of archival digital prints in her “Inexhaustible Abundance, Form 1.”
To the viewer, there is a sense of elegy and haunting sadness; the artist’s explanation leads one to into a look at not only grief but that within the context of the damages wrought by U.S. imperialist dominance.
Two artists, Jaklin Romine and Ginger Q created “Efflorescence Grip-Con Luz,” the fabric and neon piece that asks us to explore perception in its depiction of hands holding flowers suspended against the curved neon.
And Linnea Spransy’s acrylic on canvas “Patience” (above) looks at remembrance and attainment of “good death” against the context of the modern world in a mysteriously patterned divided image of dark and light that seems to represent both the Heavenward and the Hellbound paths as a kind of intricate puzzle. Spransy’s work in this exhibition is just one of the light-infused standouts.
Collectively, the exhibition is filled with motion and suffused with light, a tribute to grief, loss, change, and a sense of passage. That passage may lead through life, change the course of a life, impose dictates of social mores and rules on life, pull us from our purpose or path, but along the road, however rough, there is the chance at a transition, a journey out of darkness or sorrow or containment into a new day, one in which constraints are lifted, pasts celebrated, and futures more tentatively hopeful.
What we may see in the beams of our own headlights, in the sheen of our own neon is a Radical Dawn, lighting and igniting a new way forward.
With that in mind, Piller’s curatorial first exhibition for Luna Anais is a great place to spend at least a portion of the July 4th weekend, with artists, curator and a wine reception on July 2nd from 2 to 6 p.m.
The exhibition is located in the D2 Art space at 1205 North La Brea Avenue in Inglewood, CA 90302 and is open every Thursday-Saturday from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. through July 10th.
Art fills the soul as well as the eyes in the poetic Memories of Tomorrow’s Sunrise at CSULA’s Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery. Curated by Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanovic with Mika Cho, the four-gallery exhibition is a deep dive into what makes us human, and what makes each human who they are.
Participating artists include Enrique Castrejon, Serena JV Elston, Anita Getzler, Jason Jenn, Ibuki Kuramochi, Marne Lucas, Trinh Mai, Vojislav Radovanović, Hande Sever, Marval A Rex, Kayla Tange, Nancy Kay Turner, and Jessica Wimbley.
The works are each, in their own way, about the connective tissue of ancestry and relationships, identity, and history – both genealogical and spiritual. Some honor family, both those of our bloodlines and those chosen long after birth. Others focus on exploring present hopes and past dreams. There are images that witness loss, honor mentors, explore sexuality, refer to tragedies, relate to purpose, and search for true essence of being alive.
Primarily mixed media in terms of medium, these works are as layered visually as they are with meaning. While each artist’s creation can stand on its own, the interaction between the works is important here. There is real effort in not just bringing the art together in visual conversation, but in allowing viewers and artists alike to explore the power of personal understanding.
The show’s title suggests, according to the curators, that “Collectively, we are the ancestors of tomorrow’s sunrise and someday we shall all be but a memory.” As viewers, we pass unseen as ghosts in front of each, very much alive, work. Conversely, we are also participants in future memories of our own, involved in the immersive experience of viewing, and in our own individual inchoate ways, seeking to share and preserve what we’ve seen.
The large-scale work from Enrique Castrejon, “The Realization You are Losing Your Memory with Frequent Confusion and Disorientation” is a part of a larger series about his father’s chronic illnesses and dementia. Having served as a caregiver during his father’s illness, Castrejon’s electrifying image portrays a deconstructed human body in fragmented shapes, parts linked with artists tape and thumbtacks in a spidery vein-like web of concern, chaos, love, and loss. Strips of printed data from Alzehimer’s Los Angeles stripe the body parts like the wrappings on mummies.
Loss is also at the center of Hande Sever’s “2 or 3 Things I know About Her.” Walnut frames, appearing to represent coffins support and envelope a series of photographs. The photos are reenactments of her young mother’s arrest as a political prisoner during Turkey’s 1980 right-wing junta. It’s a powerful statement on identity and purpose, as well as on politics supported by the U.S. as a military business.
Vojislav Radovanovic’s “Years Devoured by Locusts” also examines the implications of imprisonment and generational trauma, as well as referencing climate change and our imprisoningly slow reaction to it. It’s a graceful work using natural elements such as a wasp nest and tree branches to create a scene that echoes both desolation and beauty. Broken mirror fragments spill like drying water under a tree derelict of leaves, analog television sets play a mix of nature images and static, signifying the potential loss of all these living things, but a wasp honeycomb revolves on a small stand with colored lights, a tiny rainbow of hope that life may still find a way.
Trinh Mai’s “Begins with Tea” takes up a front wall in the exhibition, family photos printed on joss paper, and held, along with seeds, herbs, dried noodles, and grain inside Mai’s grandmother’s used tea bags. Poignant and elegiac, the installation represents the stories about family and friends told by her grandmother over afternoon tea. The delicate, almost ephemeral tea bag pouches are as fragile as the remembrances they contain and steeped in love. A soft, barely-there scent of tea envelopes the wall on which the bags are hung with sewing needles that also belonged to the artist’s grandmother.
Also paying tribute to domestic rituals, is the largest of Nancy Kay Turner’s several fine works here, “Burnt Offerings.” Using parchment paper stained from the bread Turner baked on it during the pandemic, she adds gold leaf, glitter spray, vintage sheet music and paper tree bark among other materials collaging and painting them over the parchment. The result is a series of overlaid impressions, both abstract art and moments of hope and sorrow. Like Biblical burnt offerings, the archival work traces a period of great loss and sacrifice and creates an almost holy elegy from the act of making bread. Turner’s work also has a sub-context of another burnt offering altogether, that of those lost to flame in the Holocaust and at Hiroshima.
Anita Getzler’s “Pieces of Mourning” is direct about its heartbreaking memorial for genocide and imprisonment. There are crushed rose petals and broken rose thorns in small jars, thorny branches wrapped in bronze wire, memorial yahrzeit candle holders containing old watches – like those taken from Holocaust victims – with the faces of the watches holding more crushed petals. Getzler also includes a scroll featuring the names of those sent to concentration camps when deported from a French village. As a memoir of stories told to the artist by her parents, who were themselves holocaust survivors, it is deeply moving. As a work of art, it is a stunning mix of dark textures illuminated with the flickering glow of the brass wires, an electric yahrzeit lamp, and a spirit of love.
Brighter notes are sounded in Jason Jenn’s “sharing a seat with the poets,” depicting a mentor/mentee relationship, a tribute to chosen family. Arrayed along a settee, are precious minerals, plants and books. Colorful light plays with shadows on these special objects chosen to represent knowledge and growth, wisdom, and joy. Pillows on the floor represent the seating or and a conversation between the parties in the relationship, and a sense of warmth and love pervades the sculptural grouping.
In the exhibition’s darkroom, Kayla Tange’s “A Chance to Be Seen” glows. A sculptural display of illuminated documents of her adoption and letters between herself and her mother, the piece explores the complications of origin, human commodification, and the potency of artistic transformation. Ibuki Kuramochi’s “Prenatal Memory and Species” turns toward a larger picture, going beyond the personal to evolution, the maternal process, and the beginning of human life in her mysterious and evocative mix of projected media, chains, and a silicone pregnant belly. Expressing a fascinating connection between personal longing Serena JV Elston’s sculpture “Elemental Hunger” is among several richly involving works by the artist. As with other works in the exhibition, there is a visceral element, here the heat from the electric hot plate coil serving as the spiral center to the piece. Jessica Wimbley offers a beautiflu video collage that explores spiritual and physical edges, in “Edges.” The piece uses hair as a space for memory and storytelling.
Other works not discussed in depth are equally intrinsic parts of Memories of Tomorrow’s Sunrise, including a series of fine porcelain sculptures by Marne Lucas and vibrant mixed media from Marval A. Rex connecting mind to body.
Exhibiting artists and co-curators with gallery director Mika Cho, Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanovic
While many artists have created work that recalls dark events, the overall experience of the exhibition is that of hope and resilience. If art is a mirror, this mirror reflects memories, including and perhaps especially the traumatic ones, and alchemizes them with the magic that makes us human. Art grants artist and viewer alike the strength of spirit that allows us to take a good long look into the past, which is, after all, what today will be – tomorrow.
The exhibition runs through July 15th, with a closing event that day; a Zoom artist talk is set for June 28th, and an in-person performance scheduled for July 6th. The Ronald H. Silverman Gallery is located in the California State University campus Fine Arts Building.
