Aviary Soared – Curated by Betty Brown at Loft at Liz’s an Astonishingly Lovely Group Show

Posted on by Diversions LA

With Aviary, the just-closed massive group exhibition curated by Betty Brown at Loft at Liz’s, birds of many feathers flocked together in a wonderful all-media exhibition that ranged from the sculptural to paintings, mixed media, and more.

There was the fragile, poignant newspaper-based work of Nurit Avesar, and the lineoleum block ink tattoo of a fighting cock on rich crimson from Edwin Vasquez. Six stunning free-form sculptural works by Samuelle Richardson, working in fabric over armature to create birds in flight. Calling out, and about to fly, they were arrayed in the project room; Debbie Korbel’s cardboard, steel, and wood “As the Crow Flies”  took off from the floor in the front gallery.

Placed with Richardson’s work, Joanne Julian evoked the brush strokes of Japanese calligraphy in her graceful graphite, ink, and prisma color work. Cynthia James oil on copper work seethed with salmon color in the same space while Jodi Bonassi’s vibrantly colored, intensely detailed canvas works were joined by her own sepia toned, simpler birds created on paper bags, and equally sublimely magical.

Like a shedding royal cape, feathers fell from a large scale work by artists Cheryl Dullabaun and Linda Parnell in the lush, regal “Volaries.” John M. White positioned his paintings of birds on wires; L. Aviva Diamond’s riveting archival pigment prints soared in black and white.  Edwin Vasequez provided “Mayan Birds” as masks, evoking both totem poles and Mayan civilizations.

Kaoru Mansour presented works on wood panel illuminated with gold leaf and thread.

Dean and Laura Larson offered a phenomenal collaboration. Laura Larson’s astonishingly alive bronze sculptures, “Birds in Mourning,” were paired with a beautiful large-scale composite photograph by Dean Larson that placed the sculptural works within a fully invented setting.

As very different as they were striking, works by Bibi Davidson – touching on the vibrantly surreal, and rich works from Deena Capparelli both each provided immersive visual stories. Quite different works by Roberto Benevidez were equally filled with movement and power, his astonishingly alive sculptural birds perched on wooden dowls. Jill Sykes’ work glistened and shone in spare, graceful patterns.

Seventeen artists in all presented work, which viewed collectively was like entering an actual aviary, filled with varied birds from every corner of the world. Feathers, captured in sculpture or paint, photography or mixed media erupted in a swirl of motion and color, layered and lovely, fragile yet powerful.

Collectively, the works spoke to each other in a kind of contrasting, wonderful cacophony of song you could almost hear, wings you could almost feel brushing the air of the gallery space. There were resting birds, fighting birds, flying birds, perching birds, floating birds, sleeping birds. While the opening was crowded with artists and guests, on a quiet afternoon, one could almost hear the birds rustle, stir, and soar.

Vivid, beautiful odes to the longing for flight and the joy and pain of this species and our own – each work joined in this aching chorus.  If you missed it, but would like to possess a winged thing or two, reach out to the gallery or curator.

Loft at Liz’s is located at 453 S. La Brea Ave.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis

Can You Fear and Adore Flowers? Artist Susan Melly Provides Answers in New Work at LAAA

Posted on by Diversions LA
   In a way, who isn’t afraid, just a little bit, of flowers? We may fear their incredible fragility, of losing them to an all-too-quick death, to knowing their perfection is ephemeral and their beauty so temporary – an aching reminder of our own mortality.
   However, for artist Susan Melly in her new Emerging Fear of Flowers now at LAAA ‘s Gallery 825 in West Hollywood, her emerging fear was something different, risen from over two years of COVID-19 pandemic isolation. During that time period, Melly’s husband brought her a weekly bouquet of flowers from an open air market. As her own statement informs viewers “As my anxiety blossomed, my art making changed and became more abstract and colorful to ward off my dark feelings. Each work is embedded with a hint of humor – and the number 19 – as an homage to coping mechanisms, even as familiar sources of comfort counterintuitively transform into a strange beauty that is tinged with the edge of the unknown.”
   After about a year of receiving the flowers, despite the loving intention of bringing beauty and romance to her life, she began to ask hereslf if she would be “condemned” to receiving the flowers every single Friday for the rest of her life, indicating that the pandemic would never end. The blossoms blossomed – into increased anxiety, alleviated through her art. As viewers we can witness this progression in her new body of work, and revel in its layers, as fragile-seeming as flowers themselves.
   The works of course make use of Melly’s signature use of vintage tissue paper dress patterns, something that she terms an “integral part of my practice and personal history…” As a mixed media artist, the LA-based Melly creates work that includes paintings, assemblage-based sculptures, and installations. In this latest body of work, there is a powerful new energy as these flowers morph with the artist, spin discs on an old Victrola record player, weep, rail in anger, whine in frustration, sing, and seethe.  Do flowers mourn their entrapment in bouquets? Do they discuss day to day travails as they grow in the garden, rage and wish to curse those who pick them? While we may never know, here Melly certainly posits that they might.
   Within the primarily paint and mixed media on canvas works are a variety of sculptural pieces.  While some stand alone, a vintage sewing machine, a male figure bearing flowers, “Hanging Out,” is a wall scupture. It emerges like a being encased in and protruding from the wall itself,  a partial mannequin entrapped despite a glowing heart and uterus at its center, sheathed and layered with the dress patterns.
   The titular “Emerging Fear of Flowers” is a colorful mix of the tissue patterns, acrylic, and art paper on canvas.  While a hand holds a cocktail glass in the right corner, center stage is an alien looking three pronged flower that seems to have grown eyes, and one prong is looking and leaning and reaching ominously toward that hand. The viewer can’t help but think of Little Shop of Horrors and Audrey, that musical’s violently sentient plant.  It is a large work, vibrant with indigo and burgandy; the human hand, however, is so white it could easily belong to a person confined from the sunlight in which these flowers gained a robust if menacing vitality.
   Melly’s “Cut Stems” also makes use of the tissue dress patterns combined with acrylic.  These highly geometric flowers have sharp edged like wind mills and are exhibiting just emerging facial features.
   With “Enter Covid,”  what’s blossoming here appears to be the shape of COVID itself, entering via a kind of conduit into an abstract human vessel.  Layers of white on white recall bandages, sheets, and fog, as if a ghostly landscape now enveloped us all.

   Quoting Charles Baudelaire with the title “Evil Comes up Softly Like a Flower,” Melly uses acrylic, charcoal, and dress patterns to make one of the most ominous, yet still amusing, paintings in this series. Here, flowers have teeth and raging faces.

But they are comfortably more relatable in “Dandelion Wine,” in which a dandelion tears out its seeds in frustration.

And we can feel intense empathy for the sad blooms in works such as “Un-Still Life,” in which a lavendar, daisy-like flower has thorns and weeps purple blooded tears.

   In another work, the artist herself melds or morphs into a flower, a pale periwinkle and peacefully meditative one, in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Lotus.” Surrounded by a geometric abstract patterns, the figure is part statue, part flower, absorbed fully in the act of blooming, yet trapped in stillness.

   Perhaps, we can hope that our time in pandemic shut down can allow us to achieve a similarly mesmerized state. Viewing Melly’s delicate, lovely, and unsettling works may just have that effect.
   Melly’s work is beautifully paired with the light-based blend of Richard Slechta’s photography and art, Incompressible Flow; Chris Madens’ glowy dimensional assemblies, The Covid Kiss; and a group show, Felicitious,  an all-media compilation depicting the current zeitgeist.
   The exhibition is on view through June 24th. Gallery 825 is located at 825 N. La Cienega.  Melly is offering curated visits; the gallery is also open by appointment at other times, reach out at gallery825@laaa.org.
Genie Davis – images provided by the artist

Susan Spector Offers Words of Wisdom

Posted on by Diversions LA

Susan Spector’s Sticks/Stones, which just closed at TAG Gallery, is a delightful collection of text-based work filled with wit and exuberance.

Simple painted figures are featured with phrases that are inspired by a question she asked during the COVID pandemic lockdown. That question being “What is a phrase from your past that has stayed with you forever?” She was still soliciting responses on Post-It Notes at the gallery – which we can hope leads to a part two for this smart work.

It isn’t just an illustrated reproduction of these phrases that Spector is after here. Rather, she has gathered and compiled ideas that are intrinsic to our way of life, refining and exploring social issues, mental health, cultural mores. The exhibition also touches upon the way we each speak to ourselves,  and the ways in which society encourages specific forms of self-talk.

From loving advice to harsher words, the collection both charms and rivets, exposes and encourages.  The work is a significant departure from the artist’s past abstract figuration. These are simple, easy to see visualizations accompanied by text that punches both a visual palette and an emotional one.  Despite deceptive simplicity, this crowdsourced, text-based art is presented in a variety of visual ways.

Simple, heartfelt phrases such as “I matter,” “I am Enough,” and “I am at peace with who I am,” are presented on a solid colored background. The black type of the words, created in a variety of different type-faces including a cursive flourish on some words, is presented on a layer of gold leaf overlaid on the solid colored background. The viewer’s impression is that these words are especially valuable, and should be taken to heart.

Other phrases are accompanied by her unique, yet simple illustrations – a curly haired individual, holding a red heart against an outlined chest features text at the bottom of the image that reads “Always come from love not fear.” While most of the words are in black type outlined in white, the word “love” is outlined in red to match that heart; the word “fear” is simply written in black.

There are hilarious images too, including one of a screaming red face is matched with “Caution! I’m in retrograde,” highly appropros for the conclusion of a long Mercury retro just ending as the exhibition was viewed.  A female figure, chest proudly displayed, stomach sucked in, is accompanied by bold text which reads “Tits out” in pink, and “Belly in” indicated in blue, both with arrows pointing to the way in which the body should be positioned.

 

“Spend it foolishly” looks as delightful as the advice written in thick silver letters. Here, a bent-figured grandma reaches to hand two eager children dollar bills stacked in both her hands.

Nearby, a blue-skirted, wide-eyed figure perches demurely on a chair while pink letters spell out “Be A Lady” in a long line beside her,  an invisible, internalized authoritarian instructing her behavior.

Precariously balanced items plugged into a wall socket are the accompaniment to “Don’t Do Anything Stupid,” written simply in black.  In another work, a large figure points to a screen which smaller audience-member figures look up to view.  On the screen are written “3 Rules: Show Up, Speak Your Truth, Don’t Die Wondering.” Meanwhile, an aggreived looking stick figure is accompanied by a text bubble reading “Before you decide you’re depressed, make sure you’re not surrounded by a bunch of assholes.” And indeed, in close proximity all around her are what appear to be small outlines of just that – literal assholes.

 

One of the most visually beautiful works is a primarily black on black work. Written against a dense black sky, the words “It’s always darkest before the dawn” are just discernable over a gorgeous rising line of pink, orange, and gold sunlight.

Additionally fascinating were the Post-It’s added by viewers on the wall next to Spector’s work at TAG. There was “Why can’t you be more like your cousin,” next to the excellent advice “Don’t wait for everything to be okay to be happy.”  “Life is a bitch, “Brush your teeth,” and “Nobody’s Perfect” nestled close to “Take a long walk on a short pier.”

Instead, take a long look at Spector’s work, and enjoy.

Along with this exhibition, fine solo shows by David Klein, Justin Prough, and Skut were also on display, but that’s a different story.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

 

Oceans Has High Tide Appeal – Shana Mabari at Porch Gallery in Ojai

Posted on by Diversions LA

 

 

Running through May 23rd at Porch Gallery in Ojai, Shana Mabari’s new Oceans solo exhibition glows and shimmers like sun on the sea. Mabari previously presented artwork at the gallery that resulted from her NASA SOFIA space mission; the current exhibition is an outgrowth of her residency aboard Sea Shepherd Global off the coast of Africa.

Referencing the horizon, and its visually magical fusion with the sky, or depicting luminous sculptures evoking coral, her work evokes the light and ambiance of the sea, and its eliptical calling to humankind.

Mabari is the first artist-in-residence aboard on a Sea Shepherd Global maritime mission. The direct-action ocean conservation organization brought the artist on a five-day sailing off the west coast of Africa, in a clandestine effort to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in the waters of Benin. The mission resulted in the arrest of of an illegally fishing trawler; and brought the inspiration for Oceans. 

Mabari’s ethereally lovely sculptural works are created as two separate series within the exhibition. There are elongated cylinders of the  “Korāl” sculptures, and her circular “Horizōn” pieces. Created from all acrylic material,  the “Korāl” installation contains over 60 free-standing sculptures beteween 7″ and 14″ tall, in varied colors that range through a rainbow spectrum of red, blue, violet, yellow, and orange. These works were not only inspired by coral reefs, but positioned for exhibition as such as well, highlighting awareness of the coral reef devastation throughout the oceans, as well as their beauty underwater.

Her sculptural works in “Horizon” are wall-mounted. Eight, 15″ disks each contain a horizon line that recalls the meeting of sea and sky, and both that line’s call of exploration, and its use as a measurement tool by early mathematicians and astronomers.

Mabari has also created a new book featuring images of the “Koral” sculptures and essays about her Sea Shepherd residence, produced in collaboration with Sébastien Montabonel of the London-based Alaska Editions.

From the skies, flying aboard NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, to the seas on the Sea Shepherd mission, Mabari works to create comprehension of the vast and incomprehensible wonder of the world, and the risk that humans pose to it. Both as calls to action against ecological disaster, and as expressions of humankind’s connectivity to nature and the universe itself,  Mabari’s work engages the spirit with her color, light, reflection, and form. Melding scientific inquiry – and it’s importance – with her art, Mabari offers viewers the chance to engage with sea and sky through her fluid geometric forms.

Ten-percent of the proceeds from exhibition sales will benefit Sea Shepherd Global. Gallery is located at 310 E. Matilija St., Ojai, CA 93023.

 

 – Genie Davis, photos provided by Porch Gallery and the artist