Prime Territory at MOAH Cedar

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Through January 22nd at MOAH Cedar in Lancaster, Dani Dodge holds forth with an installation that soars as widely and wildly as a desert sky. Prime, like many of the artist’s exhibitions, is immersive. So much so here, in fact, that viewers might almost catch a whiff of desert sage andthe fragrance of a Joshua Tree in bloom.

The exhibition, which fills all three galleries at Cedar, is comprised of three parts.  The main room is layered with translucent panels, on which Dodge has created gold leaf and delicately painted acrylic work depicting an ephermeral, mirage-like shimmer of desert images. The experience is a walk-through installation, with viewers able to walk behind and within the panels. Adding to the experiential nature is a soundtrack of cello music the artist created herself and recorded sounds of desert animals at dawn.

Along with the gauzy painted panels, a sculptural form created from a twisted mattress spring hangs in the center of the gallery, with the panels waverying around it. It stands as a kind of monument to how human inhabitants intrude on the quiet grace of the desert, and how the desert itself may banish that habitation in its own good time. 

The artist has provided pencils and slips of paper on which to write what types of places bring them peace – as the desert brings piece to Dodge. Safety pins are also provided so that viewers can pin what they’ve written, adding them to their thoughts to the exhibition itself.

 

Across the hall,  Dodge displays images from three separate bodies of work, as seen above. These include a quite wonderful video installation of desert animals captured during her 2019 artist-in-residence stay at the Prime Desert Woodland Preserve in Lancaster. Here we see animals from jackrabbits to coyotes and desert mice as they come and go during the night.  Also on display is a wonderful, glowing collection of painted gold leaf and photography that was part of an earlier exhibition held at Black Rock Gallery in Joshua Tree.

The artist’s love for the shape, form, and fragility of the Joshua Tree is resurrecting. Dodge is intent on helping to preserve the land, creating a sense of hope that with her passion directed at preserving them, these wonderful living flora can survive man’s worst intentions. There is also a second recovered metal mattress spring displayed in this gallery, its form twisted by nature and time after being discarded in the desert.  

If you love the desert, love immersive finely wrought art, or simply want to experience desert wonder without trudging through the sand, Dodge’s exhibition is a must-see. The fine spiritual sense of her work here is both uplifting and poignant, speaking to the ruthlessness of human contact on the desert, the fragility of the desert itself, and the ways in which we can help to preserve it, if we love those aqua skies and golden sands, those brown hills and small brown creatures that inhabit them, those glorious, uplifted arms of the Joshua, and the land’s spectacular, raw sunrises and sunsets.

Above, Dodge with MOAH’s Robert Benitez (left), and Jason Jenn (right).

Like the artist does herself, we can come visit the desert every  January and pay tribute to it, and this year, we can also head to the Cedar galleries to see how Dodge has done so. The exhibition runs through January 22nd.

It also includes a series of lovely desert images created by children participating in activation classes the artist provided at the Preserve throughout her residency.

MOAH: CEDAR Center for the Arts

44857 Cedar Avenue, Lancaster, CA 93534

Open Tuesday and  Wednesday  |   11 AM  – 6 PM

Open Thursday – Sunday   |    11 AM  –  8  PM

  • Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis

Casper Brindle Radiates Light and Color at Luckman Fine Arts Complex

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If you were to pass from our universe to the next in a sudden flash of light and time, perhaps undergoing this passage through a wormhole, a dream state, or as they used to say on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, at “warp speed,”  you might emerge transcendent, with a strange glow suffusing your vision. Such is the experience of viewing Casper Brindle’s mysteriously sensory art.

In a bravura exhibition at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at CSULA, curated by Mika Cho, Brindle’s own passage through time, light, and space was on full and radiant display. Ranging from some works earlier in the artist’s career to a full focus on images created in 2021 and largely in 2022, Hypermodality provided a beautifully complete experience of Brindle’s work.

Dimensional images that pulse with color and light and play with perception are the core of Brindle’s work. His aesthetic moves the eye and the mind, vibrating with barely contained motion, hovering like a UFO just outside our peripheral vision. Both galvanizing and meditative, varying in color from vibrant shades to cloud like monochromatic shadows of varying hues, these works create emotional and cognitive leaps for viewers, bounding between shades and shadows, running into the sharp edges of horizon lines or disappearing like the taillights of an interstellar ship traveling an incomprehensible speed into a thick, floating tube.

Beautifully curated across two connected, open, large gallery spaces, wandering through the Hypermodality exhibition, which closed at the Luckman in November, was like floating on a life raft of light. Seeing these images in this serene space, it was possible to take in both the meticulously applied airbrushed layers of paint, the hypnotic quality of Brindle’s use of gradated color and shadow, and the enigmatic glow of the art.

The artist’s most recent work is so luminous that it appears to use external lighting, while in reality using color and texture to create an aura of soft, regenerative light.

Some works seem to bathe the viewer in bioluminescence, pulling the eye into a softly opaque sea or into the center of a soft cloud. Just as a bioluminescent sea shines when disturbed by a breaking wave, these works shimmer as the viewer moves closer or farther from them, whether they are viewed from the side or the center.

Other paintings recall the opalescent glow of a pearl, or the shifting colors and light flares of a fire opal. Indeed, each of these works could be pulled from the sea or the sky, or within a long-buried geode, cracked by time to reveal the shining gems within.

Uniformly, Brindle’s work is a perfect haiku of light, as well as an epic study of how color contains or expresses that light. Each piece tells a story of transformation, of how our vision of the world changes that world; how our eye creates the place in which our hearts and minds dwell, not just geographically but emotionally.

All this in works that are formal and made with careful attention to line, geometric principles, and a cool intensity of mannered shapes and patterns.

With titles that describe light glyphs and portals, it is no wonder that Brindle’s art evokes time travel, the speed of light, powerful entities and spiritual understandings, worlds that exist within or beyond our own comprehension.

An almost-holy simplicity infuses each work, whether created from pigmented formed acrylic or with layered automotive paint and gold leaf on linen. The impressiveness of Brindle’s technique rests in its quiet power, much as does the beauty of a sunset or the flare of a meteor. His art burns with the fire of color, and yet has an icy perfection that evokes a glass prism, capturing color and encapsulating it, allowing it to shift but not fade to black.

Some of the colors are startling: “Light Glyph VF 11” is the fierce cerulean blue of the hydrothermal Sapphire Pool in Yellowstone Natural Park. “Light Glyph VF 13” is the luscious tangerine of a citrus fruit on acid. Just as startling is the softly opalescent gold – with a layered burnt sienna orange bar at the center, or “Light Glyph VF 8.” The artist’s “Light Glyph VF 23” is no less riveting, an orange sun or a work with a softer, blurred orange bar at its center.

While each of these works are created using thick pigmented acrylic, Brindle’s works on linen are no less startling and rich, just differently textured. “Portal Glyph Painting X,” a massive 120 x 120 work using gold leaf and automotive paint on linen is an aqua sea and gilded sunrise with a glowing gold door cracked open just enough to see and allow passage if we dare.

A pair of sensual curves in hot pink wait succulently behind a wider passage in “Portal Glyph Painting III.” In this work, a radiant, slender rectangle of blue and gold light features a dark gold bar at its center, a portal within a portal, perhaps.

Regardless of format, Brindle’s work is above all else alive. It is alive with light, alive with line, holding within its serene and pristine depths a seething, swimming, sensorial swarm of color. If the images deliberately create a sense of the possibility of passage, or entering an “other” realm or experience, then that passage is as the viewer wishes to shape it, leading where the viewer wishes to enter. The artist offers the portal to enter, or the light to step through, but it is up to the viewer to take that step.

One of the finest exhibitions of 2022, Hypermodality commands viewers to take action, to truly see what lies beneath the surface of art, and perhaps, life itself.

– Genie Davis; photos by Rob Brander provided by Luckman Gallery/Mika Cho; additional photos, Genie Davis

Talk of the Trees – Catherine Ruane

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It is an overpoweringly beautiful tree. A tree that has survived storm and history, hurt and war, human suffering and tyranny, the vicissitudes of life itself. Catherine Ruane’s “General Sherman” captures that hard-won grace in a vast work that, at present, arcs from floor to ceiling on the wall of the Yiwei Gallery in Venice.

Ruane’s work, which I’ve previously observed shown in a more horizontal construct at the Brand Gallery some months ago, is an awe-inspiring presence here, as alive in every detailed individual charcoal and graphite leaf as if it grew into this space, creating it’s own forest. The General Sherman’s fraught history aside, the most overpowerfing sensation in observing the artist’s recreation of it is of a blessing – for the continuation of life, the ways in which trees talk to the earth, among themselves, and through their whispered rustlings, to us.

The artist has constructed this beautiful work in multiple layers that evoke those rustlings. She’s described assembling the  large-scale piece as something similar to “creating a paper doll” of massive proportions, with each leaf and limb a separate, delicate piece mounted on the wall, shaping a stunningly dimensional image.

Long a capturer of trees and nature, working at present in primarily the nuances of grey and black, Ruane offers a living world reimagined, a sensorial recreation of the natural one. Also on exhibit among her works are several sepia toned floral images, including the beautiful “Left Behind Rose,” above. The coloration resembles a dried and pressed flower, an old memory preserved.

Along with the multiple works by Ruane in this exhibition, Wanderland’s sweet, contained gallery show also features the work of Lynn Hanson and Elizabeth Orleans. Their work, too, features a peacefully monochromatic color palette, one that dovetails well with Ruane’s lustrously, luminously created flora and fauna. Each artist has shaped an almost mythological sense of meandering through a dream-like, yet resilliant universe in which color lives more in the mind’s eye than in the artworks themselves, rendering them, if possible, even more alive.

Ruane’s massive tree is a seminal work within a group of beautiful works. Don’t miss it.

Yiwei Gallery is located in Venice at 1350 Abbott Kinney; the show runs through early December. Settling in among its branches is highly recommended in our own turbulent times.

  • Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis

Gold Soul – the Art of Amrta

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Gold is a grand metal, long lasting, luminous, profoundly durable. It is a precious substance. It is mined and treasured, and used to create valuable jewelry and works of art. Emblematic of something even more precious, the resilliance of the human spirit, artist Amrta takes an event that was a negative cataclysm in her life, and reshapes it as a tribute to her own power, her own gold. In disIntegrated  at Shockboxx Gallery in Hermosa Beach,  Amrta offers a moving and utterly beautiful series of work.

As artwork, the show simply dazzles. Rooted in the expression and expulsion of the darkest heart of trauma, its depth is as rich as its visual surface. Along with the individual paintings, Amrta offers a swirling, galvanizing video dance performance; evocative poetry accompanying each work; and a visceral, heart-hurting series of exhibits in the backroom that explore the traumatic event that led to the creation of this work. The expression “spinning gold from dross” has never been more true.

The work is multi-layered and complex, with the bottom, virtually unseen layer adding textures and a swirl of emotions, with the occasional brief excavatory revelation to the careful viewer. It is dark, that layer, indicative of all the stress and trauma Amrta overcame to reach the point of creating this evocative series of artworks. The final layer is the astonishing gold, each piece of art an individual, some more bronze in color, some light; some with delicate floral drawings on them; some with thick markings beneath the gold that remind the viewer of a geographic map, or emotional Braille.

If we do indeed negotiate our deepest fears, darkest emotions and situations in the midnight of our souls and hearts, then, forged by these experiences, it is our choice whether to blacken with them or become purer, more golden, like a stormy riven sky after the sunset. It is enormously clear the path Amrta has taken, and it is a glowing one.

It is also a valuable one to peruse.  Treasure yourself, viewers, heart and soul, and revel in this stunningly original artistic reminder that what glitters here is indeed pure gold.

While closed in-person at Shockboxx Gallery in Hermosa Beach, the exhibition is up on Artsy and you should mine t’s lush and passionate images now.

  • Genie Davis ; photos Genie Davis and also provided by the gallery