Tasty Eye Candy – Pat Gainor at Gallery 825

Posted on by Diversions LA

        

With Pat Gainor’s solo exhibition, opening August 14th at LAAA’s Gallery 825, the artist enters an entirely new territory of vibrant abstract paintings which she created during the height of the pandemic last year.

These are surprisingly joyful works, filled with kinetic energy, and often integrating the use of gold leaf into the individual works. While Gainor has long worked to include “pattern as texture” in her images, here she was inspired by Frank Gehry, who studied his own crumpled papers.

That was in her mind as she layered her paint, and “slashed holes in the plastic coverings of my canvases, letting those raw edges define the perimeters of the shape.” It was from those unusual shapes, patterns and colors that she came up with the idea that viewers could “devour” each work, “as if it were a box of sampler chocolates.” So, her series and exhibition title, Eye Candy, was born.

Gainor notes “This is a radical change from my former work. It is like I have discovered a new art language for myself.  Although I have used patterns in past paintings, this has evolved into art that is totally patterns within abstract shapes.” According to Gainor the series represents a year and a half of work within her theme of luscious eye candy. “In this stressful time of COVID-19, I want my work to bring some joy and hope back to people, and infuse welcome notes of happiness into the environment.  As my Dad used to tell me, ‘Everything is going to be alright.’” She believes that “The vast majority of us will eventually get back to normal.”

The exuberance of her new work certainly encourages an experiential, welcoming view of art, and life itself.   

The Detroit native and Los Angeles-based artist lives near the beach and has incorporated a kind of tidal pull of motion and wave in these new works. The colors are as bright and delightful as those on any beach ball, glistening in the sun.

“I have always used luscious colors. Matisse is an artist I admire for his use of color.  I am not one to hold back in life or in my use of gorgeous, vivid color. Since the world is not black and white, and we have color, we should use it.”

Gainor began her art career working in oils, then made the switch to acrylic at least in part due to its quick-drying properties. Recently, she says that she starts her works with acrylic, and then uses “oil paint to emphasize sections of the painting and give depth and dimension without being exposed to the fumes as long. So, I have the best of both worlds.”

Her move into abstract came slowly. “I started out painting realistically, but I wanted to create rather than duplicate what is already there. I find abstract art freer, more exhilarating and intuitive for me.”

Certainly that is true in these abundantly bright and shimmering works, an antidote in part for the darkness of pandemic times.

Along with the exhibition at Gallery 825, Gainor’s work is also on view in the group show “Japan International Art Exchange Exhibition” at the Chiba City Museum of Art, her 17th curation into museum exhibitions.

Gallery 825 is located at 825 N. La Cienega in West Hollywood. Gainor’s opening reception runs August 14, 10-5; call the gallery for an appointment and other viewing times.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist

Gabba Gallery Reopens Sweetly with a Remix in Sight

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With an all-day opening rather than the gallery’s pre-pandemic busy, music-filled evening events, Gabba Gallery reopened in June after a long IRL closure. The in-person exhibition of “H is for Honey” represents not just a return of the in-person versus virtual gallery itself, but a reintroduction to gallery-represented artist Essi Zimm with a lush and inviting solo show.

Vivid of color, the mixed media and oil works on panel are well-worth individual, in-person contemplation. The artist’s depiction of flora and fauna creates a dense, involving world layered with beautiful surprises.

Originally scheduled to open in March 2020, the delay has if anything made these tributes to the natural world, and its residents other than man, all the sweeter. Incorporating Zimm’s childhood learning in a bookstore, with parents, both in disparate ways, believers of miracles, her paintings are steeped in folklore and fairytale, rich with spirituality and fantasy.

With a process as layered as each work, Zimm starts with an abstract representational image, covers it with paper, that “mimics the debris that sticks to memories.” There are certainly strong elements of realism in her portrayal of animals and flowers, but the life and liveliness of the images is steeped in a more indistinct, patterned visual poetry and storytelling. With colors that recall the tropical, the jungle, and the forest in spring, the works leap to life with hope and happiness, and sometimes a soft underpinning of sorrow.

In “Agave,” Zimm gives us jubilant, leaping teal bunnies and the female fertility symbol of the agave plant in bloom, a lustrous sun behind them. “Asphodal” (above) depicts three grey langurs, with solemn, haunting expressions resonating with the artist’s description of the work. The primates represent entwined good and evil, combined and different cultures, a mysteriously balanced universe. Delicate white blooms hover, creating the sensation of jungle mists, or grey spring dawn. In “Hyacinth,” a swan surrounded by purple, pink, and orange flowers preens gracefully, a representation of Greek myth and floral grace. “Yarrow,” in wild patterns and lustrous golden yellow is a study of yin and yang, featuring Quilin, a Chinese unicorn whose name represents male/female duality.

Coming in August, the gallery will undergo its 4th annual (with the exception of 2020, which made exceptions out of so many things) Remix: The Art of Music. Featuring over 60 artists, this music-inspired art exhibition will open August 21st, with viewing through September 19th. Pun intended: it should rock.

Gabba Gallery is located at 3126 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles.

Gallerists Jason Ostro and Elena Jacobson
  • Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis

LA Art Show: First Out of the Gate – A Major Art Show Returns

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With wider aisles, more compact, and with fewer opening night noshes, the LA Art Show has nevertheless jubilantly returned, with a compelling and lively mix of the cutting edge and the commercial. This year, the show is under the fine new direction of Kassandra Voyagis and returning curator Marisa Caichiolo. 

Wearing sequined masks and in some cases, performative respirators, art lovers flocked to the first night gala; at the entrance, following a signage reminder to mask up, a lovely, somber tribute of red roses in a flowing art work that represented lives lost to COVID-19.

Several artists new to me presented exciting work that bodes extremely well for a diverse, robust, and multi-media art scene; and some personal favorites, both artists and galleries, revealed bold new work. Welcome back, LA Art Show. It’s been a long 18 months, and we might’ve been wearing our required masks to hug, but it was great to embrace art, both literally and figuratively.

Here are some highlights:

Santa Barbara-based Naomi Brown’s vivid, lush, hyper-realistic Joshua Tree desert landscapes were dazzling, a fresh look at a well-loved SoCal region as expansive as the land itself. Watch for an upcoming exhibit from the artist via Slopoke Gallery in the Solvang area this fall.

Closer to home, Redondo Beach artist Susan Soffer Cohn led attendees through a small curtained passage to view illuminated patterned abstracts, created with ink on Duralar and LED lighting.

Stunning sculptural work by Ariel Vargassal and Scott Riddle played with light and shadow in a beautiful recessed exhibit space from Building Bridges Art Collective, “Bee-careful with our planet.”

The always stunning video art of Luciana Abait spilled from a black curtain illuminating the intense blue waterfall of the artist’s “Agua,” a video projection first viewed at DTLA’s outdoor Luminex exhibition several months back.

A fine installation by the ever-witty John Kilduff recreated a comfortable bar with painted stools, individual small painted “shots” for sale, colorful beer taps, and even a stained glass window at his art “tavern.”

Coagula featured a variety of spaces and artists, among them the glowing golden profile of “Luminous Symmetries” from Nikolas Soren Goodich.

Exciting video installations from DiverseArtLA drew viewers into an alternative universe dancing with dots and light in a poetic, pandemic-inspired series of works from Zeynep Abes representing the Istanbul that was once the artist’s home.

At Fabrik Gallery, standouts included gritty, smart mixed media work from Randi Matushevitz and at LAACP, dreamy gold and blue cyanotypes from photographic artist Cathy Immordino.

Lush black and white LA architectural landscapes from Maureen Van Leeuwen Haldeman cast their own evocative spell, also in the Fabrik booth.

bG Gallery presented small works by a variety of excellent Los Angeles artists, from the small scale, perfect worlds of Glenn Waggner’s circular paintings to the distanced beach-dream of Richard Chow’s photography. Barbara Kolo’s vibrating geometric abstracts, Gay Summer Rick’s lustrous westside landscapes, and Susan Lizotte’s gracious florals were also on view.

Glenn Waggner, above
Richard Chow, above

Other notable exhibitions included an illuminated dazzle from Anne Vieux, NFT from Vellum LA (below), and a live interactive work from Tiffany Trenda, Un/Seen.

At MASH Gallery, above, layered, light-filled works by founder Haleh Mashian alternated with glowing color works from Angela Johal.

Spanish artists Javier Barco and Diego Beneitez exhibited otherworldly abstracts reminiscent of desert and sea.

AiBo Gallery revealed some brilliant sculptural sparkle.

At Arcadia Art, Stephen Fox evoked Edward Hopper.

And throughout the exhibition, large-scale sculptural works dotted the convention hall floor.

LA Art Show is at the Los Angeles Convention Center West Hall through Sunday. Join us in a hearty welcome back – it’s been a long 18 months.

  • Story and photos – Genie Davis

Take a Very Special Travel with Annie Appel: The Mexico Journeys – Carmelita

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Opening July 24th at the Palos Verdes Arts Center in Rancho Palos Verdes, the work of San Pedro-based photographic artist Annie Appel is raw and personal, a riveting and deep dive into the lives of a family she encountered in Mexico.

The exhibition, Annie Appel: The Mexico Journeys – Carmelita focuses on just one of a vast cast of family Appel documented. Her work is poignant and gracefully created, with images that pull the viewer into the lives of the family she depicts, much as Appel herself was compelled to be a part of their lives over the years.

The project began in Baja, Mexico in the summer of 1994, when Appel had a chance encounter with Maria, the pregnant mother of two young daughters on her way to take lunch to her husband. Appel offered drawing materials for the children and was invited to lunch; from this meeting grew a more-than-completed promise Appel made to herself to follow and document the family for ten years. This commitment grew to span two decades and 23 visits, over the course of which she created a richly involving story told through her photographic images and a journal she kept describing the visits and her feelings about them.

The full project began with the maternal figure of Maria, whom Appel first met, then married to a brick maker and layer, Jaime. The current exhibition at PVAC focuses on one of Maria’s daughter’s, Carmelita, now fully grown into an independent young woman.

Appel says she’d most like viewers of this heartfelt, moving project to “imagine what it would feel like be in a similar situation – from the perspective of the family members, and from the perspective of the documentarian.”

Fully engaged with and respectful of the family she depicts, Appel shares her “slow but steady steps towards completion of The Mexico Journeys. Each trip, I take each family member a package of 5×7 prints — meaning, if I make a classic portrait of María, I include a copy of that portrait in each of the 5 packets for her children, and now for her grandchildren, so they each have their own print of María.”

According to Appel “I learned early on that most of the family is interested in the more traditional formal portraits, and far less interested in a beautifully composed image of María hanging laundry on the line to dry, even if the colors and light and angles are all working together to make a poetic image. ‘Why would you take a photo of me doing laundry?’ María asked [me].”

 Appel’s driving force, one that keeps her working on this on-going, voluminous project is to fulfill the promise she made to herself to reveal this family’s universal humanity and intimate experiences. This in turn ties into an earlier personal promise she made which she reveals was, “to combine whatever gifts or talent I was given with my love of the medium. Photography gives us the past history of the world, the best and worst acts of humanity. It rescues memory from the clutches of mortality.”

Indeed, the exhibition offers a truly experiential series of photographic artworks, which cannot help but affect the viewer – certainly they pull at both the eye with their precise and elegant composition, and the heart, with the richness and touching intimacy of the depictions. Appel notes “The experiences I had shooting the work are still alive in the conscious and subconscious of my oeuvre. The images that I took are alive and continually changing in my mind, because I have the ability to reorder time and events.”

She is working toward completing a book of this massive series of work, writing, editing, scanning film and printing to that end. While she is no longer photographing the family, she’s still in contact with them.

While documentary in intent, her photographic approach goes beyond this, as an evocation of life in all its uneven disparities, joys and messes. “When people ask me what I photograph, I explain to them that I mostly feel driven to pick up my camera to photograph those whom I care for. Most often, the response either deepens the conversation, or ends the conversation,” she says.

In a way, this long-term project is like a visual version of a classic, multi-character novel, one that spans many years, like something from Dickens or Steinbeck. Appel asserts that her images indeed “tell a narrative, and the story moves forward in time. The impact of the images is wholly dependent upon time.”

With other projects that include work on artist Keith Haring, depictions the reveal the topic of gratitude, and covering, in her signature heartfelt way the Occupy Movement through her photo essay “The Occupy Portraits,” Appel creates unique, visceral photographic work that records emotional history as well as its physical embodiment.

With this iteration of The Mexico Journeys, the Palos Verdes Art Center gallery exhibit will feature, along with other works, the installation of three 4 x 6-foot photo murals, and one 10 x 4-foot photo mural, printed at the photo lab Appel has recently opened in San Pedro.

The exhibition coincides with the 90th year of the Palos Verdes Arts Center.

 Annie Appel: The Mexico Journeys – Carmelita opens July 24th 6 – 9 p.m. at PVAC, located at 5504 Crestridge Rd, Rancho Palos Verdes, just off Crenshaw Boulevard; take the 110 freeway south from DTLA.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist