The World is Burning: Susan Lizotte Tells Us through Art

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Susan Lizotte is on fire. Her recent landscape paintings that present LA at the edge of apocalypse not only offer images of chaos and climate change, but burn with both beauty and ferocity. Viewed at Start-Up LA in February, her series Los Angeles: A Different Narrative, contains paintings both ominous and graceful, unsettling cautionary tales. 

The events she depicts are visionary – whether they had literally occurred in the moment she painted them, they go beyond the merely imagined to a bolder place of warning; offering a message of stark, raw beauty along with the terror of the possible.

Time has proven their portent. Smoke wafts across a Beverly Hills street; threatens the iconic Chris Burden light sculpture at LACMA, roars behind the Hollywood sign. In one image, an overturned car burns; in another, a lamppost oozes like a snake from the heat.

Rooted in recognizable locations, the looming disasters are visceral and immediate; road signs to a future we should’ve seen, but have instead ignored, as we teeter on beautiful disaster. 

Coupled with her Spring Map series, Lizotte has created richly rewarding work that paint an eerily accurate direction for these times. Her current map work, layered and almost ghostly, continues and expands upon and builds upon ideas from an earlier body of map work  first viewed in 2017.

Lizotte says of her latest maps that she is exploring abuse of power, control, image making, and mercury poisoning, among other ideas. Fecund and floral, the lands are also broken. Some resemble a confetti patchwork that could be geographic, representations of disease statistics, representations of a divided land, as with her map of America above.

They evoke the corruption of power and greed that virulently affects the globe today, just as much as it did in the 15th century world that Lizotte has meticulously researched to shape a number of them. The images serve as both treasure hunt and treatise, a deep, soul-aching knowledge revealingly spread out in evocative grids and symbols. 

She describes the series as born from both her “thoughts and dreams;” noting that these paintings are inspired by the quarantine of Covid-19. 

As such, they are a means to juxtapose the 14th century plague with the 21st century pandemic. Using Renaissance maps to speak to the spread of today’s epidemic feels fitting indeed as a way of finding our place in a new and unknown world. 

Lizotte reveals that the geography of these old maps is inaccurate, which is one reason the images feel strange and unsettling. “I’m using this inaccuracy deliberately to convey confusion and disorientation.

 The very inaccuracy of the maps add to a sense of inchoate unease. Splashes of pink and emerald lie like broken jewels against a pale background; symbols of power and borders drawn dismember the natural world. Her Mappa Mundi, above, was inspired, Lizotte says, by Martin Waldseemuller’s 1507 map of the globe which was the first map that included America. She used 12 canvasses, and shaped the same exact measurements of the original from 18 24-inch squares. There are fire-breathing dragons, falling plains, and cast off broken flowers; the debris of the world colliding.

In both her current and earlier (above) body of map work, her vivid palette compels, creating a sense of urgency in the images that evokes both ruin and loveliness. 

They serve as elegy to both past and future, a vivid and thought-provoking testimony to human existence. That existence is always linked to the natural world, one not subject to  development and borders.

Rather, nature – our own and that of the earth itself – needs no boundaries, just healing. Lizotte’s work gives viewers the visual language to understand and explore just that.

  • Genie Davis; photos courtesy of the artist

Landscapes of the Soul: Kinematic Exposures

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Photographic artist Osceola Refetoff has created many landscapes over the years that I’ve followed his work. Some are a unique take on the desert, revealing abandoned dreams and empty highways. Others feature the wings of airplanes and lustrous cloud formations; rain on a windshield; or they reveal abstract visions of urban light and land. He’s shaped stunning infrared photographs, and raw, so-dusty-you-can-smell-it photojournalism images of broken houses and jagged rock. Most recently, Refetoff has shown seemingly magical pinhole camera images that include ephemeral captures of people, mysterious places, and evocative but unrecognizable locations.

Kinematic Exposures, now at the Von Lintel Gallery at the Bendix building, available for viewing both online and in-person by appointment through October 31st, captures a sublime dreamscape of handheld, pinhole-camera exposures, primarily featuring images from a recent trip he made to Antarctica.

The desolate nature and graceful, swooping beauty of the icy landscape spins the viewer into a somewhat otherworldly dimension. Joining these images are elongated, reminiscent of Giacometti and Modigliani, vividly colored exposures of people. The latter provide viewers with the embodiment of living beings who could have come from another planet just as easily as earth.

Refetoff  has described “Kinematic Pinhole Exposure™” as his own term for the images he creates “make while moving about with a pinhole camera.” The works reveal him to be not just a formidable documentarian of place and a conveyor of time and imagination, but as an artist plugged into the soul. The human soul, sure, but also seemingly that of the earth itself, and the sense of a greater being watching us with that slightly blurry but beautiful view from a pinhole camera.

He seems to dabble with turning reality into dream, and with the deeper experience of sensation and emotion as being an innate factor in creating any landscape.

In images such as “Shifting Seas,” the storm cloud of climate change and other human failings is perceived as anxiety, even within an otherwise peaceful, blue palette.

It is there again in the blur and rush of “Active Sound,” where the palette is less unified.

A fiery sun is all consuming in “Drifting Mesa,” an image that nonetheless offers a surreal memory-superimposition, at least for this viewer, of Big Bend National Park, and Monument Valley on an ice floe.

And his human forms in the “Persistence of Being” are both surreal future and mystical reimagining of our place on this planet.

Private viewings for Kinematic Exposures are schedule at 30 minute intervals; masks required. Regular gallery hours are Wednesday – Saturday, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. To schedule a visit, stop by http://vonlintel.com/. 

  • Genie Davis; images provided by artist

An Online Adventure in Art: The Phenomenology of Hope

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Virtual Magic – a gallery view

Showing online at the Supercollider Gallery through September 30th, The Phenomenology of Hope is a visual adventure as well as an absolutely beautiful art exhibition. I had the pleasure of an advance tour given by Khang Nguyen, who co-curated the show with Eli Joteva and Kio Griffith. All three are artists themselves, with work exhibited here among over 40 artists.

Isabel Beavers
Yukiko Sugiyama

Available in both 3D and 2D formats, the exhibition is a virtual-walk-through experience that has the immersive feel of attending a real, brick and mortar art exhibition – in your mind.

Neil Mendoza

The virtual-reality setting is one of the only such that I’ve experienced which does not diminish the quality of the art. While there are many video images, which would honestly appear almost identical in-person or online, the paintings and sculptural objects are so artfully presented in the galleries, so seamlessly integrated with the video images, that the viewer almost feels as if “there.” What I am referring to, “there,” is not be a recreation of a real physical space, but rather it is as if we entered a sensational gallery that blossomed in our minds.

If that sounds absurd, and it may, that is due to the limitation of words as opposed to the surprising and complete lack of limitation in the exhibition. While I did not personally inhabit my own avatar on my artist-led tour of the space, it’s one way available to enjoy the show quite fully; walking through in 2D is also wonderful, and comes with easily accessed information about the works from the artists, as well as full viewing of all the art, including the videos, which are both visual and auditory.

Diane Williams

While I have too many favorites to mention, among the standouts for me are Ann Phong’s “Looking Up from the Bottom of the Ocean,” an acrylic on panel vision of intense blue in which the viewer seems to be swimming toward a vivid, redeeming light; Diane William’s large-scale mixed media weaving, produced with the students of the Los Feliz Charter School for the arts, titled “We Can,” is so textural, in 3D one can almost feel the fabric and wire utilized.

Blue McRight’s complex woven mixed media wall hangings, “Undescribed Variations,” which appear to be gestating forms, or tribal designs are equally well-presented in terms of physicality. Eli Joteva’s interstellar-like cyanotypes are haunting; her video, “Time Reveals the Surface” is richly compelling; equally so, though entirely different, is Kate Parsons’ vivid “Valhalla.” Both mystical and visceral, Hung Viet Nguyen’s wonderful Sacred Landscapes series dazzles here. June Edmond’s work is a kinetic trip of color; Virginia Katz offers images both dreamy and profound, of which “The Hours 1” is a particular favorite. Her wall sculptures using acrylic paint and wire are very different and also quite special. Sean Noyce’s video “Portal,” is just that, luring the viewer into a glowing new dimension.

June Edmonds

I could go on and on, certainly Khang B. Nguyen and Kio Griffith each have disparate but dazzling works in the show, as do so many others.

The exhibition describes its own title and theme in part with this statement: “Hope is an evasive phenomenon.  For some it is a most harmful impairment, for others it is one of the highest human virtues.  It is difficult to precisely define, but seems to leave its imprints on every aspect of human life and practice.” It certainly has left one on this beautiful and unique show.  

Khang B. Nguyen

Drop whatever else you are doing on your computer at the moment, and step inside: https://www.phenomenologyofhope.com/

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by Supercollider and curators

Five on the Rise Shimmers with Color and Light

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Five on the Rise is a stellar new exhibition rising up at REH Fine Art at GraySpace in Santa Barbara.

The exhibition includes the work of gallerist Ruth Ellen Hoag, as well as artists Kerrie Smith, Cynthia James, Cynthia Martin, and Dorothy Churchill-Johnson.

Cynthia Martin

The five are long-time members of the Art Salon in Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara Studio Artists. The supportive groups assist artists and worked to raise the profile of Santa Barbara itself as an art destination.

The show opens September 18th, and each artist’s work is unique, with styles ranging from the abstract to the figurative, from surrealism to contemporary realism. As different as they are, they complement each other with vivid palettes and dynamic composition.

Kerrie Smith

Smith’s work here is bright and compelling, with mesmerizing patterns and interwoven layers. She describes her work as featuring a counterbalance of symmetry and geometry with oppositional color patterns; these are deeply involving works, in which the viewer can almost viscerally feel the layers. According to Smith, her work balances and examines patterns in the environment and creates a visual conversation about the “changing intersection between place/city or nature.” More timely than ever, her work also encompasses environmental afflictions, from fires to erosion. Regardless, the work is inviting and involving, and appears to move with a shifting light.

Kerrie Smith

Smith’s “Vapours 10,” above, is one such work, with images that resemble cells or tiny-living creatures appearing to float in a dark and ethereal sea.

Cynthia James

James is also concerned with nature, but for her they are “visions from an imaginary botanical record.” She paints with oil on copper, creating a sensual vision of imaginary flowers and insects. Like Smith, she has a focus on the changing natural world, with small but dramatic environments in which the flora and fauna appear to come alive. These are intimate and moving images, part of a series, Botanica, the Secret Life of Flowers. While florals as a subject can be almost clichéd if the execution is not right, there is no such issue here. Far from it: she infuses each work with a sense of mood and place; the location may be imaginary but it is also rooted in realism. Some images feature environmental mutations in plants, while others depict pollinators facing threats from every side. It is a heightened, magical version of the real, one that very much evokes the fraught state of our planet today. Yet, while this state is revealed in her work, it is lush and gorgeous, a dichotomy of beauty existing while under siege. Her soft, highly textural “Spirits of The Hive,” seen above, glows with an almost transcendent light.

Cynthia Martin

Martin’s paintings also touch on the natural world, but with a completely different way of depicting it. Using both deconstructed images and at times a “hi-tech auto finish” which she terms as being, at least in part, an homage to the car culture of Southern California, she captures an incandescent and geometric world. With the horizontal and vertical stripes of “South Coast Sunset,” for example, she gives us both deepening sky and setting sun amid the columns of a freeway overpass. The image feels dimensional and involving, as if one could step between those columns, and walk toward the sinking sun.

Ruth Ellen Hoag

In contrast, Hoag’s work is entirely figurative. Human beings are the central subject of her paintings, and she works in a variety of mediums including acrylics, watercolor, and ink. Her palette varies by piece, and at times her image lean toward abstraction. Interestingly, with a college background focused on music, many of the artist’s images seem to emit an almost harmonic vibration, as if each individual image let loose a personal, visually-revealed “score.”

Detail of “Central Bark,” Ruth Ellen Hoag

Hoag’s “Central Bark” is a wonderful depiction of city life, both human and canine. You can feel the hum of traffic, the excitement of the panting dogs. The wonderful look at a lively street scene in New York City is both urban and pastoral, with emerald park trees and furry, leashed friends paired with traffic, buildings, and busy people.

Churchill-Johnson combines realism with the abstract dramatically, examining what she terms “instant archeology” such as weeds growing in a pavement crack. She has used mirrored, kaleidoscopic techniques that remind the viewer of a galaxy, one in which the viewer is the center. Adding thin color glazes to her works, they have a shimmer that is both beautiful and surreal, or certainly hyper-realistic. In her works, too, environmental disaster looms just out of sight, indicative of climate change, and the minuteness of humankind in the greater world. One can almost feel the folds and wrinkles on the petals of her “Inner Hydrangea,” where dew drops resemble jewels or tears.

REH Fine Art at Grayspace is located at 219 Gray Avenue, in the Funk Zone of
Santa Barbara. Social distancing and face covering required, and appointments encouraged during regular gallery hours Friday-Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. through October 11th. The in-person opening is from 5 to 8 September 18th; you can also view art works on Instagram @Grayspacesp