Flower are like stars to artist Karen Hochman Brown in her lush and literally blossoming installation Vexilla Florum, first shown at LAAA’s Gallery 825 in the early fall of 2019, and then in a smaller grouping through early March 2020 at TAG Gallery.
With this installation, Hochman Brown delves deeper into her signature kaleidoscopic floral mandala work in a dazzling tour de force of eye-popping images.
Based in photography and digitally manipulated, the artist’s riveting work sometimes reminds the viewer of a kind of dimensional, exotic stained-glass. She distorts and reflects her single-subject photographic images to highlight both color, shapes, and patterns, and has described her work as “rooted in nature and geometry.” Much like stained glass, the images also have an inward glow, an almost visible translucence.
If a flower serves as the “seed” of her work, it’s fruition is something richer and more compelling. She uses mixed media and multi-media to combine several different processes, all rooted in the fantastic, even magical, evocation of floral blooms. Using handcrafted and digital photo-manipulation, she pulls the viewer into a world that is both alchemic and amazing. Here, her digital practice is paired with precise and rather glorious laser-cut patterns.
The images begin with a photograph of a single-subject flower, chosen from one of many around the world. Distorted and reimaged in a kind of new realism, each piece becomes a precious jewel of nature transformed by specialized software.
This exhibition also involves intricate laser cut headpieces. To create them, she used a Glowforge laser printer to make the wood cuts that top each of her suspended works: six at LAAA, two at TAG. Banners are hand-sewing and assembled, in a fascinating mix of traditional textile techniques and the hyper-modern computer software-based world.
Mounted on slanted poles, each floral banner appears suspended in space. A shadow image spills behind each piece. The elaborate and graceful laser-cut “crown” from which the banner is hung features perfect leaves spreading out from and surrounding a central laser-cut version of the floral image centered on the banner itself.
The complex interwoven patterns of each banner’s background reflect the central image itself as well, and the color behind this pattern reflects that of the main floral element imprinted upon it.
Centered in the lower third of each mounted banner, the primary image is a full, mesmerizingly bisected kaleidoscopic flower. It is both a star, a snowflake, and an extraordinary blossom, or all three.
At LAAA, Hochman Brown’s banners, with backgrounds ranging from pink to brown to green to purple, were mounted in sets of three on either side of the galley, as if hung in a royal hall leading up to the ultimate throne. Here, replacing such a throne is a video installation in which realistic, intensely close images of actual flowers pop up, recede, and form a stunning, lush visual bouquet before dancing off again. These photographic images in turn evolve into stylized, star and snow flake-like digital blooms that spin and dance in a hypnotic and wonderful motion.
It is an immersive and deeply meditative experience that pulls the eye into the universe within a flower. One of the great skills in Hochman Brown’s work is that she introduces the viewer to the concept of the eternal and infinite contained in small but potent package.
Her use of photography as a medium heightens both the realism and the fantasy inherent in all her work; and she combines graphic art with her photo images in precise and revealing focus.
In short, she takes natural beauty and shapes of it an entire soothing and magnificent world.
Both at LAAA, and in a smaller grouping of two banners accompanying her digital animation at TAG Gallery, Vexilla Florum is like no other installation or exhibition. The viewer finds a rose is a rose that’s an entirely different and compelling hybrid in Hochman Brown’s hands.
Watch for future exhibitions of this installation.
Featured image: Ellen M. Friedlander; image directly above: Heather Lowe/Carole Silverstein
The online exhibition Call and Response might be one of the best exhibitions of the art decade, never mind that it happened now, was a direct call to our loneliness, our longing, and our collective creativity.
The project was organized through Shoebox PR and Art & Cake; the dedicated art leadership behind it included those organizations’ helmswoman, Kristine Schomaker, as well as Sheli Silverio, S. Vollie Osborn, Emily Wiseman and Susan T. Kurland.
Kristine Schomaker
In traditional terms, the exhibition uses the process of randomly chosen collaboration to explore ongoing partnered work reminiscent of both jazz riffs and Exquisite Corpse; as “a way for us to stay connected, to check in with each other and to support each other. This is collaboration at a distance.”
Shelli Silverio
But this show goes beyond that description: beautiful, interesting, expanding artworks created from collaborating; a riveting example of what happens in challenging and cheering each other’s abilities; and a way to truly tap into the zeitgeist of what may very well be not just this year, but this decade.
Robyn Alatorre
Creating entirely new works of art inspired by one’s partner’s work of art over a brief course of time is a pretty incredible effort and joy. So too are the formidable amounts of both that the organizers put into mounting the show, on exhibit here:
This was truly a formidable and moving project; not in the least because of the often isolation/corona virus related/ elegiac images, but more so in the vastness of the reaching out, the hope and hopefulness in participants voicing plans for future collaborations, feeling heartened by the experience, or confronting their own sense of loss.
Adrienne Cole
In short: in loss there is gain; in waiting there is growth; in stillness, there is a voice; in partnership, the soul is not alone.
This show is a moving, even wonderful, experience. I spent a lot of time enjoying the art works and attended the two hour zoom reception, and each moment spent was a pleasure.
Jackie Bell Johnson
There are too many fine pairings to cite or come close to showing them all, but I wish I could, and I will laundry list the 106 participants by pair at the end of this piece. Rather than reviewing the art – although it is uniformly exceptionally worthy, the amount is overwhelming – I’m offering a taste of the reception, and what the artists felt about the experience.
Go absorb the works online yourself: you will be glad you did.
Cindy Rinne, partnered with Jason Jenn, described their pairing as “exciting…to see that Jason also performed and writes. We did collages and poems every few days, creating with a new perspective. We plan to work together in the future.” Exciting also describes the glow and poetry of their work together, and Jenn adds “It was a great way to stretch.”
Dani Dodge and Stacie Birky Greene’s collaboration “turned out to be awesome… I got images from Stacie, who works in photo montages, and I took what she does and translated that into what I do. To have someone who was so giving and didn’t mind if I got my own image in late… it was a great process to work with her,” Dodge reports. The result was a pairing of haunting, insightful images.
Leora Wien
Ashton Phillips and Leora Wien were similarly inspired. Wien was moved to try different mediums with Phillips; likewise, Susan Kurland and Lina Kogan found their partnership to be “inspirational.”
Bibi Davidson stretched her oeuvre as well with a vibrant, moving image collaboration with Jen Snoeyink, whose photographic depictions of site-specific installations vibrate with color. Collaborative work above.
Photographic artists Diane Cockerill and Martin Cox agreed that their collaboration “was something to look forward to…it gave meaning to our day, and we were on the same wavelength with what we wanted to say, many times,” Cockerill reports. Cox agrees “I would rush out to find something, shooting close to home…this forced me to come up with something that made sense.” Cockerill adds “The [photographic] stories were a by-product of our exchange.”
L. Aviva Diamond had been in lockdown mode prior to the county-wide safer at home regulations, and found collaborating with Micke Tong – a process she has never done before, an entirely new experience. “It was hard at first,” she says, “I didn’t have any connection with the installations and thedigital art he was doing. But he taught me how to do masks, and connect to his emotions. I’m really proud of what we came up with.” Tong agrees: “It was a joy to communicate with Aviva. She would react to what I was doing and there was a deeper relationship toward our work at the end of the process.” Their work is a dance, as is that of curators Schomaker and Silverio, who also collaborated on art work as well as the exhibition.
Schomaker relates “The idea for Call and Response came as a way to help artists. Shelli convinced me to do this. We played off each other’s art and emotions, and it got me out of the anxious mind set I was in sometimes.” Silverio adds “A lot of the time we are giving advice to artists, but for myself, I didn’t take my own advice. This was a really good exercise.”
Dwora Fried, working with Jeremy Hight, adds “I was inspired by Jeremy. I had a lot of insecurity at the beginning but then I began to feel that things would more than work out.” Something to remember in general, today.
David Isaacson says of his pairing with Amy Kaps, above “Her art came fast and fun. I was sacred shitless, but I was born to do this. Working with a performing artist like Amy was exciting. We hope to make a future performance art piece together.”
And Kayla Cloonan relates of her work with Misty Mawn, “I typically work in abstraction, while Misty is primarily figurative. She got me out of myself, and it was really rejuvenating.”
Julia Montgomery said of working with Kristine Augustyn. “I didn’t want to stop, I couldn’t stop. This kept me going.” Augustyn adds “She gave me a place to focus, to see her working was so exciting. It was an organic experience, and we built something.”
Building something: the concept of Call and Response as a whole.
Given 24 hours per participant to answer each other’s “call,” these works, are especially profound given this constraint. Some artists built upon each other’s piece; others bounced ideas back and forth. All created work that was important to the spirit: their own, and that of the viewers.
Image above – Ellen M. Friedlander
Kimberly Morris, above
In all, those exhibiting include:
Nora Cohen/Emily Wiseman Jen Snoeyink/ Bibi Davidson Gini Mann-Deibert/Debbie Carlson Ashton S. Phillips/Leora Wien Ashley L. Gnar/Yvonne Jongeling Kenzie Dickens/Laura Henneforth Cia Foreman/Kat Nuñez Paula Goldman/Karen Fisher Chris Fontaine/Kimberlee Koym-Murteira Jacki Morie/Zarina Silverman Kayla Cloonan/ Misty Mawn Larissa Nickel/Ted Meyer Jesse Standlea/Dafna Steinberg Leticia Velasquez/Reneé Fox Isa Gordon/Robyn Alatorre Kristine Augustyn/Julia Montgomery Adrienne Cole/Gina Herrera Anne M Bray/Sina Evans Cathy Breslaw/Susan J. Osborn Dale Voelker/Samantha Fields Sally Baxter/Karen Hochman Brown Jason Jenn/Cindy Rinne Darren McManus/Xu Darocha S. Vollie Osborn/Alyssa Haley Moon Micke Tong/L. Aviva Diamond Laura London/Heather Arndt Conchi Sanford/Ellen Friedlander Bee Colman/Cassandra Takeshi Audrey Coates/Lissa Young Jeremy Hight/Dwora Fried Martin Cox/Diane Cockerill Kimberly Morris/Tom Lasley Lorraine Bubar/Jody Zellen Albert Valdez/John Park David Isakson/Amy Kaps Carole Silverstein/Heather Lowe Emily Silver/Angela Brooks Hillary Ramirez/Sadhana Bhetuwal Susan Kaufer Carey/Madeline Arnault Coleman Griffith/Lynn Azali Jacqueline Bell Johnson/Kris Hodson Moore Michelle Andrade/Sohani Holland William Hemmerdinger/Teresa Coates Lina Kogan/Susan Kurland Liliana Hueso/Andee Rudloff Jill D’Agnenica/Victor Wilde Allison Butcher/Leah Shane Dixon Kristine Schomaker/Sheli Silverio Kerrie Smith/Aazam Irilian Dani Dodge/Stacie Birky Greene Adeo Las/Diane Linquata Rebecca Bennett Duke/Leyna Lighman
There is a Round 2 of Call and Response, with an online reception scheduled for May 9th – and in which, I am participating with the written word and the occasional photo image in collaboration with my randomly chosen partner, Adrienne Cole.
Be sure to watch for the invitation to attend the virtual reception, and visit the work. There’s life out there in the void. You’ll want to experience it.
Genie Davis; photos provided by Shoebox Projects; featured image by Ellen M. Friedlander.
Artist Trine Churchill is using her art to defeat isolation. And what better way than to make YOU a part of that. Her participatory project Together Now began as a neighborly, local project and has now grown a global focus – and you can be a part of it, too.
“We are going through the very same human experience right now. I couldn’t shake it out of my head, the historic moment of sheltering – and who are we sheltering with? Families, roommates, your cat? Or are you by yourself? I wanted to document this future memory in a painting,” Churchill attests.
“And I wanted to engage with people anywhere and hopefully give them a sense of coming together despite what differences we might have culturally and socially.”
According to the artist, all of you reading this article can participate. “It is easy – and hopefully fun – to do. Take a picture. Send it to me. That’s it. If I end up creating a painting based on your picture, I mail off a really nice high-quality, archival print of the paintings. I sign it to you – and send it to you wherever you live.”
Churchill is currently at an early project stage, waiting to see how people are responding overall.
“I would love to see an exhibition of all these paintings. I see them covering the walls, lined up and giving a simultaneous window into how we lived the year 2020, separated but together. A book could be another way to go about it. And that would allow me to write more in words too, tell people’s verbal stories along with the paintings doing their own storytelling.”
She wants as many to participate as possible. “I’ll paint until we are no longer sheltering,” she says, but possibly for much longer than that. Her only criteria is that the photograph sent to her has to be taken during these sheltering times.
“Ideally, the picture would include a little bit of where you are sheltering, your surroundings, your room. Let me know where you live, and tell me how you are doing. And of course, I would love to get everyone’s help in spreading the word, and giving this project legs to walk on,” Churchill explains.
Like past work of Churchill’s, above, this new body of work is dreamy, delicate, and filled with a true sense of humanity.
Jude – an image from Trine Churchill’s Together Now series
Works created thus far, including “Jude,” depicting a small child looking out at the bright world, safe and solitary, but awash in grey inside, are richly moving. Her works have always been lush and figurative, and are so here.
The artist is a story-teller, and as such, she describes her work as “often based on memories with a dream-like or fantasy twist.” In previous series, she describes her paintings as “based on my own family’s photos and history. With the Together Now project, that will change.”
Her images are now “based on somebody else’s photo and moment, and I will be creating their memory paintings. However, what I am finding already with the kind of paintings that I do, is that even the most personal moment finds it ways into a shared universal space of human existence.”
And isn’t that what being together, right now, when we are physically removed, all about?
Send your photos to Churchill at: tc@trinechurchill.com
Exhibition of Stevie Love’s work at Norco College Gallery
Dream-like and dazzling,
artist Stevie Love creates 3-D wall sculptures that are filled with an almost
kinetic energy and bursting with vibrant color. She started experimenting with paint
in this way back in her art school days at Claremont Graduate University.
“I’ve used acrylic paint as a sculptural medium for more than 20 years…making large three-dimensional free-form paint objects by pushing the paint around with my hands. Right after graduating I spent some years using squeeze bottles to apply thick paint to rectangular matrices like paper, wood panels, or acrylic panels. I made free-form shapes once in a while. But about five years ago, I began focusing on creating the three-dimensional paint/sculpture hybrids that I am making now.”
Even more recently, she began adding faux fur to the back of each piece “to create an aura. Now I am hooked on the idea and look of the fur in combination with the sculptural paint,” she says. It also “references a pelt, in which case the paint would be the inside or fleshy part of the skin.”
Love wants viewers to be surprised about the work and curious about its construction, as well as “stimulated by seeing something they have never seen before. The combination of sculptural paint and faux fur, and intense colors in combination have a sense of the absurd; playful in a way, but serious in the carefully constructed intentional objectness.”
Always searching for “super bright” colors and colors that play off each other, she seeks to “emphasize the intensity of the differences between them.” She spends days mixing paints and mediums to reach the consistency she wants, primarily selecting Nova Color paints and mediums from pourable gloss to matte to super thick.
“I get a couple of specialty
mediums from Golden Paint, like GAC 800 to minimize crazing, and Clear Tar Gel
which has a syrupy texture that causes the paint to spread forever making a
level surface. The Clear Tar Gel is impossible to control but that’s what makes
it interesting – it spreads and pushes outward making unique shapes beyond my
control, and there are times I want to take advantage of that.”
She describes herself as “naturally
attracted to zingy color combinations. I love the dark and light contrasts in Van
Gogh, and paintings by the Fauves have always been favorites of mine. But I
also am attracted to the over-the-top, not ‘normal’ color combinations. Hot
pink just makes me happy!”
Growing up in Burbank and Los
Angeles, her family made trips to border towns, where she absorbed the sheen of
colorful buildings and signs that was the norm there.
“We moved around a lot and my
Dad always painted our houses pink — not hot pink, but definitely pink,” she
laughs.
Flower – from Love’s current work in the group show Bouquet, now at Roswell Space Gallery
In regard to her textures,
she says she simply enjoys painting sculpturally and “building up shapes and
forms based on what comes naturally out of a pastry bag or squeeze bottle. I am
a modernist, in that the paint for me can stand on its own as an object in its
own right. I like the playfulness of making 3-D forms with the paint. What
results is a kind of unnatural nature based in color and form that flows
naturally, but makes forms unrelated to the everyday world we see around us.”
Her titles refer to
consciousness. “I am thinking of them less as the inside of a body but even
deeper into a human’s existence – consciousness, including everyday waking
consciousness, sub-consciousness, Jung’s great unconscious, and shared
consciousness with all of creation.”
She views the works as
existing in a space between painting and sculpture. “They hang on the wall like
a painting, but because of their physical form, they exist in the space that
the viewer occupies.”
She notes that she often fluctuates between hanging the works against the wall flat, or draping them to call more attendtion to the paint skin.
“This idea conforms to an
idea I have about the world being a thin skin – the veil which is pierced when entering
another dimension of consciousness. Like my Italian mom used to say, ‘Il mundo
e piccolo piccolo.’ The world is very thin. In other words, our existence is precarious.”
Mojave Mythos
Over the years, Love has
created landscape-related forms: currently, she’s thinking of pursuing that 3-D
space, rather than focusing on the surface. “I am interested not in making recognizable
landscapes, but using the idea of landscape as a framework to drape absurd
magical forms. I live in the wild desert hills and I am inspired by their
magic.”
Mojave Pink
As viewers are inspired by the magic inherent in her work.
