Night Windows Offer an Illuminated Look Inside at CMay Gallery

Posted on by Diversions LA

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South Korean artist Hwang Seon Tae’s remarkable Night Windows is his first exhibition in Los Angeles, and it is a stunner. At CMay Gallery in mid-city through November 30th, the luminous new works from his Lightbox series are truly astonishing.

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Using literal illumination through images of windows, we are invited into perfectly designed, innately architectural rooms and spaces, through which we can see outdoor views or portals of light. In some cases, we see shadows from trees cast in light spilling onto walls. The result in each work is something incandescent.

Hwang Seon Tae, The Sunshine Room, 2019, Plastic Plate, LED, 29.9 x 22.4 x 3.5 inches , 76 x 57 x 9 cm

Asked if the works were representative of a Zen-like or meditative state, the artist demurred. Tse related that the works are to be taken “however you wish to take them, as long as you enjoy them and feel pleasure from them.”

Blissfully free of humans, while several pieces feature a peacefully sleeping cat or dog, the spaces are primarily pristine, well-designed living spaces. The emphasis on the domestic creates the sense of a place of being at rest, a true home.

Demur as he will, there is a highly spiritual component to the work, an emotional peace that vibrates through the observer.

Tse also explained that he views each of his precise lines as a kind of representative, visual language, and that each line has meaning and resonance for him as an artist.

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The use of light is enormously appealing, drawing the eye of course, but also engaging the mind and heart. It feels both transcendent and sweet, balming and beneficient.  His work is also concerned with simply the use of light, dimension, and space.

His line drawings illuminated by LED create an aura of stillness and restfulness, but also the provide a way for the viewer to step into that illumination and feel awash in its brightness. The dimensionality welcomes the viewer to step within each work.

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Some images include bright spots of color, as in the work above.

Tse’s manipulation of the physicality of the acrylic plate is a testament to his art, and in its perfection, also pulls viewers into the contemplation of simplicity, beauty, and minimalism.

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There are a number of other pieces from earlier series also on exhibit at CMay: a glass sculpture representing a rumpled newspaper; soft, out of focus photographic images of objects.

In an art talk Saturday night, the artist said “I am most interested in the objects themselves. In giving them meaning, attaching importance to them.”

Hwang Seon Tae, The Sunshine Room, 2019, Tempered Glass, Sandblast, LED Backlit, 86.6 x 34.4 x 1.6 inches , 220 x 62 x 4 cm

In a sense, he makes the objects – sofa, lamp, chair, window – into a character in his visual narrative.

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Above, a view of one of Tse’s works taken through a gallery window, a perfect introduction to the exhibition.

Born in Korea, trained in sculpture and Glass Art at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle in Germany, the exhibit is mesmerizing and involving. And it would be difficult to overstate the sense of calmness, the sense of joy which the viewer feels when “coming into the light.”

Hwang Seon Tae, The Sunshine Room, 2019, Tempered Glass, Sandblast, LED Backlit, 40.2 x 31.5 x 1.6 inches, 102 x 80 x 4 cm

CMay Gallery is located at 5828 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, 90036.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis, and provided by gallery

Rise Soars and Spins

Posted on by Diversions LA

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With live music, a lush sunset, and a desolate but lovely desert setting just outside Jean, Nev., the Rise Festival captivated from the moment the music began.

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Above, the Zack Gray band performs music that fit the site – a bit ethereal, a bit Coldplay-esque, the songs seemed perfectly timed to match the darkening of the sky. Other musical acts included Agina, Exes, and Ry X, taking the stage before the sun went down with lovely sets of their own.

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While the event describes itself as a music festival that also includes the release, at three timed intervals, of biodegradable lanterns, it is the lantern release itself that creates the true sense of magic, and draws the crowds. We attended Sunday night – the other two nights featured fireworks and a crowd of up to 10,000; Sunday was a smaller group of attendees – a little over half 10,000 – but nonetheless a truly spectacular release.

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The initial release was also a learning process: lighting the igniteable square in the center of the lantern and keeping the delicate paper that shapes it from also igniting while it inflates, is a two-person experience – even three; which makes it all the more delightful once mastering the technique is accomplished.

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Once dusk fell, and crowds gravitated away from the tasty collection of food trucks and craft brew purveyors…

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…once the sunset photos by the iconic “Rise” sign and colored moons and translucent colored columns were taken, attendees were asked to assist in lighting the rows of tiki torches laid out by sections — ticket holders were assigned to a section in  a circular grid from Northwest to Southeast.

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Following the torch lighting, and time to write any messages on the paper lanterns, there was a countdown to the actual lantern launch – and they were aloft. Some skittered too low, needed to be recaptured and reheated; others had first-time-mishaps as ours did; but in the end, they all went soaring into the sky, some seeming to pass in front of the moon.

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It was glorious. It was beyond worth the drive from LA into the desert. The visual spectacle, the sheer art of the event was terrific, but it was the spiritual element of release, fire, prayers and wishes and names on lanterns, the ephemeral nature of the lanterns as they transition to ash, sink, and fade into the desert sand that made the Rise Festival as special as it was.

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We saw participants of all ages – from children to the elderly, enjoying the event.

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Side note: the lanterns are biodegradeable, but even as we were leaving, the Rise Festival staff was waiting on horseback, foot, and cart to collect lantern detritus when the flames burnt out and gravity did its thing.

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Before it did, thousands looked up, enjoying the light, flight, and spiritual flames — Rise Festival is both a participatory performance art event and a meditative experience rolled into one.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Jack Burke

 

 

Heavy Water Digs Deep

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At La Luz de Jesus Gallery through October 27th, Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman invites viewers to step inside her dreams.

Her new exhibition Heavy Water is pure vision, a deepening of her work,  in which the viewer literally and figuratively can wade into an alchemic world awash in portent. Her characters are girls caught in a perpetual, magical youth, suffused with golden light. Sullivan-Beeman explains her paintings as a “dive headfirst into the soup of the collective unconscious. There, in the most ancient realm of the mind, I inherit stories. Like water, I draw my girls up from the deepest well.”

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The title of this exhibition refers to what the artist describes as “the rarest and most dangerous substance on Earth… made from ordinary tap water.” She posits that no one would notice the difference should the material replace the water coming from one’s tap, H20 turned to the lethal D20, “a stepping stone towards the atomic bomb.” First produced in 1932 and used in nuclear energy research, in Sullivan-Beeman’s dream world, her girls use the material for creation instead of destruction.

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Each painting is created in the artist’s signature style, using egg tempera, the time-consuming artistic process once employed by the Old Masters. The medium she uses, as well as being unique today, inherently carries a quality of luminance. Her most delicate images seem to glow with power.

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Viewers are encouraged to begin their journey through Heavy Water with Sulllivan-Beeman’s installation, in which she makes use of both stencils and sculptural elements to take viewers to the bottom of the sea, where jelly fish swim and kelp beds sway. The immersive quality of her laser-cut giant 6-foot seahorse, still-dressed skeleton, glittery treasure chest, and giant rabbit are pulled straight from her paintings; some elements of the installation were collaborated with artist Gina M. “I really want the viewer to experience the whole show and ‘swim’ through the art,” Sullivan-Beeman relates.

Somehow the oversized 3D sculptural images feel perfectly natural, as if they’ve emerged from within the paintings; this is due at least in part to the fact that the paintings have a depth in technique that makes them feel richly dimensional.

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The paintings lead viewers through images that traverse the natural and fantastical world, through history and daydreams, all alight from within. While it might seem unlikely to create work that takes the figurative to the edge of surreal, Sullivan-Beeman has done so, shaping a narrative not unlike a sci-fi Beatrix Potter. Mystical, magical and powerfully practical, the girls in Sullivan-Beeman’s works represent the artist’s own subconscious, a world of fairytales and innocence, of struggle and resistance, of wisdom and self-realization.

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In “Alchemy Girl,” a smoky-eyed, pink-haired girl reclines on a desk pouring heavy water into a beaker, while a human-sized rabbit somewhat frantically writes atomic equations on a blackboard behind her. She is clad in a blue dress with white pinafore reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland; perhaps Alice and the White Rabbit now exist in an alternate universe. Her intense, forthright gaze challenges the viewer: she has the power.

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With “Finding Marilyn Girl,” we also see echoes of Alice. There’s a white rabbit of sorts – with a skull face – tucked under the arm of a girl wearing the Mad Hatter’s headgear. She peers into an opening in a tree, through which Marilyn Monroe’s visage floats – a search for something lost, aspects of powerful gain. Who controls life’s game here? Alice has bested both hatter and rabbit, and has exhumed the ghost and grandeur of a fairy-tale movie star. There is also an Alice-like vested rabbit steering the boat of a languid “Lotus Girl.”

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The wild-haired, haunting “Gas Mask Girl” has a perfect bird perched on the hose to her mask; she may be at risk, but she has secured herself, and the bird – a promise for a brighter future, perhaps – has aligned with her.

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“Ascending Girl” arises from water in a beam of holy light, as UFOs fly overhead, a toucan watches, and another girl, clad in a bathing suit and clutching a beach ball, looks on. From this fecund, tropical world, a girl chooses to fly upward and onward, heading to a place few of us can imagine, much less aspire, to go.

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The entire exhibition is filled with beautiful, loving images – butterflies and sea life, a squirrel interested in a fallen Snow White’s discarded apple, an adorable hedgehog, a minute giraffe, a glorious pink flamingo. And of course, Sullivan-Beeman’s fascinating, complicated, magical girls.

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If art is a realized dream, then Sullivan-Beeman’s works a dream within a dream. It’s time to take a deep dive into her Heavy Water.

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72303078_10218435719871495_5522971554859712512_nLa Luz de Jesus Gallery is located at 4633 Hollywood Blvd.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by  Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman and Genie Davis 

Painted Architecture: Eastern European Art Builds a Fresh Scene in Los Angeles

Posted on by Diversions LA

 

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At the Venice Institute for Contemporary Art gallery in San Pedro’s The Loft through October 31st, Painted Architecture brings an exciting exhibtion first shown earlier this year in Tallinn, Estonia to LA.

The work originated with Estonian and Latvian artists and friends Aleksejs Naumovs and Vilen Künnapu bringing together a vibrant collection combining Estonian art and Lavian architectural paintings. The result, curated by Meelis Tammemagi,  features artists including Andris Vitolins, August Kunnapu, Martin (QBA) Kaares, Liisa Kruusamagi, and Meriliss (Meru) Rinne. In the U.S., co-curators include Juri Koll, Daisy Inslermann and Anna Matskevitš.

Along with their geography, the seven artists’ work also shares an intensity and fluidity, despite many different visions.

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Multi-colored and vividly hued, “Welcome to Lemurial” from Vilen Künnapu exemplifies the spirit of the exhibition. Viewers see symbols and brilliant colors in a cheerful architectural landscape that includes vivid green trees, a bright red monument structure, and above the rich blue of what appears to be sky, what appears to be a sea of red, with a tiny boat afloat on a single wave line. The town appears to be old, smaller, perhaps a resort town or historic district. Another work features a more traditional take on a similar view, in which the blue is sea not sky and the red an island or mountain in the distance; here a yellow boat sails along the sea with foamy white caps. There is an innocence and sweetness to these works.

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In a strong contrast, cool blues and greens and browns of Martin (QBA) Kaares’ “MOMA Yard” is all modern. This is an urban city, with high-rise buildings on the skyline, a distinct geometric structure, and a central image of seemingly winter-bare city park. Silhouetted dark blue figures rove the area, busy and on the move. Other work by the artist exhibit a similar cool hue, and a view of modern city life. Elliptical and quiet, these works offer a powerful look at urban life and a sense of removal from the personal.

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Aleksejs Naumovs’ “Buranoll” returns the viewer to a more bucolic environment; a village-like town with meandering streets, in which small black and brown cats explore a courtyard. Once again, the buildings are brightly colored; the piece builds curiosity and impact by positioning its images slightly aslant, as if the perspective came from above. Other images of Naumovs give us different wider perspectives of the same courtyard; in one a shadowy human silhouette is joined by two of the cats.

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In Meriliss (Meru) Rinne’s work, the perspective is more decidedly askew: thick, vivid abstract shapes create a layered jungle of forms that resemble both buildings and flowers, rockets and monuments. Diminutive in size, these works have a glowing depth that changes the meaning of the word “landscape” or “architecture.” In one work, an orange sun floats just over the top of buildings; in another, we see figures beneath a yellow orb in a dark sky. A dramatic energy suffuses each of the small but powerful images.

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With “The Inner World of the Departing Man,” August Kunnapu gives us a darkening blue sky and purple, black, and grey factory buildings. The man, clad in green jacket and lavender shirt is walking towards us, again, the perspective is unique, angled, highly geometric. The landscape requires us to study it more than the man himself, as if it represented the man’s inner world, and perhaps it does.

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Works by Andris Vitolins and Liisa Kruusmagi display equal power and grace. Kruusmagi wavers between impressionism and realism with encompassing city views that draw viewers into a unique world; her Dyptic, above, an evocative work that reveals a structure on the edge of a body of water. The division between the two separate panels creates a wonderful sense of nature vs. the work of man, and/or inclusive of it. Vitolins, like Kunnapu, relies  on a more rigorous, structural approach, his paintings both an exciting blueprint for architecture and a realization.

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The exhibition will host a closing reception on Sunday, October 27th from 2-5 p.m. The gallery is located on the top floor of The Loft, 401 Mesa Street in San Pedro.

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  • Genie Davis; photos provided by ViCA