Entwined Roots: Symbiotic Relationships – Magical Art from Gary Brewer & Aline Mare

Works of Mare, left, Brewer, right

Originally scheduled to open when COVID-19 hit in 2020, through June 4th this lustrous collection of works is now viewable at Wonzimer Gallery in DTLA. The article and most of the photos are taken from its earlier frozen-in-time incarnation, but it is expertly curated at Wonzimer.

The radiantly lovely works of Gary Brewer and Aline Mare are a fine collection by married artists enmeshed in a beautiful dance of passionate art and companionship.

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Entwined Roots: Symbiotic Relationships is a tribute to both artists’ works, individually and viewed together.

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Mare works in hypnotically dense, fabulously fecund mixed media; Brewer in oil on canvas. Both are abstract artists, each non-figuative piece here is nonetheless rooted with recognizable elements from their artistic pasts that are sublimely figurative images of nature.

Gary Brewer

Their palettes are rich, their sense of beauty sublime. There is a wildness in both artists’ works that defies categorization, that welcomes the subversive and the sweet in equal measures.

One can view the cosmos or the untamed sensuality of nature in both artists’ works. Mare gives us a universe in a forest floor; a galaxy within a rain soaked garden. Brewer gives us twined cells, seeds and flowers, twisted cords of natural beauty that are larger than life. Both create works that flow in a fine and fanastical series of perfectly calibrated colors and patterns that are almost hypnotic.

Mare’s “Green Seeded” combines a delicate, evocative painted background with photographic images of seeds and images from space. Layers of paint shift the image so that the viewer is both above, beyond, and within the it; we are seeing the vast and infinite in the small and perfect.

Brewer’s works here feel more decidely floral, but what a fierce and marvelous series of blooms these are. In his “Constellation,” or in “Seeds of Life,” we see orchids that seem to burst from the canvas with a muscular life-force. These flowers are no swoony, scented bouquet, but rather vital, living entities.

Brewer, above; Mare, below

Where Brewer works in vastly large canvases depicting what could be minute objects – petals, seeds, flowers – writ large, Mare’s smaller works depict a strange and tumultous vastness contained in a smaller space. Both artists seem to work in a kind of synchronistic counterpoint, creating a sense of unseen wonder and hidden, intertwined gestural relationships.

And speaking of relationships, their own – to each other, to their art, to the way in which they seem to play off one another both in life and in this exhibition, is intrinsic to this exhibition. It is a great ritual alchemy celebrating the “other” within all of us.

Both artists invite the viewer – or perhaps the correct word here is compel – to go beyond surface perceptions and into a deeper, stranger, more wonderous realm: that of intertwined roots of life and love and into the celestial, where words may be inchoate but beauty falls like a welcoming, luminous light.

Now that this exhibition is no longer in COVID limbo, the life force it brings to the viewer cannot be constrained. Drink it in deeply, in the heart of downtown.

Wonzimer is located at 621 S Olive St, Los Angeles, CA 90014 – no appointment is necessary; check open hours; through June 4th.

  • Genie Davis; Photos at Wonzimer by Genie Davis; photos provided by the artists of individual works.

Aline Mare’s Glowing Requiem for a Writer and Friend

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Aline Mare’s elegant, lush, and intensely moving work in Requiem: Aching for Acker is a tribute and an inspired exhibition of visual poetry – based on a poem. Inspired by the last writing from Mare’s long-time friend, the late Kathy Acker, these multi-media works are transcendent, a fitting visual legacy to a fierce spirit and writer.

At the Mark Kelley Gallery in Beyond Baroque through May 27th, this is a poignant and highly personal show, elliptical but relatable, moving and deep.

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Mare describes the works as her own interpretation of Acker’s final poem, which beautifully merged the writer’s cancer diagnosis with Greek mythology. What Mare has done is create lush, elegiac, and glowing works; their darkness offset by qualities of light, like rays of hope shooting through the midnight of death.

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On the stairs leading to the gallery space, Mare has sprinkled roses and broken glass, above which Acker’s poem is printed as a large, pink poster. Boxing gloves and bustier are suspended on another wall; Acker and Mare both are fierce, female, and fighters. The battle is for remembrance, expression, understanding, and life itself. It does not get any realer or more potent than this.

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The artist’s images include the gatherings of nature: seeds and roots and lichen. It includes the legacy of fossils and stone hands and grave markers, the fragile humanity of scars from breast cancer survivors – Acker died of breast cancer – and the caress of angel’s wings.

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But the touch of these wings is as much about the power of angels to crush our mortality as they are about succor; they are also emblematic of the power of art, whether it is the art of words or of visual images, to transcend death and our frail bodies.

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The palette Mare employs is as rich and soft as worn velvet, the colors of moss and rust, of tarnished treasures and the ruby heart of seeds, blood, capillaries; the pulsation of life and light that beats back the eternal night.

 

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The artist incorporates quotes from Acker’s heart-breaking and powerful poem beside her images, tying the quote “’Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels?’ I know the answer: no one.” to a haunting image of feathers, foam, seeds, and what could be human or plant matter. “Tell me: where does love come from? An angel is sitting on my face. To whom can I run?” is matched to an image with an iridescent purple and green wing rising from a scarred, natural shape that could be a wounded body or a ripening, about-to-erupt seed pod.

This is not the first time Mare has created work inspired by Acker. In 2000, she created a multi-media installation examining Acker’s life and battle against cancer. However, the works here may certainly be her most universal and visceral.

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One of the glories of Mare’s work in this exhibition is the shining quality within the images, like the silver sheen beneath a tarnished surface. There is the patina of old gem stones, a mosaic of the natural and the dream-like, a tapestry with a dusty, faded, dusky hue, beneath which brilliant threads show. Her aim to create work that shapes the same female power, certain loss, and poignant vulnerability that Acker’s poem gestated in her has been fully realized.

These works are both illustrations of Acker’s poem and a new way of interpreting them, mixed media work that vibrates with passion, pathos, and connection, that innate connection we all share — to our tenuous, transient lives and the death we look to rise above. She captures echoes of eternity in dark but burnished visual moments.

Mike Kelley Gallery is located at 681 Venice Blvd., Venice.

An artist talk is scheduled for Saturday, May 19th at 2 p.m., with artist and writer Gary Brewer.

Regular gallery hours: Fri.-Sat., 3-7 p.m.; Sun., 2-7 p.m; through May 27.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis

Jill Joy is Back

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After a rough start in a gallery space on Wilshire that had scores of structural problems, gallerist and artist Jill Joy is back on La Brea, in a second iteration that is sure to bring “joy” to fans of her art and the curated shows she’s planned featuring other artists.

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Upcoming, Aline Mare (above) and Michael Giancristiano will be presenting Organic Integration, opening November 5th; continuing is Joy’s inaugural show in her new space, Emotion, on display through December 3rd. The gallery both Joy’s art and that of other artists whose work includes elements of, to quote Joy, “spiritual healing and the evolution of consciousness.”

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Joy’s own show here is visually very dramatic. “It’s me processing an emotional experience. Calm isn’t a part of this work,” the artist attests. “It’s very raw. A lot of people respond to this, but personally I like calmer stuff.”

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The artist “barely used a brush” to create this body of work, saying “I scraped with trowels. It’s very thick paint. It took a long time to dry.”  Joy creates only a few pieces a year, the most recent in this exhibition is from 2015, with others dating to 2010.

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The power – and often the darkness – of Emotion is in both Joy’s color palette and in the slashing, even angry paint strokes. It’s work that exhumes and compels, that serves as a release and is the fulcrum in a storm of feeling. In short, it’s like touching lightening in a bottle, or perhaps more to the point, like watching visual thunder.

Emotion is one part of a three-part series including Joy’s Consciousness and Illumination. The goal of all of the artist’s work is to expand consciousness itself.

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Check out Joy’s work and in November, that of Mare and Giancristiano – (Mare left, Giancristiano right, above) whose exciting new exhibition includes natural elements – at 456 S. La Brea Ave.

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Jack Burke, and upcoming exhibition courtesy Aline Mare and Jill Joy Gallery.