A Radical Dawn Rises

Posted on by Diversions LA

 

Luna Anais Gallery presents a luminous the group exhibition curated by Alicia Piller, Radical Dawn, a series of mixed media works which simply radiate light.

Among the pieces on display are a provocative new look at a city scape as seen from the bumper of a car – as if the headlights had eyes; a floral landscape of fabric with neon igniting behind it; and glowy sculptures and paintings. Artists include Se Young Au, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Anais Franco, Silvi Naci, Ginger Q, Jaklin Romine, Molly Shea, Sarah Stephana Smith, Linnea Spransy and Kayla Tange.

Reinforcing the Luna Anais mission to exhibit female and nonbinary artists, primarily those local to Southern California, the exhibition focuses on these ten artists meditative and spiritual approaches in many of the pieces on display.

Molly Jo Shea’s “Excited Over Nothing” is an air dancer covered in sequins and beads, hand applied during the pandemic. As the inflated figure rises and dramatically falls, wonderfully depicting the hope and despair of pandemic times, the magic of this work is not just its green and silver shine but its exuberance. Even if the face of dark depression, something glitters.

Silva Naci’s work utilizes natural elements in uniquely distinctive ways.  “Untitled (Pussy)” uses an exuberantly bright color palette of vivid blue and lemon yellow in wool and natural dyes using a process that harkens back to the artist’s Albanian ancestors, and their traditional weavers. It pops with color and an almost hypnotic sense of motion.

As to Naci’s mid-fire ceramic, “Tabaka (Ass Up),” the concept of a traditional serving tray is upended by the idea of serving up a woman to suitors in a beautiful beige and brown swirling work that resembles both the sweets served to the suitors to help woo them and the open vulnerability of the women being presented.

Also working in ceramic is Anais Franco. Along with wood elements, the sculptural piece “7 C’s of Resilience” offers a delicate complexity in its poetic and symbolic approach to memory and connection. The almost impossibly detailed, beautiful work is both ritualistic and transcendent.

Sarah Stefana Smith presents a screen, monofilament, bird netting and thread weaving in “Flag to the Aybss No. 3” a surreal flag-like hanging that appears both mystical and futuristic, a kind of magical approach to time warps, black holes, and other undefinable regions of the universe, both external and personal.

More concretely delineated but no less magical are two works by Jessica Taylor Bellamy, her ethereal resin and wire “Palm Veil” suspended over “Ecology IV: Horizons of Manic Striving and Photogenic Decline,” an impressive sculpture of a repurposed BMW bumper, video projected images of city scape, and dried wildflowers. Positioned well in the gallery space with La Brea Ave. as an outdoor backdrop, the bumper appears to have come in off the street, and the viewer to be experiencing what the disembodied vehicle itself may have seen.

Wood, clay, and plexiglass are the “Vessels of Memory. Emotional bodies. Moments of loss transcend. (Haunted Scream Bowls)” created by Kayla Tange. These are delicate, even gloriously poetic sculptures about memory, sentiment, love, and pain. Impossibly fragile looking, reflective in the plexiglass elements, they are as poetic as their title.

Se Young Au takes immersion to a new level with scented elements contained in a glass covered, white porcelain flower, over which are hung poly satin blocks of archival digital prints in her “Inexhaustible Abundance, Form 1.”

To the viewer, there is a sense of elegy and haunting sadness; the artist’s explanation leads one to into a look at not only grief but that within the context of the damages wrought by U.S. imperialist dominance.

Two artists, Jaklin Romine and Ginger Q created “Efflorescence Grip-Con Luz,” the fabric and neon piece that asks us to explore perception in its depiction of hands holding flowers suspended against the curved neon.

And Linnea Spransy’s acrylic on canvas “Patience” (above) looks at remembrance and attainment of “good death” against the context of the modern world in a mysteriously patterned divided image of dark and light that seems to represent both the Heavenward and the Hellbound paths as a kind of intricate puzzle. Spransy’s work in this exhibition is just one of the light-infused standouts.

Collectively, the exhibition is filled with motion and suffused with light, a tribute to grief, loss, change, and a sense of passage. That passage may lead through life, change the course of a life, impose dictates of social mores and rules on life, pull us from our purpose or path, but along the road, however rough, there is the chance at a transition, a journey out of darkness or sorrow or containment into a new day, one in which constraints are lifted, pasts celebrated, and futures more tentatively hopeful.

What we may see in the beams of our own headlights, in the sheen of our own neon is a Radical Dawn, lighting and igniting a new way forward.

With that in mind, Piller’s curatorial first exhibition for Luna Anais is a great place to spend at least a portion of the July 4th weekend, with artists, curator and a wine reception on July 2nd from 2 to 6 p.m.

The exhibition is located in the D2 Art space at 1205 North La Brea Avenue in Inglewood, CA 90302 and is open every Thursday-Saturday from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. through July 10th.

  • Genie Davis, photos by Genie Davis

Amanda Maciel Antunes Reveals a Graceful Ithaca

Posted on by Diversions LA

Through October 23rd, Luna Anais Gallery at Tin Flats offers a deeply involving exhibit by Amanda Maciel Antunes, Ithaca, the artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles.

Antunes’ mixed media works are, as always, fascinating puzzle pieces, whether she is using acrylic and ink on canvas or faux leather with acrylic to shape a more dimensional work of wall art. There is poetry on handmade paper, held together with safety pins, thread, dye, and ink, and works that utilize cotton and thread, natural dye, and seeds.

One of the most resonant works in this richly rewarding exhibition is a sculpture that takes its place in the center of the gallery. “Her Vessel” is comprised of bamboo, rope, muslin and other fabric, dye, palm tree branches, and Pochote cotton with fiber-fill.

Each of the materials Antunes uses here are either found or foraged. The cotton was harvested by her. Words are written in thread across the garment draping work, “resting, ships, stars, Homer, hero, muse…” among others. They record the first stanza of Antunes’ own poetry, taken from the writing that thematically anchors the exhibition and bears the same title, Ithaca.

Like each of the works here, this sculptural work has a visceral textural approach. The work calls to viewers in such a way that physical touch becomes emotional – you can almost feel the work. The fabric draped around it is a section of a larger fabric that Antunes created in a daily practice during the quarantine portion of the pandemic. She would hike to the top of Mount Wilson, where she would sew one line of text each day, unspooling the material in a kind of poetic carpet across the dusty trail she climbed.

In works such as “I Have to Tell You This” and “I Prefer Truths That Carry No Prophecies,” Antunes overlays her canvasses with imitation leather that she has cut into geometric patterns. This technique provides only with the tantalizing ability peer in and glimpse the work beneath this layer, adding complexity that invokes the elliptical quality of understanding and memory, and the difficulty in finding a true map or compass to represent one’s personal journey.

Contained in clear cases, Antunes also exhibits two dimensional Pochote cotton works, the material for which is also hand-harvested, “Specimen I” and “Specimen II,” which appear like artifacts from a lost time.

Along with its intensely tactile quality, Ithaca also unfolds as a kind of song. Her poetry draws viewers into its rhythmic music, but so too does the lacy, thread-like patterns of her largest paintings, such as that of “Restless Spirits” and “Circe’s Island.” In these works, the ink lines serve as a representation for the artist’s use of thread in her paper works and sculpture.

The paper works in this exhibition, “Songs of a Poet I, II, and III” are delicate, almost ephemeral. They are reminiscent of poetic love letters to an alternate reality, to a strange and sweet but distant past. The fact that the works use handmade, roughly held together paper adds to a palpable sense of found treasure, a relic in an attic, a mystery both musty and precious.

Antunes writes “I sat on the edge of something/the grounds beneath my feet dismantle…” setting the viewer up for an experience which has the quality of a dream. In another work, she writes “The myth of us is the hope that we will have to sustain.”

And in the poem Antunes writes to encompass the exhibition, “Ithaca,” she says “What if Ithaca had already been there/But was denied its presence/For a very long time.”

Deny it no longer – Antunes has created a world both fragile and strong, her own epic visual poem as well as a tribute to Homer’s Odyssey, including recent takes on the work such as Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation of the epic poem and C.P. Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka.” Her poetry and visual art are a response to these, and a continuation of the original work. Its name is that of the island that served as Odysseus’ destination, pictured here as a space that is matriarchal in nature, or as Antunes’ writes, “What if Homer was a woman/What if the hero of the tale/was the muse.”

Originally from Brazil, the Los Angeles-based artist often reflects on her own journey in her work, translating it into a universal recognition of everyone’s inward and outward travels, as well as the intersection in which they both merge.

In Ithaca, the two are beautifully fused, encompassing a sense of place, and both a desire of entrenchment and a corresponding but opposite sense of restlessness, the aching need to move on, and the ephemeral quality of finding what could, would, or should be “home.”

Interestingly, Antunes’ epic version of Homer is the second fine exhibition I’ve viewed this year relating to the Odyssey. In June, I viewed Heather Lowe’s spectacular lenticular exhibition at Keystone Gallery, It’s all L.A. to me…ruminations on the Odyssey which envisioned aspects of Los Angeles life through the lens of the epic poem.

Perhaps both profoundly lovely exhibitions are influenced by the journey we have all been on since the pandemic upended – and continues to alter – our lives. And perhaps, as Antunes suggests, we should reinvent ourselves to survive the upheaval, and reconfigure our view of the world, its myths, legends, purpose, and beauty. Certainly, Antunes has done so through the artist’s rivetingly portrayed personal experience and the words of a poet.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis