Playground of Art – Vojislav Radovanović at Walter Maciel Gallery

Posted on by Diversions LA

Playful, provocative, grand, and just plain fun – that’s Playground at the Abandoned Chapel. This is his first solo exhibition at Walter Maciel Gallery. Serbian born/Southern Californiabased artist Vojislav Radovanović previously exhibited a variety of works at the gallery’s fine Future Patchwork, a group exhibition curated by Annie Seaton last summer.

Before describing the wonders of this Playground, it’s more than worth noting that it is a big departure from the artist’s delicate, spiritual, almost ethereal work in a solo exhibition at Diana Berger Gallery, ORNITHOMANCY, with its almost-holy references to nature, the universe, and the spiritual. In that exhibition, color palette often focused on silver, blue, grey, black, and mirrored or liquid surfaces. But it, too, like this exhibition, featured a mixed media exploration of both human light and darkness.

Playground at the Abandonded Chapel offers a wild circus ride of color and desolation combined, one that reflects Radovanovic’s recent year-long desert residency at the Museum of Art & History in Lancaster. His love for both the dusty landscape and broken or abandoned structures — so many dreams come to the desert and fade away – shows in these works. So, too does his fascination with a specific old gym, the remains of a burnt-out school, it’s arches chapel-like, but covered with vivid graffiti, discards, and trash.

That specific setting is used in a site specific video projected in the back gallery, with scattered toys and discarded objects like computer parts and safety cones strewn on the floor in front of the projection. The viewer is invited to watch both the projection unfold and how its images look when viewed through or around these objects, adding a vibrant textural and sculptural element to the video.

The video itself stars playright and performing poet Robert Patrick, in a tour de force performance singing and reciting his own poems and excerpts from an unpublished play.  Whether viewers start with this experience or conclude their visit to the gallery with a view, it serves as a perfect background to the acrylic paintings in the main room.

The main gallery also includes site-specific elements, such as the pink arches painted on the gallery’s white walls, reflecting the form of the abandonded gymnasium depicted in the video. The acrylic paintings themselves are fantasy personified, but grounded in themes of redemption, the kind that can only be achieved by reconciling losses and finding new meaning through them. It is a glorious vision, filled with both whimsical elements and darkness.

There are strong references to the war-torn backdrop of his Serbian childhood in the former Yugoslavia, as well as to consumerism, political anger, personal anguish, and the relentless march of history. How do we reconcile the childhood innocence of toys and play with the detritus of war? How do we reshape our own destiny after loss, after childhood innocence is forced to end?

Referencing the often harsh reality of the Southern California landscape – from wildfires to climate change, as well as the rubble of war, and the personification of ourselves, our battles, and our hopes and fears, the visual subject may be toys, but the themes are much deeper. Godzilla,  clear plastic robots, an accordian-playing monkey clown, and more fill canvasses as intricate, ominous and absorbing as any dark fairy story. The brilliant pinks, greens, oranges, and blues belie clouds of smoke and broken buildings.

“…and That’s How it Happened,” is a truly wonderful work, in which a grinning clear robot toy looks on at a simply, thickly painted depiction of money going down a housefront that also features a fast-food burger, and a camera. The “end” of this visual story is this: a house broken asunder, a rainbow of dark smoke issuing from it, a bird escaping from it, a small rainbow horse looking on. This disaster may have begun on a child’s playground, but it concluded in real loss and corporate greed.

“And now a word from our new spokesperson, Richard, with breaking news” features a two headed red T-Rex monster with a post-it note reading “Breaking News.” Another post-it reads “Only philosophy can save you now.”  It’s funny and horrible and true – likely coming soon to TMZ.

Some of my favorite works are perhaps the softest: in the large-scale triptych “Europa,” a blonde cherub in circus garb rides a blue rocking-horse-like pony through a sky filled with stars.  She is the central figure in the triptych, the two sides of which feature silhouettes of a helicopter and an airplane, both toys and ominous fellow residents of the sky in which she rides.

“Everyday Balancing Act” gives us a muscular strong man riding a white horse balanced on a striped ball across a golden wire. Clouds rise in ghostly puffs around a foggy grey mountain backdrop. This may be a very brave man, playfully conquoring a desolate landscape, or it is simply the way we all live, day in and day out, on the precarious edge of getting by.  “Star Wrangler” is just that – a lavendar-clad cowboy lassoing stars, gracious, happy, riding his horse with aplomb. Be the star wrangler.

This is exciting, resonant, fascinating work, an exhibition one can breeze through and simply enjoy for the colors, the toys, the embedded collage elements; or one in which you can consider its implications, the fears for humanity, the hope for the future, the joy and the terror that happens on playgrounds, in war, and in life on this planet, in this city, in its lost desert dreamscapes, today.

Go see it and consider how this world plays. The exhibition runs through February 25th. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11-6.

  • Genie Davis, photos provided by the artist, and Genie Davis

Land, Air, Sea: Works by Mb Boissonnault, Bryan Ida, and Annie Seaton at Beyond Baroque

Posted on by Diversions LA

 

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Curated by Byran Ida, and featuring the works of Ida, Mb Boissonnault, and Annie Seaton, Littoral is a beautiful look toward the horizon line and the sea. Running through May 5th, the exhibition’s title refers to the “zone where the land, air, and sea come together” as the curator’s notes state, and the three different components of the earth meet.

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Photo above: Mike Street captures all three artists, left to right, Seaton, Ida, Boissonault

Littoral is limitless, filled with promise, edged with a poignancy at our inability to comprehend and three artists’ masterful attempts to shape their own comprehension.  It is an exhibition that grasps a moment of alchemy, where a sense of bliss meets the power, danger, and magnitute of nature. It’s an amorphous but profound moment, a transition of sorts, and the three artists here, in different but richly blended ways are seeking to convey it. Using color and composition, form, line, and texture, the artists depict the interaction of humans with natural wonder; even if that interaction is purely by casting our gaze upon it. As the late Tom Petty once sang, it’s “into the great wide open…under them skies of blue…” What will we find there? What do these artists find?

Ida’s work is always highly textured; here he is using tiny points, or dots, to depict air and water and figure, humming along a mystical line between the magical and the discernable.

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Above, “Prone.”

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“Ascension,” above, buries layers of color in shades subtle enough to almost but not quite hide the deep glowing light that seems ready to burst from the depths of the work, created in acrylic on panel.  

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Ida’s “Open” intersects water with air. The background specifically, he says, “plays with value and color.”

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With “Topside,” Ida captures infinite star-like molecules of water using what he describes as “hundreds of coats of semi-transparent paint to achieve a sense of depth.” Within this, he is giving us a veritable constellation of shapes, or as he terms it “you can see the beginning of some figuration.” In each of his works here, Ida takes us to a place beyond our knowing, yet almost within our reach, seething in and out like the relentless tides, almost carrying us away.

Seaton’s work takes us to a different sort of understanding, to a place where people have met the water and sand and air, and feel as if they know it; you can feel the ocean breezes ruffling their hair; you can sense the palpable joy and tension in the moment of communion with the life of the sea. Below, left,  “Double Indigo Surfer, Rockpiles, North Shore, HI;” to the right, “Indigo Surfer and fins, North Shore, HI.” Both are inkjet prints on washi paper, with indigo dye and linen thread.

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Above, she gives us surfers, riding, ready to ride, considering a ride. How we love imagining we are the masters of the mighty forces that draw us to the coast and beyond it, into its tide. There is something comforting in that, and in the quilted structure of this work.

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The powerful allure of the sea, and the illusion of taming it; with artist Seaton, above.

Seaton makes these images wonderfully filled with the texture of the sea, with the human desire to be in it, and with it, and of it, to conquor it, civilize it in a sense. Or perhaps what we really want, Seaton suggests, is to ingest some of the sea’s wildness.

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Above, “Rose Madder Quilt, Laguna Violet.” Below, “Indigo Surf Quilt: Waves and Boards.”

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Boissonault gives us a softer, almost impressionistic look at ocean colors, at catapulting waves, at those dancing horizon lines that lure sailors and give sirens their song. Her jewel like colors and lustrous textures wash over us like the water she depicts.

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The sea evokes the heavens as well as the deep. It can lift us up or swallow us whole. We are tiny fish to swim here. Working in oil, oil and synthetic, or oil and acrylic, Boissonault plumbs the depths and we can feel them take us, we are gloriously awash in the tumult.

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But we are also entrusted with the shimmering reflective jewels of the water and the way it splashes into the air we breathe, exhilerating us, as in “Find Myself a City to Live in (2),” above.

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Above, Boissonault with “Find Myself a City to Live in (3).” The hexagonal shapes that rise out of Boissonault’s waters, above, are mysterious and archetypal, like monoliths of our own construction pushing out from the ocean floor. Or are they citadels, rising, beaming us up through the atmosphere to another realm.

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Above, “Find Myself a City to Live in.” Boissonault’s depiction is ethereal here, aglow with promise.

Whether you count yourself as a lover of the sea or a more inland creature, take a swim over to Beyond Baroque in Venice and take in this visceral, vibrant show; dive in to its depths.

Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis; supplemental from Mike Street as indicated, and as provided by the artists.