Running through August 20th, two powerful female artists take center stage at the Corey Helford Gallery. Camille Rose Garcia offers two separate exhibitions: Phantasmacabre and the illustrations of Snow White, while Jasmine Becket-Griffith presents Allusions and Allegories.
Both are the stuff of fairy tales and dreams, the mystical and the enchanted.
Los Angeles artist Garcia is a pop art surrealist, and in Phantasmacabre, in CHG’s main gallery, she spins gothic art that practically glows with color, art that sparkles with a kind of witchcraft. The paintings are huge, as is a humor-rich sculpture of the big bad wolf.
Not only large in scope but in intent, they’re crammed with Jungian references and influenced by the surrealist films of Alejandro Jodowsky.
Above, Garcia, looking as if she just stepped out from one of her canvasses.
Born of dreams, fragments of fairy tales, feminine symbols, the tangle of a forest, and the interwoven textures of childhood and myth-making archetypes, the fully formed result in a vibrant series of canvases that create a landscape of wonder. Beauty, fear, the nightmare and the promise: this is the language of Phantasmacabre.
“I was inspired by the idea of symbolic language, language as symbols for personal life. I made a deck of cards to create a series of associations, of personal symbols for my life and my personal message,” Garcia explains. “My paintings use that.”
In Gallery 3, Garcia’s Snow White illustrations create a new and surreal spin on the classic fairy tale. “I always try to find other dimensions of color and emotion,” Garcia relates.
Heading into Gallery Two, a whole new world emerges.
Above, Becket-Griffith and a wonderful work that morphs traditional and classic art with fanciful anime.
Becket-Griffith’s works in Gallery 2 have an equally female, mythic cast. Allusions and Allegories represents involved fantasy and fairy tales that offer a riff on anime as well as classic art.
The Florida-based artist paints in a traditional style utilizing acrylics to capture a mix of the gothic and lyrical natural settings. She has her own licensing line with Disney, and exhibits at Pop Gallery Orlando at Downtown Disney in the Walt Disney World Resort. You can’t get more fairy tale than that. Like Garcia, she uses symbols and stories to create allegories, in this case, between art master works and magical imagined worlds.
“There’s a story behind each one of my paintings. I have created cartoons of myself and my sisters, I did anime work, and then I tried to make what I create more realistic and stylized, with references to art history and such artists as Klimt, Bosch, and Van Ellenberg,” she says.
Many of her paintings have antique replica frames uniquely created in resin, while others were carefully curated and purchased. “My husband ran a frame store before I met him,” she says.
She says of her work that “I’m trying to bring a bit of mystery into a mundane world with each piece.”
Mystery and magic: feminine epic adventures born of night flowers, strange symbols, and provocatively sensual color.
Find all of this in the works of Garcia and Becket-Griffith at Corey Helford. The gallery’s well curated walls are located at 571 S Anderson St. in DTLA.
- Genie Davis; all photos: Jack Burke