Days of Reverie Entrances at Stuart Haaga Gallery

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Days of Reverie, carefully curated by Vojislav Radovanovic, is a compelling exhibit that brings together four visual artists who work in different mediums – drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, along with one composer. All these artists lift the viewer out of the ordinary “here and now” existence into an extraordinary meditative and otherworldly state of mind. The four visual artists – Catherine Ruane, Jill Sykes, Jason Jenn and Debbie Korbel — were tasked with creating new work for the exhibit at Stuart Haaga Gallery at Descanso Gardens using actual materials sourced from the gardens or inspired by the gardens, while musician and composer Joseph Carrillo was asked to create the soundscape that accompanies the exhibition. The results are astounding, and though each room is decidedly different from the next, each artist seems to work at the threshold of the real and the artificial with surprising synchronicity of color and materials.

Debbie Korbel’s two sculptural pieces are the only ones that are outside the gallery and immediately greet the viewer. Outdoors, her bare trees, painted a ghostly, wintry white, stripped bare of their original colors and foliage, speak to a mystical winter’s tale. The two trees in the front are populated with Korbel’s sculpted Lazuli Bunting Songbirds, some caring for their eggs in a nest, others just perched on a branch.

The other trees become wish trees where viewers are encouraged to write their intentions and messages on paper tags and affix them to the branches, thereby repopulating the bare trees with leaves of desire. This concept was popularized by Yoko Ono in 1996. She modernized a Japanese custom started in the 17th century of writing wishes on tanzaku (small strips of paper) and attaching them to bamboo trees.

Debbie Korbel

Visible through the glass window is Korbel’s striking life-like and full -sized mixed-media deer mule, looking alert yet relaxed in a painted nightscape that references natural history dioramas. The flowers and plants entwined around the antlers speak to rejuvenation amid winter’s thaw a theme echoed throughout the exhibition. A beautiful short poem is written on the wall she illustrated behind the deer.

Jill Sykes

Inside we enter the room filled with Jill Sykes’ radiant botanical paintings of roses, poppies, calla lilies and agapanthus which all grow in the gardens here. If Korbel’s work harkens to a wintry thaw, then Sykes work simulates spring with new growth visible on slender branches.

Sykes’ plants and flowers are undifferentiated in color and instead are recognizable by their flattened outlines and their shape. All parts of the plant, leaf, flower and stem are the same color, as if a shadowy presence seen on a wall, ground, scrim or window shade. Paradoxically, her specific yet highly abstracted imagery captures the very essence of the flowers, distilling the image like intimate poetry. In the five large gold leafed works, Sykes delineates flowers with delicate, white lines over a faint grid of gold. Like Byzantine painters who generously used gold leaf to symbolize divinity and otherworldliness, Sykes’s luminous paintings, highlighted against the pale pink wall, glow magically while inviting quiet contemplation.

Catherine Ruane

While Sykes’s luminous paintings are hushed and meditative, Catherine Ruane’s dramatic site-specific installation is operatic in scale and concept. Composed of painstakingly detailed and lovingly rendered Sycamore leaves and branches, Ruane’s achromatic pencil and charcoal drawings are cut out and rearranged to soar around the gallery. Looping and swooping gracefully, their rich robust darks are highlighted against the white of the gallery walls, creating wonderful negative spaces. Included in the installation are clusters of realistic rose drawings – portraits if you will.

Historically, roses are a potent symbol of beauty, divine love and spiritual enlightenment, which is the subtext of all the work on display. Each rose drawing is in a round gold frame that is painted red on the back, casting a surprising pink almost neon aura on the wall. These are grouped close together as they would be in a rose garden. This series of drawings became a sort of unintentional memento mori as the very roses Ruane was drawing were shortly torn out. Unbeknownst to her, they had come to the end of their twenty-five year cycle – once more reminding us that there is a season for all things.

Jason Jenn, left, with author Nancy Kay Turner

Autumn is the time when deciduous trees shed their leaves. Depending on one’s geographic location, the red, orange, yellow colors which the leaves turn are truly spectacular. Jason Jenn began sourcing his materials of fallen leaves at Descanso Gardens for his installation a year before the exhibit opened. The vast collection of organic materials employed is impressive in scale, shape, variety and color, highlighting the infinite visual complexity of nature.

Jenn treats the leaves which he gathers so that they can be handled without becoming brittle, thereby allowing him to paint and gild them transforming the multitude of leaves into glittery, golden-hued mandalas that ring four walls. Mandalas, a Buddhist 4th century tradition, represent dreamers in search of spiritual enlightenment. Mandalas, sacred circles, are thought to transform suffering into joy, healing the world. Jenn’s immersive installation is the most interactive with a large round low table filled with plants that visitors, mostly children can sit around (handmade pillows are provided) and create their own versions of the art. There are pink painted trees at the corners of the room, their branches reaching overhead, creating a cozy, womb-like feeling of protection. Stumps from fallen trees ring the installation covered with festive tree ring pillows stitched by Jenn. This continues Jenn’s longstanding interest in the healing power of art.

Joseph Carrillo provides not only the soundscape that accompanies the exhibition which is his own composition, but also provides the score of the piece. He has artfully arranged the sheets of paper (also called leaves) letting them cascade and slide down like a waterfall of musical notes. Those who read music can engage with the visual notation while also listening to the score that is played by Carrillo himself and a group of musicians he generously acknowledges. This exhibit is a balm for the soul as it addresses universal truths about life, death, resurrection and offers valuable lessons learned from listening to and valuing Mother nature.

  • Nancy Kay Turner; photos by Nancy Kay Turner and Genie Davis 

Talk of the Trees – Catherine Ruane

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It is an overpoweringly beautiful tree. A tree that has survived storm and history, hurt and war, human suffering and tyranny, the vicissitudes of life itself. Catherine Ruane’s “General Sherman” captures that hard-won grace in a vast work that, at present, arcs from floor to ceiling on the wall of the Yiwei Gallery in Venice.

Ruane’s work, which I’ve previously observed shown in a more horizontal construct at the Brand Gallery some months ago, is an awe-inspiring presence here, as alive in every detailed individual charcoal and graphite leaf as if it grew into this space, creating it’s own forest. The General Sherman’s fraught history aside, the most overpowerfing sensation in observing the artist’s recreation of it is of a blessing – for the continuation of life, the ways in which trees talk to the earth, among themselves, and through their whispered rustlings, to us.

The artist has constructed this beautiful work in multiple layers that evoke those rustlings. She’s described assembling the  large-scale piece as something similar to “creating a paper doll” of massive proportions, with each leaf and limb a separate, delicate piece mounted on the wall, shaping a stunningly dimensional image.

Long a capturer of trees and nature, working at present in primarily the nuances of grey and black, Ruane offers a living world reimagined, a sensorial recreation of the natural one. Also on exhibit among her works are several sepia toned floral images, including the beautiful “Left Behind Rose,” above. The coloration resembles a dried and pressed flower, an old memory preserved.

Along with the multiple works by Ruane in this exhibition, Wanderland’s sweet, contained gallery show also features the work of Lynn Hanson and Elizabeth Orleans. Their work, too, features a peacefully monochromatic color palette, one that dovetails well with Ruane’s lustrously, luminously created flora and fauna. Each artist has shaped an almost mythological sense of meandering through a dream-like, yet resilliant universe in which color lives more in the mind’s eye than in the artworks themselves, rendering them, if possible, even more alive.

Ruane’s massive tree is a seminal work within a group of beautiful works. Don’t miss it.

Yiwei Gallery is located in Venice at 1350 Abbott Kinney; the show runs through early December. Settling in among its branches is highly recommended in our own turbulent times.

  • Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis

LAAA Gallery 825 Offers Lustrous Solo and Group Exhibitions

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Group exhibition, Penumbra

With three fine solo shows and one group show, the Los Angeles Art Associations Gallery 825’s current exhibitions, which opened February 22nd, are each deeply rewarding.

Suzanne Pratt

Suzanne Pratt’s exhibit bird·song, which is profoundly meditative, focusing on the transitory yet eternal in the immediate moment. The precise but seeming infinite images weave a complexity rooted in a primal sense of life-force. Spirals, shell-like shapes, seemingly-petaled pieces such as the artist’s richly dimensional “niyamita,” compel a closer look at the world itself as filled with meaning. Dimensional and riveting.

L. Aviva Diamond

L. Aviva Diamond’s large-scale photography also offers a dazzle of meditative works – these riveting works depict water as an entire world – in her glowing Light Stream. Euphoric and filled with a swirling dance that pulls the viewer within them, these sensational abstract images transport the viewer to another world that is both mysterious and magical. 

Mark Indig

Photographer Mark Indig uses architectural shapes in his new body of photographic work, Naked Triangles. Skeletal and powerful, described as “x-rays of our culture,” radio towers and cell phone transmitters are depicted with grace, as stark, lovely, and spare, like castle turrets and church steeples for our time. Electric wires and their connection points stand like robotic sentinels, watchfully ominous. The delicacy of their construction reminds the viewer of the art of Watts Towers at first glance; a second look creates a less benign view, as if of a technological take-over.

Osceola Refetoff

And finally, the group show on exhibit, Penumbra, juried by stARTup Art Fair’s founder Ray Beldner, offers black and white as the palette in a variety of mediums. Participating artists include Larry Brownstein, Amy Fox, Donna Gough, Rob Grad, Gina Herrera, Susan Lasch Krevitt, Campbell Laird, Rich Lanet, Colleen Otcasek, Joy Ray, Osceola Refetoff, Melissa Reischman, Catherine Ruane, Seda Saar, Catherine Singer and Stephanie Sydney.

Catherine Ruane

From Catherine Ruane’s lushly nuanced nature in her graphite drawing “Magwitch” to Osceola Refetoff’s haunting infrared photographic sunset image of “Leaving Trona,” to Joy Ray’s mystical, textural wall sculpture, this is another rewarding powerhouse of a show.

Don’t miss!

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artists; exhibition photos from LAAA

Fantastic Four: A Super Hero and Heroine Quartet Hit the Art World

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Left to right, above, it’s the fantastic four artists and friends: Bob Branaman, Gay Summer Rick,  Catherine Ruane, and Mike Street.

At Venice’s Mike Kelley Gallery at Beyond Baroque through March 15th, the work of four exceptional SoCal artists makes up the Fantastic Four exhibition. Each artist is quite different from the other, yet their work in the rambling upstairs/downstairs gallery is brilliantly compatible in a quite wonderful show curated by Bob Branaman.

Gay Summer Rick’s intense golds, oranges, and pinks are the stuff of California dreams; Catherine Ruane’s delicate, ruminitive pieces are touched in gold and have an astonishing jewel-like glow; Mike Street’s work feels both modern and yet that it would not be out-of-place in Greco-Roman times, both monochromatic and richly narrative; while Bob Branaman’s work is all vibrant color, exuberant and blossoming with life.

In short, this is an exhibition to savor, in terms of its differentness among the artists – who are all friends – and their similarities. Each in their own way present work that is emblematic of their lives in California; images born both of imagination and the emotional alchemy that arises in the diverse environments of their home state and the fertile field of aristic dreams.

Enjoy the fantastic ride: these four take you on roads of beauty that refuse to remain unmapped.

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The glow of Gay Summer Rick’s work, above and below is astonishing. It is the fire of sunsets, the rising light of dawn, the backdrop, love-song, and legacy of Los Angeles. From freeway commuter views toward the sea to the skies that simmer and shift above the downtown cityscape, Rick is perhaps the quintessential artist for LA. Radiant work here, as is her norm; with an underpinning of dreamy light even in the most prosaic landscape.

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With Catherine Ruane’s work, below,  there are familiar aspects of her oeuvre, too, and many previously unexperienced. Her gorgeous, often black and white drawings of trees and branches, flowers, and desert have been supplanted here by smaller, very jewel-like etchings.

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From beautiful, motion-filled, wind-swept palms to fish with gold highlights on their scales, this is perfect, dazzlingly precise work. Each piece is a work of wonder, something so finely crafted that the viewer simply does not want to look away.

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Mike Street’s work here is somehow timeless: it is of this place and era and yet it could also easily be  from a distant world.

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There’s a sculptural quality to each piece, and their monochromatic use of color adds to that. Rich in depth, they remind the viewer of the  past, somehow transported to our time and space through the conduit of Street’s artistry.

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To some extent, these fascinating faces remind the viewer of a daguerreotype, as if created on a silver-covered copper plate.

If Street’s work offers an elegant, restrained use of palette, Branaman’s work provides the exact opposite: imposing color, the delight of a hippie kingdom, a tie-dyed world, rainbows.

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There is a fierceness to his colors, to his stained-glass-like patterns; an impulsive, vibrant quality that leaps at the viewer and catches one up in its powerful exuberance. Below, Branaman stands with Gay Summer Rick.

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So – which of the four is the most fantastic? It’s a tough call – you’ll have to go see for yourselves.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis