Hardly a Bit of Blah in “bLAh bLAh bLAh” at Launch Gallery

Snezana Saraswati Petrovic and Chenhung Chen both weave. They weave artistic magic. They weave respectively using recyclable plastics and recycled metals and wire.

The result is something fascinating and fabulous in their paired solo exhibitions at Launch Gallery in mid-city. From paintings created from silvery staples to mesh wire basket and bell shapes from Chen to 3D-printed plastic corals from Petrovic, this work is lush and lovely, while also speaking to climate change, lost legacies, recyled materials, and reshaped hopes.

What do we envision for ourselves? Can we recreate the world and make it new again? These artists believe the answer is yes. Petrovic gives us dying and healthy corals in a variety of shapes and sizes, AR viewable images of sealife; Chen provides floral and fauna that are as delicate and sweet as any flower, but are shaped from metal and mesh and copper wire.

This immersive exhibition looks at our realities and issues,  crocheting, weaving, binding, shaping, and forming the new from the old; envisioning the interconnectedness of human beings, our planet, and social constructs that divide and unite us, sometimes paradoxically at the same time.

It is gorgeous art; it is also meaningful, looking at both who we are as a species and what we might be, and what our world may become. Can we shape it more gracefully and wonderfully, as these artists have done?

Dream-like and elegant, this is an exhibition that thrills with its creativity and understated beauty. Using unique materials, both artists shape classically brilliant work that resonates visually and emotionally.

Exhibition runs through March 2nd, so be sure to step inside the terrific web of unique sculptural forms these artists wove.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

The Season for Spells – And a Special Incantation

Now at OCCA through October 28th, Incantation, curated by Chenhung Chen is a pure delight of an exhibition, converting this bright and airy gallery to a mesmerizing space filled with joy and wonder.

Featuring astonishingly lovely work by Marthe Aponte, Chenhung Chen, Annie Clavel, Catherine Ruane, Jane Szabo, Nancy Kay Turner, and Lisa Diane Wedgeworth, in the curator’s words,  “the artists in this exhibition are the vessels that channel this [ritual] energy from one place to the other while using traditional or non-traditional materials and often blending craft techniques with industrial materials. Using photography, installation, mixed media, picote, paint, graphite and electronic waste, their works are a bridge between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the remembered and the forgotten. Moving effortlessly between past, present and the future, the very creation of their art is as mysterious and intriguing as an incantation.”

Each artist weaves her own distinct and seductive spell, through the use of inventive materials and masterful image-making. The show vibrates with textural components, as well as color, light, and shadow, weaving a potent portal to the magic that can find us if we are open to it – as open as these artists have become.

Nancy Kay Turners use of unusual – yet often mundane – materials belies the fact that her works are encompassingly evocative, enchanting the viewer with their complexity and poetry. Using materials as prosaic as ordinary wax paper and crumpled journal pages, antique wooden shoe forms and vintage photographs, feathers, and pins, and a dusting of silver leaf or curve of gold she creates startlingly immersive, riveting works such as “The Secret Life of Shards.”

Catherine Ruanes lustrous, delicate, perfect drawings of trees and other flora are created in detailed graphite and charcoal. Her large-scale “Witness at Antietam” is a fully branched wonder, one that has born witness and watchfully shaded many a human foible and battle. Other smaller works are taken from the same Antietam series, still others, sepia toned, reveal the heart of flowers. Each work revels in a compelling grace.

Exuding equal but quite different precision and delicacy, Marthe Aponte exhibits a display of stunning picote works, shields emblematic of protecting us from the vicissitudes of life, the spells cast at us by others, and at the same time weaving their own shimmering, sparkling protective magic. Aponte’s entirely exquisite works dazzle in their intimacy and intricacy, compelling us to look inward and see the world through her eyes.

Voluptuously vivid swirls of color soar through Annie Clavels vibrant watercolor works. A mix of large scale and more diminutive pieces, her images are like liquid captured motion, as svelte as they are visually kinetic. They form clouds and winds, waves, sunsets and flora, wings in flight, and always evoke a sense of profound mystery and beauty, like flowers half-formed but still bursting into bloom.

For Jane Szabo, photography is the medium she “paints” with. Here it is landscapes, a portal to worlds both intensely real and mystically realized, serving as doorways into spiritual places even as they represent realistic territory. Her use of color and uneven printing combine to conjure a realm that is neither of this world or the next, but somewhere fascinating inbetween. The works are from her Damaged series.

Curator Chenhung Chen offers both freestanding sculptures such as “Entelechy” and lustrous butterflies and cocoons of wall work, each crafted meticulously from materials such as wires, cables, and found objects. Their symmetry and sensuality abound, whether exuded from suspended waterfalls of wire or assembled with the skill and perfection of mosaics, as in “I Ching in America.”

Last but not least, Lisa Diane Wedgeworth gives us shadows that hint at light and deep mauves within her primarily monochromatic abstracts,  hidden symbols and shapes fleetingly visible within her painted canvases. Elusive and illusive, Wedgeworth fascinates with ghostly, grand gestures.

Closing reception is October 28th from 3-5 p.m., and oh-so-worth the drive to Orange County. In fact, Incantation places its magical journey in the heart of any art map.

OCCA is located at 117 North Sycamore Street in Santa Ana.

  • Genie Davis, photos by Genie Davis

 

 

Looking Ahead: Echo Lew and Chenhung Chen in Time. Timeless. at OCCCA

 

Coming September 7th through 28th at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Ana, Time. Timeless features the fluid and ethereal works of Chenhung Chen and Echo Lew. The exhibition offers a look at the fascinating repeating patterns that comprise the universe, turning the prosaic features of daily life into a profound experience.

 

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Los Angeles-based international contemporary artist Echo Lew creates meditative work that immerses the viewer in a world of lines, time, and light. In this exhibition, Lew continues his exploration of the mysterious and wondrous link between time and line. He posits a mesmerizing link between the chance arrangements of hair on paper with the gestures of dancers and lights captured in his previous series of photographic work.

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Using a single strand of his own fallen hair on a 6-inch square, he creates swirling, sinuous images that reflect the same sense of magical movement that his photographic works depicted. But here, rather than catching the long exposure of moving lights with his camera, Lew shapes almost ethereal lines from his hair, lines as varied and similar as each day of the year. The prolific artist worked daily for 365 days to create a single image using this unusual medium.

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He was drawn to this work through the vicissitudes of time itself. According to Lew “Time is my style.” Citing his practice of Zen Buddhism and daily meditation, he has taken the modern habit of creating timelines and both interpreted and subverted it into an evolving and intimate take on the power of the line itself, on the body’s aging process, and the spiritual movement of the human soul.

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That rigorous discipline is paired perfectly with Lew’s view of art as “an experimental adventure, a profound form of play.”

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Above photo by Jeffrey Sklan

Also based in Los Angeles, Chen uses mixed media to express both her fascination with American DIY culture and her perception of the inner existence. While Lew works exclusively with one medium, Chen uses many recycled materials in her three-dimensional work, including copper wire, cable, and electronic and computer components that harness power just as humans are conduits of their own spiritual power. As Chen notes “The cable conducts electricity, just as humans do…we are conduits of that Power.”

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Both artists offer insightful, disciplined, yet richly playful works that radiate  concepts of time, line, and a world outside human comprehension.

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OCCCA is located at 117 N. Sycamore Street in Santa Ana: the opening reception, from 6-10 p.m. September 7th takes place in conjunction with the Santa Ana Artwalk.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artists

Sway Moves Us: Exciting Exhibition from Seven Artists at the Brand

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Curated by Chenhung Chen with project management from Linda Sue Price, Sway, at the Brand Library and Art Center, is an exciting exhibition that is both perfectly curated and filled with stunningly original art work in a variety of mediums.

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One of the most beautiful aspects of the exhibition is Chen’s astonishing ability to create a show in which the works seem to truly speak to each other; they are linked and separate at the same time, a cohesive presentation that pulls viewers into the experience of the exhibition.

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Each of the seven participating artists use a variety of materials including wire, cords, neon, plastic, found materials, graphite works, and acrylic and pencil. Primarily sculptural, the dimensionality of the works adds the to sense that the exhibition is a living, mutating form that swims with motion – or shall we say, sways with it. If this is a world of art – and it is – it’s a new world, composed of lines and light, intense color, grand patterns, and highly tactile images.

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Chen’s flowing,  often delicate wire copper wire crochet work constrasts and compliments her thicker wire abstract sculputures. Both styles of her work undulate, as if they were strange sea creatures, or alien life forms.

That sense of the alien and unexpected, of sea life and forest floor, permeates the exhibition and the viewers’ gaze. We are invited to experience something unique, alive, delicate materials made strong and connected.

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Snezana Saraswati Petrovic’s work here includes a room-sized installation that utilizes video images as well as delicate, lace-like plastic to immerse viewers in an a dive deep into a sea of art.

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Other works of Petrovic’s pulse in fierce orange or yellow, and again we seem to be a part of a world of mysterious alien shapes, puzzling and vibrant, highly textured and dream-like.

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She gives us starfish and stars, sea nettles and dimensional snowflakes, webs, fissures, and the illusion of plunging beyond or into our own consciousness.

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Price’s neon works throb with kinetic energy and motion, the colors seem impossibly vibrant, they are as vivid and visceral as light pulled from the center of the earth and straight through the soul.

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Pieces that literally move and those whose colors dance create a sense of nighttime magic, a glorious lit-up world that is both transcendent and emersed in noir.

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Speaking of light, Echo Lew creates drawings based on light and shadow, strange and ethereal, as rhythmic as if they had sound.

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His unusual process in creating these drawings from something as ephemeral as light itself is reminiscent of auras, ghostly presences, a spirit world.

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Both Debbie Carlson and Gina Herrera work with found materials that include articles as diverse as ladders and yarn and bottle caps and latex gloves.

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Herrera in particular creates works that are infused with a sense of humor and wit, fantastical and fairy-tale-like. She creates both creatures and abstract shapes out of what could be artistic detritus in less gifted hands.

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Carlson’s sculptural works link prosaic articles and repurpose them into something sublime, strange, and cooly geometric.

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The eye studies the lines that make the shapes that fuse recognizable objects into something far more interesting and rich.

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Anne Marie Rousseau exhibits a series of painted acrylic images, both sharp, modern, and shiny with color; lines of gold dance and opal-like paint shimmers within the works like the veins of rich minerals found within the earth.

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The large scale works seem to vibrate; located on the outside wall of the main galleries, they serve as a kind of introduction or portal into another realm. Her work is always filled with a sense of motion, here, the pieces are perhaps the most literal and lyrical interpretation of the show’s title.

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It perhaps goes without saying that the works here are each magical, they invoke and call out a sensual beauty, a reworking of line, shape, form, and texture that upends the expected and presents a new and intensely satisfying view of the world.

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Above, curator Chen, attendee Betty Brown, artist Petrovic

Sway is an exhibition to be savored – go take it in. The Brand Library and Art Center is located in Glendale – or perhaps, with this show, in another universe entirely. The exhibition runs through June 14th.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis