Magical Night at Gallery H of Phantom Galleries: “Where the Magic Happens”

Posted on by Diversions LA

Curated by Kristine Schomaker, the incredible collection of art on display at Gallery H of Phantom Galleries in Hawthorne was ablaze with magic Saturday night. The opening saw many of the 30-plus artists present.

Kristine Schomaker, left; Dwora Fried right
Kristine Schomaker, left; Dwora Fried right – Photos: Jack Burke

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Margaret Ouchida

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Works by Susan Melly

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Margaret Ouchida presents detailed, intimate pieces in “The Battle” and “T’ode to Klimt.”

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The exhibition’s theme, of getting out of one’s comfort zone to that special place where magic can indeed occur – or zen, or power, or enlightenment, however you want to look at it – was fully realized in virtually every piece. This group show has the feeling of celebration, and both in terms of the art created and the means by which it was created and displayed, the feeling was genuine. The exhibit included a wide variety of contemporary Los Angeles artists who go beyond conventional artistic boundaries  – the standard gallery system – to establish a vibrant presence in the art community. Presented by Schomaker’s company, Shoebox PR, the artists and their art have created an exciting body of work, and are each showing that work in independent, outside-the-system ways from artist-run galleries to online magazines like this .

From beautifully detailed small scale dioramas to large scale canvases and sculptures crafted from found-materials, there’s something for everyone in this exhibit. Perhaps its the freshness of approach or the freshness of the “we can do it” attitude by these artists, but this is a special show that unfolds the passion of art like the petals of a Georgia O’Keeffe flower.

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Terry Arena’s graphite on mixed media piece.

Artists exhibiting include:

Susan Amorde, Terry Arena, JT Burke, Jennifer Celio, Chenhung Chen, Jeanne Dunn, Dwora Fried, Rob Grad, Carlos Grasso, Cie Gumucio, Carla Jay Harris, Teale Hatheway, Cindy Jackson, Echo Lew, Erika Lizée, Susan Lizotte, Dave Lovejoy, Susan Melly, Freyda Miller, Mike M. Mollett, Andrea Monroe, Stacey Moore, Malka Nedivi, Margaret Ouchida, Lori Pond, Linda Sue Price, Lindsey Price, Isabella Kelly-Ramirez, Katherine Rohrbacher, Jane Szabo, Christine Weir

Here’s a closer look at some of the stellar pieces on display.

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Cindy Jackson’s “7 Deadly Sins” are crafted from wood, aluminum, urethane, paint, iPods, and fluorescent lights. And with these materials come seven heads, all the same but painted in a rainbow spectrum. “Because these sins are in each of us, the heads are all the same, with pride standing tall above the rest – anger, lust, greed, pride, envy – envy is always looking elsewhere, gluttony, and sloth,” Jackson says.

 

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Suzanne Lizotte blends the classical and contemporary, using aerosol spray and traditional oil-on-canvas painting in her rich “Seeking Treasure.”

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Mixed media artist Lindsey Price is a photographer with a vision, here “A Clockwork Orange” offers a stunning digital photo montage.

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Andrea Monroe’s stylized “The Harlot” and “The Oiran and Her Pussy” use acrylic on canvas to create full dimensional figures that pulse with life.

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Cie Gumicio’s “Fragile” uses mint glass and light to create a wispy, beautiful vision of the planet earth. “It reflects where we are now with our fragility as a planet,” she says. This delicate image shapes not just a planet but the construction of a leaf-like image when viewed from a certain angle – mother nature meets mother earth in a shadow box. “Art, at its best, reminds us that we are human,”  Gumucio says.

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Dancingly nuanced neon is served up by Linda Sue Price with her pieces “Joy Ride” and “Cynthia Rose.”

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Jennifer Cielo’s “Astral Travelers” is an example of the artist’s work which “expresses the effects of human disconnection with the natural world.”

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Malka Nedivi’s large scale “Woman in a Box,” evokes her singular style using wood with paper, fabric, acrylic, and glue to create an image of poignant beauty. A painter, sculptor, and collage artist, Nedivi says that all of her work is inspired by her mother, and both her parents’ previously unknown past as Holocaust survivors.

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Katherine Rohrbacher’s glittering canvasses “Early One Morning” and “Arcadia” are bright, sparkling, and brilliantly moving all at once. “I  draw everything on like a pattern, then comes the glue, and glittle applied with a paint brush. With only a few colors did I have to put paint beneath the glitter itself.” Her “Arcadia” relates the passing of her cat. “She’s entering a glittery cat Heaven,” the artist explains. “Early One Morning signifies the ending of a relationship, but also the passing of a small bird found on a balcony.”

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Chenhung Chen continues to amaze with her ever evolving art, crocheted copper with its amoeba like, sinuous shapes, a viewer-participation piece “Connect the Dots” that allows guests to literally do that with colored pencils, and free standing wire sculptures. Her works are fluid, like electronically charged water. Delicate and ephemeral are not often the words associated with recycled materials such as copper wires and components, but Chen’s work provides both. She describes her work as being “about the driving force for inner fulfilment, balance, meditative process…and experiencing the inner power.”

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Erika Lizee’s curved and haunting hanging piece is an example of the artist’s propensity to create installations that work as journeys, drawing the viewer down mysterious paths on a pursuit of nature and rebirth.

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Mike M. Mollett is the sculptor of large scale pieces created from found art, shaped into balls and bundles. His work provides an outside-in look into a different reality, in which balls and bundles of wires appear animate, hold secrets within secrets.

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Dwora Fried creates miniature tableaux, using tiny figures and photographs to create detailed worlds inside glass-topped wood boxes. “I keep re-creating the feeling of what it was like growing up,” the artist says, “the box captures the claustrophobic feeling a painting can’t,” she says.

With so many other artists to admire, grab a hold of the magic now. The show rums through October 17th. Gallery H is located at 12619 Hawthorne Blvd. in Hawthorne.

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  • Genie Davis; all photos Jack Burke

Chenhung Chen – The Power of Lines

Posted on by Diversions LA

What’s on the line in artist Chenhung Chen’s buoyant, powerful art? Line itself. Chen focuses her art on the formation of line in drawing, Chinese calligraphy, and American Abstract Expressionism, filling her own pieces – drawings, sculptures, and 3D installations – with the yin and yang of harmony and dissonance.

Delicate and ephemeral are not often the words associated with recycled materials such as copper wires and components, but Chen’s work provides both. In pieces like “Moment to Moment,” and “Water” exhibited at the Studio Channel Islands Art Center, Chen’s all-important lines are curved, willowy, tangled, and buoyant. Their representational shapes are less important than the feeling they evoke, or as Chen puts it “the Formless is the quintessential subject of my art, but we only know it through form.”

A good example of this wonderfully formless form is Chen’s 3-D sculpture “Constellations.” The piece has the qualities of an amorphous jelly fish and the meshed patterns of a sky full of stars and the universe itself. The copper wire she uses becomes a living entity, each fine, entwined element joined to another like the stars in the sky. There is both a vastness and an intimacy in Chen’s work; a sense of motion in the swirls, whorls, and coils. Her “How do you spin your yarn?” are eight separate “yarn” balls crafted from wire, each one seeming to swirl out of itself, ready to be born as something else – perhaps something as prosaic as a sweater, or perhaps a life force ready to animate.

Chen says “I appreciate the linear qualities inherent in nature,” and in her work, line appears to be the starting point for life and energy. She describes her work as being “about the driving force for inner fulfilment, balance, meditative process…and experiencing the inner power.” To the viewer, it’s the dichotomy between belonging and aloneness, or as Chen puts it, between “‘wholeness’ or ‘the self,’” a twin force which pulses through her visually haunting pieces.

Chen crafts much of her work from wire and wood, plastic casing, paper, paper clips and staples. Her goal is “to make sense of objects’ function or contrast them” in a vital way. She works with hard technological elements such as wire and components, yet manages to transform these objects into something fluid and almost liquid.

Now living and working in Los Angeles, Chen was born in Beigang, Taiwan, and received degrees from the Chinese Cultural University, and the School of Visual Arts in New York City where she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree. A world traveler and non-profit volunteer, thematically Chen’s art focuses on a sense of external shape, force, and inner existence. Her internationally cultural background may influence the ideas of change and fluidity so redolent in the works she creates. In short: if one line leads to the next, that line is both tangled and filled with twists and turns in Chen’s work, a weaving of cultures and emotions, the stuff of life itself.

The artist will be participating in 2015 Annual Benefit Auction for the Los Angeles Art Association on August 1st, held at Gallery 825, in Los Angeles. This Summer National Juried Exhibition, is juried by Nancy Meyer, of the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, in Novato, Calif.

The artist recently participated in Art of Our Century at the Woodbury Art Museum at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, featuring the work of western regional artists.
Other recent exhibitions included her Blackboard Gallery Studio Channel Islands Art Center solo exhibition, Dancing with the Formless; Kuwento Engkuwentro: Angeleno Folklore, Legends and Sidewalk Stories, held at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument; the 53rd International Exhibition, at the San Diego Art Institute, San Diego; and Fusion, held at the Arc On-Line Gallery in San Francisco. As a part of a wide variety of group exhibitions in New York, California, and abroad, Chen’s art has been showcased in dozens of venues since beginning her career.

Chen describes her art overall as “about harmony and dissonance, peace and chaos, the beautiful and the grotesque, the subtle and the powerful. It’s also about the driving force for inner fulfillment, balance, meditative process, human internal structures, the transitional human condition, and experiencing the inner power.”

She began her art career formally in 2010, and attests to the fact that the desire to create art “must come from within. If one wants to be an artist, it’s because he or she needs to be one.”

An admirer of Cy Twombly’s paintings, Chen began painting in 3rd grade . Trained as a painter, she now works in diverse materials, and enjoys the challenge of working three-dimensionally, finding inspiration through a process of internal discovery, meditation, and life experience.

Currently working on her “Entelechy” series of sculptures, Chen recently moved into the Brewery Arts Complex in Los Angeles, where along with her own work and involvement in the art community, she enjoys cooking, gardening, and family time. And finding lines, lines, everywhere a line.