chinatown

Artist Teale Hatheway is the creator of layered mixed media art and site-specific installations that express evocative emotional connections. Working with acrylic, ink, bleach, metal leaf, burning, and charcoal on linen, her complex work is designed to “explore the theory that we remember environments as compilations of elements with which we develop emotional connections.” Hatheway takes details of pattern, form, color, and texture from urban environments, using them to implicitly and explicitly “trigger recognition of place.”

Hatheway’s work is about memory, grounding, understanding, and experience; with beautifully detailed yet fragmented images compiling pieces on Chinatown, historic bridges over the Los Angeles River, DTLA’s Broadway, and more. With a solo show, “Fragmented Realities: City of Dreams” opening Sept 12th at the Los Angeles Art Association, Hatheway’s self-taught architectonic drawing and the ethereal nature she evokes of even the most common subjects will both be on full display. Her approach is experimental yet investigative, using the often unsung history of Los Angeles architecture to enthrall viewers and advocate for the city’s preservation.

The artist describes her subject matter as “a means to ground myself in a tangible environment in which an understanding of the whole is made up of an experience of the parts.” These parts are special indeed. As a part of her “Street Lights Abstracted” series, delicately colored outlines and sections of street lights are positioned to form abstract and impressionistic depictions of what could be the ghosts, memories, or filaments of the lights themselves. Her “Detour” combines spray painted images of these lights over a background of gold leaf on canvas. Like the lights themselves, the painting illuminates, both literally glowing from the gold leaf and figuratively from the impression of streetlights. In “Self Reflection” from the same series, a mirror image of an upside down red street lamp,casts beams, also reflectively upside down, against another gold leaf background. The street light here looks almost like a character from the Chinese alphabet, or an ancient rune.

In her “Street Lights” series, gone are the abstract and symbolic shapes. Here the lights are clearly lights, some with vivid matte aqua, red, and mustard yellow colors washing over, through, and around them. The viewer sees the colors as a spectrum that the lights themselves must be illuminating.

Hatheway’s “Chinatown” series offers a moody evocation of this exotic neighborhood that is nonetheless intrinsically a part of Los Angeles. East-meets-west architecture plunges viewers into another near-magical world. No prosaic impressions here. In “Success,” Hatheway employs acrylic paints and metal leaf on linen to vividly offer the winged edge of a Chinatown building in red, aqua, and gold tipped with white. These could be architectural angel’s wings, could be dragon tails, could be a temple in China – and yet with the California-bright colors, the sense of place blurs between the new West and the old East. Where do the winged edges want to fly?

Equally vibrant color marks the clearly grounded depiction of double metal gates over the facade of a building in “Secure,” painted using ink, acrylic, bleach, and metal leaf on linen. It’s flight again, or the illusion of it that grabs the viewer in the lime and chartreuse green dominated “Vision,” which shows another curved, wing-like Chinatown roof with the looming white ghost shadow of a larger building behind it, and tiny kite-like flags billowing from the ramparts.

With a burnt orange sky and a carefully detailed grey and white bridge, the long perspective of “Washington Boulevard Bridge” combines ink and acrylic with bleach on gold leaf in Hatheway’s “Victory – The Historic Bridges Over The Los Angeles.” Bridges from Downtown L.A. to Griffith Park are pristinely stylized, with their location just hinted at, their appeal speaks to a universal desire to cross a bridge to other, more golden banks. These bridges are highly realistic yet as romantic and surreal in design as a fairy tale bridge. These pieces are linked through Hatheway’s exploration of the city, through a connected map of bridges stretching across the SoCal region, which allows viewers to cross into a vivid engagement with the city itself.

“InTentCity,” Hatheway’s installation commission for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, is a collection of 53 hand painted tipis, painted specifically for the Lake Eldorado camp ground, and reflecting in the mirrored prism of the lake itself. Hatheway created a fully immersive environment in a delicately painted three-dimensional experience. As with so many other works by the artist, there is a magical quality to the environment. We could be in the California desert or in a mysterious other-wordly land that has transformed itself here on our planet, in our state. It’s this magical and mysterious quality that transcends and enhances the images themselves throughout all of Hatheway’s work.

Internationally exhibited, Hatheway received her BA from Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., studying figurative painting at the Slade School of Fine Arts, University College London, and studying photography and architecture at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Upcoming exhibitions include “Fragmented Realities: City of Dreams” opening Sept 12th at the Los Angeles Art Association, and “Some of the Parts” at West Hollywood’s Gallery 825 in October. Recent shows include “InTentCity” at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., a collection of 53 hand painted tipis; group exhibitions at Red Pipe Gallery in Chinatown, the Pasadena Showcase House for the Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and the Riverside Art Museum, among many others.

• Genie Davis