Closing this weekend, Collectivity at Durden and Ray gives viewers a blueprint for the modern world. A joint-exhibition between two art collectives – Hyperlink in Colorado Springs, and Durden and Ray here in Los Angeles – hence the title – the show was collaboratively curated by UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art Director Daisy McGowan and Durden and Ray artists Lana Duong and David Spanbock. Representing the works of 12 artists from each collective, the show offered a fresh look at image making, and what these images mean to us.
Larua Shill’s dynamic – and ironically Instagram-ready – mixed media sculptural work, Separation Perfected, features selfie sticks, plaster, and laser cut mirrors. Her held-aloft cluster of handsare lifting mirrored cell phones to take the ultimate selfie.. Reflective of today’s cultural mores and on what makes art truly art, the work is compelling visually and emotionally. What do we see in these mirrors but ourselves? And what do we reflect? Creation? A memory? A reverential tribute to ourselves as the ultimate significant other?
David Leapman’s series of gold ink and watercolor works are also visually dazling; the prolific artist also offers large scale works such as Vampire Blues, using cristalina and acrylic on canvas. Leapman’s dayglow Rambler’s Gristle vibrated with color, a mysterious voicing of change and possibility in a world that seems overwhelming at times.
Leapman above, Jackel below.
Ben Jackel’s stoneware, ebony and beeswax sculptural works Fortress Wesel and Fortress Sedan evoked a sense of flight and a wish for escape. As with many of the works here, a sense of mystery, and of a future inexorably tied to the past seemed to whisper from these works.
Sijia Chen’s lush, lavender-dominant Veil resemebled an abstract sunrise, shadows aslant, or a look into a wordless, wondrous afterlife. The large scale work has an ethereal glow.
Jorin Bossen’s oil, acrlic, and pastel works – virtually headless, rust-colored images of gunslingers from the old west – are time travellers, icons caught in a transition between now and the past. Representative of the masculine ideal, no faces to distract us, these works have a rooted irony, as well as being potent memorials to a part of the American mythos.
Powerful, witty, and passionate, Collectivity offers a brilliant commentary on the components of our modern life, and on our beliefs, hopes, and dreams. The exhibition offers evocations of the past and lush portals into an unknown future. The show was brilliantly laid out, taking us into tomorrow and yesterday, moving skillfully between the hyper-awareness of our modern existence and the restive spirit of the great unknown we all face. Above all, this is a show that invites viewers and artists alike to go dancing forever in the art of the now.
Durden and Ray is now located in the Bendix Building in the heart of the Fashion District. Come for the art and stay for the sunset, too.
- Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis