Corey Helford Gallery

Closing Oct. 29th is another strong and thoroughly unique show at the Corey Helford Gallery, featuring three artists who present their own riveting views of the natural world both outside and within us.

New York-based artist Martin Wittfooth’s The Archaic Revival occupies the main gallery. These stunningly detailed oil paintings display a beautiful and varied use of brush treatments and palette knife to create images that evoke the past while contemplating the future. Also on hand are bronze sculptures, a new medium for Wittfooth.

“The title of the show is borrowed from Terrence McKenna,” Wittfooth says, “it refers to our subjective culture. We have stepped far away from the connection to nature. We have created technological and industrial barriers between us and nature.”

Calling his works here a “visual homage” to McKenna, he views his paintings as a “first step” toward creating balance. The late philospher McKenna explored the idea that Western culture and society has become sick, and needs a healing process which can only be achieved by a reversion to archaic, or old-fashioned values. Wittfooth believes that only through a return to the past can man see himself as he truly is, a part of nature. That return is the subject of his work here. His lush color palette features complimentary colors as an approach to subjects he has explored over time, the artist notes.

His sculptures, however, represent a new approach for the artist. “This is my first foray into bronze,” he relates. “The group at MetalPhysic Sculpture Studio in Tucson did a great job of translating my two dimensional works into three dimensions. It’s interesting to me to explore that relationship.” Wittfooth plans a continuation of this collaborative sculpture. “I have several of the guys from the foundry here tonight, looking at blueprints I’ve created for future work,” he told us at the show’s opening.

With paintings that are imbued with a golden light and a seemingly timeless synchronisity of color, and sculptures that have a monumental feel, this is an important show by an artist intent on relaying a timely message, connecting viewers to the natural world using techniques that compliment rather than deter from the subject. This is an elegy, a tribute, and a wake-up call, begging viewers to return, as he has through his artworks, to the ideals of nature and its healing process.

Also on hand at Helford is Korin Faught’s Lost Days.  

“This show is basically about my time in bed, the time I’ve lost,” Faught says. “Every show I like to take my work to a slightly different concept, one that goes beyond a single piece. You really need to see the entire series at once, and I encourage people to see them in person.”

Although her work is markedly different that Wittfooth’s, she shares with him a traditional and highly detailed painterly style, and a sense of the elegaic. Faught describes her work as influenced by turn-of-the-century painters such as John Singer Sargent.

“The show is essentially five years of work postponed because of the timing of the birth of my first child,” she notes.

Using multiple poses from the same model, Faught describes her intention as both “self and omni referential.” Her figures, wrapped in sheets, resting and restless in bed, depict both transcendent and dream-like states and as she describes it, “a body in torment…an escape into the mind set ajar.”

Completing this significant show are the works of Hannah Yata in “Dancing in Delirium.”

 

The other-worldly, vivid, sci-fi like images offer an entirely different take on the state of the mind and the natural world.  The artist views her paintings as their own kind of dance, using the female figure combined with animal parts to create hybrid creatures that are inspired by religion, literature, psychology, and her experiences as a woman.

The Corey Helford Gallery is located at 571 S Anderson St. in DTLA.

• Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis and courtesy of Corey Helford Gallery.