Afterfear Comes Beauty

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“If we can’t banish our fears, we must learn to live among their ghosts.”               – Dani Dodge

Installation artist Dani Dodge has done it again, taking on the enormity of human emotion and shaping it into an art form.  Her Afterfear, now at HB Punto Experimental in San Diego, is a revelation in its beauty, and a passionate extension of Dodge’s work.

“The exhibition is directly related to Peeled & Raw, an installation I created originally at LA Artcore in December 2015, and then brought back for an encore at my studio during the April 2016 Brewery Artwalk. The installation encouraged people to purge their fears by tearing the wallpaper from the walls, and writing their fears upon the scraps,” Dodge explains.

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The catalyst for Dodge to create that piece was the mass shootings at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and the aftermath of that attack.

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“I was tapping into the material’s metaphorical potential as both a critique of Western values as well as an opportunity to peel it back. At the end of each show, I burned the fears in a symbolic exorcism,” Dodge relates.

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Afterfear goes even bigger. Gallery owner Hugo Heredia Barrera gave Dodge the ultimate “canvas” – an entire gallery for her to fill.

“Rather than making a single installation, I created a three-part story. In Part 1 I deal with my own fear, in Part 2, I deal with global fear, and then in Part 3, I deal with how the inability to rid ourselves of fear leads us to be forever haunted.”

One of the things that is the most fascinating about Dodge’s work is her ability to seamlessly meld deep meanings with installations that are simply gorgeous to look at. Like all the best art, her work illuminates; however it can also simply be viewed as a sculptural, immersive work that is pleasing to the eye. There is a trick and a gift to doing this: appealing to a visual aesthetic that a viewer can easily tap into, while delving deep into her own, and the viewer’s psyche.

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“As people walk into the gallery, the first thing they see is the results of me facing my own fears. Ever since 2003 when I covered the war in Iraq as a journalist, I have had a fear of the sound of explosions and guns,” she attests.

Dodge went to the desert to confront this fear. “The desert is a mystical and inspiring place for me. For all appearances it is a place that is dead, but you look intently and you see life teeming under your feet and all around you. It always reminds me to look beyond the surface of not only what I see, but what I say with my art. To understand that even if people don’t look beneath the surface, that all the work that goes into the invisible layers adds to the richness of the ultimate expression.”

So it felt natural and right to Dodge to use the desert as the location to mine the fears in her own heart.

“The Fourth of July is difficult for me because of the anxiety caused by the noise of the fireworks. As part of this exhibition where I deal with other people’s fears, I figured it was only fair to face with my own. I lit the fuse on firecrackers in a remote desert area to create art for the show. The video is here: https://vimeo.com/194511343 It was empowering. And I loved using the source of my fear to create something beautiful.”

Dodge was originally invited to cover the Iraq invasion after the assignment was turned down by a reporter not eager to be on the front lines. Unlike her peer,  she didn’t hesitate to take the assignment. But she felt her stories of calamity, bravery, and loss only scratched the surface of the war, and she was compelled to turn to the creation of art.  The tales she tells now through her installations are powerful indeed, visceral, and comprehensive. Starting the Afterfear exhibition with her own fear is brave and bold; it immediately creates a connection with viewers. Who has not been afraid of something? Who does not feel fear?

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“As people continue into the gallery, the come to a low wall, built with more than 100 glass bricks with the ashes of the fears burned from Peeled & Raw suspended inside them. The wall is translucent. Some of the bricks are cloudy white, some are crisp and clear and the ashes distinctly visible,” Dodge reveals.

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This is such an incredibly moving section of Afterfear.  The idea of containing one’s fear, destroying it yet retaining its aftermath, is potent. But it is the image itself that resonates. If the viewer did not know what he or she was seeing, it would be just as strong. The bricks glow. They are ice, they are X-rays of the human spirit, vessels for passing down, for remembering, for separating. They are the DNA of human nature, captured and preserved as if they represented a prehistoric creature caught in amber.

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“As gallery visitors turn the corner into the main room the simplicity of the first two parts of the exhibit are lost in a cacophony. I created the wallpapered effect in Peeled & Raw by covering 8 x 4 foot panels with about six layers of wallpaper, starting with wallpaper from the 1940s and ‘50s, and using current wallpaper as the final layer. So as people tore the wallpaper to write their fears upon it, they revealed earlier and earlier vintages of wallpaper, and created a time-based work of art,” Dodge explains.

When Peeled & Raw opened, the artist said “We’ve covered up beauty by letting our fears run amuck instead of dealing with issues in positive ways.”

In today’s politically inspired emotional context, this is truer than ever. And Dodge has not only transformed the panels she utilized in that previous exhibition, she has mutated the fear itself into something gestational, something from which things grow – in some cases good things.

“I took those panels and painted them to enhance the designs created through the process of people tearing, but also used spray-paint to desecrate them simultaneously. The pieces now are the walls in the back gallery, or Part 3 of the show,” Dodge relates.

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“Then, within the room I piled 13 totems, each one relating to previous installations I had done where people shared secrets, dreams, burdens or sins with me. The predominant material of each of the totems is Styrofoam, recycled from packing boxes. As I created it, what I had in mind was a place where the past doesn’t die, such as a grandmother’s home where mementos from the 30s are crowded together with the image of their newest great granddaughter on a digital photo frame. At the opening, one person remarked to me that they were ‘experience embedded in object.’ Another person related that they reminded her of ancient ruins.”

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Viewers – and it would be a mistake, perhaps, to call those who visit the exhibition merely viewers, participants is perhaps more apt – pick their way through the totems, some as tall as eight feet, to get to a blank wall.

“There they can write what haunts them on wallpaper, and glue it to the wall face down – making their own specter into a communal work of art,” Dodge reveals.

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In short, the artist is helping us to learn to live among the ghosts of our fears.

Interestingly, when people responded with their fears during Dodge’s Peeled & Raw,  particularly during the shows April 2016 revival, many had fears of the future. “At least two dozen wrote Donald Trump. And one wrote Hillary Clinton,” Dodge says.

“I burned those fears of a certain presidential candidate, along with fears of death, rape, injustice and snakes. I made glass bricks and suspended the ashes inside. My intent was to build a wall that was unlike Trump’s proposed border wall; it would be a wall we could see through, past our fears incinerated within. We could walk around the wall to find hope and joy and each other.”

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The poetry in what Dodge says is fully expressed in her art. That is perhaps one of the most striking things about this artist’s work: it is as large scale, in a visual sense, as a novel is to the written word, yet what one takes away from her installation is a kind of emotional haiku. It is a shorthand for life. Nothing more or less.

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“My art is not overtly political. It is about showing people their better selves by helping them to confront their secrets and emotions. Now more than ever, that is important for our country. This election has torn us apart. Our civil liberties face assault. The value of basic human dignity has taken a nose dive,” she asserts. “Now is the time for art to elevate, to inspire, to hold up a mirror to our country and shout, ‘Look at yourself. Is this who you really want to be?'”

Dodge has recently received a number of well-deserved accolades.
In 2016 Americans for the Arts named her installation CONFESS as one of the previous year’s outstanding public arts projects. CONFESS debuted at L.A. Pride in West Hollywood, CA, in 2015.

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“I sat in a confessional and allowed participants to share their worst sins with me. The result was not sacramental grace but a twisted penance and an anonymous typed note that detailed each transgression on a gold piece of paper. Thus absolved, at least in the eyes of art, confessors could move forward unburdened,” Dodge states. “The confession booth was within a 20-foot-square space with walls on three sides covered by black fabric. As the weekend went forward, the walls went from black to gold with people’s deepest sins revealed.”

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Dodge was also honored with two of ArtSlant’s 2016 juried winner awards, one for the installation Night Clouds, above, the other for the new media of Losing Perspective.  

“The accolades are great, but for me, success is about connection, when an artwork reaches people emotionally and mentally.”

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On Facebook Kelly Brumfield-Woods remarked about Afterfear:  “I walked away realizing we all have the same fears and it strangely made me happy.”

As Brumfield-Woods aptly notes, there is something about Dodge’s work that not only tackles our fears, but allows us to embrace them, and reveals that we are all, each of us, vessels, which, after fear, contain beauty. And that does indeed make one strangely happy.

Next up for Dodge:

January 27-29, 2017: Exhibiting at stARTup Fair LA, in Los Angeles.

April 2017: Solo show New Museum Los Gatos, in Los Gatos, California.

June 2017: Solo show MOAH: Cedar in Lancaster, California.

October 2017: Solo show A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, New York.

Afterfear runs through February 11th at HB Punto Experimental

The gallery is located at 2151 Logan Ave Section B, San Diego, California 92113

 

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Courtesy of the Artist; Peeled & Raw, Jack Burke

 

 

Dani Dodge: Honored by Americans for the Arts

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Dani Dodge is a force to be reckoned with. A supplier of light in the dark, an exposer of souls in transition, of the heart in flight. Always greatly drawn to installation work, Dodge hits all the marks of excellence: a visceral, punch-to-the-gut emotional connection; creation of an immersive world; a profound intellectual delicacy; and last but certainly not least, visual pleasure.

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Her work forms a kind of poetry that arcs from the eye to the heart to the mind. Each piece spans an intricate web, linked strongly to place – something that has always inspired me in my own fiction – and to time.

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The artist’s perception of the connection between time and location is matched by her even stronger presentation of the link between human surface and the soul within. There is a reverence for life as we know it and the life within us, the eternal.

Manifested in her materials, such as eye glass lenses and video footage of time elapsed skies, Dodge takes viewers on a journey that only she can lead. Revel in it.

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Others are hit hard by her profundity, too. Dodge has recently been recognized by Americans for the Arts, the nation’s leading nonprofit organization for advancing the arts and arts education, and has received Art Slant’s juried 2016 prizes for Round 3 and Round 5 in new media and installation, respectively.

Americans for the Arts honors 38 outstanding public arts projects created in 2015 through the Public Art Network (PAN) Year in Review program, the only national program that recognizes the most compelling public art. The works were chosen from 260 entries across the country.

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Dodge’s win is for Confess, an installation presented in 2015 at West Hollywood, Calif.’s L.A. Pride. Dodge manned a 20-square-foot confession booth with walls on three sides covered by black fabric. Dodge typed participants’ confessions on gold paper and posted them anonymously on the walls of the room, making the walls that started out black Saturday morning glitter gold with confessions by the end of L.A. Pride on Sunday night.

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Like all great public art, Dodge’s work offered what Americans for the Arts CEO Robert L. Lynch describes as “the singular ability to make citizens going about everyday business stop, think, and through the power of art appreciate a moment, no matter how brief.”

Art Slant’s juried competition honored Dodge in Round 3 for her work in new media, three beautiful and compelling videos contained in DANI DODGE, LOSING PERSPECTIVE, 2016.

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Art Slant’s Round 5 awarded  DANI DODGE, NIGHT CLOUDS, 2016, an installation which explores the natural wonder of clouds, interpreted by Dodge through a stunningly delicate weave of fishing line and copper wire, containing not rain but prescription eyeglass lenses which serve to reflect the dancing, sparkling projected images of stars, and emotionally, the viewers perceptions of night, clouds, nature, life, and our own perceptions. This site specific piece is on view through August 13th at HB Punto Experimental in San Diego.

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Dodge, is a former journalist and war correspondent whose work reflects an exploration of time spent on the battlefield. Soon to be reviewed by this blog, Art Share LA’s Flight Patterns exhibition contains another exciting piece by Dodge. A solo show of Dodge’s work Afterfear will take place at HB Punto Experimental in San Diego running December 10 through February 11, 2017. Also in 2017: solo shows of Dodge’s work at New Museum Los Gatos in Los Gatos, Calif., Museum of Art and History: Cedar in Lancaster, Calif., and at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Jack Burke, Kristine Schomaker/ShoeboxPR, and courtesy of the artist

 

BLAM! and Smack, Pow, Wow – Opening Exhibition “Concrete” is Amazing

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At last, Brooklyn and LA are united again, and it has nothing to do with the Dodgers. It’s all about the art.

Running through May 1 in DTLA,  “Concrete,” the freshman endeavor by BLAM (Brooklyn Los Angeles Meet) is a terrific showcase for artists from LA and Brooklyn.

Founder and “Concrete” curatorial coordinator David Spanbock says “With this opening show, we celebrate and reflect …16 individual artists from both East and West coasts. It is the belief that these two diverse centers of American creativity can co-exist…elements when mixed together can become something bigger, something stronger, like concrete.”

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Participating artists include Nadege Monchera Baer, Corey Bond, Paul Catalanotto, Dani Dodge, Kio Griffith, Pete Hickok, Richard Lebenson, Alise Mona Loebelsohn, Aline Mare, Alanna Marcelletti, Jesus Max, Vincent Romaniello, David Spanbock, Joe Wolek, Lena Kazakova Wolek and Alison Woods.

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Here’s a look at some of the art and some of the artists, eleven from the LA area, and 5 from NY. But don’t just read about this show, go see it.

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Alanna Marcelletti: “‘The Assumption’ is the first in a series working with ideas of home. I felt that in a shadow box you could contain the idea. The organza over the top, other fabric in the collage, I was looking for any fabric I could find, my grandmother’s nightgown, my old wedding dress. It’s a blend of architecture and psychological space, how I feel in a home. The layering in some more recent pieces aren’t as tightly strung as in this one, where it’s more like a skin. I had a baby about a year ago, and I felt as if I was channeling the changes to my body.”  The love and chaos around new motherhood is clearly a part of this beautiful work.

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David Spanbock: “All of my work is about the politics of transformation, the politics of human physics. I had the insight that a city is a collection of events and figures, creating a larger structure, and that’s what I’m working with here. I grew up outside of Manhattan but started painting in Santa Barbara.” Spanbock’s work can easily be seen in form and color as merging the east and west coasts, the prismatic like shapes capturing light and shadow.

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Dani Dodge: “My piece was originally a painting of New York. I covered it with silver paint, leaving some of the edges showing. Over the silver paint, I’m projecting a video I created out of the window of my car, driving from where I live downtown to Hollywood Boulevard. I also hand painted on the frames of 35 mm film, and converted those images to video. The hand drawn animation plays off images of the street looking at New York and LA. Los Angeles is moving and happening. I’ve tried to capture that in my piece and my joy of being a part of the LA art world.” The flow of the roadway, the bits and pieces of the original NYC scene on the edges of the current work take the viewer along for a bi-coastal ride.

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Aline Mare: “This is a transitional piece, I’m interested in the boundary between painting and photography. Growing crystals and painting them in relation to natural objects is the basis for this piece. The root, the bat wing with the crystal growing out of it…” The effect looks jeweled, translucent.

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Joe Wolek’s photography could almost be a painting, or a pastel drawing, whether he is photographing the back end of a Costco or tweakers searching for treasure in urban discard. “All this work from this series deals with found places. I don’t manipulate the image in any way. I shoot them in a long lens telephoto for compression of space, and then I stitch shots together for a wide angle view. My ‘Tweaked’ series, I have 15 pieces so far. The series is on-going, I come across these scenes and I’m not going to not include them.”

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Kio Griffith: “I’m doing a series of sculptures from poems. This is the second in the series, based on Alan Ginsberg’s ‘America.’ I call these haiku assemblages. Being half Japanese, I translate into haiku naturally. I deconstructed the Ginsberg poem to find the materials to create the piece. All the poems I work with have to do with my dad. He was a literature professor. I’m revisiting his favorites in the same way that a musical artist pays tribute to a musician.” Evocative of so many American past-times, using materials such as portions of a flag and a yoga mat, Griffith’s piece here is sinuous and exciting.

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Alison Woods: “I consider myself a cyborg artist,” she laughs. “Half computer work, half human. I do a digital version first, and then I paint, I hand-cut stencils. The layers and colors, some are spray paint, some poured.” Her works look as if they’ve flown out of a kaleidoscope. “As a graphic designer, I think of shapes and behind them, their emotive energy.”

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Lena Kazakova Wolek: “I’m working here in ink on yubo paper. The images are like my dreams, my insomnia. It’s hard to sleep here. I’m from a small town in Siberia, where night is like a vacuum, very quiet. But here, there is always something going on, I can hear my brain working and the sounds of the city, the freeway, the static energy. You cannot relax anywhere.” Her piece is about urban life and wakefulness, and what it means for her; the images dynamic and abstract, almost molecular.

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Nadege Monchera Baer: “I take a lot of photos of trash downtown. This represents that kind of image, or the image of what it would look like after an earthquake. I draw first, then just enjoy myself painting in acrylic color. I use light and bright color to depict the detritus. This is just one of a series.” Like a series of puzzle pieces, the images are meshed together, linked.

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Jesus Max: “These are very symbolic paintings. ‘The Curator’ is playing around with the word, which has the same root as a doctor, a healer, hence the medical items in the piece. ‘Bewitched’ is set in the same kitchen, it is about witchcraft, and there’s occult paraphernalia in it, including the little devil figure.” Beautifully hyper realistic, Max’s work offers pastel colors and rigorous attention to detail in a fantastic world.

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Whether it’s a kitchen, a house, a street, a root, a suburban store, an insomniac’s dreams – each of the pieces in this stellar exhibit are strongly grounded in a sense of place; this place, this city. While the New York-based artists were not present for interview, their pieces were every bit as strong, focused, and, well, ‘concrete.’

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BLAM is an on-going series of installations, with exhibitions both in LA and New York. When the inaugural exhibition ends, new shows are already planned for June and August here in the City of Angels, with a schedule of every other month expected locally.  According to Dani Dodge, an award winning installation artist active in this inaugural exhibit,  the initial show is designed to introduce the BLAM collective to the community. Visiting New York? BLAM’s East Coast edition will take place in June at the Bushwick Beaux Arts Center, and will be titled “Abstract.”

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BLAM Los Angeles is located at 1950 S. Santa Fe Ave #207, Los Angeles, CA 90021

“Concrete” will be open 1 to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays to May 1, and by appointment on weekdays.

Yes, Curate This 2, Too

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Always a treat, the group shows at The Gabba Gallery seem to pulse with more excitement every time. Curate This Part Deaux is no exception, with art -works created by some of Los Angeles’ top curators. Featuring something for virtually every artistic taste, the show takes viewers through a panopoly of vibrant, quintessentially LA art. There was a look and feel to the show that could absolutely only happen in SoCal, and only at Gabba, and only if including the work of artists whose taste aesthetics have been sharply honed as curators.

Below, book designer, collage and mixed-media artist David Brady pulls viewers into an astonishing visual quilt with his “Esperanza.”

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Highly detailed, frieze-like sculptural paintings by Nathan Cartwright tell detailed, fantastical stories. Cartwright is an LA-based mixed media artist and founder/curator of The Hive Gallery and Studios in DTLA. Feel the buzz.

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Dicapria’s glowing mixed media mandala’s are crafted from gummy bears and resin in a light box. Her back story: she travels the U.S. in a 1971 bus.

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Mitchelito Orquiola was born in the Philipines, and resides in LA. His self-taught works create a mosaic of color and line.F23C8702

So what could be more a part of the City of Angeles than Kristine Schomaker’s beautiful little convertible? The Ideal Sex (The Little Pink Corvette) drives us into the SoCal sunset on a road dotted with the sign posts of gender roles, power, and the healing community of art itself. Schomaker also runs Shoebox PR, promoting art and artists throughout the Southland.F23C8703

Baby, you can drive Schomaker’s other cool ride, too.

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Photographer Osceola Refetoff’s ethereal, sun-drenched desert and urban visions haunt and inspire. The artist takes viewers down a road not just less traveled, but one most people have never experienced before.

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Below, the delicate, precise images photographed by Shana Nys Dambrot reflect an intimate thoughtfulness. Dambrot recently curated the stellar Painting by Scott Trimble, Photography by Osceola Refetoff show at Chungking Studios in Chinatown.

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Ted Meyer’s beautiful acryllic “Woman Napping with Cat,” holds all the golden light, curves, and angles, of a Hollywood summer, kissed with expressionist flavor. Meyer is currently curating Scar Stories at Muzeumm.

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Performance and installation artist Dani Dodge creates compelling, often autobiographical and catharctic works. As a former journalist and war correspondent, she tells stories that vibrate with humanity. Collage, assemblage, and video are components of her works, below.

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Up close, these layered fragments of wallpaper compel viewers to look beneath the surface layers of life itself.

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Phil Santos co-curates Gabba Gallery with Jason Ostro. His beautifully detailed watercolor pencil rendering of Pasadena City Hall transports the image to something that could exist in Venice or Paris. Santos is currently at work on a triptych mural for Angel City Brewery. F23C8718

Gabba Gallery owner, director, and co-curator Jason Ostro contributed this brilliantly blue, intrinsically floral, and kaleidoscopic piece to the exhibition.

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Below, Juri Koll’s mixed media paper on board evoke water, light, and an unheard aural component in their patterns and colors. Koll is founder, director, and often curator at The Venice Institute of Contemporary Art, and the producer of the Fine Arts Film Festival.F23C8724

Venice artist Mark Satterlee is a self-taught traditional and digital artist working primarily in fiberglass and pigmented resin. His work below uses an assemblage of Poloroid portraits.F23C8725

Skye Amber Sweet’s pink fish float off the canvas. Love, kindness, and self-expression are the driving forces of her emotional and emotive art.

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Daniel Rolnik curated at the self-owned Daniel Rolnik Gallery, and recently hosted one of the most enjoyable booths at the LA Art Fair,  the “Kilduff’s Bakery” art installation.  Below, some of Rolnik’s cheerful, fun, and vibrant work. F23C8732

Even at the end of the night, Gabba drew appreciative viewers.

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Below, another piece by Gabba’s co-curator Phil Santos. His classic dog portraits are much sought after by collectors. F23C8742

Artist Radhika Hersey creates stunning art fantasies  based on meditation, dreams, and folklore. Her spiritually magical paintings are closely aligned with her curatorial works at Temple of Visions and the Do Art Foundation,among other venues.F23C8747

Ever versatile, Phil Santos dishes up a plate of mixed media zombie spaghetti.

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Curate This 2 runs until February 28th. The Gabba Gallery is located at 3126 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles.

F23C8751Genie Davis; all photos by Jack Burke