Playground of Art – Vojislav Radovanović at Walter Maciel Gallery

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Playful, provocative, grand, and just plain fun – that’s Playground at the Abandoned Chapel. This is his first solo exhibition at Walter Maciel Gallery. Serbian born/Southern Californiabased artist Vojislav Radovanović previously exhibited a variety of works at the gallery’s fine Future Patchwork, a group exhibition curated by Annie Seaton last summer.

Before describing the wonders of this Playground, it’s more than worth noting that it is a big departure from the artist’s delicate, spiritual, almost ethereal work in a solo exhibition at Diana Berger Gallery, ORNITHOMANCY, with its almost-holy references to nature, the universe, and the spiritual. In that exhibition, color palette often focused on silver, blue, grey, black, and mirrored or liquid surfaces. But it, too, like this exhibition, featured a mixed media exploration of both human light and darkness.

Playground at the Abandonded Chapel offers a wild circus ride of color and desolation combined, one that reflects Radovanovic’s recent year-long desert residency at the Museum of Art & History in Lancaster. His love for both the dusty landscape and broken or abandoned structures — so many dreams come to the desert and fade away – shows in these works. So, too does his fascination with a specific old gym, the remains of a burnt-out school, it’s arches chapel-like, but covered with vivid graffiti, discards, and trash.

That specific setting is used in a site specific video projected in the back gallery, with scattered toys and discarded objects like computer parts and safety cones strewn on the floor in front of the projection. The viewer is invited to watch both the projection unfold and how its images look when viewed through or around these objects, adding a vibrant textural and sculptural element to the video.

The video itself stars playright and performing poet Robert Patrick, in a tour de force performance singing and reciting his own poems and excerpts from an unpublished play.  Whether viewers start with this experience or conclude their visit to the gallery with a view, it serves as a perfect background to the acrylic paintings in the main room.

The main gallery also includes site-specific elements, such as the pink arches painted on the gallery’s white walls, reflecting the form of the abandonded gymnasium depicted in the video. The acrylic paintings themselves are fantasy personified, but grounded in themes of redemption, the kind that can only be achieved by reconciling losses and finding new meaning through them. It is a glorious vision, filled with both whimsical elements and darkness.

There are strong references to the war-torn backdrop of his Serbian childhood in the former Yugoslavia, as well as to consumerism, political anger, personal anguish, and the relentless march of history. How do we reconcile the childhood innocence of toys and play with the detritus of war? How do we reshape our own destiny after loss, after childhood innocence is forced to end?

Referencing the often harsh reality of the Southern California landscape – from wildfires to climate change, as well as the rubble of war, and the personification of ourselves, our battles, and our hopes and fears, the visual subject may be toys, but the themes are much deeper. Godzilla,  clear plastic robots, an accordian-playing monkey clown, and more fill canvasses as intricate, ominous and absorbing as any dark fairy story. The brilliant pinks, greens, oranges, and blues belie clouds of smoke and broken buildings.

“…and That’s How it Happened,” is a truly wonderful work, in which a grinning clear robot toy looks on at a simply, thickly painted depiction of money going down a housefront that also features a fast-food burger, and a camera. The “end” of this visual story is this: a house broken asunder, a rainbow of dark smoke issuing from it, a bird escaping from it, a small rainbow horse looking on. This disaster may have begun on a child’s playground, but it concluded in real loss and corporate greed.

“And now a word from our new spokesperson, Richard, with breaking news” features a two headed red T-Rex monster with a post-it note reading “Breaking News.” Another post-it reads “Only philosophy can save you now.”  It’s funny and horrible and true – likely coming soon to TMZ.

Some of my favorite works are perhaps the softest: in the large-scale triptych “Europa,” a blonde cherub in circus garb rides a blue rocking-horse-like pony through a sky filled with stars.  She is the central figure in the triptych, the two sides of which feature silhouettes of a helicopter and an airplane, both toys and ominous fellow residents of the sky in which she rides.

“Everyday Balancing Act” gives us a muscular strong man riding a white horse balanced on a striped ball across a golden wire. Clouds rise in ghostly puffs around a foggy grey mountain backdrop. This may be a very brave man, playfully conquoring a desolate landscape, or it is simply the way we all live, day in and day out, on the precarious edge of getting by.  “Star Wrangler” is just that – a lavendar-clad cowboy lassoing stars, gracious, happy, riding his horse with aplomb. Be the star wrangler.

This is exciting, resonant, fascinating work, an exhibition one can breeze through and simply enjoy for the colors, the toys, the embedded collage elements; or one in which you can consider its implications, the fears for humanity, the hope for the future, the joy and the terror that happens on playgrounds, in war, and in life on this planet, in this city, in its lost desert dreamscapes, today.

Go see it and consider how this world plays. The exhibition runs through February 25th. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11-6.

  • Genie Davis, photos provided by the artist, and Genie Davis

Ornitomancy – Omens Add Up to Beautiful Art

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As always, infused with poetry, spirit, and magic, the works by Vojislav Radovanović in his new solo exhibition assuredly dazzle. Curated by Jason Jenn, Radovanovic’s ORNITHOMANCY, now at Diana Berger Gallery through the 29th, is a resonant and rather astonishing blend of despair and joy. 

Overwhelmingly, joy triumphs, but there is acknowledgement of the precariousness of the natural beauty the artist celebrates, a poignancy to the hope in his shining stars and soaring birds. 

The title refers to these birds, as ornithomancy is the ancient practice found in numerous global cultures of reading omens from the actions of birds.  And the portents they present on the wing here are richly wrought, acknowledging both troubled times and the ways in which we, like Radovanovic’s avian messengers, have the chance to fly through them, and choose a new route through the world. But it’s our choice. We may accept and embrace this chance or discard it.

Unfolding in a beautifully laid-out series of gallery rooms, ORNITHOMANCY is a fully immersive exhibition offering a throughline of wonder despite the bleak urbanity that also surfaces in this show. But that bleakness is one which Radovanovic encourages the viewer to both acknowledge and transcend. 

In “Wasteland,” a free-standing mixed media installation encompassing paint and ink, barren trees, paint cans, cement, broken glass, broken mirror, paper, and a collection of found wire, feathers, glass jars, and shells, as well as miscellaneous thrift store finds, the viewer is presented with a conundrum. These are desolate objects contained in this installation, but nonetheless they’re beautiful, graceful, and moving to observe. 

Curated in at an angle but still in juxtaposition, “Rising from the Ashes III” brings us the hope culled from our observation of that eloquent “Wasteland.” This is a flat out beautiful piece, combining acrylic paint with elements ranging form ink and feathers to silver thread and plastic beads, creating a rich tapestry both fanciful and alchemic. Wings spread wide, stars trailing across the wall like the discarded flowers of a celestial garden, there’s a struggle here, as well as an ultimate sense of rising victory.

Directly behind the mid-gallery “Wasteland, ” the fierce blue and lustrous silver of “Ancient Wanderers,” is also a mix of acrylic paint, silver leaf, and peaslescent push pins. The work also features beautiful paper stars created from old road maps, as if showing us the way through our struggle. These birds are leading us somewhere that the sky is still clear and the air is sweet, and the road ahead literally papered with stars.

Delicately painted, the ribbons crisscrossing the sky and trees of “Migrations” leads us to believe that we may have to move our nests to find succor. This is such a beautiful work, a hinged canvas surface that is reminsicent of an unfolded icon in a 13th century church. This may be meaningful: birds are also angelic here, highly spirtual in their visualization. As a side note, many of the rounded tops of canvases, backgrounds, or cut-out materials throughout the exhibition recall vestibules for saints in ancient churches.  This may be a factor in the reverential quality that the viewer can feel in these gallery spaces.
It’s hard to convey the strange and liquid loveliness of “Prophecy,” works contained in glass aquariums, with water, ink and acrylic on paper. They are literally and figuratively submerging. Behind these small, wet dioramas, rises a large scale projection of a beautiful video installation, “Parable (The Wanderers), ”  images by Radovanovic and music by Joseph Carrillo.  The two installations are located in the gallery’s projection room.
Moving out of the projection room, our feathered friends reveal a far darker cast in “Omen,” in which a red-eyed bird  – his eye splendidly beaded – carries a pen in his talons,  that pen dripping ink. What has been written, and what can still be erased?
The large-scale “Sublimination” is almost a resolution of the dark and light elements here. Working with materials including paint, plywod, abandonded tires, thorny branches, and even a deer antler,  here the road-map-stars seem to have led us as far as we can go. Still, the winged figure behind the tire appears haloed, perhaps offering a kind of harsh salvation.
And yet — is this really our pre-designed, foretold path?
There is so much luminosity here – the use of silver leaf, thread, and other shiny materials, the anguish of a reaching, doll-like child clutching a feather in “Oracle,” with a bird flying above the silver-leaf covered portal, feathers cast across it; aching with a sorrowful meaning. Equally glowing, and far brighter is the innocence of a visually dynamically colored child on a trike riding on a path through the stars in “Starry Ride.” Has the child, in his innocence, found the way out of the wasteland?
Ask yourself questions, trace the enigmatic and beautiful paths in the exhibition. Truly the best way to describe the experience – and it is that, an experience – of viewing this exhibition, is to return to the idea of wonder.
We may wonder dark thoughts, hope for good omens, rise like the birds, cast feathers to ritual, but the inherent wonder in simply being alive, the magic of foretelling, prophecy, and prayer – is embedded everywhere in these astonishing, utterly fresh works. Perhaps noone but Radovanovic could create so much of a passion play, a tour-de-force visual theater in which the viewer is waiting, waiting for something to uplift, to resonate. And the wait will not take long.

There is such an enormity to both the quality and quantity of the work here. It’s grand and gorgeous, at turns ominous and even doomed. But in the end there is a sense of glory, the possibility, at least, that by listening to the visual song of these beautiful birds, we too shall rise and head skyward, migrating to Radovanovic’s winged Heavens. A big bravo to both Radovanovic and to Jenn’s powerful curation that shapes the story of these works.

Go on, drive out (or fly) to Walnut and see for yourself. Diana Berger Gallery is located at 100 N. Grand Ave., Walnut, CA 91789 on the Mt. San Antonio College campus.

Gallery hours are limited: Tuesday & Wednesday: 11am-2pm, Thursday: 1-4pm.

Curator & Artist Walkthrough: Thursday, September 8, 1pm;  Special Hours: Saturday, September 24th: 1-4pm

​Gallery contact: (909)274-4328 / (909) 367-4586; to schedule an exhibition tour, please email Phoebe Millerwhite, pmillerwhite@mtsac.edu

  • Genie Davis; exhibition photos provided by the artist and curator