Kerrie Smith Provides Fabulous Fecund Beauty with Flora Ficciones and More At Gallery 825

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The immersive experience of Kerrie Smith’s work in Portals and Pathways, at LAAA’s 825 Gallery through December 1st, is one that is both delicately beautiful and intimate.

The exhibition takes viewers on a journey inspired by Smith’s own daily walks along More Mesa in Santa Barbara. It’s a literal and emotional garden of delights that stretches from floor to ceiling with gauzily floating banners forming a kind of forest, printed with images of Smith’s paintings and sheer fabric with the lovely words of the artist’s own poetry.

The poetry was imprinted using hand-stamped wooden blocks that Smith carved. Both hanging, and positioned like small pools of nature on the floor, circular photographic images of the More Mesa’s wildlife and plants offer a joyous glimpse into Smith’s inspiration. Adding to the immersive quality of the viewing experience is an audio component recorded by the artist, providing the sounds of chittering animals and birds, wind, and ocean waves.

The artist says she’s inspired by “California light and the interaction of color,” and that she has a “passion for patterns in nature.” In her exhibited poetry she describes the nature around her – birds, butterflies, flowers, as containing a “quiet joy” that brings them “contentment and peace within their worlds.” These words could also describe the sensation of viewing her paintings.

Entering the gallery, it’s immediately striking how beautifully Smith captures the natural light she loves. The banners, interspersed with small, circular hanging discs that depict her photographs of nature, as well as the artist’s portal-like circular photographs on the floor of mandala-like stones, sand, and grasses, all contribute to a sense of the ethereal. Texturally, of course, the banners are “floating” from the ceiling; sunlight spills in the gallery windows. But like a fine cut-glass prism or natural gemstone, the light is refracted in and reflected through, Smith’s art.

“More Mesa,” she writes on one banner, “There is so much happening it could be called a field of dreams. It always surpasses our imagination.”

As beautiful as this experience is, it’s only the start. Smith’s artworks, a mix of circular and more conventional shapes, offers viewers a vivid palette and a details delicate brush, as she literally pulls the eye and heart into plants and flowers. The work is both sensual and magical, a lush combination that evokes the Eden that Smith has found near her home of 28 years through the prism of her brush.

In short, her paintings bring the mesa she loves so much to vibrant life, as she records and experiences them on her walks in nature.

Smith’s 24-inch circular wood panel, “Bellum Natura,” deftly blends acrylic and mixed media with gold leaf, the latter heightening the sense of the preciousness of the flora. Here, a vivid purple flower is the centerpiece of a swirl of greens and golds, with lines and shadows that evoke the sea-close location.

From the same series, her Flora Ficciones, comes the acrylic painting “Deena Dallancia Desconsita,” a dazzling pink and yellow sea plant surrounded by dark yet radiant blue water and nearly translucent pale green fronds of sea lettuce.

A combination of acrylic with mixed media, “Clytie Girasol Galaxis” is a glorious rust orange flower with a purple and gold center, surrounded by yellow/green blossoms, and what resembles floating orbs of yellow light, or a magnified seed pod, carried by air. A similar flower, but this image a startlingly deep pink, is aswirl on circular wood panel in “Carpos Medea.”

The titles of each piece are derived from the ancient Greek – for example, Clytie means glorious. They also recall Greek myths. Clytie was a water nymph who fell in love with Apollo, keeping her eyes always upon him as he moved through the sky. She was transformed and became a sunflower, always turning toward the glowing sun.

Each of these works are special, both for their color and depth, and for their luminous beauty. These paintings are Smith’s true poems and tributes to the nature she loves, a reverent tribute, to the earth we so often fail to appreciate – but which Smith cares about and for quite deeply.

If you can’t see this special show in person, visit many of her images online . Smith will also have one of her Flora Ficciones “Calendula Asterales,”  as part of the Sullivan Gross Gallery’s annual holiday exhibition starting December 4th, with a reception on the 7th. Sullivan Gross is located in Santa Barbara.

  • Genie Davis; images provided by gallery, artist, and by Genie Davis

 

Soar Through a Cloud Renewal with Karen Hochman Brown

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Karen Hochman Brown’s solo exhibition Cloud Renewal, now at Gallery 825 in Los Angeles is a transcendent exhibition created while the artist was sheltering in place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using her photographic images of flowers,  waves and clouds that she alters and merges, she presents three distinct and beautiful series.

The first presents larger scale works titled by where sky and clouds were photographed and the name of flowers she merges with these views, selected from her own garden. Each is a mounted, shiny acrylic print with a protective layer.

“Dusk on Honolua Bay With Roses” is one such work, vibrating with pink and gold shades against sections of blue sky, and darker cloud arising like streams of smoky incense at the center top of the work.

Her “Twilight in Ojai with Magnolia” is equally evocative, but here, there is less of the recognizable burnished gold sunset, which has instead become like glowing orbs, or a mysterious lamp suspended within a mauve-toned, gentle, near-evening sky. “Sunset in Tel Aviv With Orchid” transforms the flowers depicted to white shadowy filaments of the blossoms, making them dance together like faeries or angels.

Making a deeper dive into a world she could not then visit physically, she created the mixed media series “In the Bubble,” once again focusing on clouds viewed on her travels in the past. These smaller works allowed Hochman Brown to experiment in medium, using resin to create smaller works that are as experimental and experiential in technique as they are in image. At 10 x 10 x 2, these works are like small jewels, or their own permanent bubbles of light and magic cloud. There is the silvery blue of “In the Bubble Maui,” the seashell-like shape of “In the Bubble Galapagos, the lively orange, blue, and white mixed with gold of “In the Bubble Mexican Riviera.” She captures a vivid sense of place within each work, in her shapes, colors, and patterns. For example, her “In the Bubble Home” provides a richly recognizable orange, pink and blue sky – the color of fall sunsets over Los Angeles.

Later in her year in relative confinement, Hochman Brown and her husband wintered in Kauai, Hawaii. There she says that she brought her cloud panoramas essentially down to earth, “where the sky meets the ocean and earth…anchoring them to the horizon line.”

These works are presented on wood panels and on fabric tapestries. Where her other two exhibited series offer a focus that is sky/clouds/floral images or sky and clouds alone, here she creates full realized worlds, magical places veiwers can feel connected to. Along with the lush dark green palms and island shrubbery in “Bananas,”  there are radiant pink, white and gold flowers with banana-like curves emanating  from the vivid golden yellows of their stamens, a fully realized flower resting within a green globe sitting on the heart of the island which reflects downward into a glassy sea.

“Parting” provides the viewer with three golden orbs, a dark gold and inky colored seat which wraps around these balls, clearly the last of a glorious sunset what has set fire to the clouds and charred the ocean with its light. “Loopy” is a meditative, transfixing image in which swirls of blue sea form ribbons and arcs around a luminous pink, mandala-like center. “Welcome” shapes a vivid near-chartreuse green and deep rose watery portal – with hints of orange flaming wave – around a rocky shore line and a cloud dotted, still glowing sky. In the middle of this portal rises a full moon. “Breathe” offers a shape within a rectangular shape, reminiscent of a pillow. On this restful place foamy ocean spray rises; the sky and clouds have a lighter pink cast than Hochman Brown’s fiery sunsets.

Also a part of the gallery exhibition are two looping videos, each exuding magic and mysticism. Both were inspired by her residency in Kauai as well. “Meditation” gives us a stunning seascape with soothing ocean waves crashing to shore, and the only sound is that of the sea itself.  In “Respiration,” the ocean is contained with a portal shape, rising and falling white and blue and darker midnight colored waves flow like a perfect breath, while behind it, a sensuous, sinuous colorful background unfolds. The soundtrack is both delicately musical and the sound of waves.

The gracefully exhibited gallery room is well-curated, creating a highly sensorial world of intense visual beauty that connects the color and sense of motion in all the artist’s work from video images to her luminous clouds “In the Bubble.” The artist never disappoints. Breathe in the beauty.

Cloud Renewal is ready to renew you through October 28th, reward yourself with a visit – by appointment – at 825 N La Cienega Blvd. There will be an artists’ talk on the 21st at 11 a.m.

Also at the gallery: Peter Hiers new exhibition Burning Question features a body of work made from tire fragments he finds along highways; Ted Rigoni‘s Bygone Patterns represents a contemporary artistic presentation of the Mojave’s remains; and Sean Young offers profound mixed media work in TOUCHING THE TRUESELF WITHIN deals with The Four Noble Truths. 

  • Genie Davis; images provided by the artist

Three Solo Shows Shine at LAAA Gallery 825

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Three fine solo exhibitions and one eclectic curated group show shine at LAAA’s Gallery 825 this month.

In Gallery One,  Alison Woods solo exhibit Metaclysmic abstraction in the virtual age, reveals the truth of how Woods’ describes her work as that of “an alchemist.” Layered, intricate, and sublimely interlocking shapes grace both of her large-scale works, one a mosaic green and serpentine, the other a sci-fi scene rooted on Mars (above).  A smaller work shines with gold, futuristic and evocative of both natural wealth and the accumulation of the unnatural variety, affecting life on earth.  A sculptural piece combines detritus from coffee shop bags to Kleenex in a floating, stalactite shape that also speaks to the human state.

While she delves into the Jungian and technological in all four of these fascinating works, the result in each and overall in the exhibition space is the rewarding creation of a kind of visionary landscape that layers past beliefs and visions with a strange and scintillating map of tomorrow.

Maya Kabat fills the middle gallery’s space in an immersive fashion, with some works positioned at eye level, while others reside close to the floor. Her geometric, sculptural abstract oils use supports and wood panels to shape Super Spatial, an exhibit that expands beyond the gallery’s own spatial constraints to create a body of floating, shifting architecture.

Vivid in palette and intriguingly faceted in line, this multi-surfaced exhibition seems to contain oceans and sunsets within its compelling box-like shapes.

Speaking of color…Seda Saar creates exceptional, glowing rainbows in the third gallery, with her show In Revelations: Seeing Light. Saar offers rainbow towers; vivid yellow and sienna prisms that replicate a rising or setting sun; and a sensual midnight blue in a half-raindrop shape, with a silvery mirror at its heart. There is a crescent moon that reflects a second planet, a series of color bright connected ovals, and a double reflective oval, opalescent in tone.

Spiritual and visceral, Saar’s delightful work lights up with mystic beauty.

 

In the north gallery, curator Cynthia Penna presented a juried group show titled SUPERSENSE. A suspended, jeweled hexagon by Espe Harper is one of a variety of works exploring (either? both?) “tactile presentation or fetishism” as the exhibition describes its theme. There were colorful flowered bustiers and shadowy profiles, candy cool hyperrealism from Lauren Mendelsohn-Bass, and a bright melting lollipop from J’Attelier.

All exhibitions will be on view through September 15th. LAAA is located at 825 N. La Cienega in West Hollywood. Open 10 to 5 Monday-Saturday by appointment.

  • Genie Davis, photos by Genie Davis

 

Can You Fear and Adore Flowers? Artist Susan Melly Provides Answers in New Work at LAAA

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   In a way, who isn’t afraid, just a little bit, of flowers? We may fear their incredible fragility, of losing them to an all-too-quick death, to knowing their perfection is ephemeral and their beauty so temporary – an aching reminder of our own mortality.
   However, for artist Susan Melly in her new Emerging Fear of Flowers now at LAAA ‘s Gallery 825 in West Hollywood, her emerging fear was something different, risen from over two years of COVID-19 pandemic isolation. During that time period, Melly’s husband brought her a weekly bouquet of flowers from an open air market. As her own statement informs viewers “As my anxiety blossomed, my art making changed and became more abstract and colorful to ward off my dark feelings. Each work is embedded with a hint of humor – and the number 19 – as an homage to coping mechanisms, even as familiar sources of comfort counterintuitively transform into a strange beauty that is tinged with the edge of the unknown.”
   After about a year of receiving the flowers, despite the loving intention of bringing beauty and romance to her life, she began to ask hereslf if she would be “condemned” to receiving the flowers every single Friday for the rest of her life, indicating that the pandemic would never end. The blossoms blossomed – into increased anxiety, alleviated through her art. As viewers we can witness this progression in her new body of work, and revel in its layers, as fragile-seeming as flowers themselves.
   The works of course make use of Melly’s signature use of vintage tissue paper dress patterns, something that she terms an “integral part of my practice and personal history…” As a mixed media artist, the LA-based Melly creates work that includes paintings, assemblage-based sculptures, and installations. In this latest body of work, there is a powerful new energy as these flowers morph with the artist, spin discs on an old Victrola record player, weep, rail in anger, whine in frustration, sing, and seethe.  Do flowers mourn their entrapment in bouquets? Do they discuss day to day travails as they grow in the garden, rage and wish to curse those who pick them? While we may never know, here Melly certainly posits that they might.
   Within the primarily paint and mixed media on canvas works are a variety of sculptural pieces.  While some stand alone, a vintage sewing machine, a male figure bearing flowers, “Hanging Out,” is a wall scupture. It emerges like a being encased in and protruding from the wall itself,  a partial mannequin entrapped despite a glowing heart and uterus at its center, sheathed and layered with the dress patterns.
   The titular “Emerging Fear of Flowers” is a colorful mix of the tissue patterns, acrylic, and art paper on canvas.  While a hand holds a cocktail glass in the right corner, center stage is an alien looking three pronged flower that seems to have grown eyes, and one prong is looking and leaning and reaching ominously toward that hand. The viewer can’t help but think of Little Shop of Horrors and Audrey, that musical’s violently sentient plant.  It is a large work, vibrant with indigo and burgandy; the human hand, however, is so white it could easily belong to a person confined from the sunlight in which these flowers gained a robust if menacing vitality.
   Melly’s “Cut Stems” also makes use of the tissue dress patterns combined with acrylic.  These highly geometric flowers have sharp edged like wind mills and are exhibiting just emerging facial features.
   With “Enter Covid,”  what’s blossoming here appears to be the shape of COVID itself, entering via a kind of conduit into an abstract human vessel.  Layers of white on white recall bandages, sheets, and fog, as if a ghostly landscape now enveloped us all.

   Quoting Charles Baudelaire with the title “Evil Comes up Softly Like a Flower,” Melly uses acrylic, charcoal, and dress patterns to make one of the most ominous, yet still amusing, paintings in this series. Here, flowers have teeth and raging faces.

But they are comfortably more relatable in “Dandelion Wine,” in which a dandelion tears out its seeds in frustration.

And we can feel intense empathy for the sad blooms in works such as “Un-Still Life,” in which a lavendar, daisy-like flower has thorns and weeps purple blooded tears.

   In another work, the artist herself melds or morphs into a flower, a pale periwinkle and peacefully meditative one, in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Lotus.” Surrounded by a geometric abstract patterns, the figure is part statue, part flower, absorbed fully in the act of blooming, yet trapped in stillness.

   Perhaps, we can hope that our time in pandemic shut down can allow us to achieve a similarly mesmerized state. Viewing Melly’s delicate, lovely, and unsettling works may just have that effect.
   Melly’s work is beautifully paired with the light-based blend of Richard Slechta’s photography and art, Incompressible Flow; Chris Madens’ glowy dimensional assemblies, The Covid Kiss; and a group show, Felicitious,  an all-media compilation depicting the current zeitgeist.
   The exhibition is on view through June 24th. Gallery 825 is located at 825 N. La Cienega.  Melly is offering curated visits; the gallery is also open by appointment at other times, reach out at gallery825@laaa.org.
Genie Davis – images provided by the artist