Above: artists and curators at Groundspace.
Closing with an artist talk on October 8th, Fantastic Feminist Figuration offers the stellar work of seven SoCal artists, all female, all unique in their perspective on women, humankind, and yes, figures. Be sure to catch this beautiful show, well-curated by Betty Brown and Wendy Sherman at Groundspace in DTLA.
The artists: Jodi Bonassi, Bibi Davidson, Enzia Farrell, Laura Larson, Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman, Tslil Tsemet, and Lauren YS weave a tapestry of often magical properties, depicting women, children, animal muses and familiars, the feminine as a force both powerful and persuasive.
Jodi Bonassi’s complex, incredibly riveting universe of characters spill from their canvasses. “I’ve been working ten hours a day, for two days at a time not sleeping for months now creating these pieces,” Bonassi relates. “The smaller pieces I used my sketches. Each person depicted is not just one photo reference, it is a mixture of people, and some live sketching, some photography. My pieces are all about the experience, the communal exhcnage that happens with people,” she explains. “They’re about the convesrations that happen and the stories people tell you. Paintings are a free hand stream of consciousness.”
In “Monkey Business,” Bonassi represents “the inner work of how people are communicating” with her charming depictions of friends in the art community.
In “Small Ones,” Bonassi bases her work on a real life encounter with children eating ice cream. She asked their parents permission to include them in a photograph on which she based her work. “There were in real life questionable guys on the corner, the homeless. I integrated that with the children. With alien scared monkeys and a clown with a knife, with animals that look violent and represent people.”
In her “Edge of the World,” the animal/human imagery blends together, creating both loving and fearsome analogies to the precarious state of our present environment. In this large, oceanic-themed painting, Bonassi expresses her “feelings that come from our current election, from bitory, from being led down a river of uncertainty. Women are on the crossroads, on the edge of the world.”
Bibi Davidson’s bright and bold colors stand out in her signature style, presenting her own frequent persona, The Girl in paintings with razor sharp looks and plenty of passion. Owls, rabbits, women – each are totemic figures, icons in a way. Davidson says her work depicts this sentiment “It’s so hard to be a woman, but thank God I am a woman and not a man.”
Enzia Ferrel’s paintings take Edgar Allan Poe and turn the stories into feminist fantasies, surreal and riveting, with animal friends passing into an ethereal other-world, and imparting their spirits here.
The bronze sculptures of Laura Larson depict animal figures at a funeral. Their beloved, perhaps human, has passed on and yet remains as a kind of counterpart to Ferrel’s take on the afterlife, to comfort. Perfectly shaped, the pieces are weighty and charming at the same time.
Tslil Tsemet’s work features snakes, breasts, cats, and sunlight – icon-like images that serve as totems against the vicissitudes of modern life.
Dierdre Sullivan-Beeman dreamy aesthetic binds humans and animals in her paintings crafted in “14th century oil and tempera mixed technique. I play off feminine innocence, and mix realistic ideology,” she asserts.
Her “Zebra Girl” is a very female take on Greek centaurs. Her “Balloon Girl” is, she says, “about dharma, the path… as opposed to karma.” Style and subject fuse into a mix of classic style and colors with a modern and subversive aesthetic.
Lauren YS’s watercolor, acrylic, and ink pieces have a dark underbelly poised on the edge of the magical, with skeletons and witch-like women taking viewers into yet another aspect of magic, dark and rich. There’s an interestingly surreal, fairy-tale like look to her work.
Regardless of the differences in their works, each of these artists presents a strong female sensibility, a connectedness to earth, light, darkness, magic, fate, roads traveled and those not taken, friendship, connection and alienation. In short: the humane experience embraced by the feminine divine.
Curator’s Talk/Closing Reception on Saturday, October 8 from 4-6 p.m.
- Genie Davis; Photos: Jack Burke