When Art Is Magic – The Arcade of Hypermodernity

Posted on by Diversions LA

“Oh Sandy, the aurora is risin’ behind us/ This pier lights our carnival life on the water…” – Bruce Springsteen

Now at Studio Channel Islands Art Center in Camarillo through, July 27th, curators Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanovic create a new kind of carnival life, one that offers its own bright aurora, an interactive world that morphs technology into magic and the rush of modern life and angst into a spiritual and sensual experience.

Exhibiting artists CARLOS LUNA JAMES,  CHENHUNG CHEN, CHRIS TOWLE, EDWIN VASQUEZ, EUGENE AHN, GIRLACN, GREGORY FRYE, IBUKI KURAMOCHI, ISMAEL DE ANDA III, JASON HEATH, JASON JENN, JEFF FROST, JENNIE E PARK, JODY ZELLEN, JOSEPH CARRILLO, KAREN HOCHMAN BROWN, LESLIE FOSTER, LIBERTY WORTH, MATTHEW PAGOAGA, R SKY PALKOWITZ, and VOJISLAV RADOVANOVIĆ each shape a miraculous exhibition that invites viewers to partake of a literal art arcade, touching, playing, dancing, and yes, even inhaling the scent of the art.

It’s a pure wow of an exhibition, one that vibrates with energy, a passion for perfromance, romance, the ridiculous, and the sublime. Just as I struggled to decide where to start when wandering through this treasure trove of an exhibition, I also struggle now with how best to describe an experience that is meant to be – experienced.

The curators aptly describe the show as a “vibrant playground of ideas, focusing on the intersection of art, technology, and imagination….it explores the limits of human capability and what is now possible and in a state of major change within this new era of life globally connected online, and the evolution of artificial intelligence.”

And does it ever explore. Equal parts fantasy and futuristic window, the show is visually dazzling but also robustly meaningful. What does it mean to be human? To feel, enjoy, experience? What does it mean to think without being told what to think or how to behave? What does it mean to feel one’s humanity without conforming to political or social structures that limit or lie? How will technology change us, how has it already? Where are we going, and where have we been?

It’s a carnival of art, and a circus of ideas.  Some works are sculptural, as are Chenhung Chen’s flowering burst of wire and cable and found objects, “Currents.”

Some are sculptural forms that move, changing in multi-colored lights, mixing a traditional toy that evokes a carnival kiddie ride with fantastical portraiture, as does Vojislav Radovanovic’s take on car culture, “Phantom Traffic I (The Collectors), Phantom Traffic II (Library Girl), and Phantom Traffic III (West Coast Vibes).”

There are steampunk extravaganzas that twist and turn from Chris Towle, whose five elaborate and engaging works here include a silicone film prop, “Kraken,” and a crazy cool clockwork-type piece, “Teatime Movement.”

Edwin Vasquez offers an interactive, mixed media “Shooting Range” that also serves as a trenchant commentary on American gun fetishism.

Gregory Frye’s dazzling fiber optics and mixed media work, a freestanding fortune-telling creature called “Frank Fortune” seems ready to walk out of the gallery, even as it dazzles the eye and the spirit.

Girlacne’s “Body Électrique” wall art is a sinuous mix of LED, wire, and zip ties that undulates with light and shadow.

Ibuki Kuramochi’s ” Eggscapes” gives viewers a mystical VR metaverse to plunge inside – and then rehatch from within.

At the June 1st opening, we were also able to view a stunning performance art and dance from Kuramochi, performed outdoors to a rapt audience.

Her sense of visual poetry embodied themes of birth, rebirth, loss, and revival, all relevant to the exhibition itself.

 

Presenting a terrific, riveting series of altnerating images, Ismael de Anda III & Eugene Ahn use video projection, AR, and a vinyl dance floor to spin their “Dancing Wu-Li Masters.”

Jason Jenn’s lush, fecund “Ye Ol’ Factory Station (Homage to Sir Joseph Paxton),” includes elements scented with essential oils that conjur up forests and fantasies.

Karen Hochman Brown’s “Circuitry” offers a geometric display of digital frames and cords that resemble luminous eyes.

SKY Palkowitz’ “ALIEN ARCADE UFP Unidentified Flying Pyramid – Classified: Pleiades Starship 444 – Codename: Elohim,” invites viewers to stand beneath this mysterious shape, and view its black-lit and transportive interior.

There are mysterious and magical video works from Leslie Foster, and the vivid palette of Jeff Frost…

…a motion-activated low-tech piece from Jennie E. Park…

a thought-provoking digital “film strip” from Jodi Zellen.

Viewers also get to explore Joseph Carrillo’s musically driven “The Arcade Fantasy,” as well as Mathew Pagoaga’s exciting video game-centered, multiple installation “Trust.”

Carlos Luna James superb and transformative “OPTIMUS” AR activation,  one of two dynamite pieces the artist has here, is an innovative mind-blower. Take a look below:

And these are by no means every piece on display. Each work and each artist offers something quite wonderful, strange, special, and unique – you will not see these works elsewhere. If you saw the DTLA-recreation of Luna Luna Amusement Park, originally created in Germany by seminal artists of that time,  you could easily imagine The Arcade of Hypermodernity as such a revered classic of the future. It’s spectacular, and just a whole lot of fun.

While this exhibition pays tribute to the idea and reality of arcades and midways, it also serves as an homage to this quintessential moment in time, one in which our creativity, our humanity, our playfulness, are all on the verge of great change. There is the expansive possibility of technology, and conversely the dulling of our capacity for connectivity and intimacy through its remoteness.  Can we embrace great change without it forever changing us? How much have we changed already, and become hybrids of the human and the inhuman as the price of simply staying alive? How can our creativity, the root from which our humanity springs, still define us?

Walk through this arcade and you’ll find hope, happiness, and as many questions as answers. You’ll find the magic that makes art live and the art that makes the magic. Now go wave a wand, or get on the freeway – whatever works for you – and go see this show. “Frank Fortune” is waiting to tell your future.

Studio Channel Islands Art Center is located at 2222 Ventura Blvd, in Camarillo. For hours, schedule of artist’s talks and other activations, as well as directions, click here.  

  • Written by Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

 

Artist Arezoo Bharthania Welcomes Viewers to A Home in the Inbetween

Posted on by Diversions LA
Arezoo Bharthania’s evocative mixed media solo exhibition, A Home in the In-Between, is both delicate and layered. As skillfully curated by Jason Jenn at LA Art Core in Little Tokyo, the exhibition is divided into three distinct areas: hanging panels, which viewers can walk between, like scrolls that tell the story of both Bharthania’s childhood, early adulthood, and current life; similarly unfolding narrative pieces that flow from ceiling to floor, fringed at the bottom, recalling exquisite Persian rugs; and projected images exhibited in muted twilight, and viewed at least in part, through clear, etched panels. Linking each of these spaces is a section of  nuanced and delicate works of wall art which resemble sections of a quilt or pieces of beautiful wallpaper.
The combination of curated spaces leads the viewer from one room to another, just as you would pass between the rooms of a home. But the home here is a dream-like one, composed of memories and plans, present reality and past sensations.
As the artist leads viewers from her recalled life in Iran to her life here in LA, her personal story reflects a broader one, a uniquely human experience of emotion and sensation, observation and understanding, envirorments both interior and external. It is the unfolding and expansion of roots and the blossoming of the future on the fertile garden of the past.
The exhibition allows the viewer time to take in the full view of her emotional, physical, and remembered home spaces. Viewers are invited not just to see but to explore Bharthania’s carefully explored territory, which she depicts through painted images, photographic depictions, and a range of tactile materials.
This is a graceful show, immersive but delicately so, shaping personal images of home, and with the artist’s projected images, a more urban and global one.  What makes a home? For Bharthania is it is heart and soul, the colors of her world, from lime green to gold and pink, vibrant and personal, and moving into her images of cityscapes, a world that can be more muted and distant, a way to process, perhaps, the urban noise.
Throughout the world and throughout time, home is a place we live, we inhabit, we at least try to make in our own image – a safe refuge. It is a place in which we long for a life outside its walls and equally yearn for the succor of, or at least the hope for, sustenance that we find within them.
There is intimacy and immediacy in Bharthania’s work, and there is also a view out the windows of her metaphorical home so to speak, a look at the broader world, and the passage of time.
The artist shares beauty and wistfulness, the fragile nature of the past, the permanence of personal roots, and the restlessness of urban life, all while acknowledging the constructs of home from beyond the personal to a grander, broader, more social view.
This lovely exhibition closes Sunday, with a curatorial and artist walk through conducted by Jenn and Bharthania at 3 p.m. The gallery is open 12-4 Thursday-Sunday.  LA Art Core is located at 120 Judge John Aiso St,. Los Angeles, CA 90012.
– Genie Davis, Photos: Genie Davis

Prime Territory at MOAH Cedar

Posted on by Diversions LA

Through January 22nd at MOAH Cedar in Lancaster, Dani Dodge holds forth with an installation that soars as widely and wildly as a desert sky. Prime, like many of the artist’s exhibitions, is immersive. So much so here, in fact, that viewers might almost catch a whiff of desert sage andthe fragrance of a Joshua Tree in bloom.

The exhibition, which fills all three galleries at Cedar, is comprised of three parts.  The main room is layered with translucent panels, on which Dodge has created gold leaf and delicately painted acrylic work depicting an ephermeral, mirage-like shimmer of desert images. The experience is a walk-through installation, with viewers able to walk behind and within the panels. Adding to the experiential nature is a soundtrack of cello music the artist created herself and recorded sounds of desert animals at dawn.

Along with the gauzy painted panels, a sculptural form created from a twisted mattress spring hangs in the center of the gallery, with the panels waverying around it. It stands as a kind of monument to how human inhabitants intrude on the quiet grace of the desert, and how the desert itself may banish that habitation in its own good time. 

The artist has provided pencils and slips of paper on which to write what types of places bring them peace – as the desert brings piece to Dodge. Safety pins are also provided so that viewers can pin what they’ve written, adding them to their thoughts to the exhibition itself.

 

Across the hall,  Dodge displays images from three separate bodies of work, as seen above. These include a quite wonderful video installation of desert animals captured during her 2019 artist-in-residence stay at the Prime Desert Woodland Preserve in Lancaster. Here we see animals from jackrabbits to coyotes and desert mice as they come and go during the night.  Also on display is a wonderful, glowing collection of painted gold leaf and photography that was part of an earlier exhibition held at Black Rock Gallery in Joshua Tree.

The artist’s love for the shape, form, and fragility of the Joshua Tree is resurrecting. Dodge is intent on helping to preserve the land, creating a sense of hope that with her passion directed at preserving them, these wonderful living flora can survive man’s worst intentions. There is also a second recovered metal mattress spring displayed in this gallery, its form twisted by nature and time after being discarded in the desert.  

If you love the desert, love immersive finely wrought art, or simply want to experience desert wonder without trudging through the sand, Dodge’s exhibition is a must-see. The fine spiritual sense of her work here is both uplifting and poignant, speaking to the ruthlessness of human contact on the desert, the fragility of the desert itself, and the ways in which we can help to preserve it, if we love those aqua skies and golden sands, those brown hills and small brown creatures that inhabit them, those glorious, uplifted arms of the Joshua, and the land’s spectacular, raw sunrises and sunsets.

Above, Dodge with MOAH’s Robert Benitez (left), and Jason Jenn (right).

Like the artist does herself, we can come visit the desert every  January and pay tribute to it, and this year, we can also head to the Cedar galleries to see how Dodge has done so. The exhibition runs through January 22nd.

It also includes a series of lovely desert images created by children participating in activation classes the artist provided at the Preserve throughout her residency.

MOAH: CEDAR Center for the Arts

44857 Cedar Avenue, Lancaster, CA 93534

Open Tuesday and  Wednesday  |   11 AM  – 6 PM

Open Thursday – Sunday   |    11 AM  –  8  PM

  • Genie Davis; photos, Genie Davis

Ornitomancy – Omens Add Up to Beautiful Art

Posted on by Diversions LA

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