Stepping into New Frontiers

Posted on by Diversions LA

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In a time with the word “border” fraught with intended socio-political context, to have a show that exceeds conventional borders is inspiring both artistically and thematically. Opening October 26th at Jason Vass, Frontiers, from artists Tadashi Moriyama and Rachel Pease is a dramaticly lovely series of works created in ink.

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Both artists create highly detailed drawings, Moriyami’s, above, edging on the more surreal. Pease and Moriyama describe their work as a version of meditative mandala making, requiring both close observation and an appreciation of mysterious, contemplative visual narrative.  

The rainbow colors of Moriyami’s works are aglow, and seem to shift and shimmer. They have the look of a tapestry, one woven of ink.

The artists are married, and moved to Los Angeles from New York,  the quintessential journey to a Western frontier. But while the images could be taken as a look at their new physical landscape, it also revolves around their own brave new world in parenting, and a destination as yet not fully realized — the ongoing discovery process – of their art.

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According to Moriyama “We look for the unknown and unexplored, and attempt to make images that are new to us, and give us unexpected and serendipitous surprises.”

 Moriyama’s ink works are stretched on wood, and created with acrylic as well as ink. Their are buildings and ubran grids as well as seemingly interstellar environments. He references, subverts, and transcends images of Tokyo and New York, traveling into dreamscapes and a realm of other planets and space. A background in Japanese calligraphy is evident, as is the transcendent spirituality in his practice of Zen Buddhism. His otherworldly images are in part an outgrowth of meditation.

They swirl and spin, taking the viewer on a journey infused with movement, into which some figurative elements appear as if seeking a place within this brilliantly colored, seething world.

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Pease focuses her India ink on frosted mylar works on elaborate, magical riffs on the land and forests that surrouned her as she grew up in rural Indiana. Many of her works begin with an image of a tree that she uses as a kind of portal into a landscape that is mystical and fantastical.  There is both grace and elegy in her work, a tribute to a landscape that perhaps never was, or is in danger of disappearing from imagination and reality.

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The grace and stillness of Pease’s work is captivating; it compels viewers to enter into a forest of great beauty and strangeness.

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Canyon of the Distant Land, from Pease, above. The moonrise and mountains evoke images of Yosemite and Zion, while taking viewers into nature previously uncharted, a special, secret place. Both artists’ works surge beyond the prosaic and past common boundaries of location and imagination. They are futuristic and fantastical, yet grounded in a reality of landscape and cityscape; of dreams and desires, of the metaphorical and metaphysical.

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Viewers will find each work an immersive experience, and find a sense of the alchemic in each of these intricately realized and vibrantly alive images.

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The exhibition opens October 26th, reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Jason Vass is located at 1452 E. 6th Street in DTLA.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by gallery

Douglas Tausik Ryder Reveals Rich Body Language

Posted on by Diversions LA

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Running through October 19th at the DTLA art district’s Jason Vass Gallery, Douglas Tausik Ryder’s Body Language expands upon a sculptural topic he’s worked with in the past, creating an abstract, sensual, and richly geometric view of the female body.

Ryder’s language is a kind of code that bridges technology and nature. The artist creates his smooth, highly textured works using industrial geometric code in a CNC machine, encompassing 3D modeling to create these large-form wood sculptures.

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The works are towering, even monumental. Using computer models, he creates his sculptures into assembleable parts, forms wooden maquettes, carves, sands, shapes, and then adjusts his digital model as the work progresses. Once he moves into the machine room, Ryder is using an industrial machine he’s rebuilt, utilizing a digital cutting tool to carve individual portions of his works. He does it all himself with no assistance from an outside source.

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The result is a sleek, voluptuous series of works that is abstract in nature but obliquely figurative. Viewed as part of a group show held at Vass several years ago, his “Venus,” which was inspired by his wife’s pregnancy,  is a strong introduction to his work, seemingly entirely smooth, as if it sprung whole cloth after gestating in the artist’s vision.

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“Reclining Nude” is just that, both alien and familiar, a ribbon of wood that reaches out to the viewer in compelling curves.

His work is filled with texture, texture enhanced by the technnology he has long been devoted to, making mysterious, even poetic works with precise tools and machine techniques that he taught himself.

 

The work is seductive and dream-like. It is neither body nor soul entirely, but embodies both. Similarly, his high-tech process belies an instinctual state of grace in his forms. There are no harsh lines or jagged constructs, and yet each work is essentially an elaborate seies of puzzle pieces fit neatly together. They are smooth, yet filled with a raw power that seems to undulate just beneath the surface of his wood, and slips within the curves of his figures.

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The Body Language sculptures in this five-work series are enormous in scale, large in their passionate use of form, and sinuous. They have a liquidity to their creation, a washed-smooth take on a geometric form which in and of itself seems born of the body but elevated by the mind and heart. 

The works are cool, clean,  and connected – both within each individual work’s components and between the sculptures that make up the exhibition. Playing off the white walls of the gallery, Ryder’s pieces stand like fluid creatures, captured and frozen within their lustrous wood.

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Seeing these works in one sweeping show is a pleasure, and considering how they were shaped is fascinating and yet entirely irrelevant. However they were crafted, they stand as reflective meditations on both the physical and the spiritual.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by Jason Vass Gallery

 

Deborah Brown: Careful What You Wish For – The Sexual Tension is Palpable

Posted on by Diversions LA

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Now at the Jason Vass Gallery, Deborah Brown’s Careful What You Wish For is a sensual experience that’s both tactile and emotionally connective.

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Above, “Our Little Secret.”

Gallerist Vass says of Brown “She was someone I’ve admired for a long time. I knew I would be showing her when I first opened. I knew she would be an artist that I would have here.”

As a side note, due to the demolition of the 6th Street Bridge, the Jason Vass Gallery recently reopened – this is just the show to get crowds to see that 6th Street, up to the river, is driveable again.

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Above, “My Man”

“I’ve always been interested in identity,”  the artist says. “I used to work with things concerning culture, plastic, the facade, the veneer of things.”

Today she goes deeper, taking viewers straight to the skin.

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“I finally gave myself permission to explore my body as a battle ground in a way, an attraction and a repulsive quality,” Brown attests.

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Above, left, “Bat Out of Heaven,” right, “You Might Get Burned”

“The work embraced sexuality. It is about female desire and the struggle…how I reconcile my desire, am I okay with that, is a woman attractive if she is sexually powerful,” Brown explains.

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“The stereotype for women is being submissive,” Brown muses.

There is nothing submissive here. This is bold, seductive work that is as powerful in the materials chosen, the forms, the rigorous intent, as it is in subject matter. Above, “Do I Fulfill Your Expectations.”

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Below, the artist and her work.

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“It’s playful and it’s painful, too,” she says of the exhibition. “It’s not just trying to be clever. There’s a sadness. It glorifies and it breaks down at the same time.”

UK-based but American born, Brown’s work is universal, not so much of a specific location, but bred of an intense desire to create images that excite intellectually, spiritually, and physically.

Gone is the idea of a patriarchal sexuality. In it’s place is a female appropriation of male-driven images that through that appropriation changes the meaning of these forms.

This exhibition is Brown’s first stateside since 1996, and follows her recent inclusion in an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.

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Above, “I Only Wanted a Little”

While there are photographs in the show, including her oldest work in this subject area, a sensual and frightening image of a beautifully naked woman with bees as her garment,  Brown is first and foremost a sculptor. “I was always a sculptor. The photography started with the the bees piece, and it has become more important because I can do things with it as a medium that I can’t do with sculpture.”

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Above,  “Where Do We Go from Here?”

“Anything is game for me at this point. If it’s going to say what I meant it to say, I feel like that is what is consistent, not the medium that I use.”

Brown’s expression thematically, is, in short, powerful enough to carry a wide range of mediums.

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“It isn’t the material which is important,” Brown stresses. “Not whether or not it is polymer, clay, wood, a photograph, resin, leather, or aluminum. I work in all of those.”

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Above: “Bat Out of Heaven,” below, “Wanna Ride?”

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Regardless of the medium Brown employs there is a palpable, excuse the phrasing, even throbbing, sensuality to her work here. You can touch it, sense it, visualize it. Viewers will long to caress, to absorb, to get the same type of sensation one gets from static electricity simply by studying this work.

“I’m tapping into a raw place. It is not political work. It’s deeply personal. That’s where I believe the energy came from, from that experience, that personal experience.”

This is work that is kinetic, absorbing, magnetic, and above all stimulating. It turns on the mind more than the body. And that’s just the way Brown likes it.

The Jason Vass Gallery is located at 1452 E 6th St, Los Angeles. Brown will be exhibiting into December.

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Jack Burke

 

No Bridge Too Far: Jason Vass Gallery

Posted on by Diversions LA

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“Before the Bridge” at the Jason Vass Gallery succinctly and beautifully sums up images of change – perfect for the gallery’s location in the shadow of the soon-to-be-no-more 6th Street Bridge.  This is only the third exhibition at the gallery space, which opened January 30th, but it’s not to be missed.

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Featuring the work of six artists, Deborah Brown, Dan Callis, Mark Dutcher, Cynthia MacAdams, Douglas Tausik and Gene Vass, paintings, sculpture, and mixed media are the mediums for some dazzling art works about transition.

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Above, Douglas Tausik with the two creations his wife’s pregnancy inspired.

Douglas Tausik’s “Venus” is the artist’s tribute to his wife’s pregnancy. “I changed my approach to the work in this piece,” Tausik says. “While the idea of traditional sculpture being exhausted is premature, this piece came out a little differently, a personal narrative, thought and emotion united,” he says. The flowing curves of this piece seduces, the feeling of birth is present in every soft line, even had we not heard the story of the work’s inspiration.

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Dan Callis say his multi-layered paintings reflect light beneath darkness. “I wanted to build up these very dense layers to create intentional space, then subvert it, and build it again. That may be emblematic of my own aging,” he laughs. “I want my paintings to be beautiful but not in a traditional way, rather in a way that comes out of going down some difficult roads.” Delicate and translucent colors create a translucent effect; there’s a sense of reflection, light, water, glass in each of his pieces that pull viewers in as if floating in a wave of color.

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Mark Dutcher’s abstract paintings include stark but sensuous lines weaving through flows of color.  His “I am Hart Crane,” is blue with black graphite lines. It could be a river or a highway, something that courses on, as mutable as time.

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Deborah Brown’s “I Thought I Could Handle It” is hilarious, sexual, and simply captivating, an interweaving of female legs and bodies with a mushroom head with which Freud would have a field day. This too is a piece about transformation, as desire, as feminism, as identity. Both surreal and whimsical, her work dovetails nicely with photographer Cynthia Macadams, who presents iconic photographs of men and women that delve beneath the surface of the skin. Also beneath the surface: the swimmingly dark monolithic forms of Gene Vass that offer fine cracks of light breaking through these seemingly immovable shapes.

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Yes, it’s all about change. Check out this exhibit which will change after June 12th.  The gallery is located 1452 E. Sixth Street in DTLA.

  • Genie Davis; All Photos: Jack Burke