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

The Scent of a Flowered World

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Flower are like stars to artist Karen Hochman Brown in her lush and literally blossoming installation Vexilla Florum, first shown at LAAA’s Gallery 825 in the early fall of 2019, and then in a smaller grouping through early March 2020 at TAG Gallery.

With this installation, Hochman Brown delves deeper into her signature kaleidoscopic floral mandala work in a dazzling tour de force of eye-popping images.

Based in photography and digitally manipulated, the artist’s riveting work sometimes reminds the viewer of a kind of dimensional, exotic stained-glass. She distorts and reflects her single-subject photographic images to highlight both color, shapes, and patterns, and has described her work as “rooted in nature and geometry.” Much like stained glass, the images also have an inward glow, an almost visible translucence.

If a flower serves as the “seed” of her work, it’s fruition is something richer and more compelling. She uses mixed media and multi-media to combine several different processes, all rooted in the fantastic, even magical, evocation of floral blooms. Using handcrafted and digital photo-manipulation, she pulls the viewer into a world that is both alchemic and amazing. Here, her digital practice is paired with precise and rather glorious laser-cut patterns.

The images begin with a photograph of a single-subject flower, chosen from one of many around the world. Distorted and reimaged in a kind of new realism, each piece becomes a precious jewel of nature transformed by specialized software.

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This exhibition also involves intricate laser cut headpieces. To create them, she used a Glowforge laser printer to make the wood cuts that top each of her suspended works: six at LAAA, two at TAG. Banners are hand-sewing and assembled, in a fascinating mix of traditional textile techniques and the hyper-modern computer software-based world.

Mounted on slanted poles, each floral banner appears suspended in space. A shadow image spills behind each piece. The elaborate and graceful laser-cut “crown” from which the banner is hung features perfect leaves spreading out from and surrounding a central laser-cut version of the floral image centered on the banner itself.

The complex interwoven patterns of each banner’s background reflect the central image itself as well, and the color behind this pattern reflects that of the main floral element imprinted upon it.

Centered in the lower third of each mounted banner, the primary image is a full, mesmerizingly bisected kaleidoscopic flower. It is both a star, a snowflake, and an extraordinary blossom, or all three.

At LAAA, Hochman Brown’s banners, with backgrounds ranging from pink to brown to green to purple, were mounted in sets of three on either side of the galley, as if hung in a royal hall leading up to the ultimate throne. Here, replacing such a throne is a video installation in which realistic, intensely close images of actual flowers pop up, recede, and form a stunning, lush visual bouquet before dancing off again. These photographic images in turn evolve into stylized, star and snow flake-like digital blooms that spin and dance in a hypnotic and wonderful motion.

It is an immersive and deeply meditative experience that pulls the eye into the universe within a flower. One of the great skills in Hochman Brown’s work is that she introduces the viewer to the concept of the eternal and infinite contained in small but potent package.

Homepage slideshow-Vexilla Florum at 825

Her use of photography as a medium heightens both the realism and the fantasy inherent in all her work; and she combines graphic art with her photo images in precise and revealing focus.

In short, she takes natural beauty and shapes of it an entire soothing and magnificent world.

Both at LAAA, and in a smaller grouping of two banners accompanying her digital animation at TAG Gallery, Vexilla Florum is like no other installation or exhibition. The viewer finds a rose is a rose that’s an entirely different and compelling hybrid in Hochman Brown’s hands.

Watch for future exhibitions of this installation.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist

Inward and Outward: The Kaleidoscopic Art of Karen Hochman Brown

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Subtly yet fundamentally kaleidoscopic, Karen Hochman Brown’s works are absorbing and beautiful, photographic and complex mandalas spun and mounted on aluminum as digital prints. Using multiple, layered, and detailed images, and by subtly, elegantly manipulating elements of light and shadow,  the artist shapes a single image into an enthralling dimensional work.

Evoking a somewhat psychedelic reference to the flowers of Georgia O’Keeffe, or a stunningly beautiful retelling of the inkblot images in the Rorschach Test, Hochman Brown’s compelling works pull the viewer into a lush and unique dimension, populated by images that are both delicate and rich, in a precise process that was inspired by the artist’s first kaleidoscope enjoyed in her mother’s garden.

“Imagine the world through a kaleidoscope. The colors swirl and dance, revealing patterns and shapes in a whole different focus,” Hochman Brown explains.

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Having fallen in love with art as a young child – she calls art “as great a sustenance as food;” as a teen, her passion turned to mathematics, and “the logic of geometric proofs, where the marriage of precision and beauty struck a deep chord within me.”

Purchasing her first Mac computer was the next step in Hochman Brown’s development as an artist. She says that “the confluence of art and math created a tool that resonated to my core. As the technology grew, so did my skills.”

Working with precise fractal computer software, Hochman Brown creates images that move through infinite yet intimate dimensions, spinning, altering, and dancing colors, shapes, and layers. This is not random work, rather, the artist has morphed her art together with her delight and absorption in geometry, geometric shapes, and mathematics. She has even developed and taught curriculum in Construction Geometry Via Art.

Each of her dazzling and depth-filled works is in its own way a curriculum, taking the viewer on a ride that begins with a single photograph manipulated on Hochman Brown’s computer, transported into a modular graphics-synthesizer program, where imagery is extracted and altered in layers. Using functions like polar space, fractal space, assorted modulations, reflections, waves, distortions, and symmetry, the artist collects images as one would collect flower petals or as one’s mind holds distinct visual memories within larger events.

Hochman Brown refers to these distinct image bits as “foundlings.” Once these are identified and saved, she highlights what she sees as the most revealing and interesting parts, adjusts the colors, and stacks them as multiple layers. Returning to her modular graphic-synthesizer, she creates additional foundlings, in each case working to shift and manipulate shadows and light to create the wonderful illusion of depth that marks her work, and then adding emphasizing dots to it. “I find a symphonic union of math and art,” she says, noting that in her recent works, she explores hidden worlds inside manipulated reflections.

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In her piece “Hoya Luminosity,” above, ruby red richness creates an image that reminds the viewer of a rose or an orchid, a gestating image, as if a floral heart were beating through the fluttering wings of an alien creature. Like so many of Hochman Brown’s works, the image seems to shift as it is being absorbed; it glows from within, like stained glass suspended in the sunshine.

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With “Love in the Fringes Medallions,” the artist has created a series of pink images, flowers, snowflakes, stars, each feminine and feather-like.

KHB 5 Gnarled yellow pepper

Her “Gnarled Yellow Pepper” is indeed the vivisection of a pepper, but so much more, the perfect homage to and refinement of nature. This work has a waxy, solid quality that feels tangible, visually fragrant; other images have the look of finely spun glass, as does the transcendent background and foreground in “Dombeya Perception.’

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Other works resemble feather collages, thick oil paint, textured fabric, or ice sculptures, as in “Buenos Aires Medallions,” below.

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Her newest works, “Artists Speak” present images that reflect physical images of the artists she quotes, pays homage to, and recreates in her work.

Other works have a seasonal bent, as with the magical poinsettia quality and holiday colors of “Grevillea Regalia,” a work described by the artist as celebrating the holiday season.

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Just as kaleidoscopes, math, and Macs all play a role in Hochman Brown’s work and her evolution as an artist, so, too does a strong feeling of celebration and joy. Viewers able to fully absorb her sensuous, complex work will feel a startling, almost visceral pleasure in her light-filled, glowing images.

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In short, set aside the treasured childhood kaleidoscope of memory, and look instead at the wondrous swirling worlds that Hochman Brown creates.

  • Genie Davis; photographs courtesy of the artist