With three fine solo shows and one group show, the Los Angeles Art Associations Gallery 825’s current exhibitions, which opened February 22nd, are each deeply rewarding.
Suzanne Pratt’s exhibit bird·song, which is profoundly meditative, focusing on the transitory yet eternal in the immediate moment. The precise but seeming infinite images weave a complexity rooted in a primal sense of life-force. Spirals, shell-like shapes, seemingly-petaled pieces such as the artist’s richly dimensional “niyamita,” compel a closer look at the world itself as filled with meaning. Dimensional and riveting.
L. Aviva Diamond’s large-scale photography also offers a dazzle of meditative works – these riveting works depict water as an entire world – in her glowing Light Stream. Euphoric and filled with a swirling dance that pulls the viewer within them, these sensational abstract images transport the viewer to another world that is both mysterious and magical.
Photographer Mark Indig uses architectural shapes in his new body of photographic work, Naked Triangles. Skeletal and powerful, described as “x-rays of our culture,” radio towers and cell phone transmitters are depicted with grace, as stark, lovely, and spare, like castle turrets and church steeples for our time. Electric wires and their connection points stand like robotic sentinels, watchfully ominous. The delicacy of their construction reminds the viewer of the art of Watts Towers at first glance; a second look creates a less benign view, as if of a technological take-over.
And finally, the group show on exhibit, Penumbra, juried by stARTup Art Fair’s founder Ray Beldner, offers black and white as the palette in a variety of mediums. Participating artists include Larry Brownstein, Amy Fox, Donna Gough, Rob Grad, Gina Herrera, Susan Lasch Krevitt, Campbell Laird, Rich Lanet, Colleen Otcasek, Joy Ray, Osceola Refetoff, Melissa Reischman, Catherine Ruane, Seda Saar, Catherine Singer and Stephanie Sydney.
From Catherine Ruane’s lushly nuanced nature in her graphite drawing “Magwitch” to Osceola Refetoff’s haunting infrared photographic sunset image of “Leaving Trona,” to Joy Ray’s mystical, textural wall sculpture, this is another rewarding powerhouse of a show.
Don’t miss!
- Genie Davis; photos provided by the artists; exhibition photos from LAAA
