Feminist Variations at Loft at Liz’s: Female Philosophy in Art

Posted on by Diversions LA

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F23C0319Co-curated by Shana Nys Dambrot and Susan Melly, Feminist Variations at Loft at Liz’s through September 19th, expresses feminist issues without rancor. Nys Dambrot and Melly are second and third from the right, above, joining exhibition artists and gallery owner Liz Gordon.

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Works by Annie Terrazzo, Lauren Kasmer, Victor Wilde, Peter Walker, Susan Melly, and Carol Sears present relationships to diverse aspects of feminism in political, social, and philosophical terms. The female body, its physicality and it’s evocation in myth and allegory, is the subject of this highly poetic and vibrant exhibition. This is feminism as a life force, as a woven – in some cases, through items of clothing, literally – design in the pattern of life.

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Above,  artist Victor Wilde serves up stellar pancakes at the show’s opening August 27th, and creates the clothing-based artwork below.

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Co-curator Shana Nys Dambrot explains the exhibition’s genesis. “About a year ago I met Susan Melly. She was in a critic group in which it was noted to her that her work presented a feminist critique that wasn’t a complaint. Her work was engaged with the issues without anger. We talked about that, and worked on the idea together, and really rallied around  the idea of how the female body takes up space in the world, from fashions and wearables to negative space in abstract composition, as we brought other artists into the exhibition.”

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Susan Melly adds: “I had a discussion on a piece of mine with art critic and curator Peter Frank during a critique, in which I was telling him I always considered myself a feminist, but in a way in which differences between men and women should be acknowledged, but without complaint. That became the theme of the show.”

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Melly, whose work includes materials such as the paper-thin dress patterns her mother kept,  poses with some of her work above.

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“We were looking for artists whose work spoke to that idea. They did not have to be female. Of the six artists in the show, two of us are men.”

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Peter Walker’s beautifully detailed works here are created from graphite on paper. “I have been interested in exploring identity, the casual associations especially in a metropolis, where most of our sensations are fleeting and temporary. These pieces explore our chance encounters and how we identify ourselves as part of that random chance encounter.”

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Walker was trained as a painter, but with these works wanted to emphasize the ephemeral. “Pencil on paper felt more fragile, which was what I wanted to convey for a message, the fragility of these relationships,” he relates.

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Lauren Kasmer’s background is in photography. She’s the daughter of a clothing designer who only recently decided that fabric and photography belonged together in her work.

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“I usually work as an installation artist. Photos and video and live elements here at the opening all depict people wearing my clothes. There are many commonalities in clothing, in art. I’m sharing these commonalities, not the differences between men and women.”

Working in a wide range of mediums, the artists in this exhibition create a body of work that deals in contrasts and fluid relationships, on change and sameness, on awareness of the Venus/Mars differences, the bond of humanity, and the shared knowledge of the world that men and women experience – together.

Loft at Liz’s is located at 453 S. La Brea, Los Angeles.

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Jack Burke

 

Waste Not, Want Not: The Loft at Liz’s Delivers Diverted Destruction

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An annual assemblage show runs through August 22 at the Loft at Liz’s on La Brea. The 9th annual such show, this year’s collection, Diverted Destruction, features five artists participating in the Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence (AIR) Program. For the past 26 years, the Recology AIR program offers artists access to studio space at San Francisco’s transfer station, and access to materials in the public dump. Along with supporting artists, the program encourages children and adults to think about their consumption practices and recycling and reuse. Recology plans to offer a Los Angeles Artist in Residence Program in the future.

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Above, gallery owner and curator Liz Gordon, left, Recology artist in residence director Deborah Munk, right.

Deborah Munk, Director of the Artist in Residence Program at Recology calls her program “the first artist in residence program located at a dump. Artists scavenge materials and use them to create a body of work for exhibition.” She notes that “we work with artists in all different mediums including video, painting, and multi-media.” Student shows are also a part of the program, and Recology maintains a three-acre sculpture garden.

At Loft at Liz’s, curator Liz Gordon offered up a vast selection of free-for-the-taking assemblage materials in front of and behind the gallery on opening night, and will offer this wealth of material again on August 20th along with free recycled-materials workshop.

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Above, the recycled woodwork of Barbara Holmes.

Exhibiting Recology artists are Kristin Cammermeyer, Mark Faigenbaum, Jeff Hantman, Barbara Holmes, and Karrie Hovey.

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Above, Mark Faigenbaum.

Faigenbaum says “I love old movies and old movie magazines, which goes along with a theme of Hollywood and movie stars. I like people to fit things into their own narrative, whether I’m using old detective magazine style or old Chinese-type boxes. I work on a gut level.”

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Above, artist and animal activist Karrie Hovey.

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Hovey says “Recology is all material diverted from the trash, and here I used medical materials, such as bandages. I hold on to a lot of stuff, and it is difficult sometimes to know what I am going to do with it. In this case I could’ve wrapped the whole room in bandages, but went in a different direction.” Hovey works with the environment, focusing on Project Thron, which helps with the conservation of rhinos.  “That focus helped me create this Trophy Room. All the animals represented here are endangered or used for ornamentation or medical purposes, such as ivory. The bandages specifically relate to my work with the rhinos. If they are poached for their horns they are often not killed, but abused horribly to remove the horns, their faces. Bandaging can save them.”

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Above, artist Doug Pearsall.

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Doug Pearsell describes his work as “repositioning material. These are pages from articles in Vogue. Normally, I work with ads, but these pieces are strictly text. I just  use both a figure, stories, a poem, and visually piece it together.  It’s minimalism. What I want to do to synthesize down to its quintessence, an idea that is essentially to converge out of ether.”

Don’t miss the August 20th workshop, or this terrifically artistic and ecological show.

The Loft is located at 453 S. La Brea in mid-city.

  • Genie Davis; all photos: Jack Burke

 

It’s Elemental: See Elements at the Loft at Liz’s

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Fire, air, water, earth. At Loft at Liz’s “Elements,” the gallery’s annual nature themed exhibition, six potent artists create this year’s entry in an annual show that focuses on nature. Six artists, Doron Gazit, Michael Giancristiano, Moses Hacmon, Luigia Martelloni, Jeff Frost and Joan Wulf re-create these natural elements as something profound and poetic.

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Environmental artist Doron Gazit has worked with inflatables for thirty years, and his kinetic wind sculptures here potently visualize the unseen. Using nature as his canvas, he has worked with plastic tubes that are hundreds of feet long.

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Writ on a smaller scale here, “Frozen Flow,” take up substantially less space, white and illuminated from within, they channel air currents and pull viewers into a world both haunting and beautiful. It’s not hard to visualize Gazit working on his next upcoming projects in Iceland and in the Amazon forest.

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Artist Luigia Martelloni takes on the element of earth in an installation that fills the smaller exhibition room at the Loft. Luigia’s work involves crystals, earth, organic materials, and paper prints.

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“It’s a very personal journey, that goes back to the vastness of the land that I explored in 1986. I’m translating to the audience not information about finished objects, but about recovering and salvaging materials and translating ideas. The crystals are about a trip I took from the Colorado mines to Utah. There is salt from Salt lake City, dirt from Monument Valley. I prepare my paper in an organic way, and I use papers that are a collection of years and years.”

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Joan Wulf “fell into” her own burning ring of fire – she was painting on wood panels, and found a particularly beautiful wood grain that she did not want to gesso, instead using the panel to burn rather than paint her work.

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Now this pyrographic artist is creating art painted with flame rather than brushes, burning canvasses, crafting images that resemble ancient cave paintings or conversely, modern patterns that just happen to be burned into shape rather than conventionally painted.

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Moses Hacmon uses a liquid film technique to render images of water on aluminum. His eco-friendly project creates images that evoke both the depths of the ocean and the earth from space, watery images that shine over aluminum that could merely be representing the crystal clear waters of a distant cove.

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Michael Giancristiano says his art in this show, featuring air plants, was “inspired by melting ice caps and what’s under them. Scientists have reanimated organisms, a rebirth,” he notes. He wanted to use “organic materials that are alive and growing. The air plants are held onto functional handbags and panels by fasteners. They can be interchanged, removed, and watered.” The air plants he uses here come from the pineapple species.

 

We did not have the opportunity to talk to Jeff Frost, whose images of fire are seductively palpable in his photographic and video art works.

Find the element that moves your spirit through June 20th at the Loft at Liz’s, 453 S. La Brea Ave.

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Jack Burke

Loft at Liz’s: Divergent Voices

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What a show and what a great space. If you haven’t been to the warm, well lit, Loft at Liz’s, the gallery’s salon-type vibe will win you over. Divergent Voices ran only a single week with an opening November 7th, but all of the artists’ works were profoundly affecting, and art lovers – or just simply anyone in search of a visually stimulating good time, would do well to seek them out individually.

Hosted by artist Susan Melly, who found the venue for her art critique group, and featuring the work of twelve artists including Stefanie Bauer, Melanie Newcombe, Cameron McIntyre, Andree B. Carter, Rin Colabucci, Gill Miller, Margaret Ouchida, Peter Walker, Gina Yu, Shula Singer Arbel, and Lucie Hinden, as well as Melly’s own, the idea for the show originated with the idea to compile a show featuring high-end, quality art work.

Andre Carter’s delicate work featured beading and stitching that seemed linked to Native American crafts woven by a lost tribe.

Peter Walker’s graphite on paper drawings were beautifully realized, stunningly  hyper-realistic fine art.

Margaret Ouchida’s shadow boxes, below, danced with energy, miniaturized, perfect scenes that pulled viewers into their tiny, detailed framework. Each piece contains a minute, almost hidden toad. Find the talisman.

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Below, Melanie Newcombe’s astonishing mesh sculptures are graceful, floating, dancers in the sea, mermaids on land, nymphs whose flesh has silvered. Based on clay figures that she creates, she uses a rudimentary wooden armature on which to build her ethereal mesh figures.

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Susan Melly’s own work is equally charged. Melly’s work is all about the feminine, and female objectification. Offering up images about identity, sexuality, power, and industrial machines. The artist was inspired by a discovery of dress patterns and industrial-age sewing machines that were a part of her mother’s estate.

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“She represents the nurturing aspect of woman,” Melly says of her figure below, part of a new body of work.

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Below, Lucie Hinden’s Best Laid Plans series riffs on the idea of architectural blue prints, and creates images that feel like a patchwork quilt, or a landscape viewed from a seat on an airplane.

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Below,  Shuler Singer Arbel creates a world of color prisms,  painted images that resemble mosaics, or pebbles from a rainbow.  Geometric landscapes, patterns of water droplets…

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The show was packed with brilliant, unique, stand-out pieces, a full-house crowd, and a delicious buffet, too, with food as diverse as the art, from quinoa salad to lemon bars. What better party than a celebration of art? In short: a great night whose “Divergent Voices” rang out loud and clear – follow these artists, visit their unique perspectives now, and in years to come.

Author with Susan Melly, right
Author with Susan Melly, right
  • Genie Davis; Photos: Jack Burke