Lindsey Price

 

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Mixed media artist Lindsey Price is a photographer with a vision. Of doors to the imagination or perhaps another realm entirely in her “What’s on the Other Side” series, of the empty places where magic is just waiting to fill the gaps in her stunning black and white seascapes, “Empty,” and in “Desert Retreat” of pastel colored skies over rugged hills awash in late afternoon glow and soft sunset. Where her photography edges – into the magical and sublime – her collage’s fully land.

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Pink flamingos, wild flowers, and fields of Saguaro cacti meet ascending to a Middle Eastern palace with a minaret in one piece, evoking a fairy-tale landscape in a world where such juxtaposition may just lead to the excavation of ancient cities that stretch below the palace, or perhaps to a meeting of the minds and souls of the people crowded on rocks to the left of the collage.

As with all of Price’s collages, the field is packed with images, but never cluttered. The eye roves from one corner to the next, taking in the surreal and the real, the delicate colors, the kaleidoscopic technique. Speaking of a kaleidoscope, another Price collage uses the circular prismatic image pattern viewed through one as the frame work of a piece depicting four images of a woman’s strikingly made-up eyes, four of a flowering cactus, a spiny plant, a sea shell, each set of four meeting its twin on the other half of the collage. Between them, linking each set of four, is a set of two twinned women standing in profile against a single colored circle. The colors, with much green, blue, purple and iridescent shine add to the feeling of entering a mythical realm, a portal through space and time into the heart of a female-centric beauty.

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Similarly, three images of a dark haired woman, back turned to the viewer, stare toward three images of a planet, suspended in a glowing sky above dark mountains and swirling pink clouds below them. It’s a woman’s world, wherever we are. The woman’s body, the iconic shape of the mountains, and the beams of light all recall iconic anime images and Japanese wood block art.

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Inspired by the surrealist art movement, Price describes her continued amazement when she creates “a representation of my innermost desires, fantasies and dreams. I create my art with the home that others will travel through the images I’ve put together and be awakened to their own desire.”

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Price is a photographer, editor, designer, and artist, with her BFA in photograph and Media from the California Institute of the Arts. Residing in Los Angeles, she brings a SoCal feel to her work, from the California deserts depicted in her photography to the color palette in her collages.

  • Genie Davis

 

Malka Nedivi at the National Council of Jewish Women

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Malka Nedivi “Mother and Daughter” – all photos by Jack Burke

At the August 9th reception for artist Malka Nedivi’s solo show “Mother and Daughter,” Nedivi remarked “I’m overwhelmed at how big a reaction people have to this show, and what it does to people in an emotional way. I’m so moved.” Overwhelmingly beautiful and moving are definitely a part of the descriptive vernacular when it comes to Nedivi’s work. Inspired both in subject and material by the artist’s seamstress mother, this don’t-miss-show runs through September 16th at the National Council of Jewish Women in Los Angeles.

Malka Nedivi - Photo by Jack Burke
Malka Nedivi – Photo by Jack Burke

A painter, sculptor, and collage artist, Nedivi says that all of her work is inspired by her mother, and both her parents’ previously unknown past as Holocaust survivors. Nedivi’s work uses a great deal of wood and fabric. “My mom loved wood and boxes, so I chose materials that she loved,” the artist explains. The tactile nature of Nedivi’s work contributes to the feeling that each carefully layered piece is alive with emotion, visually leaping off the floor of the gallery.

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Her “Floating Woman” mixed media sculpture shows a white-bodied, ghostly woman in a vibrant red dress. The vibrancy of the dress beats like a visual heart, and expresses life, no matter how the woman, with her pale facial features, may fade. Emblematic of the artist’s bond with her mother, the piece seems to express the idea that love lives on after the body may have faded away.

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“My Big Doll” is the large scale six-and-a-half-foot mixed media sculpture that greets viewers entering Nedivi’s exhibit at the NCJW. The doll figure’s fabric hair and patterned skirt and top look like flowers. She seems to be blooming with both life and sadness, her eyes downcast, her cheerful colors ignored. With most of the sculpture white, there is the feeling of an otherworldly presence animating her figure.

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Mixed media on wood, Nedivi’s “Memory” features a variety of figures, children, and adults, and a tree that may be the tree of knowledge, with ripe fruit upon it. A man and a woman stand at either ends of the piece, with two smaller girls, and a smaller boy and girl, backs turned to us, in the middle. Behind these smaller figures is a woman with Rapunzel-like long hair, holding her face in her hands. This figure is two-dimensional, the others are three. Viewers may take the figures on both ends of the canvas to be Nedivi’s parents, the woman with the long hair sitting beside the tree of knowledge is perhaps the artist herself, endowed with the previously unknowable about her parents, knowledge that children, perhaps her own, perhaps the child she once was, are turning toward.

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Created on wood with paper, fabric, acrylic, and glue, the artist’s “Single Woman” is a riveting figure, her expression wise, withdrawn, palpably sad; her skin pale, her hair grey. Within this face is so much poignant life, and so much intricacy that comes with age. The wood itself that holds her visage is knotted and rough, the background to life in an imperfect world.

In each of Nedivi’s works, there is an intertwined immediacy: beauty and sorrow, cast down eyes and triumphant splashes of color, mother and daughter, past and future. The bared-soul intimacy of these pieces make them almost impossible to look away from, nor would viewers wish to do so. Rather, the pieces are made to pull viewers into a hidden world, a magical world, a world of mighty sorrows, hoarded secrets and pieces of fabric and scrap, and a world in which resilience and joy trump even the darkest past.

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“Mother and Daughter” at the JCJW – Photos by Jack Burke

Born in Israel, Nedivi studied theater and literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and film at UCLA. She is also an accomplished film-maker. Her art is self-taught, beginning with ceramics in the 1990s. A move back to Israel inspired her current works, these large scale sculptures and collage paintings on both wood and canvas. Many of the pieces in “Mother and Daughter” use fabric and other materials found in her childhood home.

The artist has previously exhibited at the Santa Monica Fine Art Studios in Santa Monica, Calif., and was recently selected as one of ten Southern California Contemporary Artists from Israel exhibited at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery in Los Angeles.

  • Genie Davis, All Photos: Jack Burke

Susan Amorde

 

Installation photos by SDK Photo & Design
From riveting figures to figurative baggage, sculptor and installation artist Susan Amorde explores the intersection of the human body and human emotions. Her figures evoke the wonder, majesty, and humor that make up life itself; her installations evoke the need for change and our reluctance, as a species, to let go.

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Amorde works primarily from live models with her figurative work, creating her sculptures in terra cotta clay, hydrocal, bronze, wax, and mixed media. Sculptures such as “Leaning Left Bookend or Not” and “Leaning Right Bookend or Not,” are supple bronze figures that seem to be melting into the thick bronze blocks on which they’re reclining. Long-legged and curvy, these women evoke the longing to move, and the comfort of remaining in place. Also reclining is the full color vibrancy of “Maura,” a hydrocal figure on a terry-cloth pool raft. Maura is a big bodied, jubilant nude, smiling at an unseen sun, amusing us with her dominance and joy, a whimsical figure with an edge. Mixing hydrocal and bronze on a marble base, “Shadow (The King)” is a stately bust of a young man wearing a crown. Study him to see his vulnerability, arrogance, longing; a shadow of the youth and power that will fade in time is etched in his eyes. “My practice explores the human form and emotions as we navigate life’s challenges,” Amorde says. Her expressionist style is beautifully suited for this twinned exploration.

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More surreal, Amorde’s series “Baggage” is the artist’s “personal examination of the universal themes associated with how what we carry around impacts our identity.” Using mixed media to explore both the literal and metaphorical meaning of baggage, the artist works from the premise that everyone carries some baggage with them in life, whether figurative, metaphysical, or emotional. Amorde “investigates how such baggage is perceived, how it feels, and how it impacts the living of our lives.” Integrating her sculptures with suitcases, suitcase parts, and other mixed media and found objects, many of her installations are large scale, as sweeping in scope as the baggage that we all carry in our lives. Amorde has plans for future works in this series that will include found objects, audio and video.

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Like her subjects, Amorde doesn’t travel light. Each piece in the “Baggage” series is quite literally freighted with meaning. “Zebra and the Red Pillow,” a mixed media and polychromed ceramic work, features a dazzlingly white and zebra-striped woman with haunted eyes lying on a red pillow which is positioned inside a zebra-striped travel bag.

She’s made her bed and isn’t sure she wants to lie in it, and is certainly not ready for the lid to close. Her long, pale, striped body is a part of that bag and she an evocation of it, and the life she’s made for herself. “Untitled (Baggage Station)” is a massive 7 ft. by 7 ft. mixed media installation of a variety of suitcases positioned on wooden storage shelves. The shapes and positioning of the suitcases – in all sizes and colors – reminds the viewer of people waiting to travel, waiting to perhaps shed their outer skin or inner problems and pass on without the baggage both imply.

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“Wounded Baggage” joins a dart board studded with bloody arrows to the surface of an aging green suitcase. Both immediately accessible and defiantly surreal, the piece calls the viewer to understand, and challenges the idea of literally carrying on in the face of adversity. The artist seems to posit the question – just what are we carrying on?

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Both Amorde’s figures and installation art have a mystical quality that belies the intensity of her expression. “I am drawn to sculpting the human form in narratives about challenges and mysteries in life. Equally appealing to me are portraits and studies of the figure that are celebrations of individuality. For me, sculpting people and their ‘baggage’ provides me with an endlessly fascinating journey of creative expression,” Amorde says.

The Los Angeles based artist was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in LA, and has a BFA from California State University, Long Beach. She recently exhibited at the Zero Down exhibition at 1019 West in Inglewood, the DAB Art Ventura at the HUD Gallery in Ventura, Calif. and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) in Los Angeles’ Barnsdall Park. Exhibiting since 2000, Amorde has shown at Gallery 825, the TAG Gallery in Santa Monica, Gallery Godo in Glendale, and at the Getty Underground at the J. Paul Getty Museum/Villa in Malibu, Calif. among many other galleries and museums.

Amorde lives in Los Angeles and maintains a studio in Inglewood, Calif. Exhibiting both locally and nationally, she’s on the web at www.susanamorde.com.