Time From Other Places – Carried by Windswept at Wonzimer Gallery

Posted on by Diversions LA

Time From Other Places – Carried by Windswept at Wonzimer Gallery by Juri Koll

Wind is potent and prescient, bringing time to us from other places, in precious moments we feel, see, smell. With this in mind, Genie Davis has curated an excellent new show, Windswept, at Wonzimer (a great space and crew) opening on March 21.

Windswept builds on 15 works from international artist’s Susan Ossman’s career as a painter with 14 other artists’ work of equally formidable insight and acumen. These works allow us to be in the moment, to stop and look at the fleeting, illusory elements, the bits and pieces we’re all made of.

Ossman’s “Pin The Wind,” represents for this writer the origin of the concept Davis has so adeptly assembled here. Made up of 2 panels that look as if they are 3, the beautiful and momentary view of sky blue above protects the orange under it, illuminates the earthy feel of each edge, and allows us to be here with it.

Motion, flow, and lush color combine in each of Ossman’s works, creating the sensation of a wind made of color and contrasts, including the wild wind that emanates from her “Dark Winds,” an astonishing oil and linen work that was created specificially for this exhibition.

Angelica Sotiriou’s collage “The Sound of Breath,” like much of her work, brings the moment forward with her free, open command of the brush and the elements she uses that sparkle, layer, and reach toward us, while Bruce Cockerill’s photograph, “Tumbleweed Sky,” below, is fleeting, transitory and yet starkly “now” as a photograph.

Diane Cockerill’s photographic image “Flurry” uses stop-motion technique to capture an image that makes you wait to see what happens next, and gives time and voice to the birds in flight.

“The Answer My Friend (Blowing in the Wind),” is Beth Elliott’s sculptural work, which brings a challenging number of physical elements to an equally challenging subject. How do we hold the fort, and keep the sail aloft, as it were, in a windstorm? How do we remember the things that might be taken away from us when forces out of our control overtake us? The cyanotype element, like a flag, makes us hope we do remember, and that the image will survive.

Each of the other works in this show deserve study, and equally anchor the show, the concept, and the time spent with it, including newly created installations by Dani Dodge, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, and Jason Jenn, each utilizing a variety of different elements, including, in one case, an actual tumbleweed.

Clouds, also windswept, as depicted utilizing recycled plastics from Nancy Voegeli-Curran, above.

The winds of personal change are a central part of Nancy Kay Turner‘s work, below.

 

There are also neon works that relate to the recent catastrophic windstorms in LA from Linda Sue Price, along with sculptural works that seem to have arrived as if carried by the wind from Scott Meskill and Eileen Oda, among the many fine artists exhibiting. In many ways, this entire exhibition is a wind-blown surprise.

In all, this immersive group exhibition features painted works by Susan Ossman in conjunction with sculptural, photographic, collage, video, and installation works by artists including Dani Dodge, Angelica Sotiriou, Beth Elliott, Linda Sue Price, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, Diane Cockerill, Bruce Cockerill, Scott Meskill, Eileen Oda, Jason Jenn, Nancy Kay Turner,  Nancy Voegeli-Curan, and a video work from David Isakson. The show explores each artist’s own unique vision of wind, from oil and acrylic to  otherworldly mixed media.

Don’t miss the opening Friday, March 21 from 5 to 10 p.m., or the artist’s talk scheduled for Sunday, March 30 at 3 -5 p.m.  The show closes with a curatorial walk through on Thursday, April 17 with the gallery open all day and the walk through scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m. Regular gallery hours are 12-7 W-Sun, March 21 through April 20th. Go see it.

Wonzimer Gallery is located at 341-B S Avenue 17, Los Angeles, CA 90031 Website: https://www.wonzimer.com/ 

  • Juri Koll, VICA; photos by Genie Davis and as provided by the artists

States of Exception Offers Exceptional Vision

Posted on by Diversions LA

States of Exception Offers Exceptional Vision: Written by Genie Davis

Moving, vibrant, and visionary, Susan Ossman’s States of Exception, at Cal State LA’s Ronald H. Silverman Gallery, serves as both a recent retrospective of the artist’s work, and as a poignant and prescient reminder of the varied circumstances and situations that affect not just our personal lives but all human life.

Artist Susan Ossman, right; curator Mika Cho, left

Ossman’s art is intensely experiential, taking viewers along with her on a ride through her own intimate experiences and those of others. Along the way she provides responses to political and social issues both timely and eternal, such as immigration and migration, health, personal freedom, the environment, the sheer wonder of the natural world, and humankind’s place in it and response to it.

 As an artist, anthropologist, writer, and performer, Ossman has traveled the world and explored the various states of living in it, political, social, emotional, and geographic. Each of those subjects is conveyed through her lustrous and vivid paintings and installations.

Mediterranean Sea Scroll

The exhibition follows an emotional and palette driven path rather than a specific timeline. Upon entering the gallery, “Mediterranean Sea Scroll” unfolds, a paper and ink on organza installation created in 2024. It’s a delicate and ephemeral piece, but it comes with a sturdy sense of place and the meaning inherent in it. A bibliography posted on the wall behind the work cites works such as The Great Sea, a History of the Mediterranean; the Dead Sea Scrolls; and Through the Eye of the Needle, Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, along with Don Quixote, and works by Camus and St. Augustine.

The burnt fragments of sentences and phrases that spill from the organza, as well as the delicate writing and shape- making on the fabric itself, have never been more timely. They are emblematic of the recent destruction from the fires in the Los Angeles area, including the devastating blazes in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, reminiscent of paper bits, their edges burnt, floating on the wind during this recent cataclysmic. The work is not only meaningful and resonant, but in many ways prophetic, of both our history and our future. 

What Goes Unsaid

“What Goes Unsaid” (2013), above, is a smaller but remarkable installation. In this piece, Ossman is once again working with shreds of words and the gestural mystery which tumbles within the folds of the shroud-like fabric.

Sources

 

“Sources” (2018)  is a large multi-media work on organza that once hung partially outdoors, and bears the marks of pollution, sun, and time on its fabric. Contained on it is the beautiful mapping of locations at every zip-code in which the artist has resided over her peripatetic life. It is shimmery and enormous, a banner and an inchoate flag of sorts, as resilient as it is malleable. 

Temporary Exhibition?

Also on exhibit is a series of small images of the artist herself, “Temporary Exhibition?” which was created as she underwent chemotherapy during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. These hand-colored prints tell a profound and moving story of protecting oneself in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Nearby, another hand-colored print on paper features the image of a yew tree – natural provider of a type of chemotherapy – and the text of a deeply moving poem, “Ode to If” created by Ossman. It reads, in part, “The cure destroys all that/grow in haste, ancient recipes…at times my body/ vibrates like lute strings echoed/in a slow-grown, yew-hewn chamber.” Similarly, her words and images vibrate within the viewer. 

From the same 2021 time period, the artist created three acrylic and charcoal works on canvas, here unframed. “Restoration” offers a hopeful message of healing within its soaring red and orange center. The image resembles flames, branches of coral, and the ventricles and muscles of the heart. Created during the same year, other large-scale works speak to the process of cures and healing, with titles of “Infusions” and “Intoxication” that are as evocative as their carefully articulated sense of motion and flow, graceful but strong. 

The artist’s “Chergui,” is something else again, a fierce 2014 oil on canvas work that sings with a vibrant, forceful red, recalling the desert wind for which it is named. 

Bataclan
One and Many; Twin Intensities #1; Twin Intensities #2
Flower Smoke

There are works aswirl with purple and lavender filaments, as in the solemn and lovely diptych “Bataclan;”  and three blossoming orange works, including 2018’s “One and Many,” and 2019’s “Twin Intensities #1” and “Twin Intensities #2” that depict poppy fields, and all they represent – their beauty, their use in creating destructive drugs, their fragility and glory. There is another reference to the floral in the dark hues of “Flower Smoke” from the same year, which could speak to the use of opium made from poppies, or fields of flowers burnt in fires.

Nearby, Ossman projects a Power Point-created video that unfolds a highly pertinent and prescient poem, “Mere Anarchy? pas de deux,” the artist’s dialog with the poem “the second coming” by William Butler Yeats. One of my favorite lines is “He feared/The world he knew was ending.” Should we fear change? Ossman bears it, rides it out, and reshapes it if she can, through her art and spirit. 

Labor’s Lost

 

In the final room of the exhibition, there is the rather amazing, mesmerizing “Labor’s Lost” created last year. This large and uncharacteristically figurative work recalls some of Marc Chagall’s images, with its humans floating like balloons, bending in impossible positions. They move like dancers without the weight of gravity, or lean forward with dangling hair as if held by invisible strings. The horizontal oil on linen work is as filled with motion as the figures themselves, awash in golds, oranges, blues – all electric with energy.

Conclusion

Also in the last exhibition gallery,  there is the aptly titled “Conclusion” (2020). It is nearly as large a work as “Labor’s Lost,” but it is vertical, with floating objects rather than people. There are shapes and buildings, writings, implements, boxes. And spread out from this mysteriously alchemic world, running the length of this final room, is a wild and wonderful runner of orange and gold, a royal carpet of paper poppies that descends from the painting in a fabulous floral trail.

Richly expressive, universal, and yet highly intimate, States of Exception is that rare, truly compelling exhibition that showcases an artist finely attuned to both the natural and unnatural world, and the political, social, and spiritual constructs in which we all dwell. Curated by Mika Cho, this beautiful exhibition is on view at the Silverman until February 21st.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

Susan Ossman’s In the Wash is Beauty in Motion

Posted on by Diversions LA

Beautiful and evocative, Susan Ossman’s exhibition In the Wash is as vibrant as it is graceful.

Made up of three large-scale works, each of which is comprised of four to six canvasses, the works depict laundry drying in the open air, stretched across multiple canvases like sheets strung on a clothesline.

Each piece follows a progressive color palette, as alive with the changing seasons as the sheets are with movement of the breeze, and the generations-long ritual of pinning freshly washed objects to clotheslines. The works are also a reflection on waiting, according to the artist.

Like all Ossman’s art, these pieces suggest movement and light, emerging from her use of lines. Clotheslines, and the action of hanging laundry are intrinsic in the gestures of the paintings, but the lines also seem to represent a kind of kinetic energy running through the works. The undulating sense of motion is hypnotic in these pieces, as is the artist’s use of rich color and soft texture.

The first painting in the exhibition, “Christo’s Laundry,”  above, uses a classical style of oil painting that recreates the soft, gentle movement of the fabric on a spring day. There’s a sense of calm in the subtle movement she depicts. The colors are those of spring flowers, lavender, pale blue, deep purple. The yellow of the sheets is soft and pale, like the spring sun.

Ossman’s style veers more toward the modernist in the expressionistic “Winter Wash,” which evokes a sense of haste in the more rapid wintery movement of the wind, and her depiction of the environment in which the laundry lines are strung. It is a tangle of swirling lines and the curls of blue and orange seem to be a visual depiction of motion itself. The palette is darker, with a stronger emphasis on the burnt umber quality of winter light.

The lively, vivid “Caught in the Sheets,” edges into the abstract, the energy and sense of movement it exudes are almost palpable. We see the sheets in intimate perspective, tangled up with them, forming a relationship with them. The sheets fit together like the pieces of a large puzzle or mosaic; and while the oranges and yellows are dominant in hue, they are paler, the light blue in the right canvas component drawing the eye the most.

Each work requires contemplation, or rather demands it, both to take in the full long strokes of the artist’s brush, and the enormity of the canvases as well as their details. The humble nature of the subject – and indeed, the context of it as a fundamental, necessary, and unappreciated part of life itself, imbues the paintings with a subtle grace, a sense of gratitude for simple rituals.

The exhibition also includes a video depicting the artist’s process and the context of her paintings within a broader overall project, On the Line, that also included anthropological research and historical research on laundry lines, as well as reflection on her own past art practice and the creation of an environment to inspire an extension of the work into other art forms, including performance. Ossman has worked with dancers interpreting her works. “In the video you see the connection between the movements and the paintings and the movements of the bodies of the dancers. Showing these and telling the story of the project expands viewers’ ways of thinking about these paintings and painting more generally… perhaps these works encourage attention to these movements more than some others. The multiple panels, the compositions and in some cases the brush strokes encourage this,” Ossman explains.

The video, which runs approximately six minutes, explores how poets, dancers, and musicians picked up on the movement and rhythms with sound, words, and their bodies. “It was like an extension of my own movement, almost as though the movement of my arm and body painting created a momentum and a direction that they picked up on with their arm or leg or the way several dancers intertwined their own bodies,” she says. The dancers took on the dynamics of her painting, using actions that indicated bodily movement, the sense of wind, and the sense of the seasons passing, which are all visually revealed in the paintings themselves.

Also available at the exhibition, for further insight into Ossman’s work, are two publications: one about her art, and one that discusses both her work as an artist and as an anthropologist, Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fields, A Memoir of Anthropology and Art.

The generosity of Ossman’s collaborations and insight into the ebb and flow of natural life recently took a different bent in an early March exhibition on the steps of the Museum of Riverside, in which her 22-foot collage “One and Many,” inspired by California poppy fields, invited a reflection on “the relationship of the part to the whole, the individual, the group, the community.” Participants were invited to take a small piece of artwork from the layered collage and fill in the blank space on the canvas with work of their own.

 

That same sense of inclusivity, universality, and movement, is what drives In the Wash. Like the wind, change is constant yet the wind itself stays as an eternal force. Ossman goes a long way to expressing the constancy of change itself, and the collective consciousness of those who are a living part of it. And, these large works are, in and of themselves, separate from any choate meaning, simply visually dazzling.

Also on exhibit at Gallery 825 are (left to right) the thought-provoking textile flag works of Sol Hill, in State of the Union; James R. Lane’s EYECU, a delicate series of acid-washed images of animal art viewed from their perspective that’s both haunting and wise; and the tragic beauty of the looming destruction of our planet in the photographic work of Matricide – Destiny Manifested, from Don Porter.

These fine exhibitions, along with In the Wash, are on display until May 13th, and are visible both online at https://www.laaa.org/4-solo-shows-at-gallery-825 and in person at Gallery 825, located at 825 N. La Cienega Blvd. in West Hollywood. Call or email the gallery for hours.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and provided by Susan Ossman