Los Angeles Art Association: 4 Solo Powerhouses at Gallery 825

Teale Hatheway's unique LA vision
Teale Hatheway’s unique LA vision

The show was packed, and rightly so – artists Teale Hatheway, Echo Lew, Marilyn Lowey, and Sasha Raphael Vom Dorp each contributed brilliant, immersive elements to this exhibition.  Each artist’s work creates a separate mini-world within the gallery. Running through October 9th, visitors will see four separate visions of light, shadow, and self.

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Teale Hathaway – Fragmented Realities: City of Dreams

The artist’s work is about memory, grounding, understanding, and experience; with beautifully detailed yet fragmented images.  Hatheway’s self-taught architectonic drawing and the ethereal nature she evokes of even the most common subjects combines the experimental with the investigative, using the often unsung history of Los Angeles architecture to enthrall viewers and advocate for the city’s preservation. The artist describes her subject matter as “a means to ground myself in a tangible environment in which an understanding of the whole is made up of an experience of the parts.”  The LAAA exhibit is made up of free-hanging paintings with layered elements of street lights. It’s a whole glowing city.

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Sasha Vom Dorp – Synesthesia – Inside Sound and Light

Do we hear color? See the sound of light? Vom Dorp suggests we do with her mechanical feedback loop Sound Illuminator which quite literally translates color into sound. Constructed from a salvaged 727-jet nose cowling, rippled patterns and waves let viewers see the sounds they are hearing. While Vom Dorp’s archival pigment prints continue to show, the haunting Sound Illuminator was a unique creation viewable only on opening night. Enter a portal of light and share an otherworldly experience with Vom Dorp.

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Echo Lew – Light in Space

Light drawings etched into photographs. Twenty-eight years of traditional drawing led Lew to this powerful expression of small lights and an open shutter. Printed on canvas and water-color paper, motion is trapped in the realm of light creating an ethereal and delicate pattern that seems to visually buzz like a congregation of bees. The artist says “During an exposure time of approximately one minute, I manipulate lights in front of the camera. Sometimes I invert the positive image to a negative one on a computer but otherwise the Light Drawings are not manipulated.”

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Marilyn Lowey – Dark Side of Her Broom

There’s something magical here. A chimera of light created from eye glass lenses, jewelry wire, and acrylic in Levitation Ashra #1 Mom’s Shadow; projected lights, video of a burial, and more glass lenses take on aspects of an interstellar dimension in Levitation Ashra #2 The Burial. Most striking perhaps are the light curtains, with a thousand eye glass lenses refracting their own vision attached by slip rings. What we see is not necessarily what we get. Moving light and shadow, the unseen mystery of illusion, the fine line between perception and vision.

Slip inside an enlightening experience before the show closes October 9th. Gallery 825 is located at 825 N. La Cienega just shy of Santa Monica Boulevard.

  • Genie Davis;  photos  – Jack Burke

 

 

 

 

 

Beautiful Bridge: Ode to 6th Street Bridge

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Multi-media art plays homage to the soon-to-be-demolished 6th Street Bridge at Art Share L.A. in the DTLA Arts District. Over 45 artists are participating in this show, which will present a closing reception on Saturday 9/19.

Curated by Dale Youngman and Tanner Blackman, the show is a heady mix of photography, acrylics, watercolors, dioramas, and collage. From rushing flood waters tearing through the viaduct under the bridge, to this iconic landmark’s golden hue in morning light and it’s shadows in growing darkness, the bridge at all hours of the day and all seasons is represented here.

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The bridge has played a part in many television shows, movies, and commercials as well as serving as a silent model for these profoundly talented artists. For over ninety years, this graceful bridge has stood sentinel, its arches surfing the sky, its buttresses delicately poised over the containment of the LA River. Sadly, the landmark architecture has to go – its cement infrastructure is crumbling due to alkali-silica reaction, a cement destroying disease that would likely cause the bridge to collapse in an earthquake.  While there is no way to repair it – the landmark’s memory and form live on through these artworks.

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The opening reception buzzed with excitement about the art, the bridge itself, the new bridge. Artist Alex Schaefer burned one of his paintings about the bridge, sacrificing his work as the bridge itself is being sacrificed. Yes, all things, even bridges and art are ephemeral – it’s time to enjoy them, experience them, savor them, and cross them while we can. Everyday we’re burning bridges with the past and setting out to ignite the future. “Bridge” the gap –  see this show.

Artists exhibiting include Suzi Moon, Dwora Fried, Lisa Talbot, Osceola Refetoff, Andre Miripolsky, Diane Pirie, Teale Hatheway, and many others weigh in on the bridge that once hosted Terminator 2 and Grease. Connecting Boyle Heights to DTLA’s arts district, the bridge was built in 1932.  A new bridge will take its place, designed by architect Michael Maltzan, and there will be bike ramps, stairs, six arches, and a new ability to explore the river beneath its arches. But for now, its time to fete the old before bringing in the new.

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Don’t miss the final weekend for this tribute, 7-9 pm. Saturday, September 19th. Weekday gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 1-6.  Art Share L.A. is located at 801 E. 4th Place, Los Angeles, Calif.

Melissa Richardson BanksDiane Behrens – Daniel Bernstein – Kevin BreakQathryn BrehmBruce CockerillDavid P. Cooke – Diane Pirie CockerillToby CorbettJean Christophe DickKessia EmbryMargery EpsteinTeresa FlowersDwora FriedFernando GalvezCarole GarlandTom GarnerPatrick HaemmerleinTeale HathewayJett Jackson –  Fred Hoerr – Mark IndigTom LambTod LychkoffRick MendozaTed MeyerAndre MiripolskySuzi MoonHarry NickelsonDavid PalmerFrancisco PalomaresSvetlana PenroseOsceola RefetoffRichard ReinerMichelle RobinsonRick RobinsonAlex SchaeferRoderick SmithCarol Cirillo StanleyJim SternLisa TalbotSean Sepehr TalebiMaureen Van Leeuwen HaldemanRichard WillsonMichael Wisnieux and Jerico Woggon.

  • Story/Photos – Genie Davis

Teale Hatheway’s “Fragmented Realities”

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Artist Teale Hatheway is the creator of layered mixed media art and site-specific installations that express evocative emotional connections. Working with acrylic, ink, bleach, metal leaf, burning, and charcoal on linen, her complex work is designed to “explore the theory that we remember environments as compilations of elements with which we develop emotional connections.” Hatheway takes details of pattern, form, color, and texture from urban environments, using them to implicitly and explicitly “trigger recognition of place.”

Hatheway’s work is about memory, grounding, understanding, and experience; with beautifully detailed yet fragmented images compiling pieces on Chinatown, historic bridges over the Los Angeles River, DTLA’s Broadway, and more. With a solo show, “Fragmented Realities: City of Dreams” opening Sept 12th at the Los Angeles Art Association, Hatheway’s self-taught architectonic drawing and the ethereal nature she evokes of even the most common subjects will both be on full display. Her approach is experimental yet investigative, using the often unsung history of Los Angeles architecture to enthrall viewers and advocate for the city’s preservation.

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The artist describes her subject matter as “a means to ground myself in a tangible environment in which an understanding of the whole is made up of an experience of the parts.” These parts are special indeed. As a part of her “Street Lights Abstracted” series, delicately colored outlines and sections of street lights are positioned to form abstract and impressionistic depictions of what could be the ghosts, memories, or filaments of the lights themselves. Her “Detour” combines spray painted images of these lights over a background of gold leaf on canvas. Like the lights themselves, the painting illuminates, both literally glowing from the gold leaf and figuratively from the impression of streetlights. In “Self Reflection” from the same series, a mirror image of an upside down red street lamp,casts beams, also reflectively upside down, against another gold leaf background. The street light here looks almost like a character from the Chinese alphabet, or an ancient rune.

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In her “Street Lights” series, gone are the abstract and symbolic shapes. Here the lights are clearly lights, some with vivid matte aqua, red, and mustard yellow colors washing over, through, and around them. The viewer sees the colors as a spectrum that the lights themselves must be illuminating.

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Hatheway’s “Chinatown” series offers a moody evocation of this exotic neighborhood that is nonetheless intrinsically a part of Los Angeles. East-meets-west architecture plunges viewers into another near-magical world. No prosaic impressions here. In “Success,” Hatheway employs acrylic paints and metal leaf on linen to vividly offer the winged edge of a Chinatown building in red, aqua, and gold tipped with white. These could be architectural angel’s wings, could be dragon tails, could be a temple in China – and yet with the California-bright colors, the sense of place blurs between the new West and the old East. Where do the winged edges want to fly?

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Equally vibrant color marks the clearly grounded depiction of double metal gates over the facade of a building in “Secure,” painted using ink, acrylic, bleach, and metal leaf on linen. It’s flight again, or the illusion of it that grabs the viewer in the lime and chartreuse green dominated “Vision,” which shows another curved, wing-like Chinatown roof with the looming white ghost shadow of a larger building behind it, and tiny kite-like flags billowing from the ramparts.

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With a burnt orange sky and a carefully detailed grey and white bridge, the long perspective of “Washington Boulevard Bridge” combines ink and acrylic with bleach on gold leaf in Hatheway’s “Victory – The Historic Bridges Over The Los Angeles.” Bridges from Downtown L.A. to Griffith Park are pristinely stylized, with their location just hinted at, their appeal speaks to a universal desire to cross a bridge to other, more golden banks. These bridges are highly realistic yet as romantic and surreal in design as a fairy tale bridge. These pieces are linked through Hatheway’s exploration of the city, through a connected map of bridges stretching across the SoCal region, which allows viewers to cross into a vivid engagement with the city itself.

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“InTentCity,” Hatheway’s installation commission for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, is a collection of 53 hand painted tipis, painted specifically for the Lake Eldorado camp ground, and reflecting in the mirrored prism of the lake itself. Hatheway created a fully immersive environment in a delicately painted three-dimensional experience. As with so many other works by the artist, there is a magical quality to the environment. We could be in the California desert or in a mysterious other-wordly land that has transformed itself here on our planet, in our state. It’s this magical and mysterious quality that transcends and enhances the images themselves throughout all of Hatheway’s work.

Internationally exhibited, Hatheway received her BA from Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., studying figurative painting at the Slade School of Fine Arts, University College London, and studying photography and architecture at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Upcoming exhibitions include “Fragmented Realities: City of Dreams” opening Sept 12th at the Los Angeles Art Association, and “Some of the Parts” at West Hollywood’s Gallery 825 in October. Recent shows include “InTentCity” at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., a collection of 53 hand painted tipis; group exhibitions at Red Pipe Gallery in Chinatown, the Pasadena Showcase House for the Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and the Riverside Art Museum, among many others.

  • Genie Davis