The Season for Spells – And a Special Incantation

Now at OCCA through October 28th, Incantation, curated by Chenhung Chen is a pure delight of an exhibition, converting this bright and airy gallery to a mesmerizing space filled with joy and wonder.

Featuring astonishingly lovely work by Marthe Aponte, Chenhung Chen, Annie Clavel, Catherine Ruane, Jane Szabo, Nancy Kay Turner, and Lisa Diane Wedgeworth, in the curator’s words,  “the artists in this exhibition are the vessels that channel this [ritual] energy from one place to the other while using traditional or non-traditional materials and often blending craft techniques with industrial materials. Using photography, installation, mixed media, picote, paint, graphite and electronic waste, their works are a bridge between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the remembered and the forgotten. Moving effortlessly between past, present and the future, the very creation of their art is as mysterious and intriguing as an incantation.”

Each artist weaves her own distinct and seductive spell, through the use of inventive materials and masterful image-making. The show vibrates with textural components, as well as color, light, and shadow, weaving a potent portal to the magic that can find us if we are open to it – as open as these artists have become.

Nancy Kay Turner‘s use of unusual – yet often mundane – materials belies the fact that her works are encompassingly evocative, enchanting the viewer with their complexity and poetry. Using materials as prosaic as ordinary wax paper and crumpled journal pages, antique wooden shoe forms and vintage photographs, feathers, and pins, and a dusting of silver leaf or curve of gold she creates startlingly immersive, riveting works such as “The Secret Life of Shards.”

Catherine Ruane‘s lustrous, delicate, perfect drawings of trees and other flora are created in detailed graphite and charcoal. Her large-scale “Witness at Antietam” is a fully branched wonder, one that has born witness and watchfully shaded many a human foible and battle. Other smaller works are taken from the same Antietam series, still others, sepia toned, reveal the heart of flowers. Each work revels in a compelling grace.

Exuding equal but quite different precision and delicacy, Marthe Aponte exhibits a display of stunning picote works, shields emblematic of protecting us from the vicissitudes of life, the spells cast at us by others, and at the same time weaving their own shimmering, sparkling protective magic. Aponte’s entirely exquisite works dazzle in their intimacy and intricacy, compelling us to look inward and see the world through her eyes.

Voluptuously vivid swirls of color soar through Annie Clavel‘s vibrant watercolor works. A mix of large scale and more diminutive pieces, her images are like liquid captured motion, as svelte as they are visually kinetic. They form clouds and winds, waves, sunsets and flora, wings in flight, and always evoke a sense of profound mystery and beauty, like flowers half-formed but still bursting into bloom.

For Jane Szabo, photography is the medium she “paints” with. Here it is landscapes, a portal to worlds both intensely real and mystically realized, serving as doorways into spiritual places even as they represent realistic territory. Her use of color and uneven printing combine to conjure a realm that is neither of this world or the next, but somewhere fascinating inbetween. The works are from her Damaged series.

Curator Chenhung Chen offers both freestanding sculptures such as “Entelechy” and lustrous butterflies and cocoons of wall work, each crafted meticulously from materials such as wires, cables, and found objects. Their symmetry and sensuality abound, whether exuded from suspended waterfalls of wire or assembled with the skill and perfection of mosaics, as in “I Ching in America.”

Last but not least, Lisa Diane Wedgeworth gives us shadows that hint at light and deep mauves within her primarily monochromatic abstracts,  hidden symbols and shapes fleetingly visible within her painted canvases. Elusive and illusive, Wedgeworth fascinates with ghostly, grand gestures.

Closing reception is October 28th from 3-5 p.m., and oh-so-worth the drive to Orange County. In fact, Incantation places its magical journey in the heart of any art map.

OCCA is located at 117 North Sycamore Street in Santa Ana.

• Genie Davis, photos by Genie Davis