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Category: Pick of the Week
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Pick of the Week: Wanda Koop & Michelle Rawlings
Night GalleryThe two shows currently on view at the Night Gallery – Wanda Koop’s “Heartbeat Bots” and Michelle Rawlings’ “In the Garden” – represent opposite ends of the spectrum of contemporary art.
The larger show, “Heartbeat Bots,” introduces us to a fantastically vibrant and massive vision of the future. There are sweeping neon landscapes with a verticality heightened by the her trademark drips (or tears, as she calls them.) And in her portraits, Koop interrogates a basic understanding of humanity by confronting the viewer with deeply emotional robots. There is an uncanniness in viewing a painting of a cyborg which looks surprised or smug, bored or content. But the emotional quality of Koop’s work is, in the end, undeniable. Koop shows to us a potential vision of the future, rich in abstract emotional depth and vibrant color.
By contrast, Rawlings’ paintings do not have monumental scale, vibrant colors, or even a shred of abstraction. Rawlings uses an impressionistic style to render models lifted from photos from Virginia Viard’s Spring 2020 show in Paris as though they were hanging in the Salons of late 19th century Paris. Rawlings work is intimately small, with some of the accompanying instillation details no bigger than a postage stamp.
And since her work is so small, it draws the viewer in close to parse through the many fine details. I found myself going over every expertly rendered thread of the high-fashion clothing and trying (without success) to place an emotion – any emotion – onto the faces of the models themselves. The more I looked, the further away I was from elucidating any concrete sensation from the works.
But of course, that’s exactly the point of models on runways; they are paid to showcase the fashion, not emotion. They are the proverbial canvas upon which designers exhibit their work. And how are we to analyze a canvas upon a canvas? We don’t. All we can do then is just appreciate the work for what it is, and it is beautiful. It’s a pleasure to simply exist in the space that Rawlings’ works inhabit and to uncover the many treasures within.
Night Gallery
2276 E. 16th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Show runs through Nov. 14th
Appointment Only—No Walk-Ins -
Pick of the Week: Amir H. Fallah
Shulamit NazarianThere are many stories that we have told ourselves in order to make our world make sense. These modern myths range from Columbus’ “discovery” of this continent to the very idea of the American Dream. These stories are taught to us from birth, intrinsically attached to the way we teach and learn our history—and are some of our greatest cultural exports. And it’s these lessons that are explored in Amir H. Fallah’s “Remember My Child…”.
Fallah, who has previously worked in veiled portraiture, tosses aside the model and instead creates a series of patchwork paintings, featuring everything from figures taken straight out of Islamic miniatures to images lifted from historical records and anatomy books. There is Christopher Columbus meeting Native Americans and being crushed by a globe, diagrams of the nervous system, and maps of the solar system. We see a chaotic confluence of patterns, designs, signs and symbols; Persian rugs, Art Deco icons and comic characters all adorn the paneled paintings.
In fact, Fallah drew much of his inspiration from his own childhood viewing America from afar while living in Iran, his formative years spent here in the U.S., as well as his son’s view of the world and interests. The hodgepodge of imagery showcases the mixing of two cultures, two identities. Fallah presents this duality in his work as it exists within himself as an individual between worlds.
And while many of his works reside in the allegorical—and can be picked apart as metaphors for immigrant life in the western world or for the ways in which identities can be muddled and unclear—his paintings are at their core understandable. There are few unfamiliar symbols, and the paintings are readable and clear. The unifying thread between all his works is the use of textual elements to form moralistic lessons; my personal favorite is one that strikes me as a lesson for our times: “Sentiment without action, is the ruin of the soul.”
Shulamit Nazarian
616 N La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Show runs through Oct 31st
Appointment Only—No Walk-Ins -
Pick of the Week: Ferrari Sheppard
Wilding Cran GalleryI’ve always had a deep love for art that dripped with symbolism. Art that encodes stories within their frame or form, all while being aesthetically appealing, draws you into a dialogue with the artist and your fellow viewer. It’s a bit like an inside joke; if you know, you know—and it certainly feels good to know.
Ferrari Sheppard’s new show “Heroines of Innocence” at Wilding Cran draws you into a world steeped in reverential references. With a style that floats somewhere between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Willem de Kooning (perhaps with a bit of Cy Twombly thrown in), Sheppard creates work that are entirely his own. His pieces possess a certain freedom in their unhemmed, charcoal lines that compose the anonymized Black women and girls.
But unlike other anonymized subjects, such as Ramiro Gomez’s essential workers, their anonymity is not to generalize them, but to guard them. The figures in Sheppard’s paintings are kept apart from this world through their anonymity. Kept apart from this world which has systematically oppressed people of color—Black women in particular. Moreover, by omitting any recognizable features, Sheppard invites us to inspect the figures simply as they exist.
Bond (2020), an intimate portrait of a mother embracing her child, is particularly eye-catching. The mother, a rough confluence of charcoal and acrylic, is almost entirely obscured by the golden child sitting on her lap. This piece has a strong religious overtone, with the use of gold leaf to highlight the “Radiant Child” metaphor. But with its back turned to us, it’s shown that the baby is a precious gem that does not belong to us and, moreover, is unconcerned with our presence.
Gold leaf is used in the show to fantastic ends, adding a religious iconographical effect throughout many of the pieces. Scribes (Study II) (2020), for example, used a large sheet of unbroken gold leaf to frame the two central children sharing a book, accentuating them and catching the light brilliantly.
Heroines of Innocence is available to be revered at Wilding Cran Gallery until October 31st.
Wilding Cran Gallery
1700 S Santa Fe Ave #460
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Show runs through Oct 31st
Appointment Only — No Walk-Ins -
Pick of the Week: Heather Day
Diane Rosenstein GalleryYou never really know which exhibition is going to make you cry. I certainly didn’t expect it to happen at Heather Day’s “Ricochet” at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery. None of the work was particularly sad and I actually had low expectations based on what I saw online. I remember I had even bemoaned to my editor; would this show just be another contemporary artist pining after AbEx?
Yet from The Persistence of Memory to Fever Dream, I could tell that Day was not pining after anything. Instead, she had cracked open the very center of her mind and laid it out on canvas for us all to see. Her works are free and expressive, with large fields of flooded pigment acting as the backdrop for floating ribbons of paint. They are chaotic and improvisational reflections of her inner world—her “mind maps,” as Day calls them.
And like any good map, they are also well-planned. Every stroke of paint falls just so, every flood of pigment only extends so far. These discrete elements work in harmony like dancers in perfect choreography; responding to one another, forming and disintegrating, flowing around each and every line.
These two poles of Day’s work—deliberate planning and improvisational chaos—do not necessarily explain my strong emotional reaction to her work. I’ve had a lot of difficulty putting my reaction into words, but I can share these few connections I forged in the hope that you’ll forge them too.
Day’s paintings show the entire spectrum of universal experience. They are fetuses forming in the womb; stars collapsing in on themselves. They are embryonic, and they are nebulous. I cried while walking through “Ricochet” because I was looking at art which so strongly reminded me of the beautiful, mystical and sometimes terrifying knowledge that I am alive.
I can’t promise you’ll have the same experience as me, nor can I promise that you won’t cry, but I can promise you that “Ricochet” will still be rebounding in your mind for days and days.
Diane Rosenstein Gallery
831 N. Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Show runs through Oct 24th
Appointment Only — No Walk-Ins -
Pick of the Week: Duke Riley
Charlie James GalleryIt is easier than it has ever been to feel distant, from one another and from the world at large. I was seeking to traverse that distance when I visited the Charlie James Gallery, and I found the path through Duke Riley’s new works in “Far Away.”
In Riley’s glittering seashell mosaics and delicate inked prints, the artist constructs the artifacts of a world distantly removed from our dystopic surroundings. His tattoo-style ink drawings depict fighting cocks, carrier pigeons, and fantastical ocean scenes, complete with crashing waves, teetering towers and finely-detailed, lithographic hedonism.
The most impactful pieces were the two mosaics, Far Away and I’ve Been Using the Same Razor Since 1947. The former, a shell mosaic depicting a bottle lost in the surf, works in tandem with the latter, a rat adrift in a tin can, to create a synchronous feeling throughout the space. Combined with the choice of mosaic as a medium, the show is more a historical review of imagined, crumbling islands than a contemporary art exhibition. This is not to say that Riley’s works lack perspective, as they are littered with the symbols of our present moment – some more obvious than others. In the large painting Everybody Knows, one can find Laika, the Soviet space dog, flying alongside a bald eagle clutching an ICBM, soaring high above McDonalds bags, nuclear waste, and skulls wearing MAGA caps floating below.
Accompanying Riley’s collection is a group show of Californian artists Sadie Barnette, Shizu Saldamando, and Ramiro Gomez. Saldamando summons fascinating, finely-rendered portraits onto large wood panels, while Barnette has blown up archival prints of peaceful, domestic life for Black Americans onto monumental scale. Gomez, a highlight in the group show, showcases in acrylic on cardboard the anonymized lives of Los Angeles’ under-appreciated laborers. The work of the group show is timely and prescient, as this year continues to emphasize the importance of essential workers, representation of the Black American experience and forging meaningful, thoughtful connections.
Charlie James Gallery
969 Chung King Rd
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Show runs through Oct 17th
Appointment Only — No Walk-Ins -
Pick of the Week: Brian Atchley
Matter Studio GalleryExiting the 110 degree heat at the end of a brutal Los Angeles summer and entering into Matter Studio Gallery to view Brian Atchley’s Being Matter, one name immediately jumped to mind: Robert Mapplethorpe. And for those who visit this show who are familiar with Mapplethorpe, I’m sure he’ll come to mind as well. The immediate comparison between Atchley and Mapplethorpe is an easy step to take, and is a comparison that Atchley welcomed – to my surprise. While I have neither the authority nor desire to attempt to unpack the complex history of Mapplethorpe’s work, it’s suffice to say that he is controversial across the board. Conservatives found him offensively explicit, and many others were quick to point out the fetishization of Black men as deeply problematic (See: Notes on the Margin of the Black Book by Glenn Ligon for a far more informed investigation.)
But there is a critical difference between Mapplethorpe and Atchley: Atchley is a painter, and a very good one. The ultra-realistic portraits do not objectify or overly-sexualize their subjects like Mapplethorpe’s portraits; in fact, the sheer amount of care and attention paid to the tiniest detail of these paintings demonstrates an overwhelmingly empathetic eye, as opposed to Mapplethorpe’s depersonalized photography. And while the black-and-white compositions with their large range of values and emphasis on light evoke Mapplethorpe, the emphasis is more on Atchley’s technical ability than the subject matter. Atchley wants us to focus on the light itself, not whatever the light is hitting.
Though the monochrome portraits are technically brilliant, my favorite works were his “Suspension” series, which is his most recent series of works. Here, we see a departure from the grounded, Mapplethorpe-esque portraiture. These three works – Jackson, Celena, and Diego – represent an evolution for Atchley. He is no longer singularly focused on light, but also explores color, movement, tension – all while preserving the fine detail and focus on musculature that can be found throughout his work.
Matter Studio Gallery
5080 W Pico Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90019
Show runs through Oct 11th
Appointment Only — No Walk-Ins -
Rina Banerjee
Fowler Museum at UCLARina Banerjee‘s assemblages are fantastical potpourris of color, texture and cultural references. The title of her 20-year retrospective, “Make Me a Summary of the World,” encapsulates her ambition of laying bare the fluid interdependency of ostensibly discrete cultural identities in a world shaped by international trade and colonization. Drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations, with elements from different works mingling in cryptic dialogues with one another, flow whimsically across floors and walls at the Fowler Museum. Banerjee’s profusions of organic and manmade media include feathers, seashells, fur, eggs, skulls, gourds, textiles, furnishings and countless other items sourced from online marketplaces and vendors near her NYC home. Individual components charged with specific cultural and historic significances coalesce into motley hybrids belonging to no one place. Personal experience has informed her work’s multicultural nature. Born in Calcutta, the artist bears vivid childhood memories of how in India, the hue of one’s garments denoted religion and class. When she was 4, her family relocated to London and soon ended up in New York, where they resided in diverse neighborhoods. As an art student, she became keenly aware of being pigeonholed into Southeast Asian stereotypes despite her cosmopolitan background. Modeled loosely after the Nike of Samothrace, her show’s most impressive piece is Viola from New Orleans-ah… (2017, title abbreviated for length), which references a real-life story of a 1906 marriage between an African-American and a Bengali immigrant in New Orleans. Its heterogeneous protagonist is slightly bent under her own wings’ weight, yet she appears strong and serene, having just alighted in a bed of oyster shells.
Fowler Museum at UCLA
308 Charles E. Young Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90024
Show runs through May 31
Museum temporarily closed -
Los Angeles Area Scene Paintings
“Los Angeles is a city without a past,” urban geographer Michael Dear once declared, referring to the city’s penchant for effacing its own history. Yet an enthralling exhibition at the Hilbert Museum attests that LA does, indeed, have a past, one recorded in vibrant detail by local artists. In “Los Angeles Area Scene Paintings,” over 70 works from the 1880s onward present a sprawling survey of LA in all its diverse districts and essences across time, offering a valuable opportunity for contemporary viewers to gain a better perspective on how the city has changed. Bringing to life previous eras, paintings of jazz clubs, Chinatowns, oil fields, restaurants, overpasses, Catalina Island, skyscrapers, beaches, mountains, ranches, homes, and parks speak to our area’s diverse flair. Frozen in bygone times, glimpses of rural roadside citrus stands and now-defunct amusement parks spark contemplation of how little we know about what preceded current landmarks. Many of these painters foresaw their familiar settings’ imminent disappearance and sought to preserve them in paint. For instance, Ralph Hulett‘s 1940s-60s paintings of Victorian homes slated for demolition in the Bunker Hill neighborhood evoke a sense of feeling and color that no photograph could echo. Millard Sheets‘ Sunday Morning (Chavez Ravine) (1929) re-vivifies a Mexican community where Dodger Stadium now stands. Depicting despondent laborers dwarfed by factory buildings, the gloom of Ben Norris‘ Discouraged Workers (1939, pictured above) contrasts with the sunniness of A Grand Place to Work (1941), Emil Kosa Jr.’s mysterious farmhouse idyll nearby. More avant-garde compositions include modernist freeway abstractions by Edward Biberman and Roger Kuntz. Most of the work falls into the larger regional genre of California Scene Painting that flourished from 1920s to the 60s, but several more recent works by artists such as Sandow Birk provide a sense of continuity. One contemporary painting of a deserted diner, Eagle Rock Winter (2014) by Suong Yangchareon, might have looked old-fashioned a few weeks ago; but now its desolation seems acutely timely.
The Hilbert Museum of California Art
167 N. Atchison Street
Orange, CA 92866
Show runs through May 2
The museum is temporarily closed; but a 144-page catalog by curators Gordon and Austin McClelland includes every work in the show, alongside historical commentary and additional pieces they would have shown had space allowed. -
Jennifer West
Fragmentary castoffs and debris from the LA River texturize Jennifer West’s current show, “Future Forgetting,” whose title was inspired by Norman Klein’s 1997 book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, a treatise on how Los Angeles perpetually constructs and demolishes infrastructure and myths. The dim installation is suffused with a reflective, slightly surreal ambience. On one large wall is projected 6th Street Bridge Film (frame pictured above, all works 2020), a scratchy 16mm film constantly punctuated by spots, discolorations, and other interference caused by the artist having performatively dragged the film through the LA River. Faintly apprehensible behind the interference is footage of Angelenos sentimentally bidding farewell to the Sixth Street Bridge, which at the time of West’s filming in 2016 was soon to be demolished. Her intentional damaging of the film three years later betokens the bridge’s destruction as well as the gradual disintegration of memory. On the floor nearby is a video installation, Archaeology of Smashed Flatscreen Televisions Thrown off Bridges, comprising nine flatscreen televisions overlaid with tiny shards of flotsam that West collected during walks at Arroyo Seco Confluence. Inspired by TVs she encountered shattered in the riverbed, this layering of objects and moving images conveys a dreamlike sense of motion and displacement, like swimming through somebody else’s daydreams. But perhaps her most concise ode to preservation and erasure is a set of hand-blown glass jars filled with river water, filmstrips and objects found in the riverbed. Probably the water will ultimately destroy the encased items; but for now, they appear as treasures that could last forever.
JOAN
1206 Maple Avenue, Suite 715
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Show runs through Apr. 26
Gallery closed until further notice, but hoping to soon reopen by appt. -
Cameron
In life (1922-1995), Cameron’s art was often overshadowed by her colorful bohemian persona as occultist and wife of Jack Parsons. But one need know nothing about her to appreciate her drawings and paintings, each of which exudes an intense bewitching presence. Some of her most bizarre scenes depict people metamorphosing into chimera; a head sprouting from an uprooted weed; and statues emerging from Rorschach-esque ink blotches. The linearity and angsty tenor of several untitled figure drawings is reminiscent of Egon Schiele; even a relatively straightforward pose is rendered ineffably creepy. Particularly shivery is Sebastian (Imaginary Portrait of Kenneth Anger) (1962), portraying a nude body dissolving into a field near a forest harboring a mysterious chapel. In Sphinx (n.d.), the protagonist’s face is delineated by hair-like flurries of crosshatches flowing outward to form a lion’s mane; while in the drawing’s left-hand corner, a prickly black sun glares intently with a knowing gaze. It’s sadly ironic that quarantine fell in the midst of this show. When a small facsimile of Peyote Vision (1955) was displayed at the Ferus Gallery in 1957, it was deemed lewd by LAPD censors, who temporarily shuttered the gallery and arrested its owner, Wallace Berman on obscenity charges. Afterward, Cameron refused to show her art in commercial galleries. Fortunately, her work is now widely exhibited; and while it’s certainly better in person, it does survive reproduction remarkably well.
Marc Selwyn Fine Art
9953 South Santa Monica Blvd.
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
Show runs through Apr. 11
Check website for updates on gallery hours -
Nicolas Party
Nicolas Party’s imaginary world contains no wilderness, only bright graphic artifice based loosely on nature and historical art. In his depopulated landscapes such as Trees (all works 2020), tree trunks and branches are smooth cylinders whose leaves fall like confetti from oddly shaped canopies resembling cartoon characters’ coiffures. Lush swipes of pastel confer surface texture upon expanses of flatness. Two paintings titled Sunset portray seascapes with ice floes—or are they skyscapes of clouds? These works appear alongside murals and architectural fixtures in Party’s current show, an immersive installation themed after the Sottobosco painting genre invented by 17th century Dutch artist Otto Marseus van Schrieck. Named for the Italian word for “undergrowth,” sottobosco paintings spotlight flora and fauna that would normally keep to woodland shadows. Sottoboscos are, by their very nature, factitious, portraying groups of botanical and zoological specimens that wouldn’t normally appear side-by-side. Similarly, Party depicts combinations of creatures, plants, and people commingling in improbably synthetic scenarios. The exhibition’s first floor affects an old-fashioned museum interior trimmed in faux marble and wood. Emerald and red-orange murals portray Land-of-Oz-like caverns that dwarf visitors who approach. Nearby, a dimly lit chapel installation, Sottobosco, contains an original 1663 Marseus painting. Upstairs are huge golden-complected head sculptures with masklike miens and scalps adorned with snakes, frogs and flora painted after Marseus. Whenever present, Party’s human subjects preside. In pastel portraits, they try on mushrooms as hats, wear bouquets of roses as garments, and otherwise treat creatures as adornments in which they never seem quite at ease, bringing to mind the precariousness of both man and nature in their delicate state of human-dominated coexistence.
Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles
901 E. 3rd St.
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Show runs through Apr. 12
Temporarily open by appt. only -
Lisa Adams & Kelly McLane
The economy is crashing; coronavirus and panic are spreading like wildfires; and political lines are being drawn in shifting sands. What better time to enjoy the near-apocalyptic visions of Lisa Adams and Kelly McLane? “Unreality,” their first joint show, arrives at an ideal moment; but in fact, the two painters have been friends for years, and curator Kirk Pedersen conceived of this exhibition in 2018. Disorder reigns disarmingly in each artist’s fanciful paintings centered on conflicts among people and nature. The work here was culled from Adams’ and McLane’s previous solo shows, making the juxtaposition most satisfying for educing their remarkable commonalities. Eco-conscious undercurrents swirl through both painters’ dystopic dreamlike realms punctuated by touches of humor and hope. Animals, vegetation and mundane structures are common motifs; the sparsely populated vistas typically contain spots of action contrasted with expanses of nothingness. Adams’ Borderland (2015, detail above) features a figure with binoculars gazing above a floating phony swan; across the gallery, McLane’s Budfish (2017) portrays decoy-esque loons observing a flock of parakeets bursting from a bloody smokestack. Whereas McLane’s paintings and drawings are loose and ethereal, Adams’ mode of representation is self-consciously artificial, with abstract shapes and synthetic hues merging with naturalistically painted elements. The events transpiring in each artist’s quizzical scenes are ambiguous, yet clearly inauspicious. Even as public tongues lie wagging unbridled, their surreal paintings question how much we really know in an era that has long since moved beyond post-truth.
Pete & Susan Barrett Art Gallery
Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center
1310 11th Street
Santa Monica, CA 90401
Show runs through Mar. 28 -
Gracie DeVito
Evoking life’s inconstancy, little is certain in Gracie DeVito’s paintings, which seem to shift in the blink of an eye from abstraction to representation and back again. Even the edges of her shaped canvases seem to sway, slump, wiggle and distend as though struggling against the constraints of conventional rectangularity. As you gaze at their surfaces, faint vestiges of imagery pop from networks of brushstrokes, only to vanish and reassemble into new configurations. Some compositions are readily interpreted as scenes—for instance, in Motion Picture Seaweed (all works 2019), dry brushwork against raw canvas suggests looking out from a cove onto a sunny seashore littered with kelp—but inklings of landscapes, faces, foliage and figures remain fugitive, like barely remembered dreams. In an aleatoric method recalling Surrealist techniques, DeVito often paints on cotton rags on which she has previously wiped brushes, allowing imagery to emerge spontaneously from byproducts of pictures already painted. Situationist Hiker (pictured above) appears to have been painted in that way, with brushstrokes layered over delicately incised cloth on panel. The most definite imagery is found in Bookies in the Garden, where two figures appear on the verge of engulfment by a dark nebulous atmosphere.
Overduin & Co.
6693 Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90028
Show runs through Mar. 28 -
Farrah Karapetian
Farrah Karapetian’s current show, “The Photograph is Always Now,” is a touching rumination on the loss of her father, who died of cancer last year. Furthering her ongoing exploration of photography’s potential for semi-fictionally recasting bygones into the present, this body of work is perhaps her most personal yet. It is less about her father—who remains largely unidentified—than about the artist remembering watching him slip away. In pictures throughout the show, puddled and smeared photographic fluids evoke muddled grief, hospital tinctures and bodily excretions while serving as metaphors for the man and his memory dissolving. Two series of sequential photos, The Gesture of Memory (2019) and Via Dolorosa (2019), originated in his hospital room, where she exposed photographic paper and later selectively developed it. Watery drips and disjunctive blotches offer glimpses of her father lying abed, being tended, expiring; and finally, family members comforting each other in the aftermath. Larger images are more speculative, such as Big Dream (2020), relating to a vision she had; anecdotal back-stories are catalogued on the gallery’s website. The installation’s layout and dim lighting emanating from a special chandelier titled Organ (2020) were intended to evoke a cathedral. Additional 3D components as in her last show, “Collective Memory,” would have more fully immersed viewers in this imagined space; but the complexity of bereavement is palpable. In a trio of photos including Fragment (2020, pictured above) inside a room representing a reliquary, Karapetian presents herself as a ravaged, sundered statue: When a loved one dies, he brings part of you with him.
Diane Rosenstein Gallery
831 N. Highland Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Show runs through Mar. 28 -
Sofu Teshigahara
Entering Nonaka-Hill feels like stepping outdoors into a Japanese rock garden. Plant matter and sculptures populate a white-pebble substrate. Evoking sky or water, deep blue walls contribute to a sensation of tranquility. The parking lot outside seems a world away. You could almost imagine yourself undersea, with the lacunate sculptures as coral formations. Their creator, Sofu Teshigahara, (1900-1979) espoused an avant-garde ethos rooted in Japanese tradition. His abstractions reference Shinto legends and symbols of old Japan while exuding modernist principles akin to Western sculptors such as Henry Moore. Tachi (1968), for instance, is titled after a traditional sword worn by samurai—a custom banned in 1876, though the sword endures as an emblem of valor. Teshigahara was born in Osaka near the end of the Meiji Era, a contentious period of extreme change during which Japan struggled to preserve her distinct national identity while rapidly modernizing in response to foreign threats. He trained under his father, an ikebana sensei, and began teaching ikebana at the age of 13. Rebelling against strict conventions, he sought to revolutionize ikebana into a modern art form, and left his father’s school in 1927 to establish Sogetsu School of Ikebana. An arrangement of flowers, wood and sago palm fronds meanders across the floor like an algae-filled stream: this is an ikebana created by Teshighara’s direct pupil, contemporary Sogetsu School sensei Kaz “Yokou” Kitajima. The sprawling ikebana’s sinuosity echoes the movement of Teshigahara’s dazzling 1977 calligraphy piece, Ryusui (“flowing water”), symbolically flowing underneath it as if to betoken an ongoing current of Japanese tradition through Teshigahara’s legacy.
Nonaka-Hill
720 N. Highland Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Show runs through Mar. 28 -
Christopher Russell
“Photography is dead,” Christopher Russell declares in the statement for his current show, arguing that with the ease and popularity of digital manipulation, “there is no longer a belief that the captured image is anything more than a record of personalized fictions.” Yet Russell delights in the liberation engendered by this so-called death, employing photography as a point of departure for devising his own fictional realms. Undermining the mechanical illusionism normally expected of photographs, he veils his camera lens with colored fabric to capture abstract photos of landscapes; then uses razorblades to scratch detailed representational vistas into the prints. Having plied this technique for several years, he has honed his compositions. Compared with his last LA show, “Explorers,” the scenes here are starker, less ornate and less computerized in appearance, resulting in greater emotive impact. Stylized latticework eerily delineates shipwrecks, waterfalls and a rural settlement. Tensions between mechanical and handmade are heightened by creased paper, curled shavings, silver paint, aerosol droplets resembling sea spray, and shadows cast by tiny etchings in picture frame glazing. Willamette Falls #4 (2019, pictured above) evokes the feeling of sinking into a fiery ocean below the towering masts of a ship aflame. Painting has been pronounced dead many times, the earliest of which is attributed to Paul Delaroche upon first encountering a photograph in 1839. Russell’s painterly photographs insinuate that the roles are reversed, or at least equalized.
Von Lintel Gallery
1206 Maple Ave. #212
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Show runs through Mar. 7
