For immediate release:
CHARLOTTE JACKSON FINE ART presents
Still Friends After All These Years
Charlotte Jackson Fine Art is delighted to present a group exhibition of work by three artists Still Friends After All These Years. The show will run from September 11 to October 10, with an Opening reception with the artists on Friday, September 11 from 5-7 p.m. On Saturday, September 12 from 2-4 p.m. there will be a Gallery Talk: A Conversation with Charles Arnoldi, Ron Cooper, Laddie John Dill and Rani Singh. The gallery is located in the Railyard Arts District at 554 South Guadalupe Street.
The colors sink deep into you. The heat of a gouache red. The radiant blue glow of light in a glass tube. The shimmering gold of pearlescent pigment on Plexiglas. The forms and formats as distinct as the techniques. Yet these works of art, large and small, all somehow find their way deep into the body of the viewer – shifting, shaping, answering questions we hadn’t realized needed asking.
These works are by three remarkable and renowned artists who emerged out of the California Light and Space movement of the early 1970’s whom Charlotte Jackson met and showed decades ago. As she notes: “In 1987, I curated an exhibition featuring three artists: Charles Arnoldi, Ron Cooper, and Laddie John Dill. Thirty-nine years later, all three are still making art—and still friends. I had forgotten about the 1987 exhibition until Ron Cooper’s registrar found the catalog and sent it to me. That discovery immediately inspired me to bring the three artists together again.”
By the time of that 1987 show, the three artists had already known each other for about twenty years. There is a sort of dusty and sun-drenched aura to the stories the three of them tell of their early encounters and artistic nascence. So much so that these stories could almost read like the opening beats of a late 60’s movie filled with cool cars, echoing warehouse studios, and shaggy-haired youths hungrily prowling the wide streets of Los Angeles against the silhouette backdrop of iconic palm trees. Each had found their way both to art and to Los Angeles at a time when several artistic and commercial forces were overlapping in the region.
All three spent some amount of time at the famed Chouinard Art Institute during its final years before it was folded fully into what is now Cal Arts. But perhaps it was really Plexiglas that brought them together. Science and technology had birthed burgeoning industries in Southern California, and many new materials were finding their way into the artistic repertoire at that time, including the resins and plastics that so intrigued the Light and Space artists. Plexiglas framing was a brand-new idea and Arnoldi, who had a job at an art framer, came up with the idea of starting Acme Framing in downtown LA. Dill joined him in the venture, while Cooper was working on his Light Traps, made by spraying layers of resin onto glass, then mounted in Plexiglas boxes.
Each of the three artists have worked with a wide variety of techniques and materials. For Charles Arnoldi, early on, this was the gestural 3D Stick paintings and later the Chainsaw paintings which explore negative space. This early work evolved into a diverse range of work in a variety of mediums. Included in this exhibition are examples of his vivid paintings. These works use layers of colors, lines, and shapes to create surprising depths. Inspired by the light filled Ojai Valley where he grew up, Ron Cooper found ways to fill space up with light, to make light nearly substantial, from his early Light Traps to the Plexiglas Bars and Combos he makes to this day. However, for Cooper art is not just one thing; included in the exhibition is a large tin work with a title that is pure poetry: Twelve of the Infinite Gods and Goddesses of Intoxication and Ecstasy, the smell of a flower, the touch of a lover, the AHA of an idea. Dill’s work initially worked directly with light in the form of his Light Sentences, neon tubes using alternating segments of colors. Here each color translates like a phoneme or word to create compound visual meanings. Dill also expanded his repertoire of media to include metal, concrete, glass works, and large sculptural installations. Included in this show are several of his etched and shaped aluminum pieces which capture light in their curving lines.
Although each found unique ways to explore the themes and artistic questions that formed the zeitgeist of the times, there are commonalities persistent among all three artists: from the physicality and dynamism of their work, to their intensive work ethic and a restless drive that keeps each of them exploring, changing, and working daily, into their 80’s. Finally, each of them, in their own ways, exhibit that quintessence of the work which emerged out of L.A. at that time – art that at its core investigates perceptual phenomena.
Come for the work itself. For its power and changeability and joy. But, if possible, take it one step further and come to learn about the history of these three friends and the art they make.
– Michaela Kahn, PhD
