The Erotic Impulse In An Ever Becoming Universe
A Group Show Featuring: Gary Brewer, Aline Mare, Haleh Mashian, Mei Xian Qiu,
Aaron Sheppard, Kiel Johnson, Olivia Sears/Samuel Spurrier, Cheyann Washington and Nelly Zagury
Curated by: Gary Brewer
Exhibiting: November 19, 2022 – December 18, 2022
Opening: Saturday, November 19th, 6-9pm
WEST HOLLYWOOD – MASH Gallery is pleased to present, The Erotic Impulse In An Ever Becoming Universe, a group exhibition curated by Art & Cake and Whitehot magazine contributing columnist, Gary Brewer. Featuring works by ten artists whose art explores Eros as the universal life force. It is the energy that creates life from the smallest cells to the vast symbiotic orchestrations of organisms that are beyond our comprehension. This exhibition is a playful romp through the myriad Dionysian themes that Eros inspires.
The opening for The Erotic Impulse In An Ever Becoming Universe will be held on Saturday, November 19th, 6-9pm. Ample street parking will be available and valet parking will also be provided for $12. A catalog of essays on each artist written by exhibition curator, Gary Brewer will be available on opening night.
There will be a curator’s walk through and a reading by poet Olivia Sears for the closing event on Sunday, December 18, at 3pm.
Gary Brewer is an artist, curator and writer living in Los Angeles. Brewer creates luminous, richly detailed oil paintings informed in part from his deep passion for nature, learning, and art history. In these paintings, the suggestive eroticism of the forms reflect the theme of this exhibition. Brewer says of these works: “With each of these paintings, I fall more deeply in love with the lush sensual complexity of the orchid’s inner space. Erotic and vulvic, they are an echo of the Big Bang radiating outward in its myriad inventions of organic form: life, consciousness and love, all spiraling in a dance of galactic wonder.” Gary is also the curator of this exhibition and a contributing author to both Art & Cake and Whitehot magazines.
Aline Mare is an American visual artist, performing artist and filmmaker who creates photo-based, hand-finished, multimedia works that combine alternative processes and digital technology, remixing nature-based imagery to create compositions that hover between creation and decay.
Haleh Mashian is an expressionist painter who works in a variety of media.For over 20+ years, Mashian’s art has colorfully illustrated her unique, astute view of the world, both real and imagined. With layer upon layer of thick acrylic paint, and mixed media continually applied, scraped off and reapplied, her paintings reveal a richly colored stratum of expressivity. She is also the owner of MASH Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in West Hollywood.
“Mei Xian Qiu works in the medium of photography – but her broader subject is the construction of identity. Across international boundaries, waves of cultural propaganda, generational, linguistics and political divides, and histories both official and personal, she diligently reconstructs subversive versions of state-sponsored social frameworks. Increasingly, she also works with historical archive materials in more gestural, emotional and materially visceral collage modes that reveal the forces of hybridity at work in these matters. In all cases, her composed visual fictions express profound truths about the events and upheavals that shape who she is–and who we all are.” – LA Weekly
Aaron Sheppard lives and works in Joshua Tree, California. His work speaks eloquently about constructing and projecting identity, religiosity, sexuality, and a counterfactual historicism. His filter is the culture’s love of fame and/or pornography, mixed with the romance and perversion of classical allegorical portraiture. His lavish materiality finds a narrative function for neon light tubes, thick heavy paint, and extreme mannerism in his mostly nude figures, forcing people to deal with the inconvenient object and not just the idea of it.
Sculptor, Kiel Johnson says this of his work and process: “Through layered narratives and storytelling, my work speaks to my travels and adventures through everyday life. I think of myself as an explorer, setting out each day on an uncharted path of mediation manifested in drawing and sculpture. My work is a springboard for metaphorical investigations of the world I inhabit. Using line to explore places, objects, and spaces that exist in my imagination, I catalog my observations and seal them in time. The idea of work as play is central to my practice: handmade, hard work, and having fun. I believe in a laboratory approach of experimentation to problems without finite solutions. Inspired by odd discoveries, coincidence and chance, I seek to personify inanimate subjects. Drawing acts as a seismograph, witnessing my experiences and recording the vibrations; sculpture advocates my quest for understanding how things are held together.”
Poet Olivia Sears and artist Samuel Spurrier will be showing a piece created specifically for this exhibition. One part is presented as a banner that expresses the erotic as an unfurling, creating a psychic space of celebration that also envelops and protects. The poem and the silk banner become a magic carpet to soar above oppressive forces that inhibit and arrest the fluid nature of the soul. Eros is not only an ecstasy of the flesh, but also the joy of a soul and intellect, free to explore and articulate the contours of one’s life.
Cheyann Washington is a painter from Los Angeles, California. Washington’s personal studies encapsulate the essence of human behavior and the figure as it mirrors nature. This conversation has been developed through numerous techniques and practices including drawing & painting. The evolution of Washington’s work connects us back to the ultimate understanding of this system in which both imbalance and balance live within us.
Nelly Zagury draws her inspiration from mythology, her Moroccan heritage and her love for kitsch. Her drawings, paintings, sculptures, photography and videos explore wonder, ornament, sex and dreams. In her work, she celebrates fantasies to better emancipate from them, with humor and poetry.
MASH Gallery is a contemporary art gallery curated for both collectors and interior designers. A contemporary artist herself, Haleh Mashian, founded MASH Gallery as a venue designed to create intimate conversations between curators, artists, and the Los Angeles art audience, which like our city, is constantly-changing, thought-provoking, and always-refreshing.
MASH Gallery is located at 812 N La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90069 in the La Cienega Design Quarter of West Hollywood between Melrose Ave. and Santa Monica Blvd.
