Curated by Gary Brewer and on exhibit both online and IRL at Wonzimer Gallery in DTLA, “The Shape of Life,” is a dazzlingly lovely show. The nine-artist exhibition includes works by Brewer, Tim Hawkinson, Aline Mare, Cheyann Washington, Jeff Colson, Mercedes Dorame, Nasim Hantehzadeh, Patty Wickman, and Tim Musso.

Thematically, the show focuses on the energy of life, and its expansiveness beyond and through our bodies and minds, into the universe beyond in an interconnected cornucopia of overflowing beauty. Drawing from works that look at a wide variety of life forms from the body to flowers, the roots of trees and the rush of a river, the connective tissue to the exhibition is the shifting nature and history of consciousness itself, touching on elements of the eternal and the ephemeral in a tactile dimension.

Using natural dyes that will alter with time, Washington’s vivid silk paintings are like semi-diaphanous scarves. The images themselves are filled with motion; hung as they are, the surface also wavers slightly in an imagined breeze. A loosely impressionistic meld of floral and human images, the interconnectedness of time, motion, light, color, and transformation she invokes is graceful and bright.

Darker and deeper, Mare’s work is both flower and passage, complex as the desire of love. Her palette in Phallic Birthstone glows with fecund earth tones; viewing is a descent to the center of the earth, illuminated by fire, yet exuding serenity, the profound stillness before tunneling into light. Reflected in a hexagonal mirror surrounded by rock salt, the works are immersive, a forest of the soul.

Earthen brown and wintery, Wickman’s oil on linen Raised Bed is a delicate garden awaiting rebirth, lying as dormant as the pet resting on dusty ground. Her smaller works resonate with themes of awaited birth and decay. In contrast, Hawkinson’s ink on synthetic paper Ovo is pure gestation, a spare and resonant image. Turning brighter, Brewer’s oil on canvas work is an ecstatic fusion drifting beyond the floral to the cellular, to a watery world of magical wonder. In his Chimeric Universe, transcendent shapes waver and dance.

Dorame’s To Cross the River is equally immersive, an acrylic-on-canvas pool with concrete-cast stones resembling a pool of swirling sky as well as water. Her archival pigment prints are equally mesmeric. Like modern petroglyphs, Hantehzadeh’s vivid work offers a mix of oil paint, pastel, colored pencil, and graphite on paper varying in emotion from the howl of pain in The F-Word, Noise, Scars to the serene, prismatic incantation of Looking Through Magnifying Glass.

Nasim Hantehzadeh, The F Word, Noise, Scars, 32″ x 42,” oil pastel, dry pastel, color pencil, and graphite on paper.

Musso’s Cetasea Sempervirens woodcut is a large-scale deep dive into the complexities of a burgeoning forest. Smaller pieces are fragile and lovely. Angled opposite is Colson’s fiberglass and spray paint sculpture Stump, alive with the skin of the forest. His mammoth created fiberglass and metallic paint Incident, is a multi-surfaced bubble, beautiful and ominous, luminous yet opaque.

In fact, that is one way to describe the exhibition itself: a mysterious, sublime amalgam of the seen and unseen, the visionary and the hidden.

“The Shape of Life”
Wonzimer
On view by appointment through Feb. 7, 2021