Press

Beautifully curated by MOAH’s Andi Campognone, Collaborate and Create, now at The Loft at Liz’s through March 3rd, is an exciting exhibition. Matching up the talents of 17 different pairs of artists, the result is compelling – it reveals new dimensionality in some projects, new ways of looking at the world in others, and perhaps best of all, showcases just how wonderful two terrific artists can be when working on the same projects. It’s like the old Doublemint Gum commercial “double your pleasure, double your fun.”

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For the last 30 years, El Nopal Press has intentionally been a studio where artists can experiment with printmaking. Men and women alike have been drawn to El Nopal for a chance to work with Francesco Siqueiros, a man whose reputation as collaborative, experimental printmaker precedes him. Interestingly though, some of the most provocative artistic pieces and innovations have come from the studio’s collaborations with women.

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In the haunting group show The Nothing That Is, now at the Brand Library and Art Center, curators Yaron Dotan and Christine Rasmussen have shaped a powerful exhibition that takes as its inspiration a Wallace Stevens poem that suggests viewers behold “nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.” The exhibition includes mixed media, painting, and sculptural pieces, as well as a multi-image video installation, that are thought-provoking and rich. The viewer feels submerged in a world that emphasizes the contemplation of aloneness in many pieces; while others seem supercharged to bring us to light and communion.

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It’s the third and by far the largest and most comprehensive of the duo’s B.A.T. series, which had its first two iterations at Off-Ramp Gallery and SOLA (South Los Angeles Contemporary) in the past few years. Co-curator Anita Bunn is an artist herself, and was making some prints with El Nopal and noticed that Siqueiros was working with Carolyn Castaño, Lisa Adams, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh and Analia Saban, all at the same time. She had known Siqueiros for many years, since the beginnings of El Nopal Press, and was aware of the broad spectrum of artists with whom he had worked. “But while the overall list of artists is impressive,” Bunn tells the Weekly, “this moment just struck me. Why not,” she thought, “do an exhibition focused on the women artists of El Nopal?”

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“B.A.T.” is one of those bits of art-studio lingo that print-makers use to communicate; it stands for “bon a tirer” which translates as “good to pull,” meaning that a print has been proofed and the satisfied artist is ready to go forward with producing its edition. In CSULB’s new exhibition B.A.T. State III: Women Artists In Conversation with El Nopal Press, curators Anita Bunn and Francesco X. Siqueiros survey the innovative prints (lithographs, reliefs and monoprints) produced by 37 women across 30 years of Siqueiros’ legendary DTLA print studio, El Nopal Press.

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Si le collage est une pratique qui a pris son essence dans les courants surréalistes et cubistes au début du XXe  siècle, il n’a rien perdu de son fond ni de la diversité des formes qu’il recouvre. Chelsea Dean parcourt Los Angeles et ses environs pour rassembler les éléments du passé qui la et nous questionnent sur notre façon de vivre notre contemporanéité, pour en extraire des compositions très personnelles et composites conjuguant photographies et matériaux de construction.

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In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men James Agee and Walker Evans documented the unimaginably harsh lives of several tenant farmers and their families in the Deep South during the Dust Bowl of the nineteen thirties. Using prose and photographs they painted an indelible portrait of a hardscrabble existence that was forged by an environmental disaster and made worse by the Great Depression. In Paradox California, the fine show organized by James Panozzo at LAUNCH LA, Chelsea Dean and Osceola Refetoff depict another desolate environment in another time. 

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If California is in many ways a state of mind, as well as a state in the western continental U.S., Paradox California exemplifies its mystique. The California dream depicted in this lush and burnished exhibition from photographic artist Osceola Refetoff and mixed-media artist Chelsea Dean is desiccated by desert heat, burnished gold and amber and brown by desert sun, and crested by dry blue skies as vivid as a Mojave wildflower.

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“For the past four years, I have been combing the Mojave Desert, wandering in and out of abandoned Jackrabbit Homesteads taking pictures and collecting artifacts. These remnants have served as reminders that someone used to occupy these once hopeful spaces. It’s here that I find myself drawn to the multitude of textures, colors, and patterns that live within the detritus. When reconstructing or re-imagining these spaces in my work, I assign new meaning and value with the addition of gold elements and embellished patterns.”

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The four artists participating in the Fellows of Contemporary Art’s Curators Lab Exhibition are like members of any good band; each one embodies a different characteristic that contributes to the success and appeal of the whole. Chelsea Dean has curated a show that focuses on our local, built environment through different perspectives, her own, as well as those belonging to Susan Feldman, Susan Logoreci and Aili Schmeltz. 

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The four artists participating in the Fellows of Contemporary Art’s Curators Lab Exhibition are like members of any good band; each one embodies a different characteristic that contributes to the success and appeal of the whole. Chelsea Dean has curated a show that focuses on our local, built environment through different perspectives, her own, as well as those belonging to Susan Feldman, Susan Logoreci and Aili Schmeltz. 

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Ooooh! So many elements, all living together in beautifully composed harmony. This is the work of Los Angeles based artist Chelsea Dean. Here’s just a tiny list of some of the bits in these three pieces alone – hand-cut photographs, wood veneer, decorative paper, foam core, washi tape, mat board, found objects from abandoned homesteads – and that’s just the beginning.

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Hans Ulrich Obrist explained curating in a 2014 article in The Guardian: “Today, curating as a profession means at least four things. It means to preserve, in the sense of safeguarding the heritage of art. It means to be the selector of new work. It means to connect to art history. And it means displaying or arranging the work. But it’s more than that. 

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We might ask, has exhibition curator Shannon Curie Holmes accepted the immutability of the term, ‘man made,' as a necessary conceit? Or is the fact that all seven participants are women and the two-word title, “Man Made,” serves to further emphasize the gender element intended as tongue-in-cheek, or, better yet, a slap in the face? At the top of the home page of participant Sinziana Velicescu's website, she's spelled out MAN MADE in a stern font above one of her photographs; and at the bottom right of the photo, in all lower case, it reads "an all female show." Continuing to address the exhibition's gender makeup feels a bit ridiculous because of what we would all, at this point, be thinking: if the dynamic was reversed, and it was an exhibition in which all seven artists were men, we would simply regard it as an all men's show. Rather than getting further into those weeds, let's point out that this is a group of solid local artists, which is one of the Center's specialties.

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An exhibit that examines the way people engage with an urban environment will be on display at the Brand Library & Art Center starting Saturday and running through May 6. “Man Made” features works by seven female artists who explore the intersection of manufactured structures and nature in each of their pieces. The Los Angeles-based artists participating in the exhibit are Jacqueline Bell Johnson, Anita Bunn, Chelsea Dean, Jennifer Gunlock, Jenene Nagy, Michelle Robinson and Sinziana Velicescu.

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Spectacular Subdivision is a group of site-specific artist projects and performances by over forty artists organized by High Desert Test Sites, Monte Vista Projects, and the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA). Sited in two locations over one weekend -- one within a home interior environment in outlying Wonder Valley near Joshua Tree National Park and the other at a remote, undeveloped parcel owned by HDTS several miles east of the home site location. The series of installations and events took place over three days in early April 2014.

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A delicious bit of market-driven irony has boosted drawing, the oldest visual art form, into the limelight as the hottest new trend. The more attention drawing gets, the more new adherents it seems to attract. Never mind that some of them are working in paint and sculptural materials; if a work is in a drawings show, it must be a drawing. Cross-fertilization and discovery matter more than exclusionary definitions anyway.

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