Wiley Wallace, Here It Comes

Jason Krause, Ancient Vortex

Without the restraints of an overarching theme, Point of Departure allows each artist the opportunity to show their personal vision and most current direction in their work, whether that be in the subject matter, technique or style. The show includes a dynamic selection of work by diverse artists including Nicole Bruckman, Jeaneen Carlino, Samir EVOL, Ken Garduno, Jenna Gibson, Brooke Grucella, Jason Krause, Ohgie and Sarah Stieber; it also features new paintings by Arizona artist Wiley Wallace.

Sarah Stieber, Lila

Cella Gallery
11135 Weddington St. #112, North Hollywood, CA 91601
http://www.cellagallery.com/

#adidas, 2013

Oswaldo creates his ‘blooms’ by borrowing the logos of major corporations and replicating them in kaleidoscopic abundance, with smaller and smaller rings of logos falling in towards each flower’s heart. Superficially these works are about color and shape; but on closer inspection, each possesses great conceptual depth. Oswaldo believes that next to sales, ‘viral lifespan’ is the most important factor in a product’s success in our increasingly internet-dependent world. Logos play a pivotal role in the vitality of these products: “Our post-social media machine that we now call the internet celebrates ideas that are lean, quick and easily consumed and distributed.”

#apple, 2013

The familiar logos used by Oswaldo are mental shortcuts to brand and corporate identity. By turning them on their head, melding them together or changing their color, Oswaldo decontextualizes them just enough to reveal what they really are at heart: pleasing arrangements of color, line and shape. Some logos retain the integrity of their original message, others are transformed entirely.

#luxury, 2013

Oswaldo’s process divests them of their mystic ability to exist as graphical surrogates for products and their parent companies. These logos simply become oversized and expressive brush-strokes on his canvas. Though Oswaldo uses an automated process of his own devising to create his fractals, they communicate the power of art, transforming something ‘mathematically sterile’ into an object of abundant ‘organic human attraction’. Each of these blooms, like their component logos, are strikingly bright, bold and barely trichromatic. Their apparent simplicity, however, belies the complexity of Oswaldo’s artistic process: his computerized vectors are brought to the canvas with self-adhesive vinyl, automotive paint, silk-screening and a plethora of other printing techniques.

#sport, 2013

LAUNCH Gallery
170 S. La Brea Ave., 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90036
http://www.launchla.org

Cryptic Creatures, Kafka Series, 1948

Study for Final Jury, 1953

The Cavern, 1948

Wayne, an integral part of the World War II California arts scene, was a printmaking force to be reckoned with and a proud participant in California’s Feminist Art Movement of the 1970′s. She died in 2011.

The Chase, 28 February 1949

The Tunnel, 1949

All images © The June Wayne Collection, LLC, courtesy Louis Stern Fine Arts 

Louis Stern Fine Arts
9002 Melrose Ave. West Hollywood, CA 90069
http://www.louissternfinearts.com/

Crescent Eyed Portrait, 2012
© Daniel Gordon, Courtesy M+B Gallery, Los Angeles

In Gordon’s practice, the artist culls photographic images from the Internet, prints them out and uses them to build three-dimensional tableaus. He then photographs these tableaus with an 8 x 10 inch view camera. Afterward, the sculptures are dismantled, though their various elements—body parts, colors, background patterns—are often reused to make new works.

Portrait in Yellow, Orange and Blue, 2012
© Daniel Gordon, Courtesy M+B Gallery, Los Angeles

Gordon’s melding together of fragmented parts form a dislocated reality where different perspectives, profiles and people merge into an incongruous whole. Through the process of slicing, cutting, gluing, staging, arranging and recycling, Gordon executes a shift from digital to analogue—almost as though he were engaged in a physical form of Photoshop—and challenges the stability of the fixed image, opening up the possibility for new meanings to emerge.

Portrait in Yellow, Red and Blue, 2012
© Daniel Gordon, Courtesy M+B Gallery, Los Angeles

This unique handling of the photographic medium connects Gordon with the history of collage and painting. In these works red, yellow and blue dominate in bold blocks. Visibly torn edges, gobs of glue and raw, recycled scraps fuse and separate before our eyes, wavering between completion and dissolution.

Still Life with Shadows and Pears, 2012
© Daniel Gordon, Courtesy M+B Gallery, Los Angeles

Also on display is a selection of smaller works depicting fruits and vegetables that Gordon refers to as color and object studies. These formal investigations employ another layer of recycling: all are parts or pieces that have been discarded from the larger still lifes and portraits. Here they are given special attention, as if viewed under a microscope, to further examine the physical nature of these objects—the fine line the work straddles as it shifts from the two-dimensional into the three-dimensional.

Still Life with Lobster, 2012
© Daniel Gordon, Courtesy M+B Gallery, Los Angeles

M+B Gallery
612 N. Almont Dr. Los Angeles, CA 90069
http://www.mbart.com

Artists in the exhibition include Thilini Abeygunaratne, Jonathan Aceves, Jacob Adame, James Barsalou, S. Bekey, Jeffrey Bowie, Kiarra Elliot, Katelin Gates, Genevieve Celeste Hazboun, Alex Hwang, Yehsiming Jue, Jinyoung Ko, Kazuko Kruse, Jorel Ledezma, Joan Lee, Fang Li, Tiffanie Lin, Joel Lovos, Kayla Madison, Jennifer Martinez, Sarah Moore, Jordan Morales, Breeann Ochoa, Vincent Pickering, Katie Reed, Sarah Reed, Luog Saepharn, Cecilia Saldivar, Irin Son, Elizabeth Valencia, Karen Yi, Zaid Yousef, and Wei Yu.

Photo credit: Anas

A reception for Area 51: A Sound Installation by Venzha Christ will run concurrently with the reception for Thank You For Coming. Area 51, which runs through June 1st at Culver Center of the Arts, is a new site-specific, sound installation based on the artist’s travels to the secretive U.S. military base, Area 51, also known as Dreamland, or Groom Lake, where he made recordings of the sounds emanating from and around the base. Located in the southern portion of Nevada, the base’s purpose is officially undetermined. However, it most likely supports development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. The base has become well known due to conspiracy theories and its portrayal in popular culture. It is these secrets and ambiguities that Venzha explores in this new work created especially for UCR Culver Center of the Arts Black Box intermedia studio.

Photo credit: Anas

Sweeney Art Gallery and Culver Center of the Arts
3824 Main St. Riverside, CA 92501
http://sweeney.ucr.edu

Nick Taggart, Hieronymus Night’s Dream

Works on Paper 1989 – 2013, an exhibition of Nick Taggart’s black and white graphite drawings, acrylic and watercolor paintings explores organic forms and their manifestations in everyday life. As presented in his series Insects and Garden, Taggart engages in the creation of analytical, labor intensive drawings of natural phenomena. Instigated by the changing events in his life. Taggart introduces spontaneity to his latest works including not only critical observations of garden life but also exploring mystic fairy creatures and adding faces to organic forms. Taggart’s character studies have turned into surreal landscapes leading the viewer to rediscover known elements within mysterious environments. For instance, Lookout Orchid, 2009 presents a surreal landscape with human figures viewing an orchid floating in space. Introducing the viewer to a metamorphic world, Taggart highlights hidden forms found in the orchid and translates them into human physiognomies supported by the large scale of the plant life.

Nick Taggart, Pod Owl Bats Mantis Locust

Catherine Coan’s Canary Suicides utilizes elements from films, stereotypes and famous suicides as inspirations in her satirical suicide scenarios. Coan states, “The Canary Suicides are meditations on captivity, miniature embodiment, the pet as fetish, and the relationship between death and delight.”

Catherine Coan, Burn Out

Coan’s interest in the canary started as a child, when her mother and grandmother bred and kept many. As she studied medieval art, her interests expanded to the reliquary and the mystical objects contained within. Coan’s exploration led her to the creation of sculptural assemblages presented within a birdcage. As a symbol of domestic life and captivity, the yellow canary represents a test subject for human actions. The entrapment and isolation of the individual’s future exacerbate feelings of despair ending in suicidal actions. In viewing Coan’s work the canaries seem to embrace the moment in which death brings the delight of freedom, achieving true happiness and a peaceful existence. Each scene contains hidden money, asuicide note, and a pet owned by the resident canary, along with other unique elements completing the poetic setting.

Catherine Coan, Comme Ci Comme Ça

Lois Lambert Gallery
Bergamot Station E3, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90404
http://www.loislambertgallery.com/

John Wesley
Bird Lovers, 1973
Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and Fredericks & Freiser, New York, NY
Photography: Thomas Mueller

Objects and Paintings includes paintings and sculptures from several periods in Wesley’s career; all of them point to the “eccentric precision,” as artist Dan Flavin described it, that has made him one of the most indispensible American artists of the post-war period. Over the course of his half-century career, Wesley has created an amalgamation of minimalist, surrealist, and pop vocabularies that taps into the cultural unconscious. His formal universe, which is predicated on patterning, seriality, and a particularly deliberate use of line and color, brings together references and images of all kinds.

David Kordansky Gallery
3143 S. La Cienega Blvd., Unit A Los Angeles, CA, 90016
http://www.davidkordanskygallery.com/

Rachel Kessler, Subject of the Saturant at Night, 2013
Courtesy of the artist, Wharton + Espinosa, and photographer Angela Chilberg

Rachel Kessler’s new series of oil paintings, entitled Luma Peel, show objects fading in and out of discreet form, enmeshed in the atmosphere of the moment. Made using a system of layering color in peels, similar to how the eye organizes visible light, they depict a frozen isolation afforded by long hours of looking. Each piece explores forms both as they are, and as they appear to be, in order to emphasize the potential and peculiarity of their conditions.

Nicolas Lobo, Grape syrup action for Paul Octavian Nasca’s “U smile 800% slower,” 2011
Courtesy of the artist and Wharton + Espinosa

The Furthest Distance Between Two Points features an eclectic mix of drawings, paintings, sculptures and videos from thought-provoking artists Skip Arnold, Eli Langer, Nicolas Lobo, Jeff Ostergren and Daniel R. Small.

Wharton + Espinosa
Pacific Design Center Suite B275
8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, CA 90069
http://wharton-espinosa.com

Pedro Matos‘ paintings are reminiscent of wheat paste and decollage-like exterior surfaces, layering textures, patterns, figurative subjects, and typography with a combination of trompe l’oeil and accelerated physical deterioration. Influenced by skateboarding, surfing, graffiti, hip hop, punk, and DIY (do it yourself), Matos began working in the public realm. He identifies with the evanescent existence of street culture, the disintegration of society and historical folkloric heritage.

Matos uses his various mediums to create an atmosphere of aesthetic decay and ephemerality. With a survey of subjects, historical and contemporary societal references, Matos raises questions of subjectivity, arbitrariness, and transience in our cultural value structures and social epistemology.

All images courtesy of the artist and Martha Otero Gallery

Martha Otero Gallery
820 N. Fairfax Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90046
http://www.marthaotero.com

Nick Aguayo

Nick Aguayo was raised near Palm Springs and received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of California at Irvine. His method of painting is grounded in his interest in abstraction, and his diagrammatic works showcase the processes of their own creation. In his paintings, shapes are contrived, juxtaposed and then overlaid with a grid layout. Through such a process, Aguayo’s work seeks to create a dialogue between harmony and dissonance, establishing moments that exist outside of a language of representation.

Daniel Payavis

Daniel Payavis was educated at the University of Texas, Austin, and moved to Los Angeles in 2011. His works on display involve a rigorous pursuit of the modernist form within a landscape of exuberant, kitsch graphic design. Situating palm tree scenes as the backdrop to sober geometric lines, his work creates the effect of European minimalism in the South American jungle, akin to Brasilia, Brazil or the works of Oscar Niemeyer. These series of paintings reflect a lived-in architectural experience laden with emotional or psychotropic elements, creating a cohabitation of contrasting forms.

Zack Stadel

Zack Stadel grew up in Portland, Oregon and received his MFA in painting and sculpture from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. His untitled series of irregular photographs are appropriated from pornographic imagery and presented in custom wooden frames. Through using the frame as an active agent, Stadel explores how formal subtraction can open familiar readings of explicit content to other narrative possibilities.

Beth Holden is the principal of New Theme Inc., a design-build architectural firm with a focus on sustainable practices. Her work Open Stall is a conceptual installation of a female urinal, a prototype for a bathroom fixture that still has no definite form or mass appeal. Her sculpture renders transparent the difficulty in equating feminine and masculine forms, not only anatomically, but also within the wider professional and aesthetic realm.

New Theme Gallery
8178 Melrose Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90046
http://www.newtheme.net