Pic of the Week 08/30/2009

Super Mario's Art Needs Your Help

Hello My Fellow Readers,

First I want to thank all of you for reading and following my blog. I really appreciate the feedback and the support you have given me since my blog went online in November, 2008. As it reaches the one year anniversary, I have decided that it is time to expand.

I am planning to cover other art scenes in the coming year, and to add photos to my reviews and postings. I cannot do this without your support.

You may have noticed something different about my blog. I have added ads to my blog. These ads will help support the continuing coverage and reviews of galleries and exhibitions around LA and hopefully around the world.

Don't need to send money; All you need to do is click onto the ads and that's it. Your "click" help will make this blog better. Please help by supporting the advertisers on my blog.

Thank you again for your support and continued patronage.

Mario

Pic of the Week 08/16/2009

Pic of the Week 08/09/2009

Summer, Summer Time, It's the time to Unwind...

I love summer. Summer is a great time to be outside, go to the beach and, yes, go to galleries around LA. At this time in early August, many galleries do close. However, there are some galleries that do remain open and have some great shows to see. The exhibits that are shown at this time are normally group shows, which highlight artists that the galleries represent. Below is a list and highlights of a few group shows that are worth seeing.


Honor Fraser
http://www.honorfraser.com/
2622 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
T: 310.837.0191
F: 310.838.0191
Tues — Sat. 10AM — 6PM


Group Show: Bitch is the New Black
Curated by Emma Gray
July 11, 2009 — August 29, 2009




Artists: Cathy Akers, Kathryn Andrews, Rosson Crow, Krysten Cunningham, Pearl C. Hsiung, Annie Lapin, Shana Lutker, Ruby Neri, Catherine Opie, Amanda Ross-Ho, Anna Sew Hoy, Mindy Shapero, Kirsten Stoltmann, Bari Ziperstein


Highlights: I really enjoyed the show and all the artist presented some quality work. I think the best works were from Krysten Cunningham, Mindy Shapero, Kathryn Andrews, and Rosson Crow. Check out the gallery office, where a recent painting by Rosson Crow, "I Just Can't Stop Loving You," which pays homage to Michael Jackson. Great work.


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Richard Telles Fine Art
http://www.tellesfineart.com/
7380 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
323-965-5578
Tues - Sat 9am - 5pm


Group Show: Round Up
June 27, 2009 - August 1, 2009 (Call to see if still showing)


Highlights: Works by Richard Hawkins, Jim Issermann, and Thomas Eggerer are the best in this group show.
If the show is closed, please check out the website, which has some great photos of both the installation and the individual works.


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Sam Lee Gallery
http://www.samleegallery.com/
990 N. Hill Street #190
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Phone 323-227-0275
Fax 323-227-0256
info@samleegallery.com
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 12 - 6 pm and by appointment


Backyard
July 11 – August 22, 2009


Backyard, a summer group show featuring painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography, is a smorgasbord; the artworks depict the “backyard” as a dystopic eden--a open-ended interpretation of this theme that ranges from the whimsical to the serious, and the humorous to the creepy. Participating artists are Justin Allen, Joe Biel, Frick Byers, Margarita Cabrera, Carleton Christy, Rebecca Clark, Brian Cooper, Waylon Dobson, Nathan Hayden, Darren Hostetter, Joshua Levine, Luke Matjas, Pipo Nguyen-duy, Mary O’Malley, Jon Rappleye, Shizu Saldamando, Macha Suzuki, Devon Tsuno, Erica Lee Wheelock and Carrie Yury.


Highlights: I really liked the drawings by Luke Matijas, whose portrayal of broken lawn chairs, ice chest and road cones are both tragic and beautiful. I also liked the paintings of Brian Cooper, whose paintings portray a broken urban landscape of concrete and graffiti. Done in detail and color, the paintings are excellent. I also liked the works of Justin Allen, Joe Biel, Devon Tsuno Macha Suzuki and Rebecca Clark.


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Cherry and Martin
www.cherryandmartin.com
2712 La Cienega Blvd.,
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Phone 310 559 0100
Fax 310 559 0120
info@cherryandmartin.com


Bellows and Whispers: Claude Collins-Stracensky, Mari Eastman, Erik Frydenborg, Noah Sheldon & Torbjorn Vejvi
July 11 - August 15, 2009

The exhibition Bellows and Whispers: The Large and Small Effects of Structure, Its Presence and Absence brings together the work of five artists interested in abstraction. While abstraction as an art historical category is relevant for some of the artists, all of the artists included in the show are interested in the abstract as a day-to-day experience. These artists use the process of considering something independent of its fixed associations as a method to test the overarching structures that guide viewers through artworks. Confident, yet unexpected or incomplete structures can create interesting situations, and while interpretation is what art is all about, of course, the generally-speaking para tactical syntax of the works in this exhibition—a technique in which ideas and images, usually disparate, are placed side-by-side without clear connection—here forces viewers to navigate obliquely in order to come to the conclusions implied. At stake is a sense of mystery, the evocation of memory, a questioning of concreteness and a sense of things less well defined. The resulting artworks facilitate new ways of seeing the world outside of the art context as well as new structures with which to examine the artworks themselves.


Highlights: Mari Eastman's wall installation entitled [bird mural] Title TK' is a beautiful work of art that portrays birds in a baroque and abstract style. I also liked the works of Noah Sheldon, which combine both the abstract and the musical in a way that reminds me of early 20th century interests in Synethesia, the sensory combining of both music and visual senses.

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Gallery Luisotti

http://www.artnet.com/gallery/684/gallery-luisotti.html

2525 Michigan Ave, Bldg A2
Santa Monica, California 90404
Tel: (310) 453-0043
Fax: (310) 264-4888
Tues.-Fri. 10:30am-6pm, Sat. 11am-6pm

Nighttown
July 15, 2009 - Sept. 12, 2009

“Nighttown.” Derving its title from the ‘Nighttown’ phantasmagoria of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus at the near end of Ulysses, the exhiition will include a selection of works from ten artists; Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Dike Blair, John Divola, Frank Gohlke, Shirley Irons, Michael Ormerod, Mark Ruwedel, Toshio Shibata, and Henry Wessel.Centered around the transformations of places and objects as witnessed through delimited fields of vision, the immediate worlds of these images take on a mythopoeic figuration through what is not so immediately perceivable. Like Bloom and Dedalus’ hallucinatory transformations of places and objects as witnessed through the specter of night, the veiling darkness inherent in all of the show’s works alludes to a similar disengagement between what is rational and what appears not. Highlights: John Divola, Lewis Baltz, Toshio Shibata, and Dike Blair

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Ruth Bachofner Gallery
www.ruthbachofnergallery.com
2525 Michigan Avenue, Suite G2
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Tel: 310 829 3300
Fax: 310 449 0070
Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00a – 5:30p


Group Show: MFA Graduates 2009
July 25, 2009 - Sept. 05, 2009
Press Release:
EBEN GOFF, UCLA In the most recent work, I’ve become attuned to considering my paintings as dimensional objects made from specific substances. They signal a shift towards treating image, surface and support as an interdependent material event. Furthermore, I’ve been exploring ways in which paintings can perform as containers, both of their own making as well as our gaze. The waxed frames are reductive permutations of this dynamic, where the containers themselves become the subject. This trajectory expands the works from a descriptive, representational mode, and carries my root interests in material processes towards more abstract, sculptural ends.


KOZUE HASEGAWA, Art Institute of Chicago I make paintings from photographs, which I take or find. In the process of creating painting, I reduce and transform some visual information to avoid giving specificity and to generalize the imagery. By being less iconographically specific, the work becomes more accessible. My aim is to stimulate viewers' emotions, experiences, memories or traumas. I heighten their role in interpreting an artwork and help them to create their own shifting sense of the paintings' reality.


KATE MCPEAK, UC Riverside When I paint a waterwall, I am slowly submersing myself into the deep: the deep of the ocean, the deep of a gently floating state of being, the deep of my subconscious. My descent is accompanied by images and sensations rather than narrative. I imagine the warm translucent blue of the South Pacific ocean slowly turning opaque in the depths below. I feel the boundaries of my body dissolving into the water so that all of me exists everywhere while my eyes cease being portals and become saline.


SARA ROBICHAUD, University of Victoria In my current painting practice I am starting with reclaimed under-paintings of gesture and transparency that are later readdressed through the insertion of geometry. The resulting form has a kind of discord between picture plane and pictorial space or figure/ground ambiguities that tease out imaginative associations in the viewer. My intention is to initiate a questioning of aesthetic beauty through the construction of opposites causing the observer to be perversely attracted to discordant elements because of their phenomenological pull.

GINA STEPANIUK, Claremont Graduate University These paintings are rooted in the tradition of landscape genre. I am interested in the parallels between the micro and macroscopic view of nature, the way detail reflects the whole and the unwavering passage of time. Through a system of painterly mark making and by utilizing color, I strive to convey a snapshot of the intricate complexity of nature as it constantly mutates – movement stilled in a painting.

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Enjoy your summer and see you in September when the gallery season begins.