Los Angeles Art Association is proud to present its next group exhibition, The Non-Objective Moment, an all-media exploration of abstraction juried by Lonnie Lardner. In addition to The Non-Objective Moment, LAAA will present solo exhibitions by Laura and Dean Larson, Lynne McDaniel and Lori Pond. The Opening reception is Saturday, September 8, 2018 (all shows run through October 12, 2018)
Spanning several years, Laura and Dean Larson's new solo show The Council Gathers in Timemarks the completion of their third collaborative body of work. In continuing the use of sculpted human-animal hybrid bronze figures, the duo's playful mixture of mediums sets the stage for unforeseen lyrical encounters. The work's retracing of historical events through its 'council' of human-animal hybrid characters are presented independently as sculpture, through photographs and a limited-edition art book. The bronze-casted figures reference the poses and scale of The Mourners, a series of 14th and 15th century alabaster sculptures of monks and clerics encircling a tomb. With nineteen figures in all, their animal heads reveal themselves to be among various endangered species. Mounted continuously across three gallery walls will be an archival pigment print on canvas. The Council Gathers in Time depicts the travels of the Council from the home planet to this planet as they come to discover the cause of its sixth mass extinction. This journey continues across the Baltic Sea, Scandinavia, Finland, Russia and Germany. At 17 inches tall and over 23 feet in length, the horizontally extended frieze recalls the medieval masterpiece known as the Bayeux Tapestry, recalling the Battle of Hastings in the 11th century.
Lynne McDaniel's work uses the language of the landscape to explore current events, as well as the sometimes-surprising beauty of urban existence. Her current body of work Boom! is inspired by Chinese hand scrolls, creating landscapes on paper using not the traditional ink and brush, but charcoal and oil paint. The work engages the scroll paintings in a dialog, using the same elements of panoramic format, monochromatic colors, and atmospheric quality. But rather than the dreamy, idealized scenes of the Chinese paintings, the work depicts the environmental and ecological changes caused by natural disasters, human intervention, and the passage of time. Often using news photos as sources, she paints the landscape then disrupts the image to indicate the place where things go wrong. The incursion can be a subtle dash of color, or a more violent stroke or erasure. The mostly black and white palette evokes the memory and nostalgia of vintage photographs, while small touches of vermillion echo the bright red seals on the scroll paintings. The destabilization or interruption of what is happening in the paintings reflects the artist's growing uncertainty about what is happening on the larger canvas of our world.
Lori Pond's photo-based project Bosch Redux takes flight from the unprecedented imagination of Early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch. Pond became fascinated with Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights as a teenager when his limitless imagination and intricately detailed images captured Pond's mind. In Bosch Redux, Pond hones in on details that occupy the background of his work. The artist uses her friends as models, hires prop makers, prosthetic designers, makeup and wardrobe to aid her in the recreation of small tableaus from Bosch's works, mostly from his masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Pond feels compelled to use the medium of photography to try to understand him, to inhabit his world and mind. Pond painstakingly recreates in photographs the details that sprang from the mind of a painter five hundred years ago, counterintuitively creating new and compelling contemporary works.
When: Opening Reception: Saturday, September 8, 2018, 6 - 9 pm
(show runs through October 12, 2018).
Where: Gallery 825, 825 N. La Cienega Boulevard,
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Admission: Free and open to the public.