March 14, 2011, Featured Articles, Current

LAUNCH presents Solid Stripes

By Shana Nys Dambrot   Tue, Mar 15, 2011

The assembled artists all use stripes and layers as formal constructs -- but each has found a way to transform this staple of abstraction into genuinely expressive, individually poignant, and even quasi-narrative works of affecting beauty. Among them are those engaged with the current of life in a city, those finding their inspiration away from the man-made environment, and those who seduce the pattern-finding impulse in the mind of the viewer. The show presents works of heavy, gestural pigmentation; the cool regard of photographic science; the topographical layers of mixed media collage; and instances where evidence of the artist’s hand has been obscured. Above all, it demonstrates just how salient, resilient, malleable, and, so to speak, solid the stripe can be when it representing everything from a street, to a cresting wave, an emotion, or even an idea.

Nature is a fecund realm of astonishing power and chaotic harmony, where a prismatic array of simultaneous phenomena self-choreographs each moment of existence. Though sometimes cruel and destructive, the natural world is also a place of simple beauty and awe-inspiring splendor. Cities are bustling places that offer alternately vibrant, dangerous, crowded, lonely, sublime, terrifying, inspiring, haunted, architectural, energetic, intellectual, and violent experiences. Both city and nature are archives of interlocking histories; multidimensional, ever-changing networks of generations that continually replace, displace, and build upon one another, like the soil and stone in the strata of the Earth beneath our streets. Moving between these layers of Life and lives is man, who among his faculties are counted both the gift and the drive to try and sort all of this out.

Andy Moses generates a new visual language, using the forces and rhythms of gravity instead of brushes to create ambiguously evocative non-landscapes. Jay Mark Johnson’s hi-tech photographs reverse the usual roles of movement and solidity, capturing unmediated images of the outside world that are as much brain science and document. Philippa Blair uses a fair variety of techniques, the better to encapsulate something essential about the meandering way a city shudders into being over centuries, and what it is like to navigate that in real life. Painter Christopher L. Mercier organizes images and spaces in way that resolves the age-old battle between line and color, using masses of paint to conflate the x, y, and z axes in playful, unsettling tableaux. Gretel Stephens seems to turn line on its head, forcing paint into flattened, luminous cross-sections like halos, or single rings of a tree. Raul de la Torre is perhaps the most ebullient of the bunch, compressing linear splashes of latitude and longitude into colorful gestures that speak to the accumulation of memories.

--Shana Nys Dambrot, Los Angeles 2011

On Saturday, April 2, from 3pm to 6pm, LAUNCH will host an artist discussion and reception at the gallery with participating artists, Shana Nys Dambrot and LAUNCH Director James Panozzo.

LAUNCH is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit social enterprise created in 2010 to produce, manage and direct events, programs and exhibitions for the purpose of developing artist - audience relationships throughout important Los Angeles communities. Passionate about promoting all contemporary art-forms and their hybrids, LAUNCH recognizes the need for exemplary productions that create important cultural happenings. With the assistance of commercial partners, cultural institutions and like-minded individuals and organizations, LAUNCH strives to engage a broad cross section of Angelenos in cultural events that foster mutual understanding and creative expression.

By Shana Nys Dambrot

LA Canvas Arts (and Books) Editor Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in regional, national, international, and online publications including LA Canvas, The LA Weekly, Artkrush, Daily Dose, Modern Painters, Art Review, Artweek, Art Ltd, ARTnews, The Believer, tema celeste, Angeleno, Art Asia Pacific, Coagula, THE Magazine LA, and Juxtapoz. She was the Managing Editor at Flavorpill.com until late 2010, and where she continues to contribute to its LA, NYC, and London editions, and is currently LA Editor for Whitehot Magazine. Her monthly blog, Urban Scrawl, lives at Createfixate.com, and a full account of her activities is periodically updated at sndx.net.

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