Wishing you the best of the holiday season. 
IN THE GALLERIES
Lia Halloran: Night Watch at Luis de Jesus gallery is a series of large scale oil paintings capturing the passage of time across multiple scales. “Through interplay of colors and textures, Halloran’s works engage in a dialogue between the mechanical and organic. Referencing the iconic “Device” works of Jasper Johns, this series investigates the many mechanisms that symbolize the passage of time. Through the use of dynamic marks and textured layers time appears as a cyclical and expansive force, not confined to a linear path. Each work reflects the interplay of visible and hidden forces that propel time’s flow, evoking a fluidity where time spirals, shifts, and stretches. Halloran’s imagined landscapes transcend the visible, representing the forces that move through nature and the cosmos. The color palette vibrates with the energy of these active macrocosms, emphasizing the inherent connection between time, light, and movement, provoking viewers to contemplate the rhythms and cycles that govern our world.” Thru December 21, 2024. Artist Talk, on Saturday, December 14, 2024, from 2–3 PM.
Lia Halloran
Various Small Fires presents Dianna Molzan: Seasonal Charts. Her paintings draw attention to the materials of painting and the infinite possibilities contained within these simple traditional elements – paint, canvas, and wooden stretchers. WPostell known for her “string paintings,” composed on canvas that have been unraveled and transformed back into individual threads, stretched, painted, and cut into shape; Molzan also explores soft sculpture and larger site-specific interventions in her practice. Thru December 21, 2024.
Dianna Molzan
An exhibition of new bronze and ceramic sculptures and pastels on paper by Ruby Neri is on view at David Kordansky Gallery. The exhibition is titled Staircase, as Neri creates works in which she depicts relationships as alternately mythological, mundane, ecstatic, inscrutable, hilarious, and tragic. Throughout the show, Neri stacks female figures on top of one another, creating two- and three-dimensional tableaux defined by wild-eyed sexual tension and playful struggles for power. In Earthly Delights—one of the most complex and intricate forms the artist has made to date—a central figure functions like a vertical landscape, dwarfing other figures and, as the title suggests, supporting fantastical flora with faces that further blur the line between figure and ground. The work also serves as a reminder that erotic connections between creatures are not limited to those between humans—or even between discrete beings—but are a connective force that keeps the entire world in a state of precarious unification. The visual vocabulary through which Neri expresses such energies is also a uniting force, one that brings together meditations on figuration, mass, and volume with the emotional resonances set off by the intense colors she has applied to its surfaces. Thru December 14, 2024.
Ruby Neri
Walter Maciel Gallery presents Jil Weinstock, Unwanted Collaborator: Fractured Landscapes and Rubber Herbaria In these unconventional collages and illuminated pieces, Weinstock mixes photography, plants encased in rubber, embroidery thread, and fabric to explore the fragility and resilience found in the natural world, especially when faced with disruptive forces. Weinstock draws memories from her past to create a sense of nostalgia within her work. In her practice, rubber is used as a material to preserve, binding together objects and the memories they elicit. The common objects she focuses on are consequently transformed. Thru January 11, 2024.
Jill Weinstock
Sarah Lee: Quiet Days at Anat Egbi gallery is an exhibition of haunting landscape paintings. travel through a range of seasons, climates, and topographies.According to the gallery, “Lee works intuitively, building the compositions piece by piece, often painting at night, or through the night. Her paintings reflect a shared sense of human vulnerability and smallness felt looking up at a starry night sky. They are containers for the kind of inner distance found in dreams. Absent brushstrokes, the artist’s hand is made nearly invisible through softly and slowly applied paint. She creates slick layered surfaces with unexpected elements like in Glacier, a full moon reflects its crescent counterpart in the polar waters below contributing to an uncanny consciousness. Regardless of geography, each painting begins the same—two colors, a top and a bottom; they meet to form a horizon. An elemental eeriness emerges between earth and sky. In End of the Cliff, comets shoot across the heavens over a still glass sea below. In others this tension is expressed with a windy ground and a muffled airless sky above.” (AE) Thru January 11, 2025.
Sarah Lee
The Brick (formerly LAX art) continues with its noteworthy exhibition, Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism. “This exhibition is inspired by four decades of ecofeminist thought and action in art. Ecofeminism is a theoretical and activist movement that locates critical connections between gender oppression and the exploitation of natural resources. In the U.S., it developed from the environmental, anti-nuclear, and feminist movements in the late 1970s and 1980s; in addition to their primary concerns around the subordination of nature and women, ecofeminists sought to resist racism, homophobia, and the capitalist patriarchy. As quickly as the movement was developed, artists began adopting an ecofeminist position, producing ambitious, often site-specific work that addressed the systemic subjection of women and the environment. Originally conceived of in 2018 and tied to a research fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Life on Earth uses ecofeminism as a both a lens and departure point, bringing together eighteen international artists and collectives who present new methodologies for thinking-with our natural environment in the twenty-first century. These artists challenge anthropocentric notions around both gender and ecology to call for new positions that embrace communality, intersectionality, mythmaking, joy, and reparative action. Works in the exhibition address themes including social ecologies, the commons, indigenous cosmologies, deep time, witchcraft, hydrofeminism, plant knowledge, science fiction, and speculative futures, among other threads.” Participating artists include Alliance of the Southern Triangle (A.S.T.), Alicia Barney Caldas, Meech Boakye, Carolina Caycedo, Francesca Gabbiani, Masumi Hayashi, Institute of Queer Ecology, Kite, Leslie Labowitz Starus, Maria Maea, Otobong Nkanga, yétúndé olagbaju, Alicia Piller, Aviva Rahmani, Tabita Rezaire, Yo-E Ryou, Emilija Škarnulytė, and A.L. Steiner. Thru December 21, 2004.
Masumi Hayashi Masumi Hayashi (1945-2006) Republic Steel Quarry, Site 666, Elyria, Ohio, 198
IN THE MUSEUMS
There is only one new exhibition by a woman artist at our local museums this month. This one is at the Riverside Art Museum. Eve Wood: Mostly Birds (and a Few Humans) delights in the “resilience and fragility of birds and humans.” The exhibition features works on paper by this local artist and poet including gouache paintings and graphite drawings. As if to commune with ghosts from her past, her illustrations often depict creatures in peril, a state of being in which the artist identifies. Birds have occupied a central place in Wood’s consciousness since she can remember. Her hope is that a young person will see her “drawings and be changed in some small way — if only to pay better attention to the living world around them.” She shares, “I’ve always felt a kinship with animals, probably because I find people so complicated and unknowable.” In addition to birds, Wood’s compositions also include inventive personifications of vibrant color. Thru March 30, 2025.
CONTINUING MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS (in case you missed them last month)
Deux Femmes at the Orange County Museum of Art. brings together a collection of work by artist Leonor Fini (b. 1907, Buenos Aires, Argentina; d. 1996, Paris, France) and Leonora Carrington (b. 1917, Clayton Green, England; d. 2011, Mexico City, Mexico), each of whom emphasize metamorphosis and transformation as a source of power. Thru February 23, 2025. (An example of Carrington’s artwork is below).
Also at the Orange County Museum of Art is Transformative Currents, Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean, an exhibition of work by Liz Larner. Larner’s works are part of the multi-venue exhibition Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean, a group exhibition organized by the Oceanside Museum of Art, with additional presentations at OCMA and Crystal Cove Conservancy, which is part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, 2024. Thru January 5, 2025.
Joanne Julian: Nature’s Spirits is on view at The Santa Paula Museum of Art. Thru March 9, 2025.
Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective continues at the Hammer Museum. Ramberg is best known for her stylized paintings of fragmented female bodies. Thru January 5, 2025.
Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion continues at the Skirball. The remarkable life and work of fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. The exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of Diane von Furstenberg’s iconic wrap dress (I did own on these long ago). Thru August 31, 2025.
Paper and Light at the Getty Center is exhibition of drawings that charts some of the innovative ways in which the two media were creatively used together. Works include the Museum’s extraordinary 12-foot-long transparency by Carmontelle—essentially an 18th-century motion picture—which will be shown lit from behind as originally intended. Drawings by more contemporary artists including Vija Celmins will join sheets by Tiepolo, Delacroix, Seurat, and Manet to portray the themes of translucency and the representation of light. Thru January 19, 2025.
