Women Around Town, February 2025

What a year so far!!! Fires everywhere, a new administration, cease fires, storms….and there is still art. A huge thanks to the art community for offering so generously to those afflicted by the fires. Our home (see photo below taken before the fire) still sands amongst the ruins covered in soot (and?) and of course like many others we have been evacuated and have relocated as of date to northern San Diego County for the next year.  I do plan to continue writing about exhibits in the So. California area and to continue making art, a saving grace.

IN THE GALLERIES

Sarah Steinberg: Rooted in Memory is the current exhibit at Lois Lambert Gallery. Steinberg preserves the memories of her past in her oil paintings comprised of marks across the canvas. Some shapes are left abstracted, while others are transformed into recognizable figures: the outline of a house, or the dense treeline of a snowy forest. Steinberg captures the likeness of her home in Ontario, while still allowing the image to be transformed by her imagination. “These paintings not only capture the memories of Steinberg’s childhood home, but the overall experience of being homesick and what it’s like to long for a place and time you can only revisit in your heart and in your mind.” Thru March 8, 2025.

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce Paintings, Watercolors by Lesley Vance. The exhibition features large- and medium-scale canvases, along with a group of new watercolors. Vance fully immerses herself in the calligraphic, elegant, impulsive, and exploratory potential of flatness and the sheer facts of oil paint on linen. In the watercolors and paintings alike, Vance continuously shows how oppositional tendencies in abstraction can co-exist, and how, when they do, the gradations between the elements of painting and the moods they communicate to viewers become more subtle—and more conceptually far-reaching. A watercolor featuring swaths of amber and blue is also dominated by unfurling waves of black, white, and grey that alternately embrace and overcome everything else around them. Inasmuch as those waves appear to have a will of their own, their status as living things—perhaps even living beings—exemplifies how Vance’s abstraction always tends toward the real. (DK) Thru February 23, 2025.

Jessica Taylor Bellamy: Temperature Check is the current exhibition at Anat Egbi gallery. Drawing from personal photographs to newspapers, several works also incorporate intricately embedded video elements, to explore politics of climate change and disaster. Bellamy’s observations are rooted in her experiences of the sprawling urban landscape of Los Angeles—a meeting of nature and civilization at the edge of a precarious paradise, formed by fire, drought, flood, and wind. Throughout the exhibition, Bellamy draws parallels between her own body and the anatomy of machines, particularly cars or power tools. The exhibition revisits Bellamy’s interest in driving and car culture, as a symbol of Los Angeles and metaphor for the body; simultaneously she unfolds a feminine takeover of ‘the body shop’ or construction zone, softening them into fantasy.  Washed and brushy, Bellamy depicts sunsets, shorelines, trees, flora, atmospheric skies and cloud formations. These are juxtaposed with boundaries and barriers that appear as soft lace curtains or harsh iron gates and chainlink fences. (AE) Thru March 22, 2025.

Veilmetter Los Angeles presents Kim DeJesus: Moonbliss Riverdream. Her recent abstract paintings are created using acrylic, oil, and mixed media on canvas. Uniquely, each painting reflects on and builds upon the next. This creative progression allows DeJesus’s picture planes to develop through both surrender and intention, chance and control. She choreographs energetic and vivid compositions that pulse with life and offer space for transformation—equally for the artist herself and for the viewer—by creating a harmonious balance of introspection and expansion, form and formlessness. (VP) Thru March 8, 2025.

Some fascinating ceramic work by Brittany Mojo is on view at Craig Krull Gallery. The exhibition is titled Strong Spell and indeed it is. The artist is engrossed in time and labor as she investigates the histories of gendered work through the manipulation of material. She describes her ceramic practice as cumulative action, creating movement through repetitive mark-making and by uniting individual objects within a space. Thru March 15, 2025.

IN THE MUSEUMS

At the UCLA Hammer Museum is a very cool exhibition of 3 noteworthy artists who all deal with the human body in one way or another in their practices- Jennifer Bolande, Mona Hatoum, and Alison Saar. In three sculptures from the museum’s collections—Bolande’s Pinnacle (1989), Hatoum’s Bourj (2010), and Saar’s Stubborn and Kinky (2023)—each artist has used found materials to craft a theatrically protean object that flickers in and out of various iconographic connotations. The works’ titles, their materials, and the actions that transform those materials operate on multiple symbolic registers. Each of the objects offers oblique layers of meaning and implied narratives that evade conclusive explanation. They invoke theatrical and linguistic symbolism, but their signifiers remain porous. These artists emphasize the experience of perception, privilege the spectator’s interpretation, and insist that meaning remain open-ended. Thru April  20,  2025.

Alison Saar

Also at the Hammer is Out of the Ordinary: Uncommon Materials, Marks, and Matrices.  This exhibition explores contemporary artists’ use of unusual mark-making devices, including blood, smoke, Kool-Aid, coffee, scrap metal, vegetable juice, pins, dryer lint, and more, to create drawings and prints. With works drawn largely from the collection of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Out of the Ordinary examines artists’ wide-ranging motivations for choosing such unorthodox media, from sensory play and experimentation to excavations of the charged historical and symbolic values of mundane substances. Out of the Ordinary includes works by Tara Donovan, Anya Gallaccio, Mona Hatoum, Richard Long, Umar Rashid, Sherrill Roland, Ed Ruscha, and Zarina, among others. Thru April 6, 2025.

The Craft Contemporary presents Ahree Lee: Home Maker Space. Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist working in video, new media, and textiles. For example, Lee combines weaving, video, and electronic textiles to imagine the kind of technology we might have in our homes if technology had evolved differently in the 20th century. Thru May 4, 2025.

Also at Craft Contemporary  is Amanda Maciel Antunes: I’ve Got To Tell You Something Now. “Antunes creates durational work as a means to relate and understand the world we live in. This exhibit consists of a film, an object, and an artist book, that functions as a portrait of an action of resistance, and an appeal to the intention of memory and stillness. The artist spent 365 days walking up and down a mountain with a piece of cloth, an audio recorder, a cell phone, a GoPro, sewing thread, and a needle. The journey began on the first day of the Covid-19 mandated lockdown in Los Angeles. The text was written during the hike and hand-stitched upon reaching the summit each day. The trail leads to the oldest peak in the San Gabriel Mountains, and its elevation is one of the highest reached in the least amount of geographic time. Persisting in this daily action was a transformative mental and physical exercise of exploring the geographies of personal and ancestral territories. Resembling the daily journey, the 90-foot scroll of fabric will be displayed in the window lobby area of the museum and fabric will be suspended in several parts of the lobby forming waves resembling the hills of the mountains culminating in an area where a monitor will display the filmed journey. The final object created for the project is a handstitched and bound artist book, an assemblage of collected images and text encouraging readers to rethink the nature of our memories during traumatic experiences. It is the exploration of a particular time and place. It is a story beginning with loss and moving, finally, to acceptance.” (CC). Thru May 4, 2025.