Past Exhibition
Nancy Monk : walk + wood
April 1 - May 13, 2023
Reception: April 1, 2023 5-7pm
Artist Talk: April 15, 11am
The work of Nancy Monk embodies a knowing naïveté filled with symbolic simplicity. It is equally imbued with stick-figure purity and Japanese haiku, filtered through a natural sense of design perhaps inherited from her Scandinavian roots. She acknowledges formal inspiration from Paul Klee and Yves Klein, but her unaffected and fresh approach is wholly original and almost childlike in its sense of discovery. This new body of work, entitled walk + wood, was made during lockdown which, as Monk poetically explains, was filled with “long walks when I was frequently visited by white butterflies.” Flowers, trees, clouds and houses are delicately crafted on small canvases in thread, paint and thin strips of cloth, each of these elementary forms animated by stick feet ambling across a soft void. A series of tiny 3.75x2” paintings were the result of a Christmas gift of a box of thin black walnut and maple blocks of wood. Drippy white stars, gold leaf moons and rolling hills follow the natural patterns of their wood grain. Monk compares them to the art of Bonsai or Suiseki, capturing nature through a minimalist aesthetic.
D.J. Hall: Pandemic Pause-- Plein Air, Portraits, And Posies
April 1 - May 13, 2023
Reception: April 1, 2023 5-7pm
Artist Talk: April 15, 11am
DJ Hall is regarded as the quintessential Los Angeles photo-realist painter. While Richard Estes was painting reflections in New York windows, and Audrey Flack was focusing on luscious still lifes, DJ Hall was in the backyards and swimming pools of Southern California, framing the sunny life of what she called, “ladies who lunch.” Her paintings of women in big sunglasses, chatting poolside with drinks, cakes and magazines functioned as her own personal “illusion of reality” and formed the basis of her retrospective at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2008. Recently, again as a byproduct of Covid, Hall was afforded a “time-out” for introspection and chose to explore new media and challenged herself in various directions all at once. These self-assigned projects included experiments in pixilation, an art historical re-imagining of Max Pechstein’s work, a narrative sequence of French travel, and a series of portraits of artists, curators and gallerists masked an unmasked. This multi-faceted assemblage of projects also included her lifetime practice of plein-air painting, usually in the form of small 6x4” landscape studies in gouache or watercolor. In conjunction with this exhibition, the artist and gallery have co-published a facsimile of one of her sketchbooks in a signed, limited edition.
Michon Weeks
Presented, 2022
egg tempera on wood panel
13.75 x 8"
Imperfect Geometry: Katrin Aason B., Brittany Mojo, Tanja Rector, Michon Weeks
April 1 - May 13, 2023
Reception: April 1, 2023 5-7pm
Artist Talk: April 15, 11am
Imperfect Geometry is defined as the actual geometric shape of an old building which has been altered due to weather or human intervention. What was once a crisp vertical line may now be wobbly, like the edges of a Morandi still life. The four women in this exhibition employ geometric structure in their work, not in strict and justified lines of plumb, but shaped by the more imprecise caress of the hand. Their sense of geometry is not necessarily a principle to be adhered to, but a starting point, shifting the static to a dynamic sense of play. The ceramics of Brittany Mojo embody the repetition of hand built coiling methods, not smoothed and “perfected,” but pinched and squeezed with the evidence of her fingerprints pressed into the clay. Her surfaces are covered with uneven black and white checkerboard patterns, no two squares being the same, a haphazard geometry, more fluid, like a rippling flag. Costa Rican artist, Katrin Aason B. uses strips of vinyl and ribbon to weave patterns over wooden stretcher bars to create abstractions influenced by Mayan and Incan textiles, as well as present day weaving processes practiced in Puebla, Mexico and the Sacred Valley in Peru. Her stretching of these materials allows for bends, bowing and inward curls, creating incidental shifts in symmetry and an activated, dimensional surface. Michon Weeks makes small egg tempera paintings on wood panels that have a slightly recessed plane, creating a subtle framing device on an otherwise flat surface. Her humble, isolated shapes, sometimes drawn from late medieval liturgical artwork, delightfully ignore that indented rectangle and quietly assert their singular presence, floating in a metaphysical, indeterminate space, like a Robert Therrien drawing, but rendered in modest daubs of paint. Tanja Rector assembles cut pieces of linen, canvas and solid colored cotton into abstract patterns that are sewn together and stretched over irregular pentagons (5 unequal sides). As Leah Ollman writes, her curves and angles “align in jaunty rhythms like fragmented building blocks of poems.” And, “pulling the sewn collage around a frame sometimes exposes seams; the rows of stitches contribute their own minute percussive beats to the overall musicality.”
