WAVES
Works by Silvie Deutsch, Ariel Dill, Blossom Folb, Anna Elise Johnson, Nora Shields, & Trina Turturici
(More images and exhibition information below essay. Photographed by Allison Stewart)
“The sun rose. Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore, gilding the ribs of the eaten-out boat and making the sea-holly and its mailed leaves gleam blue as steel. Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach. The girl who had shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the aquamarine, the water-coloured jewels with sparks of fire in them, dance, now bared her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a straight pathway over the waves.” — The Waves, Virginia Woolf
In Waves, the work of six Los Angeles artists considers the wondrous power of waves--waves as lengths, breaks, movements, spaces, times, and physics. Contextualized alongside the historical work of Blossom Folb, brightly dancing and expressionistic painting from the artist’s estate, the women in conversation variously play and revel in the tides, breaching a confluence of styles from the intense emotionality and awe of early expressionistic depictions of landscapes--roiling seas, rolling mountains--to the gestural of abstract expressionism in the movement and choreography of paint on canvas or the free play of conceptualism and participatory frames.
In considering the notion of a wave, all manner of rhetorical and ideative distinctions might arise--from the sensation of swimming or floating in the ocean to the reception of tones and vibrations in the ear to the course of development in systems of thought, particularly successions of political cultures, discourses, or movements, as in waves of feminism. In the experience of waves we might become dislodged free-form, transiting between dimensions, inward and outward, of thought, sensation, and action. This play with time and energy necessitates a vigor and a spritely quality, moving about with colors on canvas, inviting participation, or immersing ourselves in the layering of images. Waves might be distortions, patternings, cyclings, rays, or trajectories. In physics, a wave could describe the science and speed of light and color, the registration of form, detail, or the course of sound and frequencies taken in the ear--radioed or transmuted. Waves implicate the body sensorily, placed in the path of something that might break or breach, or in traveling along or through. Waves can be popular trends, cultures, ideologies, uprisings--a tide of people in resisting or overcoming historical difficulties at the moment of a swell, a burgeoning or explosion of energy. In this, rhetoric and language dances, the metaphor tracking, and it is unsurprising we might remark of a shift: the notion of a ‘sea change’ or ‘change of tides.’
In Nora Shields’ wall sculptures, there is a ribboning of metal, folded over and outward, like the recording of waves via technical instruments. In gradient color systems remarking of sunsets over vast waters, or light refracted in the dust of urban skylines, the sculptures fold like the physics of wavelengths, building, charting, tightening and gathering, or splaying in space. Ariel Dill paints abstractions like visual occlusions, bleary representations cavorting or frolicking on the canvas, as in hiccups of visual register, the moment of the image caught unfocused and between where movement is implied, and the painterly space might be entered psychically. Anna Elise Johnson paints images of calm tides and remixes their bobbing and lolling against the canon, a wave about waves, collaging these waters rippling in the shapes and strokes of Matisse or Kandinsky, where the depths of art historical tides are brought to the surface, layered in new contexts, and re-mastered. Trina Turturici’s paintings are of free-form movement, occupied principally with curvatures and sways, shapes and color systems layered as bends and ebbs in a painterly dimensional, inviting the viewer to dance along with the image. Off the wall and in the traffic and fray of movement in space, Silvie Deutsch’s sculptural instruments call upon viewers to attempt sounds, to learn anew, and interface with the stretching and binding of strings, the oblong travel of voice and song through tubes. In shapes and colors reminiscent of classroom materials, these sculptures remark of familiar instruments deconstructed and re-assembled.
In Waves, we are invited to consider confluences and intersections spatiotemporal, where movement (of the body and mind, histories and cultures, in concert) is anticipated. Invited on a walk with the artists, we encounter the intoxication, intensity, and clamor of city streets or ocean channels, thoughts racing alongside signs and symbols received, sensations of visual and aural register, or smells and flavors summoned. This metaphor casts a matrix between the works enclosed, where the jazz and cacophony of passionate brush strokes might receive the multi-layer of photo-realistic articulations, or the spring of painterly space outward 3-dimensionally, the curve of instruments crafted, and the facilitation of new understandings formed in the play and ecstasy of an aesthetic relation to the work. The paintings and sculptures of Waves dance with time, frisky and cheerful, maneuvering about obstructions. Waves invokes the disruptive spirit and play of the moment between high modernism and conceptualism, as the artists invite us to a party in honor of this history with the revival of Blossom Folb, spurring us to shake and dance at the image and its sensation with other bodies and objects. In viewing the work, we might find release, surfing temporal ruptures and riding this tide ecstatically.
WAVES: Works by Silvie Deutsch, Ariel Dill, Blossom Folb, Anna Elise Johnson, Nora Shields, & Trina Turturici.
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