Summer Survey Group Show
10 Contemporary Artists


July 28 – August 18, 2007
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 28th, 6 – 10pm    

               

 

Lawrence Asher Gallery presents Summer Survey Group Show, July 28th to August 18th, 2007.   This intriguing collection of 10 artists displays distinctive examples of contemporary compositions found in LA today.  Each artist delivers unique perspectives in a variety of shapes, sizes and mediums conveying thought-provoking narrative and visual bliss.  Mediums represented, ranging from painting to drawing to sculpture and installation, provide moving examples of ingenuity and technical precision.

Please celebrate this summer extravaganza with the artists in our newly-designed gallery at our opening reception, Saturday, July 28th from 6 – 10pm.  LAG is located at 5820 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and adjacent to the Craft and Folk Art Museum. Free parking is available across the street behind 5858 Wilshire Boulevard. Enter on Stanley Ave.  For more information please call 323.935.9100

 

The Artists

Hollis Cooper - Virtual environments have opened a new era in the experience of architectural space. Digital representation has produced perspectives that are no longer based on physical space but, instead, on multiple-user organization and efficiency – a limitless number of vanishing points. I regard these developments optimistically, as a means of expanding our ability to suspend disbelief and project ourselves into the world around us, interacting more actively with and within it. Viewing a painting is a similar process of projection, of entering a non-three-dimensional space. I believe that interacting with virtual environments enhances our involvement with the painted surface because we become more comfortable relating to spaces we cannot physically enter. I seek to integrate this new visual sensibility into painting by creating works based on virtual architectural spaces.

 The architectural imagery is painted on flexible PVC sheets that allow for the compositions to be twisted further, physically spilling off the wall and onto the floor. Sections of digitally-influenced color seemingly interweave, even though their actual abutment is revealed by their transparency

In my search for a new space between digital imagery, architecture, and painting, I explore the breakdown between foreground and background, form and content, wall and floor. Freed by the relaxation of boundaries, movement also emerges, flowing through the pattern of shapes and colors, transforming all the elements into an organic, evolving environment.

This is Hollis’ first exhibition with Lawrence Asher Gallery.  She recently graduated with a M.F.A. degree in painting from Claremont Graduate University.  In 1997 Hollis graduated Magna Cum Laude from Princeton University in Art and Archaeology/Studio Art and then completed a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1998.

Megan DeArmond - The series “Sweet Substance” centers on potential. The balls are nutrient- rich seeds suspended in resin. They are nourishment, strength, and energy for the Bee Girl.

Bee Girl is based on an early 20th century beehive that was structured bottom to top—drones, workers, queen, and honey. In this sculpture, the bee girl cranks a honey pot atop a storage tank of her own sweet substances.  She tells a story of self-reliance.  The sweet substance series is the result of her small actions—her efforts.

Megan earned a BFA in Art History and Sculpture from the University of Kansas, Lawrence and later a MFA in sculpture from the University of Arizona, Tucson.  She lives and works in Los Angeles.


elow -  I grew up in a neighborhood ruled by gang activity with the only positive being the urban manifestation of culture.  With so many creative influences to inspire me like street art, pop culture, toys, typeface, children’s books, I have found my own style and technique.

Since the age of nine, I have been fascinated with alternative styles of art.  I try to incorporate nostalgic images from the past adding a sense of space and texture.  A wide variety of materials have been used in my work, ranging from watercolors to digital printing, Xerox copies, plywood, and silkscreen.  It is the layering and juxtaposition of old and new that ultimately gives depth and meaning to my artwork.

elow is currently enrolled at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.

             

Leora Lutz - "City Silhouettes" are actual paintings made from modern ideas for real people. They began as a sketch series inspired by the city as night falls, then evolved into little gems using a formula that makes it easy to acquire art with meaning.

People say that they capture a particular tone and a mood - bittersweet and nostalgic. They are all painted one at a time, using zero stencils so you always get a unique landscape. In fact, it may be impossible to repeat a silhouette, as the options are as varied as the dusk from which they are inspired.

             

Leora graduated with a BFA in Art from Cal State Fullerton with a minor in Pop Culture and Creative Writing.  She is the owner and director of Gallery Revisited in Silverlake, CA.

Max Miceli - I describe my work as Pop-Folk Nouveau, a genre-mashing nod to street and outsider art that puts as much emphasis on personal allegory as it does aesthetic appeal. The themes and imagery beckon the viewer to decipher a candy-coated mythology--a forensic exercise of sifting through our relationship to nature and with each other. With the use of personal symbols, a menagerie emerges to create wry vignettes of contemporary life.

        

Max Miceli was born in Dayton, Ohio, and grew up in Redlands, California. He received his BFA with Distinction from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions across the country. Locally, his paintings have been seen at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Broken Wrist Project artists/writers collective, La Luz de Jesus, Fröden Gallery, the Art Center Wind Tunnel, the annual Fresh Start benefit, and at his sell-out shows at LA’s Gallery 825.

             

The LA Weekly calls Max a member of “a formidable stable of emerging artists”. Collectors include film director Martin Brest (Beverly Hills Cop, Scent of a Woman, Meet Joe Black), music producer Jay Baumgardner (NRG Recording Studios), and animation magnate Gabor Csupo (Rugrats, Duckman, The Simpsons).

In addition to fine art, Max has worked as a freelance illustrator, commercial designer, Art Director and visual development artist for many feature films and Emmy award-winning animated TV shows. Clients include The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Atlantic Records, Nickelodeon, Trilogy/MGM, and Disney among others. His work has been featured in the pages of CMYK Graphic Arts Magazine, American Illustration and The Society of Illustrators Annual. In 2001, he received the Albert Dorne award from The Society of Illustrators in New York.

             

Max lives in the historic West Adams district of Los Angeles with his wife Andrea and their two dogs, Myrtle and Oscar.

Antonio Pelayo - I find myself a wanderer, a traveler between two cultures. I capture the landscapes of people's faces, the lines of time that have etched their marks on the people I draw.   I am a writer who uses images to tell his stories, with a single pencil.

Antonio Pelayo born on March 13th, 1973, is the product of two cultures: the land of myth and legend, Mexico, where he was raised for several years and North America, the country where he was born.

At a young age, Antonio was sent back to his father’s village “El Palmar de Los Pelayo” in the rural countryside of Mexico.  Antonio found himself alone most of the time.  He turned inward to find solace.

Antonio picked up pencil and paper and a new universe was created into which he could escape.   He would sit quietly in the back of dark churches in the late afternoon and copy the artwork.  This lead to his fascination with Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Siquieros and Orozco. 

Several years later when Antonio and his mother and sisters came back to America, Antonio had to acclimate himself to a world he vaguely remembered. The one constant in his life at this time was his artwork.  In America he had more of an opportunity to seek out different artistic influences.  It was at this young age that he became inspired by contemporary artists like Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo and H.R. Giger

Completely self-taught as an artist, Antonio feels the strongest connection to his art when he does a portrait. “When I do a portrait, especially a portrait of someone I know or admire, there is an intimacy achieved between the subject and the artist and honesty that goes both ways. You honestly try to convey what’s within your subject or what you believe is there,  and the subject leaves himself open and vulnerable to your interpretation.”

Antonio has always considered himself to be the ultimate outsider observer.  The only world in which he fully feels at home is the one he creates for himself with his art. - Dan Madigan

Bryan Ricci - In my paintings, the worlds surrounding the spotlights display various images from the natural world.  These are rendered as a blurred scene or as abstract, simplified shapes, tones, and patterns, as one might view them through perceptions shaped and altered by our fast-paced technological society in which nature has become virtually obsolete.  These abstracted, altered visions of our world are how I imagine humans in our society acknowledge, or fail to acknowledge, the natural world.  We see only a version of what exists, a landscape glanced through a car window while speeding past or surveyed through weary, indifferent eyes.

The animals that exist within these scenes are spotlighted as if viewed through a magnifying glass and revealed in obsessive detail, with a pixel-like digital quality.  This creates an aesthetic visual contrast between lucidity and ambiguity, invoking a curiosity and inviting the viewer into the painting. 

I hope to bring to light the ever-increasing disparities between the limitedness of what we allow ourselves to see around us and the enormity and timelessness of the world that goes unnoticed.  My paintings serve as a reminder of human ignorance and neglect, an invitation to look deeper and a challenge to question and examine your own perceptions.

Brian graduated with a BFA from Purchase College School of Art and Design, SUNY before moving to Los Angeles as a full-time artist.

                                                                                           

Sharon Shapiro - My work vacillates between naiveté and cynicism, hopefully striking at the core of contemporary romantic confusion. Influenced in part by childhood memories of patterns and color, there is a decorative element in my paintings; but isolation, vulnerability, and yearning lurk beneath the candy-colored surfaces. The female body, presented in very sexual ways, is rife in our commercial culture yet seemingly absent in discourse on gender and sexuality. In my work, I try to draw upon both my internal world of desires, as well as society’s ambivalent depictions of women, to transform the generic figures into images of individuality.

             

Sharon was born in Bluefield, West Virginia, and later earned a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art.  She now lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her daughter Ryan.

Ardeshir Tabrizi - I am a 25-year old painter working in Los Angeles. I strive to bring a unique entity of learning and enlightenment to contemporary art.  

My work revolves around ideas that express a common theme amongst people, a theme that brings us back to the idea that we as humans are all connected. I use simple concepts to tell stories of deep meaning. I express a part of myself in hopes of urging the viewer to dream a little more and to remind them that none of us is really alone.

My work closes the gap between art and culture by reaching the viewer on a level that is understood by everyone alike. This is my direction; a common man expressing a common idea.    

                 

Ardeshir was born in Tehran, Iran, and now lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Art Weeks –  Utilizing my years of computer design skills as an advertising Art Director, I began working out my ideas
for paintings on the computer, using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. That evolved, just recently into combining digitally created art with traditional painting on paper or vinyl. In these new works I appropriate backgrounds from old newspapers, maps, an old Russian passport, even Bob Dylan's trash. The figurative work and other  design elements are painted in acrylic, gouache and ink with the end result having a collage effect. The traditionally painted figures interact with characters I create digitally, blurring the lines between the real world and the digital world.

             

Art lives and works as a full-time artist in Los Angeles.  This is his first exhibition with LAG.

             


 

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Lawrence Asher Gallery  |  5820 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 100  |  Los Angeles, CA  90036
Tel.: 323.935.9100  |  Fax: 323.323.964.7107