Jessica Joslin’s Clockwork Circus is a mixed-media menagerie of odd mechanized animals whose appealing tufts of hair and alert eyes are mounted in bone, spring loaded and bolted together. Its whimsy flavored with the macabre and strangely arresting. www.billyshirefinearts.com
Fragmented bits of beautiful nature make Lisa Adams’ paintings of the conundrum of The Future Of Paradise Past involving. You’ll find her painterly floating world of scientific exactness and lyric survival at Lawrence Asher Gallery to 2/14.
The remarkable abstract paintings of Roberta Eisenberg make liquid space, calligraphic mark and radiant color into fluid internal landscapes of emotion. This large, posthumous retrospective at Cal Poly Pomona’s Kellogg University Art Gallery also includes the beautiful and poignant journals of sketches and poems she created while battling breast cancer. To 2/21.
An installation of photographs that have been painted over with hundreds of brightly colored dots, dashes and other geometric shapes give Nancy Monk’s obsessive images a bright ornamental quality reminiscent of Gustav Klimt. At Craig Krull Gallery to 2/21.
In homage to the ecologically threatened Great Barrier Reef Christine and Margaret Wertheim of The Institute for Figuring instigated a crocheted, handmade reef of wooly color and vibrant form that has traveled the world. It’s spread out at Track 16 accompanying Harriet Zeitlin’s 30 year retrospective of paintings, printmaking collage and sculpture that depict her lifelong social and political concerns. To 2/21.
Using an unplanned process of layering on different surfaces and incorporating delicate ink drawings Marcia Finkelstein’s jewel colored abstract paintings play with illusions of disappearance, depth and motion. At Ruth Bachofner to 2/21.
Colorful paintings by Danielle Eubank that capture the liquid surface and mesmerizing distortions of light and color reflections on water are at Found Gallery to 2/22.
LACMA’s Art Rental and Sales Gallery features a group show of landscape paintings that includes the raw linen stain paintings of Pam Douglas and Gisele Gellman’s paintings probing various meanings of the term ‘power’. To 2/26.
Beili Liu transforms everyday materials like needles and coils of dangling red thread into delicate installations that invoke Chinese myths and culture as well as the artist’s ongoing search for meaning in the Western world, in Three Thousand Troubled Threads. At Tarryn Teresa Gallery to 2/27.
New Mythologies at Pharmaka reflects on the possibility that women artists, unconcerned with art trends or art as commerce, are diligently making profound art that examines “the reasons for why things are”. It’s an intriguing thought that the curator suggests addresses the vacuum of myth in a civilized world assaulting a living world with war, technology and ecological damage. Exhibiting artists are Marina Fortsmann Day, Cheryl Ekstrom, Suzanna Schulten, Margaret Lazzari, Michelle Weinstein and Suzan Woodruff. To 2/28.
Self-Portraits in the Age of MyFaceSpaceBook is a group show of 27 artists looking at themselves in a culture of obsessed, empty appearance and vacant Self knowledge. I guess it probably should say something redeeming about contemporary female vanity and self obsession that only 9 of the artists selected are women: Nena Amsler, Nancy Braver, Anne Greenwald, Laura Hipke, Iva Hladis, Leora Lutz, Stephanie Mercado, Ada Pullini-Brown, Judi Russell, Cathy Stone, and Alyson Souza. At I-5 Gallery at the Brewery, to 2/28.
Energetic anthropomorphic animals dressed in striking Japanese robes bring a wry humor to the artist’s critical view of the current state of the earth in Moira Hahn’s new watercolor paintings at Koplin Del Rio. To 2/28.
Desiree Engel’s retrospective AN ARTIST'S JOURNEY, at 57 Underground features examples of the artist’s very personal and highly experimental work done over the past 20 years in a wide variety of media including monoprints on handmade paper, mixed media works, cast and poured glass, and ceramic sculptures. To 2/28.
MOCA curator Alma Ruiz has selected forty women artists for an exhibition in conjunction with the national WCA and the downtown Korean Cultural Center that uses art to focus on the varied immigrant experience. Women Artists on Immigration: Crossing Borders, Confronting Barriers, Bridging Identities goes from the personal to the political to inspire an ongoing conversation sparked by the sharing of personal experience and the aesthetic presentation of social and political complexities that help to inform our cultural, personal and political identities. Also included are selected posters from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. At the Korean Cultural Center Art Gallery 2/20 to 3/7.
Kim Light/LightBox presents Penelope Gottlieb’s delicate pencil on paper drawings of archetypal American homes she culls from the ignominy and hype of newspaper real estate ads. It’s a timely look at the complex subject of home where it sit on the now shifting sandbar of investment. Also showing are Swiss artist Marianne Mueller’s formal photographs of her own body and things mundane. To 3/7.
Ten women artists, including yours truly, make up The Visual Word: The Art of Contemporary Bookmaking at Coastline Community College Art Gallery. It includes printed books, embellished texts, books as objects and books that are furniture. 2/5 to 3/7.
Chizuko Judy Sugita de Queiroz’s watercolors, Camp Days 1942 – 1945 are delicate memoir images from her days at the Japanese internment camp in Poston, Arizona. Touching images of her confinement experience when even those with as little as 1/16th Japanese heritage were affected by Executive Order 9066. At the Palos Verdes Art Center’s Backstrand Gallery, to 3/8.
A spirit of generosity is encouraged by a new performance/installation by Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy, two artists long known for the innovative social awareness of their work. Alongside previous pieces by the artists at UCR’s Sweeney Art Gallery, they have established a performative ‘collection point’ for discarded clothing and small appliances. Donated items will be cleaned, repaired and prepped there for distribution as part of a barter economy established by the artists and Otis College students in the small farming town of Laton, CA. To 3/28.
The fifth biannual Hammer Museum invitational of work created in Los Angeles focuses on nine “artists of unique vision and often strange, scary and humorous takes on life.” Included in the exhibition are Lisa Anne Auerbach, Julie Becker, Victoria Reynolds and Kaari Upson. 3/8 to 5/31. Also showing in the Hammer Projects room is the artist-curated exhibition by LA artist Francesca Gabbiani that selects images from the Grunwald Center that explore witchcraft, sorcery and figures that are phantom and myth. 2/15 to 5/24.
At Jack Rutberg several decades of paintings and works on paper by Ruth Weisberg will trace the way the artist weaves art history, personal memory and cultural experience into her liquid-looking works expressing very human themes of growth and belief. 2/7 to 4/18.
