Theory plays out when Juta Koether, uses the self, or rather herself, as the ultimate “Sovereign” state and thus the single source of art judgment, language and structure. She makes her fragile point in floor to ceiling paintings of historical women and black liquid that made on long walls of clear glass. At Suzanne Vielmetter. To 4/4.
Thick clay peeling and curling into tubes and off center, robustly hued bowls by Patricia Ferber meet the improbable delicacy of a daily art journal made out of circles of eggshells by Ingird Lilligren at Bunny Gunner Gallery in Pomona. To 4/8.
Margaret Lazarri’s rich, and layered acrylic on canvas paintings in Coming Together at the Manhattan Beach Creative Arts Center merge traditional landscape, painterly mark and photo realistic bits into delightful images that are energetically alive. To 4/16.
Matching the micro with the macro, the cosmic with oceanic, Christine Nguyen at Angels Gate Cultural Center uses seawater, coral, crystals and drawings projected onto light-sensitive paper to make lovely camera-less photographic images. To 4/12.
At Western Project, Nancy Riegelman shows fragile looking non-objective images made of thin pencil lines drawn on canvas for the length of her breath. At five feet square the spare, linear works are delicate graphite compositions that make something visible and physical out of thin air. To 4/18.
At Jack Rutberg several decades of paintings and works on paper by Ruth Weisberg trace the way the artist weaves art history, personal memory and cultural experience into her liquid-looking works that express very human themes of growth and belief. To 4/18.
Susan Sironi shows a fascinating array of ordinary books she has intricately cut and folded to create three-dimensional quilts of floral color or rearranged story structure at Offramp Gallery. Also showing is a site specific, wall-climbing rice paper sculpture installation by Joyce Dallal entitled Wave that turns dry newspaper reports of Iraq refugees into a visual specter of cascading scale and translucent fragility . To 4/19.
Two installations and more than 50 collage-based photographic works by Terry Braunstein create fantastic fictionalized landscapes of personal angst and environmental dislocation at El Camino College Art Gallery. To 5/1. Concurrently her artwork is also showing at Craig Krull Gallery, 4/11 – 5/16.
Forth and Back is an insight-stimulating show of migrating influences between the ceramic work of Phyllis Green and Karen Koblitz. It’s interesting to speculate on the cross pollination of feminist-inspired ideas about history and art between Green’s delightfully odd male/female hybrid objects and Koblitz’s decoratively imbellished, negative vessel works. California State University, Dominguez Hills. To 4/22.
Sherry Frumkin is presenting the large, scribed line works of Doni Silver Simons. These works are documentation of the process of drawing a mark, as well as the meditative rigor of repeating that mark as an act of counting that builds into landscape or ancient-looking journal page. To 5/30.
The fifth biannual Hammer Museum invitational Nine Lives: Visionary Artists From LA focuses on “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. 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. To 5/24.
The Orange County Museum of Art is showing the combined works of four important American women Modernists: Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Agnes Martin, and Florence Miller Pierce. It’s the first time a museum has focused on the commonality of these four quite different, notable artists. They all drew on nature as their primary focus, and were inspired by arid and spare desert environments. Through their keen “sense of place” they each developed influential vocabularies with varying degrees of abstraction. 5/3 to 9/6.
In the Project Room of the Santa Monica Museum New York painter Jeni Spota fills her canvases with cramped figures engaged in frenzied religious activity. Through her small canvases, the viewer is able to peer into another world, watching epic religious scenes play out with a surreal, impressionist twist. 5/6/ to 8/15.
