Symbolist painter Gail Potock shares her intense ecological anxiety in Opened Apples at Billy Shire Fine Arts. She approaches her themes of impeding environmental disaster with old master brushwork and an elegantly garbed female as mother earth drenched by lushly presented but threatened worlds. To 12/6.
Clash at Katalyst Foundation features the figurative works of newspaper photographer Sarah Reingewirts and Los Angeles myth maker Sara E. Wedman. To 12/6.
Artists who use nature as a theme or subject in everything from painting to caved marble or funky mixed media objects are featured in the small group show Natural Connection at the Frank M. Doyle Art Pavilion at Orange Coast College. Included are Elizabeth Turk, Karen Brown, Kirara Kawachi and Amy Caterina. To 12/12.
Twenty three works on paper for a series of etchings by artist Amy Sillman are at Susanne Vielmetter. Turning the search for grand or assured imagery on its head the artist keeps to the challenge of creating abstract and figurative images that feel consistently uncertain and awkward. To 12/13.
The linear, vibrantly colored acrylic paintings of Linda Besemer at Angles Gallery seem to warp and wiggle in front of your eyes. Marrying Op art playfulness to computer graphic color her paintings fool the eye into seeing deep space and movement that just isn't there. To 12/13.
JK Gallery has two solo photography-based shows. Jennifer D Anderson presents mediation on the vulnerability of mankind by combining grainy images of amputated limbs with old war documents and illustrations. Diane Cockerill makes minimalist-styled abstractions out of colorful fragments of L.A. street curbs. To 12/20.
Eight women using various media depict the momentary coincidence of place and memory in a little gem of a landscape show curated by Director Mary MacNaughton at Scripps College Pomona. They are Ciel Berman, Nancy Friese, Karen Kitchel, Rita Robillard, Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin, Laurie Brown, Monica Furmanski and Idelle Weber. To 12/14.
Sculptures that give a nod to having roots in painting are in the group show Like Lifelike: Painting in the Third Dimension at UC Riverside’s Sweeney Art Gallery. Among the eight artists showing are Jacci Den Hartog and Jean Lowe. To 12/20.
Kim Kimbro’s oil on canvas paintings of whales, sled dogs and ice are drawn from archival photographs of R. F. Scott’s fatal historic race for the South Pole. They make for a fascinating examination of the Antarctic as a metaphorical landscape of trial and fatal desire. At Lawrence Asher Gallery to 12/20.
Nancy Kye’s organic sculptures made from post-consumer waste and junk held together with pieces of wire, and Margaeret Pezalla’s fomecore iceberg sculptures floating in the air are two of the seven artists who make up the post industrial materials show Forming at Angels Gate Cultural Center. To 1/11/09.
Twelve oil paintings by Lisa Adams add to her ongoing, enigmatic narrative pictorially examining time, life, relationships and other haunting intangibles. At Lawrence Asher Gallery 1/10/09 - 2/7.
Looking at abstract painting to find examples of art’s elusive creative process Oranges and Sardines at the Hammer features works by six artists including Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, and Charline von Heyl. It’s a dynamic question the curator asks in his essay, "Why would anyone commit his or her life to making paintings?" Unclear is if the work itself can present an answer. Perhaps it is devotion that is the elusive element given a market which currently treats abstraction like a poor relation.
Painting her friends, musician and other artists Linsley Lambert reaches for something universally human in her sharp, photorealistic portraits at Offramp Gallery. 1/11/09 – 2/22.
The sprawling 2008 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art was curated this year by LAXART founder Lauri Firstengberg. It includes work by more than fifty artists and offsite projects as far away as Tijuana and Northern California. Hard to imagine why there are only sixteen women artists in the selection. To 3/15.
Over 90 large-scale photographs of African life-passage ceremonies collected over 30 years by photographers Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher are at the Bowers Museum. These are images that mark the dynamic spiritual beliefs of the different societies as individuals are tied to the community in public marriages, courtship rituals, coronations, funerals and coming of age ceremonies. To 4/19.
