Inspirecation 001 – Hollywood Woman’s Club
Posted on December 27, 2009
As assistant curator, I helped to organize this group art show on November 22, 2009, and showed my recent Ecstasy Unveiled video collages at the show.
Yes, I know. It’s the “Women’s Club” not the “Woman’s Club” but that’s actually how the organization is registered – possessive singular.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
The Woman’s Club of Hollywood is a non-profit organization with 104 years of history in support of the arts, sciences and the Hollywood community. The show Inspirecation 001, on November 22nd will be the first of a monthly series of performances and art exhibitions. A group exhibition event of works about or by women. It will be held in the club on a monthly basis through June 2010. Please call the Woman’s Club of Hollywood for further details and schedule.
Inspirecation 001.1
featuring artwork by: Shirley Ash, Calvin Burtley, Marlaya Charleston, Mariah Csepanyi, Kristina Faragher, Onno de Jong, Sheila Fein, Carol Gehring, Gina Genis, Marco Greco, Christopher Hassett, Micol Hebron, Arthur Kegerreis, Carolin Kewer, Laura Murphy, Frank Rozasy, Patty Sharkey, Stephen W. Smith, Barbara Testa, Tiffany Trenda, Violeta Villacorta, Jeffrey Zatlin.
When: November 22nd at 5 p.m. till 9 p.m
Where: The Woman’s Club of Hollywood, 1749 N. La Brea Avenue, Hollywood, CA 90046
Parking available. Free event open to the public
For more information, please contact:
Carolin Kewer (Curator) Arthur Kegerreis (Assistant Curator)
Phone (323) 876-8383
Participating Artists Statements:
Shirly Ash:
A fascination for the human form with an attempt to give life and personality through fluid line, movement, grace and balance. Focused on composition; using mediums of prisma colour pencil and pastel, pen and ink, conte crayon, watercolour and acrylic paint, subjects demonstrate a sensibility of quiet strength and introspection. I find the beauty, expand and create a harmony in my figurative works that evoke and inspire ubiquitous feelings and moods.
Marlaya Charleston:
In my work, the music is the conduit. I am completely inspired as I experience the freedom, dynamic energy, love, passion, joy and the improvisational quality, exploring new and infinite possibilities. Working in this way brings forth to me the idea that we are always creating our own reality and we always have the choice to create joy for ourselves and for others. I find communicating this idea of creation to be powerful and exciting.
Kristina Faragher:
Kristina Faragher has exhibited works of art individually and collaboratively in a host of media including video, installation, film, and performance. Selected venues and festivals include: The Oakland Museum, Oakland, The Autry National Center, Los Angeles, The REDCAT Theater, Los Angeles, Shoshona Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico, LA Freewaves Ninth Annual International Media Festival, Los Angeles, The Berkeley Film and Video Festival, Berkeley, CA, The Fifth Festival International de la Image in Colombia, South America, Pixel Pops Short and Fast, Scotland, Orkney Islands, UK. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Minsk, Belarus.
Publications include: The Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, Yosemite Art of an American Icon, UC Berkeley Press and Extensions: Online Journal of Embodied Technology at UCLA.
Onno de jong:
Onno De Jong was born in Holland and moved to America in 1997. A fine artist and film maker, he received his BFA from the Academie Minerva te Groningen in the Netherlands and earned an MFA in animation film making at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium. “ My paintings reflects the mood and timeless spirit of the seasons. I am drawn to the dramatic light and the open spaces of landscapes.”
Sheila Fein:
Artist Sheila Fein is working in a new direction. Her Figurative Pop Acrylic paintings and drawings are bringing back fantasy and whimsy to the figure. Imaginative and playful, they are the perfect addition to her colored pencil work and her personification chair paintings. Throughout her career Sheila’s use of her imagination has taken the viewer to a world unseen. People Sketchers, the weekly figure drawing class she books the models for and helps to run, is the perfect place for her to experiment with her new venture. She is now also beginning to combine her photographs with her paintings to create digital works of art in an effort to connect what we actually see to what we imagine. Sheila’s work is psychological and reminiscent of the 60’s with the tilt of today’s popular culture.
Carol Gehring :
Carol Gehring’s photographic work is an eclectic mix of painterly, abstract, and organic images of nature, architecture, geographical plains, objects and people, which act as open, interactive environments or temporal terrains into a psychological space. “The unconscious is like an infinite sea that ebbs and flows, intrinsically connected to our own spiritual nature, and our state of mind; vital and indispensable it is linked to our memories that continually lead us back to our inner self.” Gehring earned her MFA in Film/Video, 2003, and her BFA in Photography/Film/Video, 2000, at the California Institute of the Arts. Before her return to school, she had a successful career in the publishing industry with VOGUE magazine, and as a fashion photographer.
Gina Genis:
Gina Genis has exhibited her work in museums and galleries across the U.S. She is included in the permanent collections of the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, the Otto G. Richter Library Special Collections Division of the University of Miami, Orange County Transit District, and IBM, and the Hard Rock Casino among others. She is currently shows her work with the Los Angeles Artist Association, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and Paragone Gallery. Genis’ work combines the most exceptional elements of nature and technology. Using a camera and software processing systems, a squirrel jaw bone found in the forest becomes an abstracted pattern of delicate beauty. This beauty, however, barely masks a strong presence of danger. The raw elegance of an animal skull reminds us of the tenuous nature of our existence, but through Genis’ photography, celebrates and memorializes life.
Marco Greco:
Marco Greco is a cable Ace award winiing performance artist, playwright, who also done some acting work in film, and TV. When the moment is right, he loves to paint.
Christopher Hassett:
It is a commonplace of our era that in any act of communication the medium becomes a part of the message. The painting, as much as a tomb wall of Mayan hieroglyphs, contains patterns of meaning which it overlays onto the message it blazons forth. Like Mayan hieroglyphs sited in a tomb, Chris Hassett’s hermetic paintings appear as an attempt to gain access to a redesignated sanctum, away from the eternally receding boundaries of experience. In Burn Victims, an indeterminate background draws the viewer into the most private viewing conceivable, in this case, two badly burned but delighted children hold semiautomatic handguns to the head of a kneeling man, whose own predicament seems to have reduced him to a state of childlike receptivity. Hassett often explores societal violence, but in an intentionally awkward way. In Fury, the giant eyes of a baby brutalized by starvation stare up at a figure with all the intensity of one of the Grady daughters in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. His women often appear vacant, lost in thought, sometimes appearing as unnerving sexual automatons, at other times staring out at us, turning us into witnesses of some un-nameable event. Smoldering red backgrounds surge at the viewer, often trapping seemingly independent, uncontrollable, and eccentric figures in featureless locations. Hassett has the unique talent of painting right where the stakes are highest, crushing clichés with an anti-epic vengeance.
– THE Magazine Santa Fe, New Mexico
Micol Hebron:
Micol Hebron is a video and performance artist, writer, and curator based in Los Angeles. She received her MFA in New Genres from UCLA. In 2004 she founded the LA Art Girls, a collective of 30+ women artists in the LA area. Hebron writes for Art Forum, Flash Art International, Arte Contexto and is on the editorial board of X-Tra magazine. Recent work includes a self portrait for THE Magazine (June issue), and group exhibitions Is This the Real Life, Horazdovice, Czech Republic (May/June), Interiority Complex at Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles (June) and Rogue Wave, LA Louver, Venice, CA (July/Aug).
Micol is an assistant professor of art at Chapman University in Orange County.
Arthur Kegerreis:
Arthur Kegerreis is an experimental videographer, photographer, sound designer, and composer. A graduate of CalArts, Parsons, and Hampshire College, he has most recently been applying website production tools in experiments with cubist video. Initially inspired by Hockney’s Pearblossom Highway photo collage, bolstered by some technical video programming tricks in multimedia software, he has been developing an emerging form of dynamic imagery that compresses the time element of sound and sight into multi-layered cubist imagery. Initial works focused on panoramic landscape imagery, but he is now delving into less realistic visual forms juxtaposing multiple locations, while attempting to incorporate multiple views of a single space in a single image.
Carolin Kewer:
“Perception is a way of understanding or interpreting a subject captured in a moment of time.
A skillful artist can create this a lasting mental impression with a brush stroke, a splattering
of paint or in my case, with the expert use of light.”
International artist from Germany with exhibitions world wide.
Laura Murphy:
For over ten years Laura has been consciously creating, professionally exhibiting and selling her work in California, Arizona, and Oklahoma. She has experience in collaborative work with adults, children, and with outdoor and indoor murals. Her artistic goals include creating beauty while being of service, sharing ideas and inspiration, facilitating a safe studio for healing and growth, and participating in creative communities. Laura’s work is generally abstract and often expresses sacred geometry, figurative studies and interpretations of human anatomy, relationships, animal symbols, prayers and positive affirmations. Through these expressions she sets intentions for her life and the world. Working from a mixed media approach, incorporating collage and found objects, three dimensional designs, painting and more allows her the creative space she needs to convey messages of world peace, appreciation of Mother Nature, discovery of authenticity and self worth, idealism and spirituality. “Divine Mother Avocado Tree” is a safe place to turn over my will and life, to surrender to a shift in consciousness towards compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude for my parents and for the parental aspect of God or Mother Nature who sparks life in all beings and always lives in this present moment.
Frank Rozasy:
Large scale hand painted mixed media photography Using old family photographs and women movie stars photos from the golden age of Hollywood as source material, I then distort, enlarge and print them on bond paper. They are then painted with water color and color ink, crumpled and mounted on wood. The final pieces have a textured and old looking painted photographic surface. The use of old family photos and starlet photos from the 1930′s, 40′s and 50′s has both a personal and universal quality that brings out a nostalgic feeling in the viewer.
Stephen W. Smith:
A graduate of Brooks Institute of Photography with 24 years of experience working as a professional Currently on assignment at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Ca as a special projects photography. “I love working with musicians, in the studio or on location, taking a little time with the lighting until they look just so. I start shooting…trying to capture that moment when I’ve brought out something in them, some personality…Never treating the person as a still life, but having a intimate experience that I capture in a frame”
Tiffany Trenda:
Tiffany Trenda is a video installation performance artist based out of Malibu, CA. She received her BFA from Art Center College of Design and is finishing her graduate work at UCLA Design and Media Arts. She has exhibited at Robert Berman, Farmani Gallery, Photo San Francisco, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Korean Cultural Center, Highways, and Track 16. In 2009, she created an artist installation for Photo Los Angeles and performed live. Later that year she performed “Entropy” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Trenda won the prize of The Artist of the Year at the London Creative Awards in 2008 and 2009. Tiffany Trenda’s work is an investigation of how we are defined and redefined through the integration of technology. She questions how the machine has become an intrinsic part of the body and how the inorganic fused with the organic is a collage of time and space. Her central process is to take technology (LCDs, video projectors, cameras, etc.) and create a digital environment with an embodied performance that simulates the human psyche inside a nostalgic digital world. The viewer is physically and visually immersed in the process in how the psyche evolves to relate and survive within the machine.
Violeta Villacorta:
Born in Lima, Perú and raised in New York City, Violeta Villacorta began painting as early as she can remember. Painting and design go hand in hand in her creative life. A Clothing Designer by profession, she is inspired by the many cultures and travel that enrich her life. Her paintings incorporate surreal organic shapes and ethereal themes that deal with the many realms, mind, body and soul and she is continually influenced by the supernatural. The play of Light and Shadow in her compositions depict the balance between these two forces.
“A Woman’s Depth: Three Incarnations Of A Goddess” from the series Beyond The Light was inspired by the power of every woman. These three women, the incarnation of a Goddess, represent All the Women in the World, from the many cultures and backgrounds. It embodies All feminine gifts and traits, as well as the the trinity of Mind, Body & Soul. The Guiding Light emanates from them All.
Jeffrey Zatlin:
Jeffrey Zatlin was born in Orange County in the summer of 1963 and has lived in Southern California all his life. He started painting in 1994 after some art was damaged by the Northridge earthquake. He has been painting ever since. Jeff paints Southern California people in their native habitat. The lifestyle, the beauty, and the underlying sexuality of the people who live there are portrayed in the scenes that Jeff creates on canvas. The color, energy, and attitude of our culture and lifestyle are reflected through his work and make us part of the scene. Jeff currently lives and paints in Camarillo, California. He can be reached at jeffrey.zatlin@hotmail.com or visit his webpage at www.jeffreyazatlin.blogspot.com to see more of his work.