Culver City Art Group Walks the Culver City Art Galleries
Seven members of the Culver City Art Group met at The LAB 101 gallery on March 17 for an informal walk along Washington Blvd and La Cienega to visit the art galleries that have popped up in the last couple of years. (Much has been written about this area recently, so I won't go into that, but a good article can be found here if you are so inclined: Art of the new. How a previously industrial area in Culver City morphed into the latest gallery hotspot.)
Seven members of the Culver City Art Group met at The LAB 101 gallery on March 17 for an informal walk along Washington Blvd and La Cienega to visit the art galleries that have popped up in the last couple of years. (Much has been written about this area recently, so I won't go into that, but a good article can be found here if you are so inclined: Art of the new. How a previously industrial area in Culver City morphed into the latest gallery hotspot.)
I was still feeling a little woozy from oral surgery a couple of days before, but decided to go anyway, rather than spend the day on the sofa. Whenever I push myself to do something I have made a commitment to do, I always feel better that at least I gave it a try! And this try turned into visiting at least 15 galleries along Washington Blvd. and La Cienega Blvd. The thing I enjoy about visiting galleries is not the satisfaction of seeing a lot of artwork that I necessarily love and admire, it is more the variety of creativity on view.
At Lab 101 I was fascinated by the work of Andy Howell. I am always attracted to collages and I liked the juxtaposition of grotesque faces with the fancifully-patterned backgrounds in the exhibition “I Wish I Was Here.”
At Corey Helford the walls of the showroom were eerily decorated with rubbery arms extending out of swooping black drapes. This was appropriate for the David Stoupakis exhibit, "Sheep Will Follow." Paintings of dead children or just ghastly dolls? Creepy in a wonderfully amusing way. And beautifully framed. I am always aware of the choices of framing, as the right or wrong decision can enhance or detract dramatically from a piece.
We visited a few more galleries with nothing particularly interesting to me (which doesn't mean it wouldn't strike someone else's fancy).
Then at d.e.n. contemporary, Carlos Estrada-Vega's "About 4,000 Paintings" caught my attention. Each painting is comprised of tens to hundreds of individual squares or rectangles of varying depths, made of different colors and hues from his own mixture of limestone dust and pigment. At first it seems like a simple concept, one of those, "why didn't I think of that," ideas. But really quite complicated when you look at each piece closely.
At Blum & Poe, we walked into Sam Durant’s “Scenes From the Pilgrim Story: Myths, Massacres and Monuments.” Yep, that’s right. We couldn’t decide if it had been stolen from the Natural History Museum, was a put on, or somebody was serious about it being a work of art. Think a 70s presentation of what it meant to be a Pilgrim in wall plaques and vignettes, and you got it. Well, at least I remembered it.
At the George Billis Gallery, I was particularly struck by one painting of a 76 gas station with a dried-up palm tree in the foreground and a dinosaur in the background, everything suffocating in thick brown smog. Unfortunately there is no artist attribution on the website so I will never know who painted it. Interestingly, as a nod to the sudden hipness of Culver City, they have their address listed as Culver City with an LA address. Although the galleries along La Cienega are actually located in the city of Los Angeles, it is now considered part of the “cool” Culver City gallery neighborhood.
I believe it was about here the lack of Vicodin and antibiotics caught up with me. End of tour, to be completed another day.
I would encourage anybody who is an artist or has an interest in art to make the effort to stroll around current art galleries, whether it be in Culver City, the Melrose area in West Hollywood, downtown LA, etc. Take a friend and have a conversation about the art you are seeing… good or bad, it’s always interesting and stimulating.
At Lab 101 I was fascinated by the work of Andy Howell. I am always attracted to collages and I liked the juxtaposition of grotesque faces with the fancifully-patterned backgrounds in the exhibition “I Wish I Was Here.”
At Corey Helford the walls of the showroom were eerily decorated with rubbery arms extending out of swooping black drapes. This was appropriate for the David Stoupakis exhibit, "Sheep Will Follow." Paintings of dead children or just ghastly dolls? Creepy in a wonderfully amusing way. And beautifully framed. I am always aware of the choices of framing, as the right or wrong decision can enhance or detract dramatically from a piece.
We visited a few more galleries with nothing particularly interesting to me (which doesn't mean it wouldn't strike someone else's fancy).
Then at d.e.n. contemporary, Carlos Estrada-Vega's "About 4,000 Paintings" caught my attention. Each painting is comprised of tens to hundreds of individual squares or rectangles of varying depths, made of different colors and hues from his own mixture of limestone dust and pigment. At first it seems like a simple concept, one of those, "why didn't I think of that," ideas. But really quite complicated when you look at each piece closely.
At Blum & Poe, we walked into Sam Durant’s “Scenes From the Pilgrim Story: Myths, Massacres and Monuments.” Yep, that’s right. We couldn’t decide if it had been stolen from the Natural History Museum, was a put on, or somebody was serious about it being a work of art. Think a 70s presentation of what it meant to be a Pilgrim in wall plaques and vignettes, and you got it. Well, at least I remembered it.
At the George Billis Gallery, I was particularly struck by one painting of a 76 gas station with a dried-up palm tree in the foreground and a dinosaur in the background, everything suffocating in thick brown smog. Unfortunately there is no artist attribution on the website so I will never know who painted it. Interestingly, as a nod to the sudden hipness of Culver City, they have their address listed as Culver City with an LA address. Although the galleries along La Cienega are actually located in the city of Los Angeles, it is now considered part of the “cool” Culver City gallery neighborhood.
I believe it was about here the lack of Vicodin and antibiotics caught up with me. End of tour, to be completed another day.
I would encourage anybody who is an artist or has an interest in art to make the effort to stroll around current art galleries, whether it be in Culver City, the Melrose area in West Hollywood, downtown LA, etc. Take a friend and have a conversation about the art you are seeing… good or bad, it’s always interesting and stimulating.
(All photos on this blog copyright roslyn m wilkins and not to be used without permission.)
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