Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Papel tejido 28, acrylic on paper, 48″ x 48″

ART AND RELIGION

California artist weaves faith into acclaimed works, show

By Kimberly Winston

December 22, 2017

LOS ANGELES (RNS) — Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia had a full scholarship to study engineering and was more than halfway to his degree when he took an art class.

It changed his life.

Today, Hurtado Segovia, 38, is a much-admired contemporary artist who lives, works and shows in this city, which has become ground zero for much of American contemporary art. He is fresh off a critically acclaimed solo show that one reviewer called “deftly crafted, quirky, spiritual, private and timeless.”

He is also a Christian, something that frequently makes its way into his work in ways both open and veiled. And while the contemporary art world often dismisses religious subjects — especially if they’re not critical — faith is both a touchstone and wellspring for almost all of his abstract works in wood, fiber, paper, paint and even sand and tar.

For Hurtado Segovia, Christianity is not just a faith. It’s woven into his Mesoamerican identity, evident in his use of handicrafts such as embroidery and beads.

“I am convinced art is my vocation, my passion, my calling, a deep part of my being,” he said recently from the sunny living room of the second-floor apartment that is both the home he shares with his wife and two children and his studio. “My faith in Jesus filters how I understand the world and the art I make that goes out into the world is therefore a seamless entity as a practice.”

And the religious subject matter of his art has a purpose, one that may not endear Hurtado Segovia to either the contemporary art world or some of his fellow Christians: reclaiming from conservatives what it means to be a Christian and love God.

“For Lorenzo, Christian values are not what the media portrays as Christian values on the basis of — and I will use the word ‘evangelical’ Christianity, even though, to me, evangelical Christians is not what a lot of these people are,” said Clyde Beswick, the co-owner of CB1 Gallery, the downtown Los Angeles space that represents Hurtado Segovia.

“To me, Lorenzo is what Christians should be. He lives his faith, he cares about people, and I have never seen him break away from his position of what Christianity is to him, which is living out the love of God.”

Merion Estes, Desolation Row, 2013, fabric collage and acrylic on fabric, 63.25″ x 79.5″

ART AND CAKE

Dispatches from the Front Lines, Merion Estes at CB1 Gallery

By Sydney Walters

December 28, 2017

In CB1 Gallery’s latest show, Dispatches From the Front Lines, artist Merion Estes weaves a sublime chorus of color, pattern and texture into a systematic outcry against corporate gains at the cost of the environment.

Estes creates a visual symphony of senses by peeling back repeating layers of texture and emphasizing colored elements such as the glittering vibrato of gold in Yellow River. One of the best examples of bringing sound into a color field is her fabric collage, Drink Me. Three black music notes punctuate an otherwise still and quiet swamp. Small frogs are tucked behind red reeds and an alligator emerges from the shadowy depths. Yet the surface is covered by smoke. Smoke from the small flames erupting from the surface of the water. Non-organic shapes, which suggest pieces of trash, are silhouetted against the hazy surface. Plucked from Alice in Wonderland’s “drink me” bottle in Lewis Carroll’s classic tale, Alice recalls, “If you drink much from a bottle marked, ‘poison,’ it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.” Estes’ Drink Me is a reverberation on human abuse and over indulgence of this natural resource.

Other pieces continue projecting dramatic scenes of pollution, fires and chemicals disrupting animal habitats. In Desolation Row, elephants walk in a straight line, a death march, toward a blazing fire on the terrain. Skeletal angelfish meander underneath other fish belly up suspended in acrid green pollution in Bayou Blues. Painted in the style of futurist artist Umberto Boccioni, a smoking, polychromatic waterfall penetrates a clear blue river. Futurism’s fuel was the promise of industrialization. Chemical Falls is not only a rebuttal against industrialization destroying the environment, but it also does what WWI did to Futurism: it proves intent is not always a reflection of reality.

The stories Estes weaves are not only packed with tremendous relevance to environmental crisis, but also nod to pop culture and political happenings. In Black Star, a spider web reads as a complex astrological chart with planetary orbs as the nesting place for large spiders and black stars scattered throughout the web. Here, Estes reflects on David Bowie’s last album and global chart topper, Blackstar, and the obscured spiders imply the illness hidden from the public that resulted in Bowie’s death.

Another piece influenced by current revelations is a large fabric collage titled Pink Power. Here, Estes considers the Los Angeles Women’s March this past January. Delineated paper flower petals whose outlines are similar to breasts are sprinkled among an array of pink and green foliage. Five paper hands adorned with henna patterns guide this ornate torrent and the stunning pink overhaul mirrors the sea of pink from the pussy hats worn by so many LA marchers.

For Estes, Dispatches From the Front Lines are messages from war. She is burrowed in the trenches in the battle to save the environment. In synthesizing dreamlike utopias in jeopardy, her work is more than a narrative. It is an invitation for action.

READ REVIEW ON ART AND CAKE

REVIEW

Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia: Vida, pasión y muerte

By Shana Nys Dambrot

Issue 37

In Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, we have an artist embracing change in his practice, without ever weighing anchor on what came before. CB1 is showing new works from four distinct series, inviting viewers to discover the plentiful interconnectivities for themselves. It’s a warm, generous, engaging, mysterious exhibition, by turns somber and witty, deftly crafted, quirky, spiritual, private and timeless. It’s part of the Pacific Standard Time family, but this is more than a Latinx moniker; label, because in the case of Hurtado Segovia, that PST heritage exerts a salient and specific influence on his content, processes and materials. Chiefly centered around iconography and folk-infused rituals of early Christianity, Segovia’s paintings on paper set a tone of dark whimsy, telegraphing their allegorical character even to those unfamiliar with the imagery. For example, the white stag in Pushing Daisies (Resurrection Painting), echoes the Unicorn Tapestries, Biblical references and embodies a certain Greco-Roman mythological quality. The prolific, multi-layered, chromatically vibrant palette and textures and rhythmical patterning relate directly to the paper weaving. Festooned with pattern motifs like six-point stars, hearts, candles, mosaics, flowers and wheels, the paintings on paper are set off by the overtly reliquary quality of the coffin cover for which the entire show is named, lovingly embroidered and beaded, and another example of Segovia’s penchant for hand-crafted textile based sculpture.

Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Pushing Daisies (Resurrection Painting), 2017, acrylic on paper, 35″ x 25″

The Paleolithic quality of the sand and tar paintings (with materials meaningfully sourced from the La Brea Tar Pits and local beaches) replicate not only the motifs but the substantial qualities of heft, texture and surface of their petroglyphic inspirations. The biggest surprise was the small army of gleaming wood sculptures. Abstract, yet always bordering on the figurative, they radiate a warmth and display a jaunty stylization reminiscent of totemic folk art. The artist follows the contours of found wood (culled from chopped down city trees) and performs a perfect, patient marquetry to fix all gaps and wounds, bind striations, to contrast wood grains and to tease out figurative resemblances within the same lexicon of holy virgins, gentle monks, old-world ships and tribal altars. The care given their finishes and details speaks to the spiritual energy infused into their making with a pre-Columbian elegance, highlighting a folkloric narrative that’s both universal and totally personal.

Merion Estes, Radioactive Sea, 2017, fabric collage and spray paint on canvas, 48″ x 76″

The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) announced the 2017 recipients of the Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award, which was established in 2015 to recognize artistic excellence and provide resources to visual artists with a long history of creative practice. Merion Estes will receive an unrestricted cash award and will create a catalogue to accompany an exhibition of her work to be held at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles in September 2018, which coincides with her 80th birthday. 

With the support of an anonymous donor, NYFA created this annual award to enable artists with a long history of creative practice to pursue deeper investigations or new explorations that can inform and enrich their work. It has been developed in memory of the artist Murray Reich, a New York-based painter who also had a highly regarded career as a professor of art at Bard College.

On receiving the award, Estes said: “This is only the second grant I have received in my long career, and I am most grateful. It will allow me some leeway in preparing for my three upcoming shows and in particular for the 10-year survey at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles.”

Estes is known for her use of varied depictions of natural “scenes” using found fabrics coupled with mixed paint applications and photo transfers. Her works address the beauty and fragility of life and the tragedy of man’s intervention in nature. She has shown regularly in Los Angeles since arriving there in 1972. An active participant in the Women’s Movement since its inception, Estes was part of the only women’s co-op in the first “Woman’s Building” in Los Angeles. Her work was exhibited in two shows there, and she continued as a member of a Feminist service group called “XX” for several years after the gallery closed. The group’s mission was to expose other artist’s work and their work through mounting shows in alternative spaces and sponsored lectures. In 1979, she was given a five-year survey at the Municipal Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park. Her work continued to evolve and be seen throughout the 80’s and 90’s, and in 2006 she was given a 35-year retrospective at the Pomona College Art Museum, curated by Rebecca McGrew. Her artistic evolution continues today as she works towards a third show at CB1 Gallery, The Feminine Sublime at Pasadena Museum of California Art, and the Craft and Folk Art Museum show.

READ ANNOUNCEMENT ON NYFA.ORG

[See image gallery at cb1gallery.com]
Eric Beltz, Body of Adam, 2016, graphite on Bristol, 39″ x 30″

REVIEW

A million points of dark: The thrilling pencil drawings of Eric Beltz

By David Pagel

June 27, 2017

Time doesn’t stand still in Eric Beltz’s new drawings. It expands and contracts, taking visitors at his “Night Skies” exhibition at CB1 Gallery on a fascinating journey made up of moments that let you get lost in their beauty while putting you in mind of much longer time spans.

Each of the Santa Barbara artist’s seven works on paper (most not much bigger than pocket size) makes you think of hours, days and weeks. Years, decades and centuries quickly fill your consciousness, followed by millennia — and beyond.

At a time when attention spans are measured in nanoseconds, and impatience seems to be everyone’s default setting, it’s thrilling to come across Beltz’s out-of-step art. His great subject is the way little gestures accumulate to form meaningful wholes while being dwarfed — but not overwhelmed — by the vastness of the cosmos.

You need to see his graphite drawings up close, from a few steps back and from across the gallery. Each piece changes significantly as the clarity of your vision shifts. The millions of pixels Beltz has drawn with ordinary pencils blend and mix differently.

When vivid, the contours of his sharp-edged shapes recall medieval tapestries and ancient mosaics as well as embroidered fabrics, children’s game boards and digital imagery from the early 1990s. Like Pointillist paintings made with a pencil, their surfaces are composed of myriad blacks, whites and grays that mix in your eye to create forms and suggest depth.

In Beltz’s hands, such illusions are evocative, not seamless. All are riven by internal tensions and the sense that you are looking at two or three levels of reality, mashed but not melded. The artworks of Vija Celmins, Sharon Ellis and Fred Tomaselli come to mind.

Space, like time, is elastic, made palpable by Beltz’s masterful mixing of what we see and what we sense. His devotion and patience stand out in a world fixated on the instant gratification of instant communication.

READ ON LATIMES.COM

[See image gallery at cb1gallery.com]
Eric Beltz, Night Sky, Waning Moon, Clouds, 2017, graphite on Bristol, 14.5″ x 11.5″

PRETTY HURTS
a panel discussion

Sunday, May 21, 2017, 3 p.m.

In conjunction with the current exhibition, Pretty Hurts which features new works by artist, Phung Huynh, CB1 Gallery will host a panel discussion about uncovering the complicated issues related to Asian female bodies and plastic surgery. The panel will present probing conversations about body image, patriarchy, colonialism, popular culture, and social media as critical markers in how beauty is constructed and to what lengths women will go to subject their bodies to be reconstructed.

The moderator for the panel discussion is Annie Buckley (artist, writer, curator, and Associate Professor of Visual Studies at California State University, San Bernardino); and the panelists include Evonne Gallardo (Arts and Culture Consultant), Phung Huynh (artist and Associate Professor of Art at Los Angeles Valley College), Tiffany Lanoix (Associate Professor of Sociology at West Los Angeles College), and Jennifer Lynne Musto (Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College).

Annie Buckley is an artist, writer, and curator with an emphasis on art and social justice. Her work embraces image, text, and social practice and has been included in public and gallery exhibitions since the early 90s. Recent works include the participatory project, “Pollinating Kindness” and the multidisciplinary work, “The People’s Tarot” which was included in Miami Basel 2014. Her writing about contemporary art has been published in Artforum, Art in America, The Huffington Post, and she is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books. Buckley is currently Associate Professor of Visual Studies at California State University, San Bernardino, and the founder and director of Community-based Art and the Prison Arts Collective, for which she has been awarded prestigious grants from the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Annie earned a BA with honors from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. She completed additional coursework in Psychology at UCLA and Education at CSU, Los Angeles. She is a member of the Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society.

Evonne Gallardo is an arts and culture consultant dedicated to honoring and valuing artists as critical components to a successful society. Evonne works to advance and resource artists and the organizations that serve them, and has held leadership positions in a wide range of arts organizations including museums, community based art centers and artist-led international organizations. Evonne has hands-on leadership experience in arts management and programming, curatorial and public art projects, board development and fundraising strategies, organization management, as well as cultural equity, inclusion, and diversity in the arts and culture sector. Evonne received a B.A. in American History at Columbia University and an M.A. in the Sociology of Art/Liberal Studies from the New School in New York City. She currently serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Directors for the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC).

Phung Huynh is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice is primarily in drawing and painting. Her most current work probes the questions of cultural perception and cultural authenticity through images of the Asian female body vis-à-vis plastic surgery. Huynh is interested in how contemporary plastic surgery on Asian women have not only obscured racial identity, but it has also amplified the exoticism and Orientalist eroticism of Asian women. Phung Huynh is represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles and has had solo exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills and the Sweeney Art Gallery at the University of California, Riverside. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in countries such as Germany and Cambodia. She has also completed public art commissions for the Metro Orange Line, Metro Silver Line, and the Los Angeles Zoo. Phung Huynh is Associate Professor of Art at Los Angeles Valley College. She completed undergraduate coursework at the University of Southern California, received her undergraduate degree from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and received her graduate degree from New York University.

Tiffany Lanoix is Associate Professor of Sociology at West Los Angeles College where she teaches courses in racial and ethnic relations, social problems, intersectionality and related topics. Tiffany Lanoix was Chair of the Sociology and Ethnic Studies Department at Los Angeles Valley College where she was also the faculty advisor to the Gay-Straight Alliance and spearheaded significant programs such as the Same Sex Parenting Forum, Sexual Harassment Symposia, and Heterosexual Privilege Workshop. Community activism and social awareness are core to her activities as a scholar and professor. Currently, at West Los Angles College she serves on the Student Success Committee, is the Transfer Honors Director and was awarded a student equity grant along with two other faculty members to launch a program called “Westside Connections,” which helps underserved students reach their goals for transfer and certificate completion. Tiffany Lanoix received a B.A. in Sociology from CSU Dominguez Hills and an M.A. in Sociology from UC Irvine.

Jennifer Musto is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College and a postdoctoral researcher with the SEXHUM: Migration Sex Work, and Trafficking project. An interdisciplinary scholar, Jennifer’s research interests and expertise are situated at the intersections of gender, sexuality, feminism, technology, law, and migration and she has lectured widely and published articles and a book on the laws, policies, and technologies designed to respond to human trafficking and sex work in the United States. Before arriving at Wellesley College, she was an External Faculty Fellow at Rice University and a member of the inaugural Humanities Research Center Seminar, Human Trafficking Past and Present: Crossing Borders, Crossing Disciplines. She was also a postdoctoral researcher at USC’s Annenberg Center on Communication & Leadership Policy. Jennifer Musto received her PhD in Women’s Studies from UCLA.

REVIEW

Lisa Adams’ Fictitious Worlds @ CB1 Gallery and College of the Canyons Art Gallery

By Lita Barrie

March 22, 2017

Lisa Adams’ idiosyncratic paintings are interior monologues. Her paintings are a hybrid of representation and abstraction, landscape and still life, surrealist and dystopian imagery that blur so many genre lines, they defy categorization. Adams’ paintings play with anomalies that are disturbing, eccentric, and quirky – rather like Tim Burton’s movies. Her paintings are fictitious worlds built from disjointed fragments that evoke her own bewilderment in a world that is falling apart.

Adams is fascinated by unexpected things she discovers around her – in downtown L.A. , nature walks, or on the internet – that she projects into images of fictitious worlds where everything is out-of-step and a bit skewed. Her imaginary constructs are inspired by Italo Calvino’s short stories in Invisible Cities recounting Marco Polo’s purported journeys to imagined cities. Like Calvino’s prose, Adams’ paintings are poetically constructed explorations of imaginary travels which represent psychological states.

A two year survey of Adams’ recent paintings at College of the Canyons Art Gallery together with an exhibition of small works at CB1 Gallery provide an opportunity to see how Adams has created her own lexicon out of her leitmotifs. Each painting is a discombobulated world unto itself – a fictitious construct without an imposed narrative. Seen together each painting becomes a vignette from a continuing vision of an unpropitious universe Adams has conjured from many fictitious places she has travelled in her imagination – like an inter-galactic explorer on a quest.

In Adams’ fictitious worlds unexpected beauty appears in unlikely places. The singular beauty of a solitary flower ( a daisy or amaryllis lily) appear in bereft imaginary landscapes and cityscapes. Mysterious reflections of plants appear against the background of burning skies. Improbable architectural structures appear neglected and decaying covered in graffiti or overgrown with weeds. In Adams’ melancholic fictitious worlds filled with poverty or pollution these singular glimpses of natural beauty are a signifier of hope amidst despair.

Nothing is quite what it appears to be in Adams’ fictitious worlds – leaving the viewer to use their own imagination. Adams creates puzzles the viewer must decipher to discover “what is off ” in each picture of a disjointed world. These paintings are often what Adams calls “polar worlds crushed together in the same place” which she says is “almost like the edge of madness.”

Adams’ paintings are often situated at the land’s end where the borders between land, sea and sky are unclear. In her monumental Borderland ( 2015) an observer ( based on a photograph of Jayme Odgers) looks through binoculars into a post-apocalyptic background but we do not know what he is searching for. The polluted sky is orange and the sun is black. A wall made from river stones ( typically seen in early settlements near foothills in East L.A) disappears into the distance suggesting that everything is falling apart. A beam of light from an unknown source recalls a helicopter searching for danger. Her swan decoy is a startling anomaly because swans usually signify idyllic scenes in fresh water lakes and streams. But this is a kitsch battered decoy out of place at the world’s end. Adams’ says “everything we know about the world has gone wrong.” But Adams still takes an opportunity to accentuate the abstract qualities of dripping paint on a gray water tank from a paint gun. Adams combines different painting styles to make her voluminous feelings of melancholy, more tangible.

The sky is also on fire in Caput Mortuum (2014) and shows three moons and an improbable structure based on a kit home, surrounded by abstract gray ashes. Adams often creates fantasy structures based on her hand-made maquettes and computer generated images of improbable architecture – which are leitmotifs in her lexicon. In Land’s End (2014) she uses the silhouette of her hand – made windmill maquette which she flattens, to suggest a world that has been washed away at the edge of land and water.

Petrichor, at CB1 Gallery refers to the atmospheric scent of the first rain after a drought. This intimate exhibition features a group of small oil paintings with her recurrent motifs of improbable structures, graffiti, overgrown weeds and bright flowers in unlikely places.

In these scaled down paintings Adams’ signature palette of pinks, yellows, turquoises, and blood-oranges are more jewel-like.The ominous beauty of Nimiety (2016) is created by a polluted red overflow streaming from a disused wooden testing box perched on a pole, in a play on the dangers of excess (suggested by the title). Toffle’s House ( 2017) is inspired by a children’s book about a shy hermit who sought comfort. Adams re-imagines his house caught between a turbulent sea and stormy sky with a weather balloon that cannot protect his shelter from danger.

Adams’ uses color and composition as her main visual vocabulary: rendering, scribbling, blending, and bending to move paint in different directions. Like her earlier large paintings these small paintings evoke a sense of impending doom, by suggesting that there is more outside the picture – like a cliff hanger in a movie trailer that creates suspense by gesturing toward what is yet to come. Adams’ paintings are always left unfinished because they are continuous interior monologues about a world that makes no sense.

In I Can’t Help Myself ( 2017) Adams reveals herself in her first self-portrait, spewing vitriolic rage like petroleum. The profile view serves the same compositional role as her fantasy architectural structures – but now she brings herself into the picture. A yellow daisy appears behind her against an unnatural pink sky, as a last sign of hope amidst the anguish. Like Llyn Foulkes, she foresees the danger of environmental destruction and poverty. In the Trump era with the momentous Resistance Movement, Adams’ prophetic work has a bellwether quality.

The Dark Bob concludes, “ her idiosyncratic art isn’t as easily honored or even sold as much as the trendier abstractions going on right now. But she’s doomed to be a real artist – someone who is skillfully visualizing her insanity. That is what ends up being the most beautiful and meaningful kind of art.”

READ REVIEW ON THE HUFFINGTON POST

REVIEW

Pattern Recognition: Merion Estes Brings New Life to an Old World

BY Douglas Messerlie

March 19, 2017

Lisa Adams, Toffle’s House, 2017, oil on canvas, 16″ x 20″

Michael Mancari, Skate Park, 2016, oil and enamel on canvas, 60″ x 77″