Monday, January 1, 2525
Monday, February 11, 2160
practice, Practice, practice
Curated by Doug Harvey
Dina Abdulkarim, Ryan Callis, Linda Day, June Edmonds, David McDonald, Rebecca Niederlander, Khang Bao Nguyen, Kenneth Ober, Mary Anna Pomonis, Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, & Dani Tull.
March 13 - April17
Nan Rae Gallery at Woodbury University
7500 N Glenoaks Blvd Burbank, California
Opening reception: Sunday March 13, 3 - 5 pm
Gallery Hours: Weds 12- 8 pm, Thurs - Sun 12 -5 pm
What is art for? For most of its history, art was closely linked to liturgical functions by granting access to spiritual states of consciousness through formal stimulation, symbolic communication, and pictorial representations of mythological narratives. At the dawn of the era of Modernism, many artists sought ways to disengage their practice from depictions of external reality, turning their visual vocabularies inward, to depict spiritual truths primarily through the formalist languages of shape and color.
These works - later reinterpreted as mere stepping stones toward pure formal abstraction - actually functioned as records of spiritual experience (usually integrated in the artmaking process itself) as well as technologies to trigger contemplative states of awareness in the viewer. While some artists sought to transfer the spiritual charge of artmaking to a new, autonomous Church of Art, others linked their work to existing religious systems, as well as the Eastern traditions that were beginning to filter into Western consciousness.
The Los Angeles-based artists in Practice, practice, practice pursue this latter strategy today, producing their non-figurative, non-objective work in consort with a non-studio spiritual disciipline, mostly rooted in ancient religious and philosophical traditions including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Amazonian Shamanism, and the cult of the Sumerian goddess Inanna. At a point when the master narratives of contemporary art have become hopelessly garbled and timid, these artists dare to reassert the original and primary function of art making, resulting in profound meaningfulness and dazzling beauty.
(Image: Various works by Emma Kunz, 1892-1963)
Doug Harvey’s curatorial projects have ranged from many traditional gallery exhibitions (including the short-lived Annual LA Weekly Biennials and 2008’s Aspects of Mel’s Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace) to CD compilations of sound art, programs of found and experimental films, performance events, experimental radio, artist’s comic books and zines, and an LA solo gallery exhibit determined by raffle. In July 2011 his global project (with Christian Cummings) Chain Letter 2011 included work by 1600 artists in its incarnation at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in LA, shutting down the 10 Freeway exit to Bergamot Station during installation.
Saturday, April 16, 2016
Closing Family Workshop with Rebecca Niederlander!
3:30 PM - 5 PM
Nan Rae Gallery at Woodbury University
7500 N Glenoaks Blvd, Burbank, California 91510
Join Rebecca Niederlander in a afternoon of making abstract sculptures from wood! The building blocks of Rebecca's installation for the practice, Practice, practice exhibition are the scraps she retrieves from woodworkers all over town. Come and develop your own expandable sculpture. Everything provided. Free for all, all ages encouraged.
This workshop coincides with the last day to see "practice, Practice, practice: Abstract Spirituality in Los Angeles Painting, Sculpture and Performance" curated by Doug Harvey. Please join us as we celebrate the exhibition.
Friday, April 15, 2016
June Edmonds: Circle/Curve Series
June Edmonds' vibrant, confidently impastoed circles of radiant color are like controlled bursts of psychic energy, caught at various points in their unfolding, often cropped like a snapshot, offering a momentary, fragmentary glimpse of a much larger system and process. Citing the remarkable and rich ideographic Adinkra symbol-system of the Ashanti, Edmonds' description of her work as "a doorway to memory" also reinforces its visual similarity to the dot-paintings of the indigenous Australians -- the longest continuous visual art tradition operating in the world today (and, in case I need to point it out, an Abstract Spiritual Painting tradition).
Edmonds' circles and curves also bear a delightful social interpretation, as multiple "doorways" brush against one another, intersecting or overlapping -- multiple simultaneous autonomous but interdependent denizens of Flatland jostling and negotiating to find balance. It's called "composition," people!
June Edmonds: The Circle/Curve Series
Inspired by my meditation practice, The Circle/Curve Series began as a way to explore how col-
or, repetition, and balance could serve as conduits to spiritual contemplation and interpersonal
connection.
I am drawn to the use of the circle because of its rich array of cultural and historical
associations. The West African Adinkra use concentric circles to symbolize what is said to be
the symbol of “the greatest power”. In my work I use the circle as a doorway to memory, to
identity and to connection to the highest and most mysterious parts of the inner self. Themes of
personhood and the complexity of relationship are also addressed in these works.
I’m interested in the ways counting, keeping time, improvisation, and elements of surprise can be
represented visually within each work. My goal is to infuse each work with a rhythmic, pulsating, and alluring energy which invites the viewer to connect with something higher within.
or, repetition, and balance could serve as conduits to spiritual contemplation and interpersonal
connection.
associations. The West African Adinkra use concentric circles to symbolize what is said to be
the symbol of “the greatest power”. In my work I use the circle as a doorway to memory, to
identity and to connection to the highest and most mysterious parts of the inner self. Themes of
personhood and the complexity of relationship are also addressed in these works.
represented visually within each work. My goal is to infuse each work with a rhythmic, pulsating, and alluring energy which invites the viewer to connect with something higher within.
See more of June's work here: http://juneedmonds.com/home.html, and in person at pPp until Sunday the 17th!
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Thursday, April 7, 2016
pPperformance Nite Roundup
As predicted, an extraordinary evening of powerful strangeness. Here are some shots of Joana Alaya channelling MAGA, accompanying Khang Bao Nguyen's yoga demonstration on the mouth harp, Mary Ana Pomonis invoking the Sumerian goddess Inanna, and Dani Tull pulling out the stops all the way to 12 on his dueling chord organs. Video to come.
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
pPperformance Nite
If you're in the Los Angeles area and in the mood for a different sort of performance art, swing by the Nan Rae Gallery at Woodbury U in Burbank tonight for an unusual line-up of LA-based performers, in conjunction with "practice, Practice, practice: Abstract Spirituality in Los Angeles Painting, Sculpture and Performance" curated by Doug Harvey.
This evening's unique offerings include Mary Ana Pomonis' blindfolded abstract painting ritual dedicated to the Sumerian Goddess Inanna, a demonstration of advanced yoga asanas by Khang Bao Nguyen accompanied on the mouth organ by Joanna Ayala, who will also debut a new body of solo vocal work channeling a divine feminine archetype called MAGA. The evening will conclude with a drone chord organ improvisation by Dani Tull. It promises to be a memorable evening!
pPperformance Nite
8 - 9:30 PM
April 6th, 2016
Nan Rae Gallery at Woodbury University7500 N Glenoaks Blvd, Burbank, California 91510
Tuesday, April 5, 2016
Diamonds, Lambdomas, and Mt. Meru: The Return of Sacred Objects to a Secular Landscape.
Former Angeleno musical spiritual abstractionist Kraig Grady alerted us to the following recent blog posting. The Music of Anaphoria would have fit nicely with tomorrow night's pPperformance Nite.
Wilson's Chart of the Mt. Meru/Lambdoma interface
Today, as never before,we are witnessing an opposition
not between art and life,
but between sacral and secular spaces.
-Ilya Kabakov
"In the process of my wife, Terumi Narushima working on her book on Erv Wilson's Tuning innovations, the subject of the Partch's Diamond and its origin have come up. What strikes myself is that how this structure seems to have been reawakened in not only Harry’s vision even if through Mayer, but the others to as close relatives. Spontaneously they appear in others such as Novaro (in the same year as Partch, 1927), but also Schlesinger too once one scratches the surface of her subharmonic scales sharing a common tone. That all this rediscoverering would happen within a few brief years after 2000 years is uncanny and could be seen almost as if the structure had a life of its own. In its former context it was used to please the gods or to represent the celestial clockwork or even as a reflection of political structure. This Lambdoma returns, but not in the context of an object to be worshipped, but as a something that nevertheless is once again in communication with our secular world. It is within this contact and communication that Partch deserves credit for placing his work and vision. His rituals do not worship these objects, but nevertheless places them within the conversation throughout his own aesthetic objects..."
Continue reading Archivist/Cultural Liaison's "Diamonds, Lambdomas, and Mt. Meru: The Return of Sacred Objects to a Secular Landscape" at the Field Stations and Outposts of Anaphoria Island blog here: http://anaphoriasouth.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/diamonds-lambdomas-and-mt-meru-return.html
Entoptic Phenomena
"In the 19th century, European and American opticians, physiologists and philosophers developed a broad interest in entoptic phenomena. To generate and study entoptics, they conducted experiments by stimulating brain and retina, electrically at first, later also with mind-altering substances. Especially in the 1960s and 70s, a number of experiments on subjects were conducted using agents such as THC the active ingredient in marijuana), mescaline, psilocybin and LSD. A worldwide ban on these substances interrupted the drug based research on entoptic phenomena.
In 1988, two South African archaeologists referred to this heritage of the 1960s and 70s when they presented an alternative interpretation of stone age rock art of a certain kind. In a sensational publication, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson observed that the rock and cave art of the later Paleolithic (about 40,000 to 10,000 BC), the time when man (homo sapiens) developed abstract thinking and art, is characterized by two main themes: vivid depictions of animals on the one hand, geometric figures such as dots, circles, lines, curves etc. on the other.
Ever since the discovery of the European Paleolithic caves, archaeologists have been wondering about the importance and meaning of such geometric representations. Attempts to explain them in terms of totemism or magical rituals were hardly convincing to the research community. Lewis-Williams and Dowson brought forward the original thesis that Paleolithic art is inspired by subjective visual phenomena, seen and depicted by shamans or spiritual men and women during altered states of consciousness..."
Read the rest of "Entoptic artifacts as universal trance phenomena" by Floco Tausin here: http://www.viewzone.com/entoptic.html
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
"Through art alone, the Mexica said, can human beings approach the real.”
Turquoise-mosaic Disk AD 1300-1521, Mexico Turquoise and wood, 15 3/8 in. (diam.)
"Because we human beings are transitory, our lives as ephemeral as dreams, the tlamatinime suggested that immutable truth is by its nature beyond human experience. On the ever-changing earth, wrote León-Portilla, the Mexican historian, “nothing is ‘true’ in the Nahuatl sense of the word.” Time and again, the tlamatinime wrestled with this dilemma. How can beings of the moment grasp the perduring? It would be like asking a stone to understand mortality.
According to León-Portilla, one exit from this philosophical blind alley was seen by the fifteenth-century poet Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, who described it metaphorically, as poets will, by invoking the coyolli bird, known for its bell-like song:
And his words rain down
Like jade and quetzal plumes.
Is this what pleases the Giver of Life?
Is that the only truth on earth?”
“Ayocuan’s remarks cannot be fully understood out of the Nahuatl context, León-Portilla argued. “Flowers and song” was a standard double epithet for poetry, the highest art; “jade and quetzal feathers” was a synecdoche for great value, in the way that Europeans might refer to “gold and silver.” The song of the bird, spontaneously produced, stands for aesthetic inspiration.
Ayocuan was suggesting, León-Portilla said, that there is a time when humankind can touch the enduring truths that underlie our fleeting lives. That time is at the moment of artistic creation. “From whence come the flowers [the artistic creations] that enrapture man?” asks the poet. “The songs that intoxicate, the lovely songs?” And he answers: “Only from His [that is, Ometeotl’s] home do they come, from the innermost part of heaven.” Through art alone, the Mexica said, can human beings approach the real.”
Charles C. Mann 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Saturday, March 12, 2016
practice, Practice, practice: Khang Bao Nguyen
Absorbing Nocturnal Perception 36x36 oil on canvas
I first became aware of Khang Nguyen’s luminous visionary oil paintings when Carl Berg asked me to be the the juror for the Irvine Fine Arts Center “All Media 2012” show, for which I selected one of Khang's paintings and awarded him first prize. I love serving jury duty on these open call exhibits -- there's always very surprising artworks, things that have slipped through the cracks or otherwise circumvented the art world radar.
Limpid Moonlit Posture 36x36 oil on canvas
Khang’s work initially struck me as a very sophisticated and historically informed variation on Modernist geometric abstraction, but discovered in subsequent conversations that he is almost entirely self-taught, and that his imagery derives not from 20th century art historical (and blacklight scifi paperback cover) precedents, but from experiential phenomena encountered in the course of his yogic meditative practice.
Self-Organizing Field of Intuitive Utterance 48 x 48, oil on canvas
It was Khang's work in that Irvine show that sparked the idea for practice, Practice, practice, and it continues to epitomize the kind of spiritually rooted art practice that is so invisible to and in The Art World, and which pPp is designed to showcase. Here are some more of his paintings. Even more work -- plus information about his yogic discipline -- may be gleaned from his website at: http://www.intuitiveformation.com/yoga.html. Khang will also be demonstrating some advanced yoga asanas for the pPperformance Night on Wednesday April 6th -- more details to come!
Awareness Encountering Its Own Modes of Presenting 48 x 60 oil on canvas, 2013
"As an integral facet of my non-traditional spiritual and aesthetic practice within the schools of non-dual, intuitive discernment, my intimate engagement with visual art is an instrument for uprooting opaque settlements of the mind. Exploratory in nature, my artworks of architectural and geometric formations (yantra) are not considered means to individual self-expression, but reflect an investigation into the essence of perception, awareness, and existence. They probe the mystery of time, space, and being, which call into question preconceived notions concerning the nature of identity and reality.
Translated into visual terms from spiritual intuitions, these nonrepresentational formations depict the primal source from which all phenomena manifest, by which all things subsist, and to which all things reintegrate. By revealing the inner qualities and processes of perceptual awareness, the work of art acts as a conduit between limited perception and spacious awareness through which the beholder leaps into an expanded realm of existence. My work inquires how the viewer, upon closely contemplating visual relationships, can be incited to transcend external aspects of form such that a clear space for direct awareness into the basis of being becomes possible. This is fundamental to my investigation of visual media’s capacity to spontaneously evoke an immediate awareness of reality without dependence on any reasoning process."
Rendering Nascent Matrix 36 x 36 oil on canvas 2012
Moonlit Facets of Perceiving 48x60 oil on canvas 2013
Purple Robe Draping Night Cascade 60x48, oil on canvas, 2014
Steps of Time Free From the Past 60x48, oil on canvas
Friday, March 11, 2016
Hilma af Klint at the Serpentine
pPp UK correspondent Cathy Ward forwarded this visual report on the synchronistically linked (CONVOY!) show Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen which opened a week ago at London's Serpentine Gallery. af Klint's work was debuted 22 years after her death as part of the Spiritual in Art show at LACMA.
Video Interview with pPp Artist Kenneth Ober
Los Angeles artist Kenneth Ober talks about the role of spirituality in his paintings. Check out more of Kenneth's work at kennethober.com, and be sure to see the two meticulously painted mandalas included in practice, Practice, practice!
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
The Short Bright Day of the Soul
Pulse #9 2008 acrylic on panel 39" x 21"
| Pulse (Between / Beyond) #13, 2008 acrylic on panel 60 x 60" |
Any suggestion of New-Agey philosophy, though, would have been met with a dismissive snort. Linda was strictly Church of Art -- a Modernist for whom abstract painting had provided a tangible manifestation of of a hardwired technology of sensory-based psychological transformation. In my essay for the catalog to her “Horizons” show at Jancar Gallery in 2008 I wrote:
Corona #3, 2005, acyrlic on panel 35 x 48"
Day’s work is directed toward the activation of this co-creative feedback loop, and her aesthetic decisions can be traced in part to the gradual tweaking of the parameters of this relationship... direct[ing] the viewer away from passive engagement with sequential narrative tropes, kicking away the conceptual crutches so that these subtler visual mechanisms move to the foreground, and empowering the viewer to determine the durational parameters of their engagement with the painting less encumbered by a framework that suggests a beginning, middle and end to the experience.
Chime #2 2005-2006 acyrlic on panel 132 x 30"
Linda’s work seemed to be -- somewhat paradoxically -- on a course of incrementally, precisely honing the technology of perceptual feedback, and the suspension of Time. Then, something happened. In 2010, she participated in a residency at Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi, India
For her last solo show OU-BOUM (at Another Year in LA at the PDC), Linda debuted a body of work that was deeply transformed in relation to her earlier oeuvre, although her virtuosic formal skills translated effortlessly. As she observed in her notes for the exhibit:
“My work goes through periods of refinement followed by those of disintegration in which I re-examine and dismantle.... my experience in India provided me with the impetus – and the inspiration – to begin again within the framework of the past. This is not merely an interest in the exotic – but an embrace of new and increasingly complex hybrid relationships in art and the culture at large”.
Hawa Mahal (large incomplete) 2011 89 X108" variable , acrylic and mixed media on wood
The show title refers to E. M. Forster’s “A Passage to India,” in which the protagonist’s western rational worldview is overwhelmed by the experience of the echoing void of the fictional Marabar Caves, whose voice manifests as “ou-boum.” Linda commented
”I have begun to see Forster’s “ou-boum” as touching upon the sublime. The aesthetics of the sublime has been investigated historically – from the Greeks, to the philosophers Edmund Burke, Kant, Hegel, and the more contemporary Lyotard. To simplify the sublime is largely experiential and the result of an overwhelming event in which we, as participants are physically and emotionally engulfed. Unable to define our own boundaries within the experience, we are at once filled with pleasure and terror.”
Sanskriti 1, 2010, 36 X22" variable mixed media on paper
The work itself was scrappy and rough hewn. Where Day’s previous series of paintings had tended to a precise rectangularity and tightly controlled surface, the OU-BOUM works were organically expanding collages of corrugated cardboard and other (mostly paper) materials. Those familiar with Day’s masterful collage work (one of the best shows of the early days of ACME was 1997’s Linda Day: Drawing Project, a linear, taped-together experimental narrative or musical score) knew that she was extremely fluent in that visual vocabulary, but when infused with her newly Indianized color palette, a synergy occurred.
Sanskriti 2, 2010, 40 X 30" variable mixed media on paper
The show had a tremendous sense of warmth and vitality, of playfulness and pathos -- LA critic Peter Frank compared the assemlages to “discarded shelters or decorated walls” found in a “tropical shanytown” - which pretty much sums it up. Peter goes on to absolve Linda of any taint of exoticism or colonialism, but claims they “resist the no-up-no-down infinity implied in the sublime bliss of Forster’s -- and Day’s own -- India.” I see it a little differently -- possibly because I know that Linda died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma a few months later. It seems to me that rather than resisting the shining void, Linda was embracing it -- confronting and celebrating fragility, mortality, time, and awareness. In spite of their rickety materiality, the OU-BOUM works are imbued with luminosity and seem to levitate, brimming with good humor.
genesch, 2010, 30 X 20" mixed media on paper
And sadness. The image chosen as the anchor for the practice, Practice, practice show is genesch, a 30 inch short stack of painted cardboard discs, immediately conjuring associations with sunsets and a Buddha-like figure sitting in a contemplative reverie. But these figurative readings recede in the sensual immediacy of the object itself, and the rippling bubbles of color gradually modulating from dark earth tones to near-fluorescent yellows and oranges ultimately seems to embody a process of literal enlightenment, a purification or distillation of vibrational energies (AKA color). Of course, I could be reading it backwards. But Ganesha is the god of beginnings, and besides -- backwards, forwards, whatever. The sun sets, then rises, then sets again.
Untitled diptych, 2010, mixed media on paper, dimensions TK
The untitled, previously unexhibited OU-BOUM diptych I chose to include as Linda’s second piece for pPp turned out to be a double-sided work, with one red/silver square and one pink/gold square, each perforated with a New-Delhi-boogie-woogie of square holes, and studded with tiny cubes (square pegs! square pegs!) of painted something - foam-core maybe? There’s something of the illuminated manuscript at work here -- albeit one written in interdimensional braille by Tantric aliens. It’s a system of interrelated, but unparseable grids, impossible to see all at once, offering a sumptuous diagrammatic glimpse of a section of Indra’s Net, the Vedic web of interdependent holographic points of consciousness that are the underlying structure of reality. And the colors aren’t bad either!
The Curator at Work (photo by Pat Nickell)
Images courtesy David Scardino, lindaday.com, Another Year in LA, and Pat Nickell
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