Saturday, January 23, 2010

Home on the Strange: In Search of the Salton Sea

Home on the Strange: In Search of the Salton Sea
New work by Deborah Martin with collaborative works by Amy Sather Smith and Juli Vizza.


February 11- March 6, 2010

Artist Reception
Saturday, February 13th, 2010
6:00-10:00pm


Based on Polaroids taken over a period of four years, Deborah Martin paints portraits of landscapes depicting various aspects of reality of life on the Salton Sea; including scenes from Slab City, Salvation Mountain and Bombay Beach. Martin’s subject matter includes such curiosities as dilapidated trailers, an eerie outdoor living room, and a Technicolor monument built for Jesus, but belies so much more. In her trademark style of haunting American Realism, she skillfully and subtly examines concepts of worth and beauty and begs compelling questions about the psychology of place and the search for a sense of home.

Amy Sather Smith contributes text to supplement Martin’s paintings, providing a history of the Salton Sea and examining the dreams that originally attracted people to the area as well as the psychology that compels some to stay and others to still arrive.

Video artist Juli Vizza accompanied Martin on trips to the Salton Sea, taking film footage of the environs that inspired the series. What results is a masterfully pieced together visual translation of the unspoken language between landscape and painter, establishing the context that exists between a series of snapshot frames, where still life and life in motion intersect.

About Deborah Martin

Deborah Martin is a Los Angeles-based contemporary realist painter, fine art photographer and curator. In her continued exploration of American landscapes, Martin turned her attention to this landmark saline site known for it's distinctive inhabitants, unorthodox social ecology, and unique architecture. Deborah has exhibited in galleries and Museums in New York, Provincetown, Boston and Los Angeles. Her work was recently selected to be featured in the next issue of New American Paintings Magazine representing the Pacific West Coast. Martin received her BFA and BS Master of Arts in teaching, Art Education, from the Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University.

About Amy Sather Smith

Despite overt tendencies toward megalomania, Amy Sather Smith has a difficult time producing personal content for public consumption. She does, however, embrace with guardedly naïve enthusiasm the prettier things in life and states, “My work is part of a conversation between my Self and an Other…both variable and specific. I am uninspired when I have nobody to impress.” An expatriate of intellectualism, most of Amy’s notions of the nature and importance of Art tend toward the existential. When pressed to make comment about her most recent work, Ms. Sather Smith replied, “I am fascinated by the relationship between the human psyche and physical environment. We are amazing and resourceful animals. How we create and/or adapt to our physical surroundings, our notions of home and definition of community: all potent reflections of our inner hopes and fears, which on a base level are completely universal…no matter how disparate things may appear on the surface.”


About Juli Vizza

For more than 15 years, Juli Vizza has been working in the film industry from Development to Marketing. Her credits as a producer and editor include, "Fallen", "Riding In Cars With Boys", "Sunday Driver", "DaVinci Code", "Angels & Demons" and "Julie & Julia. She has exhibited her experimental filmmaking at the Guggenheim in New York.



Wednesday, January 20, 2010

LA ART SHOW



The Deborah Martin Gallery will be at the LA ART SHOW exhibiting with the Downtown Galleries Association Januray 20-24, 2010.

Monday, December 21, 2009

SYNAPSES New Sculptures by Kim Ye Live Interactive Installation



SYNAPSES New Sculptures by Kim Ye


January 14-February 6, 2010

Artist Reception & Live Interactive Installation
Saturday, January 16th, 2010
6:30-9:30pm

Interactive Installation:

With their bodies connected by shared organs and appendages, live models wear Ye’s latex sculptures in the Deborah Martin Gallery. An experiment in compromise and confrontation, this interactive performance makes literal the relationships that bind humans together.



Kim Ye offers a fiercely intelligent body of work that provokes both fascination and discomfort. In the tradition of William Burroughs, JG Ballard, Donna Harraway, and Jana Sterbak’s infamous “Flesh Dress,” Ye’s anatomical objects populate a captivating interzone of flesh and polymer that blur the boundaries between synthetic and biological.

She is a master of composition and decomposition of new organic form, fully coherent in its execution. Her edgy vision is matched by an alchemist’s command of her materials - latex, nylon, human hair, silicone, wire and wood – whose mad genius betrays the sensibilities of seamstress and surgeon.

At play is a distorted and unrelenting fantasy of organic yet surgically-fabricated humanoid hybrids and cyborgs. Ye’s exquisitely disturbing creations suggest gynecological mutation (umbilical artifact, displaced placenta, intestinal catastrophe), or neurological prolapse of dendrite and synapse, or even post-apocalyptic intestinally-conjoined humanoids lounging on beds of sea kelp.

Yet Ye’s brutally delicate chimeras somehow comfort as much as they disturb – they are totems of our shared human vulnerability and dislocation. Her organisms’ unlikely eroticism transcend repellence and beauty, offering a peculiar familiarity and invoking a surprising sense of tenderness and affinity.

About Kim Ye
Born in 1984 in Beijing, China, Kim Ye is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sculpture, performance, and video. Kim Ye received her B.A. in studio art and graduated summa cum laude from Pomona College in Claremont, California. Her work has been exhibited nationally, and featured in a wide range of publications from Los Angeles, California to Sarasota, Florida. Ye was the recipient of the 2006 Corinne Gilbert Beaver Prize in Art and the 2007 Matthew Klopfleisch Memorial Prize in Art. She is also a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. Kim Ye is the gallery director of The Annex LA alternative art space.

“Vessels of the Avant Garde” New Paintings by Melanie Van Latum


December 10- January 9, 2009


Silent Auction To Benefit PAWS/LA Assisting animal guardians in need.
Auction Bidding ends at exhibition closing


Melanie Van Latum’s portraits pop with a hardboiled baroque, neo-noir coterie of haunting, flamboyant heroines. Handsome, sinister, and supremely confident women stare from the canvas with an imperiously mysterious gaze, clearly indicating that no cloister, boudoir, suburb or nursery could ever contain the canny power of their bodies and minds.
Van Latum’s cleverly balanced compositions and high-tension-line lighting conjure a triumphant, intelligent feminine charisma – a mise-en-scene flushed with dizzyingly endless décolletage and the intricate obsessions of coiffure. In playfully provoking erotic traditions, these post-traditionalist paintings resuscitate the vapid, gaping pin-up model to her proper stance as empress, saint, and icon.

About Melanie Van Latum

Melanie earned her BFA in illustration from Art Center College of Design and her MA in Drawing & Painting from Cal State Fullerton. A Signature Member of the Pastel Society of America, Melanie is the only female street painter to win the title of Maestro and several gold medals in both Italy and Germany. Co-Founder of two prominent organizations in the chalk painting world, Street Painting Society and the Street Painting Academy, Melanie has consulted, painted, and held painting workshops for clients in Turkey, Holland, France, Canada and throughout the U.S. Melanie’s fine art work has been exhibited in galleries throughout Southern California.


Monday, November 9, 2009

ASHLEY HAGEN AND HOWARD SETH MILLER: REFLECTIONS OF INNOCENCE



November 12- December 5, 2009
Artist Reception
Saturday, November 14th 6-10pm

Ashley Hagen

Within each of Hagen’s deliberate and romantic meditations linger the traces of a lustrous, dark enigma – an atmospheric effect concurrently brooding and joyous in its intensity. Hagen’s paintings offer a captivating, resplendent mirage in which dense abstraction of shape and texture seem to distill themselves over time, inexorably coalescing into tangible, half-glimpsed form – rabbits, spaceships, hopscotch charts.

Her romantic, lustrous colors of chartreuse, charcoal, lavender and cherry evoke the mysterious delights of an Edwardian children’s candy counter as well as the phosphorescent bottles of Belle Epoque aperitif liqueurs.

Born in Iowa, Ashley Hagen currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Hagen received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has studied in Florence, Italy, and Vienna, Austria. Her work has exhibited in galleries in Iowa, Chicago, Vienna, and throughout Southern California.

Howard Seth Miller

Howard Seth Miller gazes at youth through the milky cataract of age and cultivation, creating opalescent images of childhood. Light reveals often disturbing ambiguities of character, as shadow conceals an impending loss of naiveté. Baseball cards and blackboards and chain link schoolyards provide a charmingly stilted cinematic backdrop for Miller’s haunted iconography of childhood.



Miller was born in New York City, 1954. He received his BS from Empire State College (SUNY) and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Howard's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout NY, Chicago, Arizona and the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Jason Alexander Cruz / Amerikan Blackheart "TEMPORARY MASTERS and RUNAWAY DISASTERS"




September 10 – October 3, 2009


Born in Los Angeles in 1974, AmerikanBlackheart is painter and musician Jason Alexander Cruz. Scrawled with apocalyptic odes and enchanting mod-pop iconography, his paintings evoke an ominous nocturnal tension: a clustered menace of Kalashnikov-slung Tuareg warriors, a hauntingly violet-tinted Twiggy, and the patent leather-wrapped talons of an impeccable trench-coated courtesan tidily folding away a bloody pocketbook full of crows.

Cruz's portraits emerge as a flirtatious, reckless army of the bar, the battlefield, and the urban alleyway. His female figures are fey, enchanting and ferocious within their glossy haute couture - his men ravaged, deranged, and disruptive. Yet within their insouciant violence run threads of sorrow, isolation, and grief.


Downtown Art Walk: Thursday September 10, 2009 12-9pm
Artist Reception 7-9pm

Live acoustic performance by the artist Jason Alexander Cruz / Amerikan Blackheart @ 8:30pm.



Friday, July 24, 2009

Valerie Daval Les Grandes Vacances

Valerie Daval

Les Grandes Vacances

August 13- September 5, 2009

Private Artist Reception
Wednesday August 12th 7-9pm

(Contact the gallery for an invitation to this event.)


Downtown Art Walk
Thursday August 13 12-9pm
Reception 7-9pm

In her new American paintings, French artist Valerie Daval invokes the luminosity of childhood memories - intimate moments of grace where time seems suspended in space and light.

Her eloquently suspenseful composition draws inspiration from her work in street art, frescos, theatre sets, and live dance portraiture. Valerie's work has been exhibited in galleries in France, Germany and the U.K.