Archive for April, 2016

CSULB Fiber Assistant Professor Diedrick Brackens will have a solo show at the Steve Turner Gallery in Santa Monica from April 30 through May 28, 2016. The exhibition entitled No More Trauma (after the Mary J. Blige album No More Drama) will feature weavings that incorporate techniques drawn from European tapestries, West African weavings and Southern quilts. “The exhibition title refers to Mary J. Blige’s album No More Drama which marked a turning point in her career as she moved away from bluesy, tragic, heartbreaking songs towards more upbeat ones. In a similar vein, Brackens has worked through political protest and personal pain in creating these new compositions that incorporate joy, pleasure and imagination.”

CSULB Painting Professor Marie Thibeault will be in a exhibition at Gallery Elena Shchukina in London, England. The show entitled Neon Baylon pairs Prof. Thibeault with American artist Kimber Berry and will run from April 21 through May 26, 2016. The exhibition explores, “the modern condition and our relationship with the environment in the modern age,” with vibrantly colored paintings that touch on the sublime, and the entropy that wears it all down.

Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden creates immersive installations that explore what she calls the sixth dimension, where a multitude of pasts, presents, and futures exist concurrently. Ms. Golden combines physical spaces with illusory spaces that appear only in mirrors, reflecting what the artist refers to as “layers of consciousness,” akin to psychological and hallucinatory spaces in the mind. Her use of mirrors in conjunction with sculptural elements made from a silvery insulation board, allows the illusion of space to expand in multiple directions; creating imaginary depth below the gallery floor, for instance, or suggesting adjacent rooms that do not actually exist. Ms. Golden received her MFA from Columbia University and has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally.

Tom LaDuke‘s painstakingly constructed paintings toy with the boundaries of perception and recognition. Layering representational scenes (ranging from the history of film to the history of painting) with bold abstraction, LaDuke negotiates between the conceptual, material, spatial, and formal issues inherent in painting. Abstract expressions dance atop the most precisely rendered compositions, flattening the layers of the painting to a single plane. These fresh daubs of paint complicate the viewer’s ability to dive into the familiar representations, underscoring the artist’s exploration of reality versus perceived reality.  The artist was raised in Los Angeles and received his MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. His works are in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim, New York; MOCA, Los Angeles; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Portland Art Museum; Speed Art Museum, Louisville; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, among others. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.