Current Exhibition

Adrian Amjadi

Adrian Amjadi
Feigenbaum's Cloche
mild steel, resin, glass, water, LEDs, turntable
15¾" x 11½" x 12"

Hilary Baker

I grew up in post-war Los Angeles watching a landscape of orange trees and ocean views morph into an urban grid tricked out with freeways, movie studios and industrial buildings. The Los Angeles of my childhood has never been more intricately woven into the Los Angeles of the present than in my latest body of work, Predators. The title refers both to the predatory nature of our local wildlife, as well as the threat by developers of the loss of their habitats. In Predators, graphic depictions of wildlife are presented among a variety of historic locales. I consider my Predators portraits and present them straightforwardly. My urban dwellers position themselves at the forefront of the canvas. Their gaze is oblique. Their confrontation with the viewer is unflinching, and their presence – like the past – uncompromising. It might be argued that these mostly nocturnal creatures serve as stand-ins for any city resident (or at least this artist) attempting to co-exist with a disappearing homeland.  

www.hilarybaker.com

Hilary Baker
Heron, Los Angeles
Memorial Coliseum
acrylic on linen
24" x 24"

Phoebe Barnum

The Salton Sea is a land locked body of water that was created by accident in 1905 when water from the Colorado River was diverted for an irrigation system and ultimately became a 400-square-mile body of water with no outlet to the Pacific Ocean. The Water has either evaporated or seeped into the soil that has caused an extremely high toxic saline content. The fish can't survive the conditions and consequently the entire shore is strewn with fish in the throes of dying and decaying. The beach is made of sun-bleached bones, the "sand" is crunching vertebrae. The dramatic play of light and shadow on the fish skeletons is remarkably beautiful.

The name for this series is “Transcendence” exemplifying the life cycle of the Salton Sea.                                     

Nancy Buchanan

Nancy Buchanan
Bengal Tiger
ink on paper with patterned paper overlay
16" x 22½"
2019

Mary Clark-Camargo

WE WILL NOT FADE AWAY 2020
In the summer of our youth the majestic Monarch butterfly fluttered around elegantly and gracefully heralding the arrival of our favorite season.

In Mexico, their presence has a deeper and even more beautiful meaning.

These butterflies return to Mexico on Nov. 1 and 2, el Día de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead — when tradition holds that the Monarchs are the returning spirits of loved ones who have died.

Monarchs are threatened by deforestation of their habitat in Mexico, disruptions to their migration caused by global warming and poisons that kill Milkweed, a flower that is important to their survival.

Their numbers are dwindling rapidly.

This piece represents the fragility of our deteriorating eco system, which is supposed to support a tiny being as delicate as a butterfly and the futility of time slipping away from us.

If the Monarch represents our loved ones returning to comfort us, who will save her ?

Do the spirits know? Do the butterflies know?

http://www.newstoneagemosaics.com

Mary Clark-Carmargo
We Will Not Fade Away
glass mosaic and found object wall hanging
17"x 22½"
2020

Susan Davis

19th century periodicals and journals documented the degree to which global imperialism changed the planet. Engraved illustrations were the mass media of their day and critical to extolling the virtues of Western dominion over foreign cultures and the natural world.

I find these images to be beautiful and foreboding at the same time. They document an age in which we assumed control over the habitats of creatures deemed to be both exotic and exploitable. I also see humor in their earnest depictions of an era that seriously overestimated its own virtues. I subvert these engraved images and their original intent with irony by combining and re-contextualizing them in a digital format.

The animals used in my pieces are recognizable as endangered through scientific study and media exposure but the spider in several of my images is not readily known as an endangered species. I use spiders in two ways – as a metaphor for the insect/animal world trapped by human aggression and as a species that is reviled by many while also in peril.

“The Nature Conservancy, in cooperation with the Network of Natural Heritage Programs (NHP) and Conservation Data Centers, maintains one of the most comprehensive biological databases in the Western hemisphere. This database includes global, national and state conservation priority ranks (Master 1991). Only 114 spider species are being tracked in these databases, with 57 assigned priority ranks, clearly illustrating the lack of compiled information on the status of spiders. Of these, 40 species are considered of national concern, with 29 species considered imperiled or critically imperiled (The Nature Conservancy 1997). The other 11 species are considered rare and not necessarily imperiled, but six of these have some uncertainty regarding their status.”

Source: University of Michigan

Technological advancements from the past and accelerated destruction of habitat in our own time endangers species and nearly guarantees their demise – to their great peril and ours.

I thank the New York Public Library's Archival Resources for the source materials used in these digital photo-collages.

Susan Davis
June, 2021

https://www.instagram.com/p/CS-RdwwhSGp/?utm_medium=copy_link

Susan Davis
OctoGlobe
archival digital print
8" x 8"
2019

Lauren Evans

Welcome to the Rhino
The “Rhinoceros” is a metaphor for the frightening, inner turmoil residing in each of us. It is that hidden creature, prehistoric and powerful yet fragile and endangered. How we live our lives while trying to control this turmoil is something that has intrigued me for decades. This ongoing human struggle is at the heart of my work. In my work, the Rhino is a container, canvas, silhouette, portrait, pattern, form, shadow and texture. It is an actor, prisoner, ally, toy, adversary, observer, and patient. The Rhino is passion and passivity, ugliness and beauty, strength and vulnerability. My Rhino is universal and unique. So is yours. I deploy multimedia and multi-technique processes throughout my work. Found objects bring their unique histories to their repurposed functions. 

I like to use repetitive units requiring repetitive tasks such as casting and glazing hundreds of Rhino tiles or gluing hundreds of ping-pong balls or by creating multiple colored pencil shavings. Repetitive activity can be both frenetic, like racing thoughts, or meditative, like repeating mantras. 

The series “Welcome to the Rhino” was the first series when the Rhino entered my work. It was a time of turmoil both personally and in our country. Facing my own demons felt like a Rhinoceros breaking through my chest. This image sparked the work. The series includes seven relief sculptures hung around the space like a circus parade. The Rhinos lumber up and down in a whimsical but awkward way. 

laurenevansvisualartist.com 

Lauren Evans
Welcome to the Rhino #4
wood, rubber balls, mixed media
82¼”x 48”x 7½”
2017

Satoe Fukushima

“Helium is the only element on the planet that is a completely nonrenewable resource.”  
Geoff Brumfiel

It too is in the realm of potential future over-use and extinction.

Its unique characteristics have been used in medical and industrial setting; MRI to quantum computing as cooling agents or non-flammable shielding agent.  It is an element we highly depend on in order to have technological advancement and party decorations.  Helium balloons can become too expensive to decorate the parties someday. 

About the Artist

Satoe Fukushima earned her MFA in Fine Art and Integrated Media from California Institutes of the Arts in 2013.  Her art often deals with the gaps of language and its transmitted information; these gaps concern not only verbal communication, but also cultural agreements and disagreements. Fukushima uses a wide range of media including bread, video, sculptures and whipped cream, and humor in desperation. Intentional miscommunication is often part of the mix.

Satoe Fukushima has exhibited, curated and performed at various venues both locally and internationally, including the Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts, LA Municipal Art Gallery, Artists’ Union Gallery, California Institutes of Arts, California State University Long Beach, Otis College of Art and Design, El Camino College Art Gallery, and Huashan Creative Park in Taipei.

Satoe Fukushima
Helios' Animalis Installation Documentation
helium filled balloons, kids, parties, mess, instant
films, blue tapes, measuring tape
2021

James Griffith

One of the goals of my paintings is to raise the question of the presence of sentience and emotions in all animal life. I believe in the equal value of all living beings.  This is a very inconvenient idea.  As humans have come to dominate the entire planet by developing the advantages of agriculture, architecture, weaponry, massive population, and other technologies, we have institutionalized our power over other species so that we cannot easily give up our mantle of self-proclaimed superiority.  Now, although the lives of every living being on earth is at the mercy of human choices, we as individuals have very little power to save another species. We must act in groups and coalitions to preserve the diversity of life needed to survive changing conditions and altered ecosystems.  Humans are creative and inventive enough that we might actually succeed in postponing the worst of the Sixth Extinction. However imagination is a double-edged sword: Humans have a unique capacity to believe in imaginary realities and to behave as if the actual facts of our existence do not apply to us.  The desires of our egotism and our false superiority may bring us all down.

My response to this dilemma is to try to resist the easy tendencies toward human egotism in my personal life, to support ecological equality any way I can, and to paint these images to inspire others to regard all life as magnificently beautiful and valuable to us all.  

James Griffith, 2021
 
jamesgriffithpainting.com

Gregg Hamby

Animal Spirits
“Man vs. Nature” is a narrative we’ve all heard. Western culture has taught us that nature is the enemy of humanity. The divide created between the natural world and ourselves has made us see nature as an object. As something to exploit for personal gain. This distancing has also made us numb to the perils nature faces and even harder for us to empathize with what is happening in nature. We have now reached a point in time in which we are finally realizing the impact our actions are having on the natural world. Foolishly there are people that still do not believe that we are causing harm and have forgotten that we, too, are animals.

There was once a time when it was Man & Nature. When we knew our place and treated nature with respect and reverence. The earliest instance of
humankind’s acknowledgment of nature and animal spirits can be traced back more than 35,000 years to the cave paintings in France. It can also be seen in the cultures of the Native American people. They believed that every animal, plant, waterway, and other element of the natural world all hold spirits. Because of this, they treated everything that they believed had a spirit as they would another human. Animal spirits were how they passed down their thoughts, reflections, ideas, theories, beliefs, and history through symbols and signs to the next generation, in the form of stories using animals like the eagle, bear, or wolf.

It is in the tradition of the Native American’s honoring of the animal spirit, that I create my art as one-of-a-kind original drawings. Each drawing is in recognition of the animal’s innate talents and is meant to be a gift and a teacher to those who have made a spiritual connection with the animal. In much the same way as the Native Americans, my goal is to use my art to continue to pass down stories, ideas and believes that reflect our continued connection to animals and the natural world that surrounds us.

“One thing to remember is to talk to the animals. If you do, they will talk back to you. But if you don’t talk to the animals, they won’t talk back to you, then you won’t understand, and when you don’t understand you will fear, and when you fear you will destroy the animals, and if you destroy the animals, you will destroy yourself.” ~ Chief Dan George,

I believe, if I can personalize nature in a way that will make people want to take better care of and empathize with nature and animals more then we can take steps towards a better relationship with the Earth, like that of the indigenous tribes of the Americas.

About the Artist
Gregg Hamby was born in Iron Mountain, Michigan. He received an AA degree from El Camino College and a Bachelor of Fine arts degree in painting and drawing from California State University Fullerton, graduating with honors in 1999. Growing up, nature played an important role in his life. His mother was the only child of an avid outdoorsman and learned from her father the beauty of nature. In turn, his Grandfather passed this same love to him while spending many hours together in the woods of Northern Michigan. This instilled in him an understanding and respect for all living things.

Additional statements for individual pieces by Gregg Hamby can be viewed at the COUNT DOWN: ARTISTS' STATEMENTS AND IMAGES link.

gregghambyart.wix.com/gregghamby 

https://www.instagram.com/gregghamby/

https://www.wyland.com/product-category/featured-artists/gregg-hamby/

WS Milner

We Are All The Same is WS Milner’s illustration of our deep, ebullient, if you will - animal selves, the essential lightness of being which is who we are long before gender, ethnicity, family, community, religion, or politics.  These better angels are us regardless of our backgrounds.  Created as a self-tutorial in 2019-2020, my intent was to undo the personal, psychic damage of living in an unconscious and polarized America where
nature is disregarded and man blunders about in enmity.

Cynthia Minet

Unsustainable Creatures: Elephant, 2013
Unsustainable Creatures: Elephant is the largest of the sculptures commissioned by the LA Dept. of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles World Airports for Packing (caravan), a solo installation in the Tom Bradley International Terminal. On view April-September 2013.    The installation filled the display case in the Customs Hallway with a series of new sculptures made specifically for the 43’ foot display case. It consisted of four life-size pack animals. Inspired by working animals that international travelers could identify with, it featured a camel (11 feet), an elephant (11 feet), and two oxen (9 feet each). In addition to providing tourists with an exciting visual display, the Packing (Caravan) presented a humorous parallel to the international travel experience. Additionally, the work draws upon the artist's ongoing reflection on the complicated relationships and dependence humans have with the world we inhabit, and points to the ecological hazards that plastics and petrochemicals present to our planet. 

More About the Elephant:
Her nickname is Gladys. She is based on an adolescent female Asian elephant.  Among other items, she is constructed from a large red car bed found on the street by a friend, as well as other materials culled from dumpsters and thrift stores.

Cynthia Minet
Unsustainable Creatures: Elephant
post-consumer plastics, PVC, LEDs,
hardware
80" x 115" x 52"
2013

Seconds to Last, 2021
Seconds to Last is a new solo installation by Cynthia Minet, made for the Torrance Art Museum Dark Room.  Minet is known for her life-scale illuminated sculptures of animals. Made from recycled plastics and lit by LEDs, her works draw attention to our human dependencies on fossil fuels and electricity, as well as the resulting environmental degradation facing our planet.

The artist's first inflatable sculpture, Seconds to Last, depicts the nearly extinct Northern White Rhinoceros: there are only two surviving members of the subspecies on Earth.

In a nod to her most recent work, which focused on both human and animal migration, Minet utilizes repurposed camping tents sourced from her neighbors' visits to the Burning Man festivals. As our cities fill with people living in tents, the result, in part, of our profit-based economy, so too does the rhinoceros face extinction, due to poaching and loss of its habitat. 

The sculpture is lit by LEDs whose colors reference the seven energy chakras. Presented in a darkened room at the museum, the project's sequenced lighting slowly extinguishes before the viewer, until its presence is only sensed in darkness. 

Seconds to Last can be viewed online at the following link:
https://youtu.be/Vh40YsDcaDM 

Lowell Nickel

This digital art making images can be associated with what has recently been labeled as the “Anthropocene”. The term Anthropocene or Holocene Epoch begins when human activities started to have a significant global impact our earth's biology and ecosystems.

The basic concept of these axe heads can be strengthened as a perceptible iconic symbol… these are long lived (double edged) tools. The “clearing of the land" was once necessary but we now find limitations by recognizing earth as a biome. Over time, when the weathering forces of nature serve as the ultimate liberator of all human creations, the flora & fauna will again develop fully and richly.

These artistic investigations are mixed media, i.e. Slab built Ceramic axes (7”x12”) then photographed and used in digital compositions that can be printed any size.

Sarah Perry

Speak for Me, 2004
If we climb down the Tree of Evolution far enough, we discover that all life is kindred. Unfortunately, most of us have forgotten how to howl. But the ones who can translate to the rest of the human horde are asking to please make room for the profound beauty and breathtakingly mysterious lives of others.

Additional statements for individual pieces by Sarah Perry can be viewed at the COUNT DOWN: ARTISTS' STATEMENTS AND IMAGES link.

sarahperryartist.com

Vojislav Radovanovic

Wanderers is an audio-video artwork by Vojislav Radovanovic in collaboration with composer Joseph Carrillo. This work is about grief and anxiety for the growing climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction-level event that our planet is currently experiencing due to human impact. The video tells the story of the two last surviving birds flying through a desolate landscape of a burned forest, as told by a human puppeteer (performed by Jason Jenn), suggesting that the action is taking place in a barren future where there is little other life in existence. The use of some repetitive sequences is a reference to looped social media videos, a popular visual style we have grown accustomed to in this human-influenced Anthropocene era.

This piece can be viewed online at:
https://youtu.be/IYCbF8_P2zQ

https://www.vojislavradovanovic.com

Vojislav Radovanovic
wanderers
digital video
2021

Directed by Vojislav Radovanovic
Music by Joseph Carrillo
Puppeteering by Jason Jenn
duration 8’24”

Samuelle Richardson

Ghost Dogs
A memory of the African Savanna haunted me for years until I knew I had to tell my version of it.

There was a buzz of excitement that morning.  A rare pack of African Wild Dogs had been sighted in the area as we rumbled off into the bush hoping to find them.  At last we did and with hearts pounding, inched closer as they locked eyes on us.  I stood transfixed as I watched their kaleidoscope of dappled fur on stiletto legs, jostling and head-butting like a kinetic sculpture.   Then they gathered to move on, and aching to prolong the moment, we followed them until they disappeared into the mist.

The Ghost Dog sculptures are handmade armatures of tree branches and found materials that include wire, wood, paint, foam rubber and wool sweaters. 

Samuelle Richardson,  2021 

https://www.samuellerichardson.com

Nancy Romero

Fooling around in the studio during COVID isolation, I made a couple of small tempera paintings of animals around me . Normally, most animals will not directly look at you because it is confrontational .The eyes from the frontal position of these faces seemed to follow me and say j’acuse. The power in the gaze challenged me to develop this format to speak to the loss of habitat and diminishing numbers of animal species around the world. Ultimately I made 46 portraits that I hung together for mass effect. This collection of faces is a selection from that work.

https://www.pinterest.com/Openstudiodena/nancy-romero/

Nancy Webber

Recent work from four murals commissioned by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for the Harbor Animal Care Center in San Pedro and the drawings of endangered species/animal portraits, is concerned with my love of animals. These are rendered from digital photographs, in pastels and colored pencils and are intended as an awareness and appreciation of the planet’s variety of wildlife now at risk from global warming, loss of habitat and human greed. As my “Life imitates Art” photographs was an ongoing series begun in 1979 continuing until 2015, this series of drawings, is ongoing due to the persistence of factors related to the disappearance of animal species. 

https://nancy-webber.com