Contemporary Collectors Council's June Trip

Karen Feuer Schwager, a member of the Contemporary Collectors Council and also a contemporary fine artist, took a memorable trip to LA's Chinatown with the CCC and she graciously contributed an entry about her adventure.

The CCC's destination for the day, Chinatown in Los Angeles

June 6^th started as a mildly, foggy Laguna morning for the Contemporary Collectors Council's tour of Chinatown's gallery scene. There was a plethora of art to be experienced in LA’s nooks and crannies: including assemblages in gardens, muraled walls and painted cars. Our bus trip began with a video filling us in on the day’s itinerary pre- recorded by Grace Kook Anderson who was unable to join us, followed by a couple of excellent Georgia O’Keefe videos, provided by Johanna Felder, tempting us with a taste of what is expected from the September CCC trip to Santa Fe.

Charlie James giving a lecture to the CCC members

CCC members attentively listening to Charlie James

As we approached the Charlie James Gallery, our first stop, I immediately faced a dietary challenge to my days “no dessert” resolution. There, in the entrance, lay a table overloaded with a variety of mouthwatering pastries: petite four, chocolate and sponge cakes, and several cakes delightfully decorated with colorful butter cream icing. As I waited for the aroma to erase my resolve completely, I realized with equivocal relief that the pastries were a realistic installation of embroidered sculptures.

Delectable treats made from fibers by Orly Cogan

Cogan's audacious vintage pillowcases

The artist of this work, Orly Cogan, is a fiber artist who skillfully employs classic female crafts to contemporary imagery. Besides her representational approach to pastries, she also exhibited audacious and playful embroidery. Cogan often uses feminist and erotic images and sayings on vintage dollies, table cloths, and pillowcases.

Dane Johnson's lottery ticket pieces

Charlie James gave a great talk on Cogan’s process. (His helpful guidance continued throughout the day as he hosted our excursion to all the venues.) Next door, in the Sabina Lee Gallery, we observed Dane Johnson’s stark acrylic paintings of his collected remnant pieces of lottery tickets.

Next, we saw stormy, manic, intensely drawn textured landscape images by Pierre Picot at the Jancar Gallery. Although Picot is a trained artist, his work, in my opinion, maintains a raw repetitious gestural outsider art quality. A few surprises lay tucked on the floor, such as intriguing works by Mary Lynn McCorkle who incorporated buckling, medium coated, rayon cloth which created a relief element to partially obscure an intricate painting.

Alia Malley describing her piece to CCC members

On to the Sam Lee Gallery saw an exhibition of the richly detailed landscape photographs of Alia Malley. Malley’s photographs capture the moody, painterly effect of a John Constable scene and the feeling of a passing era. Her imagery displays secluded, rare city pockets of natural pastoral settings that are yet to be urbanized.

We took a needed brain break with a lunch of dim sum at Ocean Seafood.

Asad Faulwell talking about his culturally infused art

one of Faulwell's piece

After lunch, we hopped on the bus to visit a young, edgy, emerging LA-based artist Asad Faulwell. Faulwell uses a culturally traditional Afghani approach to his large colorful paintings in which he combines contemporary secular figures from modern Middle Eastern history with Western and Eastern religious iconography to make subtle political statements.

Tim Campbell speaking to his guests

Last venue, but not the least, was an extravagantly catered cocktail hour at the home of Tim Campbell and his husband Steve Machado. Campbell, a self taught building designer, created a four-story industrial construction which is beautifully designed to present his art collection of politically charged, contemporary, figurative, and conceptual work merged with antique African and Far Eastern artifacts. Climbing the impressive grated stairwell to the main floor gave me a feeling of being in an Escher litho and, as I looked below to see the switch back overlapping grid pattern and my curious fellow travelers passing in alternate directions below me, a slight feeling of vertigo.

A painting by Travis Somerville dominated the dining room. Somerville’s bold work is based on racial and political themes. We are fortunate that he is currently participating in Laguna Art Museum’s exhibition Art Shack.

The sky was darkening as we drove through the canyon to Laguna’s calming pastoral scene of the goats munching on the dry grassy hills. An end to a memorable day!

CCC Day Trip to Pomona and Claremont

In earlier April of this year, the Contemporary Collectors Council took a day trip to Pomona to visit the Andi Campognone Projects exhibition, Curiosities of the Curio, along with his and Alex Couwenberg's private collection of works, and also a visit to the Pomona College Museum of Art and the studio of Karl Benjamin.

Contemporary Collectors Council listen in on a lecture

The group started the day by exploring the Curiosities of the Curio, which celebrates the collecting of ktischy objects we hold with sentimental value. The small works that resemble curio, the bizarre objects, are inspired by personal momentos ranging from family heirlooms to random objects one finds at a thrift store. Throughout the exhibition, the works continuously provoked a sense of curiousity among the group as they encountered pieces such as Laurie Hogin's peculiar portraits of odd spotted bunnies and pink and green monkey-people banging on drums that resembled human skulls. Moira Hahn's Japanese prints portraying parrot-headed geishas as opposed to beautiful women emphasized the strangeness of these curios.

Next up, the group visited the private collection of Andi Campognone. This private rendevous for the CCC not only included works of Campognone, but also incorporated the paintings of Alex Couwenberg, which are similar to the works of Karl Benjamin.

After Lunch, they visited the Pomona College Museum of Art which held three different exhibitions. The first exhibition was Helen Pashgian's Working in Light. As a pioneer light and space artist, her use of industrial materials offer a various range of optical and color possibilites. In these works Pashgian brings together small scultpures from the past and current larger-sized light columns as she continues her work to portray the spatial qualities of color in light.

The Project Series 40: Amanda Ross-Ho exhibition was next the list. Ross-Ho's site specific installation concentrated on the mutability and materiality of context. She incorporates paintings, sculpture and installation pieces that observe the boundaries of exhibition space, the direct and indirect products of creative expression, and the connectivity of the visual world.

Finally, the group visited Famous for 15: From Andy Warhol to your Camera-Phone. As Warhol stated "In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes," this exhibition circles around the idea of that statement. The exhibition observes the curiosities of instantaneous fame based on the modernization of technology, primarily photography, and the connection of that fame to camera-phones photos.

In addition to the exhibitions, the group also visted two mural sites: Rico Lebrun's Genisis and Jose Clemente Orozco's Prometheus. LeBrun's mural serves to portray a visual and symbolic center through the display of Noah sheltering a child. Surrounding Noah are also represenations of other significant places and people of the Bible; the Deluge, Job, Sodom and Gomorrah, Cain and Abel, and Adam and Eve. Orozco, who is also known as one of "los tres grandes," the three great Mexican muralists, painted Prometheus as his first work in America and also the first Mexican mural in North America, and thus began the Mexican Mural Movement.

The shallow pool from Dividing the Light

James Turrell's metal canopy shading the seating area

The group made one last stop at Pomona College at James Turrell's Skyspace: Dividing the Light. In a piece that incoporates the use of lighting elements, a floating metal canopy, and a transparent courtyard, Turrell's installation helps to heightens the audience's awareness of light, sky and space.

Karl Benjamin showing pieces of his work

Finally, at the end of the day, the Contemporary Collectors Council visited the studio of Karl Benjamin. The group was given the opportunity to talk to the artist about how he created the genesis of geometric abstraction. As a self taught artist, he started his career as a grade school teacher. His intesity in art evolved and eventually he became a member of the "Four Abstract Classicists," which started with an exhibition in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As a leading member of the "Hard Edge" movement, Benjamin focused on saturated and sunny colors that resonates with one another in the environment of his geometric designs and gave way to an assortment of shapes and patterns.