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!