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Presented here are brief biographical notes on some of our West Adams artists. The ones featured here displayed their work at WAHA's Saturday, June 5, 2010, self-guided tour. We hope to display more of their work in the future and that of other artists who live in our community.
SHELLEY ADLER
Shelley Adler grew up in N.D. She studied art at the Univ. of Wisconsin, the Art Students League in NYC, UCLA extension and CSULB. She studied as a fine art painter and illustrator and worked as an illustrator, graphic designer and art director. Currently she paints small-scale realistic images using old B&W snapshots from the first half of the 10th century. She translates these images into color using oil on gesso board. I use old snapshots rather than studio photographs because people caught unaware or somewhat unposed tend to reveal a great deal with facial expression and body language. I feel as though I am discovering the character of the persons in the photo as I paint them, and I try to amplify my feelings about the person within the painting. I love small Dutch genre paintings and I attempt to create a sort of contemporary version of them.
SUSAN ARENA
Susan Arena was born in a small town by the ocean in Massachusetts, right next to Salem, the “witch city.” She earned an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University School of Art. Arena was awarded grants that allowed her to live in Egypt and India; her work in painting is largely influenced by her love of these and other cultures and their art and customs. Arena has lived and worked in New York City and taught drawing and painting at numerous institutions there. She moved to West Adams in 2001 where she now lives with her husband Jonathan Blaugrund, two children, one cat, and one dog. In my painting I work to create a world like that of the fairy-tale: where fear, shame, corruption and anxiety can exist at the same time as humor, hope, innocence, and wonder. Though the images, at first glance, are often playful or humorous, they also reveal a darker and more complex world.
RORY CUNNINGHAM
A professional costumer by trade, Rory Cunningham's true passion is in Historic Buildings. An active participant in West Adams Heritage Association since the late 1980s, he has owned and restored two homes in the area and served on the WAHA board. When not toiling away stripping paint, hanging light fixtures or searching the salvage yards for just the right hammered copper sink, he is constructing historically accurate gowns, futuristic space aliens or something rather mundane in between. His film credits include: "The Changeling," "Hidalgo," and the soon to be released "Tron." Television credits include: "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," "Star Trek: Voyager," and "Ally McBeal." Cunningham and his husband David Pacheco are deep in the troughs of restoring yet another house -- will it ever end?
ART CURTIS
Art Curtis grew up on Mt. Washington in Los Angeles, CA. He has been drawing and creating miniature dwellings since childhood. During the Vietnam War, Curtis served in the US Air Force for four years, two as a bomb wing illustrator. After being discharged he attended Cal State University, Long Beach and received a BFA and MFA in illustration. He has worked as a fine artist, a freelance illustrator, and a graphic designer. Currently he is using his love of gardening, botanical illustration, and architectural rendering to work with landscape designers and architects. He creates drawings and paintings, using their site plans, to show clients what a garden/estate will look like as a 3-dimensional drawing after the plantings have matured for 3 to 8 years. During my career as an artist I have been moving from architecture to whimsy and recently serious landscape concept design. As an avid gardener I have found this subject the most appealing. The only things that haven’t changed are the mediums I work in. Watercolor and graphite pencil are my consistent favorites.
JENNY HAGER
Jenny Hager received her BA from Knox College in Galesburg, IL, and her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. She also studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture from 1994 to 1996. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Hager was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in 1999, and received a second grant from the foundation in 2005. She is currently on the faculty of Santa Monica College, and has lived in West Adams since 2007. I have been working with a symbol system that I feel is universal, but also highly personal. Ambiguity is important within the work, as I find this symbol system to be fluid and I feel that the work takes on different references for different people. I seek to inject subtexts through formal elements such as pressure, asymmetric balance and lack of “finish.”
STEVEN IRVIN
Steven Irvin is an artist, curator, writer, and critic who was born in West Adams in 1966, raised in West Adams, and a resident currently. He double-majored in studio art and ethnic studies at Stanford and received his MFA from the Claremont Graduate School. Irvin has participated with Collage Ensemble, an arts collective founded in 1984 as a collaborative vehicle for artists who address the L.A. urban experience. Irvin has produced shows and shown his own work all over Southern California, in Mexico City and in Japan. His reviews have appeared on Buzzine.com, in art issues, and in Artweek. I work and live in Los Angeles not only because I was born and raised here, but also because I believe L.A. is an important art destination. I have traveled to and worked as an artist in many countries, but L.A. is the place for real growth and concentration. While conducting serious investigative phases in photography, mixed-media installation, and performance, I have always maintained a practice as a painter. The painting is a synthesis of all these critical and social studies (documentary photography, re-interpreting the public object, the body viewed in time and space, etc.) boiled down to studies of a larger social “fabric” in theme, color, texture, and composition. My recent practice has unearthed swells of energy and renewed focus on the color, shape, and texture of material brought about by my daily existence as a purveyor of my domain.
The plywood remnant paintings recall an emotional period of upheaval, retreat, and reflection. Less formal and focused in material, they contain the moments of response, willy-nilly as well as deliberate, to crowding forces and their corresponding impulses. The mixed media and monotype works are older examples of experimentation with new and found media. The smaller panels are the most recent: studies showing where the paint and the marks settle in both more gestural and focused arrangements.
SUE ANN JEWERS
Sue Ann Jewers attended the Columbia College of Art & Design in Chicago. In 1998 she relocated to LA to work as a hairdresser and makeup artist. She has worked on two feature films, numerous commercials (including Coca Cola), many movie junkets, and consults with COA Theater. She works out of her home attending to the styling needs of a diverse group of clients. Sue Ann bought her West Adams home in 2004 where she currently lives with her son, Elias, and her dog, Minoki.
KIM LEE KAHN
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Kim Lee Kahn was born in New York City and grew up on the East coast. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College and both a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Her work has been exhibited nationally, including shows at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Artists Space, New York; Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Sandroni Rey Gallery, Los Angeles; Side Street Projects, Los Angeles; The Guest Room, Los Angeles; and Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles. She is the recipient of an Art Matters Inc. Fellowship and a Western States Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowship for Visual Artists in Sculpture. She lives and works in Los Angeles and has been a resident of West Adams since 2002.
DIANNE V. LAWRENCE
Dianne V. Lawrence is best known for her award-winning album cover portrait of Leonard Cohen (Recent Songs) and the creation of his hummingbird logo as well as for her series of blues portraits that hang in various House of Blues venues around the country. Her work has been collected by Leonard Cohen, Dan Akroyd, Kim Cattrall, Oliver Stone, Buck Henry, Jackson Brown, Citibank, and La Opinion, among others. Lawrence has received favorable reviews for her paintings from L.A. Weekly, Artweek and Arts Magazine. She also sings in a jazz band and is publisher/editor of The Neighborhood News. She has lived in West Adams since the early 1990s. To view her work go to www.diannelawrence.com.
TOM LAZARUS
Tom Lazarus has been painting since his youth. Early in his career, he had two local one-artist shows and was a member of the Scarsdale Art Association and the Westchester Art Society where he participated in group and juried exhibitions. He showed at the Sindin-Harris Gallery in Hartsdale, New York, and at a design showroom in New York City. Lazarus studied at the School of Fine and Applied Art – Boston University, The New School, and at Cooper Union in New York City, where soon he was selected for a juried group show. His work was reviewed favorably in the New York Herald Tribune, which lauded Lazarus as “a new realist.” Lazarus has lived in West Adams since 1994. During his careers as screenwriter, director and educator, Lazarus has continued painting and doing ceramics. His pottery has been likened to a “present day George Ohr.” For the past two decades, Lazarus has shown his unusual ceramics at the Clayhouse in Santa Monica, and in 2009, eight of Lazarus’s paintings were included in an international painting show at the Loft Gallery in Los Angeles. Influenced by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, Lazarus is currently painting what he refers to as “Renaissance Folk Art.”
MAX MICELI
Featuring a graphic and highly stylized mix of pop and folk but imbued with an ironic tone, Max Miceli's landscapes and portraits examine the relationships between man and beast, industry and nature, and abstraction and realism. Miceli received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he concentrated on fine art and illustration. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and San Diego. He worked as an illustrator and commercial designer at the New York Times and Disney, and is also a freelancer with commissions from Rolling Stone, Animation Magazine, Nickelodeon and Atlantic Records. His work has been featured in the pages on CMYK Graphic Arts Magazine, Juxtapoz, American Illustration and The Society of Illustrators Annual. In addition, Miceli is an art director and character designer at Klasky Csupo Studios (Rugrats, Duckman, The Simpsons). where he has worked in the development of various feature films and Emmy-winning animated TV shows. Miceli is also a member of the Los Angeles-based Broken Wrist Project artists collective. He has lived in West Adams since 2003.
MARINA MOEVS
Marina Moevs’ work has been exhibited in solo shows on the East and West Coasts, and she has participated in numerous group shows locally and nationally, both in museums and galleries. Her work is in many private collections. After studies and residency in Paris, she returned to the United States to complete her MFA at Brooklyn College in New York. She currently teaches at Loyola Marymount University, and she has taught at the University of Southern California, and California State University, Fullerton. She is represented by Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Culver City. Moevs’ metaphysical landscapes are largely invented and constructed, and the imagery is selected and arranged for its metaphoric potential. The starting point for the paintings is the growing environmental crisis. The recurring theme of the natural disaster in many of the paintings is, on a first level, a reference to this crisis. In a deeper reading of the paintings, the metaphor of the natural disaster describes a key transition in the experience of identity: from the common and culturally sanctioned interpretation of our individual “self,” to an unfamiliar but more accurate understanding of who we are. This transition has relevance to the environmental challenges we face.
AARON MORSE
Aaron Morse’s paintings depict epic collages of imagery pulled from sources as divergent as 20th century American politics, 19th century Romantic literature, comics, art historical painting genres, and current events. Morse weaves these various themes together to fabricate symbolic, alternative worlds in which time and history seem at once recognizable and otherworldly. Morse was born in 1974 in Tucson, Arizona. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona, Tucson in 1996 and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio in 1998. Selected solo exhibitions include the Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2008), ACME, Los Angeles (2009, 2007, 2005, and 2003) and Guild and Greyshkul, New York (2008, 2006). Selected group exhibitions include MATRIX 213: Some Forgotten Place, Berkeley Art Museum (2004); Women Beware Women, Deitch Projects, New York (2004); and The Old, Weird America, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2008). He has lived in West Adams since 2003.
MASUO OJIMA
Masuo Ojima is an award-winning, Zen-inspired ceramicist who has lived in West Adams since 1990. Ojima was born in Schizuoka, Japan, and studied ceramics at California State University, Los Angeles as well as Otis Parsons Art Institute, also in Los Angeles. He exhibits at juried shows around the country, and his ceramic pieces are in the permanent collection of the Renwick Gallery, the nation's craft museum. In Ojima’s work, Eastern and Western influences have combined to inspire a unique blend of purity of form and subtlety. My work represents my personality and character. I have lived in the United States, [so] it is inevitable that my work should be influenced by Western culture, philosophy and style. However, my inner thoughts are strongly rooted in Zen Buddhism. A free spirit must exist to make my work come alive for others.
TAIDGH O’NEILL
Taidgh O’Neill works in photography and sculpture. His photography uses the myriad tropes from the medium to explore and highlight the different social functions of photographs: the now-anachronistic claim of objective document; the exclusionary evidence of the lo-fi party aesthetic; a tourist’s critique; a cue for nostalgia, etc. He uses this practice of deconstruction as a jumping off point for his reconstructed sculptures in which he moves in the direction of narrative sprung from a hyper-image, post-historical, distracted internationalism. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, O’Neill studied art at UCLA. He created and oversees an artist-run gallery in West Adams. In addition to his art practice, O’Neill is a carpenter whose specialty is preserving historic homes.
CARMEN PATTI
Carmen Patti is a professional mural and decorative painter with over 20 years of experience. After graduating college, she was the lead scenic artist for the Alaska Repertory Theatre in Anchorage before returning to Los Angeles, where she painted scenery for television and movies such as The Birdcage and Mars Attacks. She has also executed murals for private residences from Montecito to Newport Beach, as well as corporate ones for Fox Studios and Lawry's Prime Rib in Beverly Hills. She has been one of the lead artists for the Cheesecake Factory, supervising and painting murals for over 130 of their restaurants nationwide. Her new Looking Glass Paintings creates art in unexpected places. I was redoing my son’s bedroom when I saw a workman about to junk a pair of old wooden windows. Instead of seeing trash, I suddenly saw a blank canvas and a picture frame.
KIM REESE
Kim Reese has been living and working in the West Adams District since 2004. She received her BA Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Her design work took her to Minneapolis and Boston, where she worked on retail accounts in addition to environmental graphics. Reese is currently transitioning into a life of fulltime fine art work, which, so far, seems to be fueled by faces, skulls, words, hands, and bold color. I deal with human struggle in my artwork. I explore ideas of death and redemption, and the mystery that comes with both. The process is almost always messy with very little planned ahead of time. When I'm working on mixed media pieces, the mess is literally on my hands with paint being applied to a surface...paper and images cut, torn and glued...paint swirled and pencil pushed to form thoughts or simple emotions with line. Words stumble in. I add, take away, simplify ... identifying what wants to be seen. Oftentimes, there is layer upon layer of color and images that are no longer visible. The layers imitate life...some faces and emotions we choose to wear on the outside, some we choose to hide. Eventually, the work shows itself to me. The mystery of it unfurling intrigues me, just like the mystery of the lives we all lead.
ROB REMER
Born on Long Island in 1964, Rob Remer attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 1987 before relocating to Los Angeles. While painting for most of his adult life, Remer also worked in the film and television industry, as a scenic painter and then a set decorator. He has since gone back to his primary love...Fine Art Painting. Remer’s paintings have been featured in Metropolitan Home, The Los Angeles Times and Wallpaper. Jennifer Lopez, Ellen DeGeneres and Disney are among the many who have purchased his work. Currently Remer’s work can be seen at Twentieth in Los Angeles where he has shown for the past decade. He moved his studio from Downtown to the West Adams area in 2004.
ART TOBIAS
Arthur Tobias is a lifelong ceramist making sculptural and functional forms in reduction-fired stoneware and porcelain. He has lived in West Adams since 1990. Along with a variety of hand-thrown, functional wares from mugs to jugs, in porcelain and stoneware, for the last few years he has been exploring large vase forms made with recycled clay glazed with fireplace ash, old wine bottles and slip clays from Death Valley. Inspirations range from the meat storage jars of Dave the Slave Potter to the sculpted flora and fauna framing Ghiberti’s first set of Baptistery doors. I researched the 19th century shapes of my native Illinois when I was starting out in the '70s. I have always had a fondness for the churns, crocks and jugs of that place and time. I also have long been inspired by the china coffee mugs of Mid-Western diners. They mostly came from the potteries along the Ohio River. Their simplicity and functionality has long shaped my aesthetic.
TOLANNA
Tolanna (Georgia Toliver) has been engaged in creative endeavors all her life, from drawing and painting, to fashion and food, to gardening, interior decorating, and fiction writing. But she pursued a career in science, becoming an expert forensic examiner of documents. Her career peaked in a legal art case authenticating signatures on prints alleged to be by masters such as Picasso, Dali, Chagall, Miro and Neiman. She examined hundreds of prints sold in galleries around Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Hawaii and determined that they were in fact forgeries. She testified in court, published the results of her research, and later was featured in a PBS documentary about art forgery produced by NOVA. Her involvement with this art case redirected her life. Today, Tolanna works as an artist herself, creating sculptures that are a combination of realism and abstraction that exemplify the essence of a person.
JOAN TUCKER
Joan Tucker’s painterly abstractions include the gestures, the slashes and blocks of textural paint of her Abstract Expressionist forebears, but they articulate her own ideas about subconscious creative expression. Tucker has exhibited at William Turner Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, Toomey-Tourell Gallery in San Francisco, Milo Gallery, LA Art Core, Gallery C, and The Loft at Liz’s in Los Angeles. Tucker grew up in Detroit and graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has lived in West Adams since 1990. While my work is primarily abstract, a subject or story begins to reveal itself to me while I'm working. I attack the canvas, and together the painting and I begin to "work it out." I'm interested in the hidden world beneath the surface - in layers of texture and color. So I begin to dig and shape... to push and pull...to sometimes tearing the painting apart and reassemble it with other elements...old paintings, more paper, torn photographs, discarded bits from my wastebasket...whatever I feel it takes to create the finished painting. |
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