Plateaus: Art that Resonates
September 7 – November 16, 2024
Curated by Stacie B. London
This exhibition was curated by Stacie B. London in partnership with Art Share L.A. It was made possible with generous funding from CD14 and the Los Angeles County Department of Art and Culture.
Art Share L.A. is pleased to present Plateaus: Art that Resonates a multidisciplinary and multisensory immersive art exhibition that explores dualities: art and craft, death and life, grief and love, and activity and stillness. These contrasts exist with an interdependent bond, reminding us that bonds are intrinsic and often intertwined partners. In multiple materials, processes, and scales, monument-like creations are revealed through thoughtful burnishing of passion. The exhibition curated by Stacie B. London features seven visual artists: Amanda Maciel Antunes, Kyong Boon Oh, Hadley Holiday, Soojung Park, Emily Sudd, Kate Turning, and Cheyann Washington, along with additional contributions of ikebana by members of Sogestu Los Angeles, music by Rocco DeLuca, perfume by Lesli Wood (La Curie Eau de Parfume), and seating by Hunter Knight. Through a shared refinement of intentional experimentation with their mediums – acrylic panels, clay, glass, ink, photography, scent, sound, stone, thread, tree stumps, and wire– these artistic achievements reveal work that is brave, meditative, resilient, and vulnerable.
Our five senses inform our experiences and knowledge and assist us in ordering the world. In Plateaus: Art that Resonates the traditional forms of visual art of painting, photography, and sculpture are broadened to include aural art — via music and sound — and olfactory art. These multisensory and immersive pieces enhance the experience of viewing visual art and introduce additional dualities: sight with smell, smell with hearing, and hearing with sight. The expanded human experiences in an art gallery switch the expected experiences and invite the possibility of a familiar experience in a new way, or a breakthrough!
Breakthroughs often occur after long periods of what often seems like stagnation, or a plateau. It’s instinctual to want growth to be a continual upward trend, but instead it’s usually a series of long, flat periods (plateaus) of work with few visible results. Seemingly out of nowhere the plateau makes space for a breakthrough of creativity or growth—an intermittent moment when everything comes together. Instead of focusing on the result, it’s good to get comfortable in the plateau.
The artists and artisans of Plateaus: Art that Resonates use a broad range of approaches and techniques towards creative creations that are examples of how to grapple dualities, navigate the plateaus of life, and share breakthroughs that transmute our awareness of mortality into loving engagements with life and it’s contradictions and opposing perspectives that inspire and infuse life with meaning, immediacy, awareness, and appreciation.
Plateaus: Art that Resonates is on view September 7 through November 16, 2024. The artists will be present at the opening reception on Saturday, September 7 from 6 to 9pm. At the opening there are two exciting performances: Amanda Maciel Antunes will premier a new multi-media performance art piece that invites the audience to participate and activate the artwork, and musician, songwriter, and steel guitarist Rocco DeLuca known for his soulful compositions and captivating performances will perform in the gallery.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Amanda Maciel Antunes (aka dama) is a Brazilian artist based in Los Angeles. Her autodidactic and transdisciplinary practice merges language and durational performance to create paintings, writing, sculpture, sound, film and assemblage. She works in collaboration with public libraries, nature and communal spaces, reflecting on the selective nature of memory, inherent language and anthropological references written by women as points of departure.
Korean-born, Los Angeles-based artist, Kyong Boon Oh is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans sculpture, painting, photo/video collages, and sculptural installations, blending spiritual practice with art practice. She underwent a transformative journey, shifting from creating tall figurative paintings to weaving metal wires, a meditative craft inspired by her father’s legacy and her own struggles with physical illness. Her art, influenced by her experiences as a first-generation immigrant, serves as a personal map that navigates the complex terrain of assimilation, nostalgia, and belonging, situated between chaos and order. Through her evolving practice, which now includes community engagement initiatives like the “Flow with Medium” workshop, she aspires to reveal personal histories as communal destinies that transcends time and space.
Hadley Holliday’s artwork explores a collision of images of nature with natural forces, abstraction, experimentation, broken systems, forgotten rules, mistakes and play. Holliday’s work has been exhibited internationally including in solo exhibitions at ACME, Taylor de Cordoba, Carl Solway Gallery and SolwayJones. Holliday has worked as a teaching artist all over southern California including at LACMA, the California State Summer School for the Arts, College of the Canyons and Chaffey College. Holliday was born in Kansas City. She received her MFA at Cal Arts. After 20 years in Los Angeles Holliday moved to Crestline in the San Bernardino mountains to explore a new landscape. In 2023 she launched One With the Sun Projects, a line of stained-glass artworks.
Soojung Park works with the layers of ink pigments colors onto the buffed plexiglass surfaces. Each line of colors represent a unique motive state, reflecting the artist’s profound emotional depth. Park’s process involves both painting and un-painting, as inks are rubbed away or layered over during the artist’s revisits. These dynamic, translucent quadrangles are meditative objects that demonstrate the artist’s patience and perception.
Emily Sudd is a multimedia artist working primarily in ceramic sculpture. Her work engages in conversation with still life, narrative, and abstract painting; postminimalist sculpture; and hierarchies of materials and taste. Her recent group of hand-built ceramic vessel pieces made with a combination of white porcelain, colored porcelain, a dark-bodied stoneware, and terracotta are fired to the high temperatures suited for the stoneware and porcelain bodies. As the terracotta is a low-fire material, it is unable to withstand the high-temperature firing and thusly melts and bubbles. The clay itself produces much of the surface and texture in these pieces as there is little to no glaze used. The works appear as if frozen in a state of transition and often seem to defy gravity, eliciting a sense of entropic disorientation.
Having been born in a taxi during a family trip, it’s no wonder that Kate Turning just can’t stand still. She is known for her riotous use of color and lyrical storytelling in photo- illustrations for music projects, film art and concept gallery presentations . She orchestrates her fine art projects, shows and commissions like frothy Rossini bonbons, bursting with detailed embellishment and an ever-present sense of imagination.
Her latest images present an investigation into impermanence, beauty and savagery, and the passing of time, by manipulating the binary codes of the iconic Cirio trees in the remote Catavenia Desert of Mexico.
Cheyann Washington is a painter from Los Angeles, California. Represented by Wonzimer Gallery for the last two years, Washington’s personal studies encapsulate the essence of human behavior and the figure as it mirrors nature. This conversation has been developed through numerous techniques and practices including drawing & painting. Her most recent series of natural pigments works on silk and homemade paper also depict the nurturing bond that we all hold or maybe that which is holding us. This process extends her studies into biology and natural medicines such as ethnobotany and personal studies which examine her own body. The evolution of Washington’s work connects us back to the ultimate understanding of this system in which both imbalance and balance live within us.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Stacie B. London, a Renaissance woman with over 15 years experience in art exhibition production, last year had the opportunity to Co-Curate It’s About Time with April Greiman at The Brand Art Center, a multidisciplinary exhibition with 17 Los Angeles artists and over 200 objects. Other project affiliations include: The Autry Museum, Gallery Luisotti, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and SBLONDON: Exhibit of Industrial Art, a gallery she founded in Silver Lake. Stacie’s past pursuits also include being a vintage motorcycle racer who in 2016 was awarded Lady Roadracer of the Year and in 2018 set five land speed records on a motorcycle she built.
As the Exhibition Designer at MOCA, Stacie executed over 80 exhibitions and worked with esteemed curators on momentous projects including Brooke Hodge: Louise Bourgeois, Paul Schimmel: Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years, and Alma Ruiz: Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color and Space. While at MOCA, one of Stacie’s favorite projects was restoring and operating Chris Burden’s Big Wheel; providing the opportunity to hang out with Chris, one of her favorite artists.
Stacie has a MS in Industrial Design from ArtCenter College of Design where she won the Best Thesis award and completed part of her thesis in the Nano Labs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her BA in Theater Arts is from UCSC where she focused on directing and theater production, and directed her thesis, a multidisciplinary interpretation of A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, in The Barn Theater.
