Artillery Magazine: "peace love freedom happiness"
"Joy to the World: My Holiday Season in a Nutshell," by Ezrha Jean Black (Jan 3, 2016)
Jan. 8, 2016
"...Diane Rosenstein opened a show that was like a giant gift box nesting, Russian doll style, yet another gift within, each opening upon some sparkling gem(s) of art – in painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, photography and other works on paper, and objects almost unclassifiable.
Cumulatively, it was almost breathtaking. I ran into a prominent local curator who happened to be viewing the show at the same time I was there, and neither of us could conceal our elation. The consistent excellence of the work gives the show a kaleidoscopic, almost celebratory dazzle; yet it also touches on some of the most pressing issues of our time.
The show is titled, peace love freedom happiness; and however its spirit may or may not be carried away with the viewer into the new year, I think I can safely say the viewer will experience some moments of intense joy within the gallery’s spaces. The first of those moments is a small Sarah Awad painting, that may have been a study (or simply a smaller work) for her Gates paintings, a beautiful show Awad opened earlier in the year, that used the filigreed wrought iron gates and fences that typically surround large residential properties and estates all over L.A.’s more affluent suburbs and urban enclaves as motive and springboard for a painterly excursus into the view ‘through’ and ‘over’ implicit in both landscape and abstract conventions. The painting, “Casement” could be a kind of talisman for the series, and it’s simply exquisite.
Viewers might be familiar with the explosive quality of some of Anish Kapoor’s work – not least from his show earlier this past year at Regen Projects. But he can bring the volume down now and then; and the Rosenstein show included a beautiful suite of slightly more subdued ectoplasmic eruptions in a suite of beautiful color etchings. That muted quality connects with the Miranda Lichtenstein photographic prints and Polaroids of mostly floral and foliage subjects. Lichtenstein comes at her subjects obliquely (and sometimes from several angles simultaneously – or so it would seem). Lens, ‘filter’ (in any number of senses) and lighting may veil, distort or simply complicate the view, the surround, the atmosphere around a subject that, finally, eludes firm definition.
Nature (or a kind of counter-nature) is treated with similar ambiguity in works on paper, canvas and panels (and even sculpture) variously by Eben Goff(extensively), Jane Wilbraham, David Schafer, and Roland Reiss (including the rippling Bent Field of 1969, which has its own talismanic, almost iconic power). Each produces a kind of visual poetry that ranges analogously from the sparest haiku to elegant lyricism to the elegiac. Fissures register prominently in many of these works – in nature, in perception; and Karin Apollonia Müller’s earthbound subjects have long considered them; also the aura of ambiguity, even ambivalence that envelops the concrete – our slippery apprehensions of physical actualities. But from here, she simultaneously soars and submerges in the cosmic apprehension of our tenuous, intermittently luminous, imprint on the cosmos in the “Citylight” and “Starlight” series of lightjet prints produced from NASA/JPLtelescope data transmissions for her 2013 Far Out show.
The show, which runs through January 16th, also includes work by John Adelman, Eleanor Antin, Jedd Garet and Arnold Helbling.
