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MORPH: Transformation in Technicolor
at Mash Gallery, Los Angeles (through December 21)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
The group exhibition MORPH is thematically about transformation, boundary pushing, and serves as an exhilarating tour de force by the artists as they explore edgy, surreal and transitory forms. But more striking perhaps than its theme is its color. Vibrant, dazzling, surprising and strange, mixed with heightened, dimensional textural elements or purely 2D ink and paint. It is that technicolor vividness that grabs the viewer first, almost daring the eye to enter thrillingly into its radiant dimension.
MORPH offers many fine surprises in its bright wash of color and mixed media. Curated by gallerist Haleh Mashian, who also presents many of her own works in the show, the artists are as varied as their techniques and their images yet bound together through their bright palettes and focus on the human form, primarily female.
Samuelle Richardson’s fabric sculptures, made of linen and thread, offer evocative facial expressions and a mysterious affect. Her series Head 3, 5, and 6 are aqua, white, and mustard yellow head-only busts positioned on contrasting color fabric blocks. They are both real in their expression and surreal from the standpoint of their caught-in-life expressions shown on seeming dismembered heads. They are captured and…
