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Myth-Making, Storytelling And Imaginations In Play In Contemporary Identities
at LAUNCH LA, Los Angeles (through February 8)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Shula Singer Arbel, Carla Jay Harris and Christina Ramos each offer gorgeous, personal, figurative work in Contemporary Identities, now at Launch LA. Each artist explores personal and universal identities through contemporary figurative work.
Arbel’s works are from her Love Hope Memory series. She uses images culled from family photos to inspire figures that remain faceless. These paintings have a haunting quality because of just that — their facelessness, and yet the overall impression is of a kind of quiet joy, something to be shared with viewers, inviting them to add their own memories. Summer 1963 is one such example, in which a lustrous aqua pool spreads out around a family of four, bodies relaxed and in the water at the edge of the pool, their faces pale ovals. Her Best Friends features two faceless girls in blue dresses against a vividly colored yellow and orange floral background; the cheerfulness of that backdrop adds a sense of hopefulness to her figures. Darker in tone is the work Arriving on the Shores of America, in which a mother stands beside her daughter against a dark sea on rust-colored sand. The viewer has the sense that the pair has arrived at a so-called safe-haven yet still somehow in peril.
