TAG Gallery at Bergamot Station unveils a new exhibition Tuesday that runs through April 20 featuring artists Anne M Bray, Elsie Sims, and Elyse Wyman.
The opening reception is scheduled for Saturday, April 6 from 5-8 pm while an artist talk is planned for Saturday, April 13 at 5:30 pm.
In Bray’s exhibition, she explores the various ways in which the vivid glow of a sunset or the reflection of a fiery sky heals the land marred by man.
Including a range of media from oil on canvas, to pastel on paper, to digital paintings and composites, Bray’s work serves as a personal coping mechanism, helping her come to terms with the dwindling access to the natural world.
Looking upwards to the skies, the only direction above the chaos below, Bray takes solace in the colorful expanse.
With her attitude, Bray provides a modern version of the Hudson River School – finding the sublime in a landscape wracked by human intervention.
Artist Elsie Sims looks to nature’s cycle when creating her expressive woodcut designs. Finding inspiration from Southern California’s natural landscape, Sims’ process begins with her own encounters with nature’s transformations.
Among her observations are trees clinging to eroding bluffs and a flowering agave stalk blooms and dies, leaving scattered seeds at its base – allowing new life to sprout alongside its degeneration.
Sims uses her technique to enhance the contrasting situations of death and rebirth often communicated in her landscapes.
“Although I love drawing and painting, the powerful lines and bold gestural strokes of the woodcut process is a more satisfying representation of my mind’s eye of nature,” Sims said.
Her latest series of large-scale woodcuts portray the push and pull of nature’s course with attention to the vivid color and texture of California’s coast.
As an artist who has had her own body image tested by cancer and bilateral mastectomies, Elyse Wyman is interested in the connection between body image and the often hidden, protected interior identity.
In her current series, Wyman explores these concealed emotions through bas-relief sculpture.
“I seek to expose and illuminate the inner life generally obscured by the more carefully managed outer shell we present to the world,” Wyman said.
Working with mass-produced plastic forms – analogous to the emotional armor we present to society – Wyman layers targets, and an assortment of fascinating found objects and fragments within her sculptures.
This process communicates the complex relationship of the sexualized female body and its deeper cache of interior energy and emotion.
TAG Gallery is open 11 am to 5 pm Tuesday through Saturdays and 12 pm to 4 pm on Sundays.
For more information, visit www.taggallery.net or call 310.829.9556.
