Artists Susan Tibbles and Sunny Bak are currently presenting a “hometown” show in Santa Monica, exhibiting a new collaboration dealing with pop culture and fabrics of society, featuring psychologically charged images and rare portraits of Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Jackie Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, and many more icons from the ‘70s.
The exhibit, “Sleep Walking Through Dreamland” is a mixed media assemblage, showing through Dec. 16 at the Essentia Sleep Shop and Gallery space located at 2430 Main Street in Santa Monica.
Tibbles has a rather baroque sensibility when it comes to her mixed media construction/assemblages.
She builds her composite objects from the unique and expressive detritus of our culture, throwing in everything from antique birdcages to newspaper headlines, machine parts to pharmaceuticals and salvaged metals.
The results are simultaneously poignant and precious, funny and bitterly satirical.
Her most recent pieces are pointedly political takes on the tension and fear plaguing our society.
Tibbles has been an accomplished artist since 1990. She has been exhibiting in museums and galleries, as well as serving as guest lecturer and speaker at several universities and art counsels throughout the West coast and is freelance illustrator for various publications including the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun since 2000.
Meanwhile, celebrity photographer Sunny Bak’s earliest photography days started in the ‘70s as a young paparazzi before there was TMZ.
Her photo skills sharpened quickly as she learned how to bulk load in the dark, focus while walking backwards, meter by eye on the fly and process negatives in her parents’ second bathroom. And assimilate where only adults fraternized.
Her fly on the wall Tri-X images of this time period sat in storage for over 35 years as she worked as an fashion, music and celebrity photographer, capturing intimate portraits of everyone from Madonna to Gregory Peck to the Village People.
Her iconic archived Beastie Boys series from the ‘80s came out of hiding in 2011 and is currently at Rock Paper Photo at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Café and Morrison Hotel Gallery in Soho, NY.
For more information on these artists, visit www.susantibbles.com and www.sunnybak.com.
For more information on Essentia Sleep Shop and Gallery space, visit www.myessentia.com.
