1162 Glendale Blvd
Los Angeles, California 90026

Steppin’ Out at Artillery and Ammo Gallery:
Kelly Eginton, Camilla Brannstrom, Paul Evans, and Michael Blasi

April 10 through 17, 2010
Receptions on Saturday, 4/10, and Saturday 4/17, 7 PM to midnight

Pulled together by sculptor and painter Michael Blasi, these artists share a restrained sense of humor, a carefully chosen color palette, an affinity for the meditative, and a guarded relationship to representation. These are artists the world should be seeing more of – they step out together here for a week at Artillery and Ammo Gallery in Echo Park.

Kelly Eginton, a recent London transplant now based in San Diego, builds up pictures with lines, sometimes ruler-drawn, sometimes bent into seismo/cardiograms to form land and spacescapes. Her recent sculptural work conjures the fantasy world of an artist-cowboy on the trail, bringing home the detritus of the journey. Dressed up with traditional art and hobby materials, her sculptures seek to explain western mythology to the universe. The landscape of her high-desert childhood informs heavily: think pre-fab, sun-baked aluminum siding and hot cloudless skies of 1970s and 80s Riverside County.

Camilla Brannstrom, Silverlake resident and Anaheim native – takes on a similar doodle-informed strategy. Her small striped gouaches and quilt-like collages of colorful phone-doodled post-its serve as private meditations in rhythms of color and line. Both Camilla and Kelly studied art in the Bay Area – Camilla at California College of Art in Oakland, Kelly at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Paul Evans, of Hollywood by way of New York, is working through a series of collaged works on paper. These drawings feature a central meditative character: an architectural personage featuring four sets of xeroxed eyes (the eyes were appropriated from a catalog of dolls geared for foster children). This character rests on a delicate scaffold of lines in a quiet, shallow space, vulnerable and Buddha-like. Paul studied painting at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and currently curates the gallery space at Happy, in Hollywood.

Michael Blasi, Echo Park native, is working through his own series: painted paper mache rock-like sculptures he calls “psychedelic suiseki”. These sculptures take the tradition of Chinese and Japanese “viewing stones” as a jumping off point. Michael’s sculptural forms and paintwork relay the contorted curves of metamorphic, water-carved geology with the circuitous line of his imagination. Michael also teaches art as a traveling teacher to elementary students for Los Angeles Unified School District. Michael studied art at Purchase Collage, State University of New York.

Added by HappyLosAngeles on April 4, 2010

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