Oscillating between black and white gallery walls, the new exhibition “Natural Selections” at the Brand Art Center in Los Angeles explodes with color and tactility. The group show is a combination of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and paper works all weaved together that echo each other’s color palates from room to room. The artists each reference the organic and ideas of landscape while maintaining their own individual styles and inflections with their materials.
Variety is pushed further in the exhibition by the fresh use of alternating scales between the artworks. We are walked through miniature worlds on paper in delicate frames and then come unto enormous four paneled paintings on washi paper that expand across an entire back gallery wall with exquisite line quality overlapping with bursts of acrylic paint. Color is certainly the thread one follows through the gallery, it pulls and pushes you to each piece with a strong graphic response and then keeps your eye moving between painting and sculpture and then back again for a very flowing and tangible experience.
The sculpture and fiber artworks in the show play a crucial and symbiotic role with the hanging wall pieces. The sculptures act as an anchor for the concepts of landscapes and natural structures while softly giving us a sense of weight and accumulation. Ideas of beauty and form are sturdily expressed and give the viewer a visual soaking in stunning hues.