Opening nights are always exciting; big crowds, star sightings, speeches and toasts. After that the event roll along with everyone busy and content…until its closing day and the show is almost over. For the gallerists and artists it’s been a long haul and most are ready to go home but I find closing days are often easier for viewing, a chance to see the work without distraction, maybe have more than a momentary conversation with an artist. I like them, these quiet Sundays just before the circus packs up and heads for home. This year though I wasn’t alone. The LA Art Show reported that Sunday was the busiest day of the event.
Walking the LA Art Show on Sunday I was struck by how much photography and painting are trading references and tools. More and more photographers are working in impressionistic fashion using analog processes, and/or the powers of Photoshop. At the same time painters are producing art using photographic tools filtered through painterly sensibilities. Good examples are the pictures of Burton Gray, a painter formerly working in oils who now creates complex and imaginative scenes in Photoshop. Looking at his images you might easily believe they were made with a paintbrush, not a Waacom but they are in fact painted entirely on a computer, not mixed media but rather mixing the tools and processes of media.
Not far away Australian gallery Retrospect was showing work by Alberto Sanchez. He first makes black and white photographic prints then paints on the prints then mounts them on blocks of differing heights to construct three dimensional collages. They feel much more painterly than photographic but then he started as a musician so perhaps we’ll just call him an artist and leave it at that.
And then there’s Mike Saijo who was creating instantaneous imagery using on the spot digital photographs of people which he printed on pieces of newsprint torn from the days papers. Then his team fixed and bound the images to hand cut panels, making the works he calls Reconstructing Memory Portraits. Watching Mike and his team making the work before your eyes is worth the price of admission but is it photography or mixed media or what? No matter, call it a soup, call it a stew, something rich and wonderful was going on here.
This is the LA ART show, not a photo fair. Although Photography was everywhere it was interspersed amongst old master paintings, video installation walls, ironic sculpture and modern art imagery. Photography felt right at home there too.
Andy Romanoff
Andy Romanoff is a photographer and writer based in Los Angeles, USA.
The LA Art Show ran January 10-14, 2018 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, in the United States.
LA Art Show – https://www.laartshow.com/
Burton Gray – https://www.burtongray.com/
Mike Saijo – http://www.msaijo.com/now/
