LIGHT MATTER a TOP PICK by FITZ & CO

PST ART: Art & Science Collide is now in full swing.

Now in its third edition, Pacific Standard Time in Los Angeles brings together over 800 artists, 70 exhibitions, and institutions throughout all of Southern California with one central theme: the collision of art and science. The landmark arts event brings the community together to spark meaningful conversations on today’s most urgent issues. Project topics range from climate change and environmental justice to the future of AI and alternative medicine.

“Los Angeles right now is the most creative city on earth at any time in history,” says Michael Govan, the CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of participating museum LACMA.

Swipe through to see some of our top picks for PST ART, on view across California.

1. ‘Fred Eversley: Cylindrical Lenses’ at David Kordansky Gallery | Installation view of ‘Cylindrical Lenses,’ 2024. Image courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery.

2. ‘Lia Halloran: Night Watch’ at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles | ‘Lia Halloran: Night Watch.’ Image courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

3. ‘Lita Albuquerque: Earth Skin’ at Michael Kohn Gallery | Installation view of ‘Earth Skin,’ 2024. Image courtesy of Michael Kohn Gallery.

4. ‘Light Matter’ at William Turner Gallery | Casper Brindle, “Cuboid 4,” pigmented acrylic, 36 x 15 x 15 inches. Image courtesy of William Turner Gallery.

5. 'Los Angeles Water School (LAWS)' at Morán Morán | Installation view of ‘Los Angeles Water School (LAWS), 2024. Image courtesy of Morán Morán.

6. ‘Max Hooper Schneider - The Unknown Masterpiece’ at the Virginia Robinson Gardens. Presented by Del Vaz Projects, Francois Ghebaly Gallery, and Marc Selwyn Fine Art | Robinson Gardens Pool Pavilion. Image courtesy of Robinson Gardens.

7. ‘Shirazeh Houshiary: The Sound of One Hand’ at Lisson Gallery | Shirazeh Houshiary, “Aurora,” 2023, Pigment and pencil on Aquacryl on canvas and aluminum, 190 x 190 x 5 cm, © Shirazeh Houshiary, courtesy Lisson Gallery.

8. ‘Helen Lundeberg: Inner/Outer Space’ at Louis Stern Fine Arts | Helen Lundeberg, “Cloud Shadows,’ 1966. Acrylic on canvas, 153 x 152.4 cm, courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts.

About Fitz & CO…
A growing global footprint continues to make FITZ & CO. a serious player for arty clients with worldwide profiles. About to enter its 25th year, Sara Fitzmaurice’s 20-person agency still reps Art Basel; Gagosian; Storm King Art Center; and brands like BMW and eBay, for whom FITZ & CO. builds artist partnerships. Equinox just tapped the firm to get closer to (real) art/culture influencers, and Mastercard engaged FITZ & CO to extend its Priceless campaign into the cultural sphere. Also in the agency’s collection: ultra-blue-chip international gallery Almine Rech; Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue arts/culture district; Denmark’s ARoS Aarhus Art Museum; ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair; and the Faurschou Foundation, which operates spaces in Copenhagen, Beijing and NYC.

LIGHT MATTER - PST ART: ART & SCIENCE COLLIDE - Exhibition Catalog Now Available

William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Light Matter, the first of two exhibitions, in partnership with the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, which explore the intersections and influences between art and science.

Light Matter showcases the influences of scientific research on artistic process and intention, and builds on a collaborative experiment that began with LACMA’s innovative Art & Technology program, a collaboration between artists and industry that ran from the late 60s to early 70s.  As part of this initiative, Robert Irwin and James Turrell collaborated with NASA scientist and psychologist Ed Wortz at the Garrett Corporation. Together they developed a series of art and science-based investigations into the dynamics of perception, with a special emphasis on sensory deprivation. This intrigued Irwin and Turrell, who began to notice that perceptions were heightened after sessions in sensory deprivation tanks. Perhaps, they reasoned, the purpose of the work of art wasn’t as much about the work, as it was about the experience of perceiving the work.  Enter Light & Space in Southern California, where the emphasis shifted from looking at art as “object”, to art as “experience”.

Artists in Light Matter continue to expand on this notion, experimenting with the possibilities of their materials, often through scientific research and innovation, to achieve heightened visual effects that engage the viewer in the wonder of the phenomenology of perception. They utilize materials and approaches that  inspire the viewer to reflect - not only on “what” they are perceiving, but “how”. Many of the pieces require the viewer to interact with the works in unexpected ways - either by encouraging unusually active movement around, or stillness before, their works. The act of viewing engages the senses and heightens our sense of perception.

Light Matter includes work by Dawn Arrowsmith, Larry Bell, Casper Brindle, Shingo Francis, Jimi Gleason, Eric Johnson, Jay Mark Johnson, Peter Lodato, Andy Moses, and Roland Reiss.

Opening This Saturday 4-8PM - LIGHT MATTER - PST ART: Art & Science Collide

William Turner Gallery, Santa Monica, California - is pleased to present Light Matter, the first of two exhibitions in partnership with the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, which explores the intersections and influences between art and science.

Light Matter explores the influences of scientific research on artistic process and intention, and builds on a collaboration that began with LACMA’s innovative Art & Technology program, a collaboration between artists and industry that ran from the late 60s to early 70s. For a number of artists, this unique program led, unexpectedly, to a significant new way seeing and thinking about the purpose of a work of art. Enter Light & Space in Southern California, where the emphasis shifted from looking at art as “object”, to art as “experience”.

Artists in Light Matter continue to expand on this notion, experimenting with the possibilities of their materials, often through scientific research and innovation, to achieve heightened visual effects that engage the viewer in the wonder of the phenomenology of perception. They utilize materials and approaches that inspire the viewer to reflect - not only on “what” they are perceiving, but “how”. Many of the pieces require the viewer to interact with the works in unexpected ways - either by encouraging unusually active movement around, or stillness before, their works. The act of viewing engages the senses and heightens our sense of perception.

Light Matter includes work by:
Dawn Arrowsmith 
Larry Bell 
Casper Brindle
Shingo Francis 
Jimi Gleason 
Eric Johnson 
Jay Mark Johnson 
Peter Lodato 
Andy Moses
Roland Reiss

September 14 - November 2, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 14, 4-8PM

INCONVERSATION: Melanie Pullen + Shana Nys Dambrot - Wednesday @ 7PM

Signed copies of Melanie’s exhibition catalog "VOYEUR" will be available for purchase.

Doors open at 6PM and the talk will begin at 7PM.
There will be refreshments served complimentary of the gallery.
Wednesday, June 19, 2024
7:00 PM 9:00 PM
WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY

Please join us for a conversation between art writer Shana Nys Dambrot and photographer Melanie Pullen. The two will discuss Pullen’s work and her research of true, unsolved crimes through the Los Angeles and New York Coroner’s office archives. 

Giving herself a guideline, Pullen's subjects in her High Fashion Crime Scenes series were never post-1950 and were always unidentified “Jane Doe’s”. Due to her work and research, she is on the Los Angeles School of Forensic’s advisory board.

In her newest series, Voyeur, she expands upon this theme by commenting on the voyeuristic tendencies of the human condition.

As Dambrot writes, “Photographer Melanie Pullen uses the visual lexicon of editorial and couture photography, critiquing our society of sex, death, and spectacle. The contrast between beauty and ugliness animates the work and captures the guilty conscience of the viewer’s own imagination—a dynamic she pushes even farther in her more recent Voyeur series, in which the watchers (us), watch the watchers (in the portraits) as they watch their own unseen prey. Everyone is implicated, everyone is dressed to the nines, and no one is safe.

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown LA. Formerly the Arts Editor at the L.A. Weekly, she is the co-founder of 13ThingsLA, and a contributor to the Village Voice, Flaunt, Artillery, and other culture publications. She studied Art History at Vassar College, and is the recipient of the Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, the Mozaik Future Art Writers Prize, and the LA Press Club National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Critic of the Year award. Her surrealist novel Zen Psychosis (Griffith Moon) was published in 2020.

Melanie Pullen’s (b. 1975) photography has been shown in major museums and galleries internationally and is permanently in the holdings of many of the most prominent public and private collections around the world including: Colección Jump, Mexico City, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Jacksonville, Florida; The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; Nasher Museum of Contemporary Art, North Carolina; Howard Stein & the Forward Thinking Collection, New York, New York; Walker Art Center Museum, Minnesota; The Rand Collection, Santa Monica, California. Most recently the Getty Museum acquired several pieces from her High Fashion Crime Scenes which now reside in their permanent collection after being included in their exhibition: Icons of Style: 100 Years of Fashion Photography. 

Melanie Pullen + Shana Nys Dambrot - INCONVERSATION - June 19 @ 7PM

Please join us Wednesday, June 19, 2024 at 7PM for a conversation between art writer Shana Nys Dambrot and photographer Melanie Pullen.  Doors open at 6PM and the talk will begin at 7PM.  There will be refreshments served complimentary of the gallery and signed copies of Melanie’s exhibition catalog VOYEUR will be available for purchase.  

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown LA. Formerly the Arts Editor at the L.A. Weekly, she is the co-founder of 13ThingsLA, and a contributor to the Village Voice, Flaunt, Artillery, and other culture publications. She studied Art History at Vassar College, and is the recipient of the Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, the Mozaik Future Art Writers Prize, and the LA Press Club National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Critic of the Year award. Her surrealist novel Zen Psychosis (Griffith Moon) was published in 2020.

Melanie Pullen’s (b. 1975) photography has been shown in major museums and galleries internationally and is permanently in the holdings of many of the most prominent public and private collections around the world including: Colección Jump, Mexico City, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Jacksonville, Florida; The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; Nasher Museum of Contemporary Art, North Carolina; Howard Stein & the Forward Thinking Collection, New York, New York; Walker Art Center Museum, Minnesota; The Rand Collection, Santa Monica, California. Most recently the Getty Museum acquired several pieces from her High Fashion Crime Scenes which now reside in their permanent collection after being included in their exhibition: Icons of Style: 100 Years of Fashion Photography.

Her work has been featured in a number of publications including: The New York Times T Magazine; Los Angeles Times; Vogue; Esquire Magazine; ELLE; London’s Independent; Spin Magazine; W Magazine; Flaunt Magazine; 1814 Magazine; Rolling Stone Magazine and Vanity Fair. Pullen has published three photography books. Melanie was awarded the D&D Yellow Pencil Award. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Pullen has published numerous books of her photography with notable fine-art publishers such as: Nazraeli Press and most recently in 2020 with Kodansha Press, in Japan.

Melanie Pullen: Voyeur Digital catalog is now available to view

"The best fashion photographs can remind us of other works of art or expand the boundaries of the genre, redefining what a fashion photograph is supposed to do or be. 

The photographs that do both are the ones that excite me the most. For example, the work of Melanie Pullen (b. 1975) represents a relatively new type of fashion photograph — one that was made for artistic reasons and celebrated by the fashion press after the fact. Based on crime-scene photographs that she found in police archives in Los Angeles and New York City, Pullen’s work reverses the aspirational nature of most fashion photographs, celebrating instead the darkly romantic idea of dying young, beautiful, and well dressed. As an image of suicide, Half Prada flies in the face of the industry’s claim: buy our products and your life will improve. The waist-down cropping keeps what would have been the picture’s most disturbing aspect out of the frame, while the undone shoe strap becomes, in Roland Barthes’ terminology, 'the punctum disrupting the perfection of the image.' The viewer is simultaneously attracted to and repelled by an image that is virtually impossible to forget."

Paul Martineau 
Curator of Photography 
The J. Paul Getty Museum 

MELANIE PULLEN: VOYEUR

Voyeur marks Melanie Pullen’s first solo exhibition at William Turner Gallery of large-scale photographs from her highly acclaimed High Fashion Crime Scenes and Voyeur series’. 

Born in New York City in 1975, Melanie Pullen is a self-taught fine-art photographer raised in a family of photojournalists, publishers, and artists. Growing up within the halls of the famed Hotel Chelsea, Pullen was immersed in this avant-garde setting, which greatly informed her artistic practice. Bi-coastal from an early age, Melanie spent her formative years between New York City and Los Angeles.

Pullen’s work focuses extensively on both social values and taboos while purposely taking aim at the media’s exploitation of sex, gender, and violence. Pullen herself has noted that she targets society’s obsessive glamorization by literally re-dressing what are deeply disturbing events, forcing the viewer to question their own values and observations.

Her photography has been shown in major museums and galleries internationally: it is permanently in the holdings of many of the most prominent public and private collections around the world: Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Jacksonville, Florida; The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Howard Stein & the Forward Thinking Collection, New York, New York; Walker Art Center Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Rand Collection, Santa Monica, California. 

Most recently the Getty Museum acquired several pieces from her High Fashion Crime Scenes which now reside in their permanent collection after being included in their exhibition: Icons of Style: 100 Years of Fashion Photography.

Pullen’s work has been featured in a number of publications including: The New York Times, T Magazine; Los Angeles Times; Vogue; Esquire Magazine; ELLE; London’s Independent; Spin Magazine; W Magazine; Flaunt Magazine; 1814 Magazine; Rolling Stone Magazine and Vanity Fair. 

Melanie was awarded the prestigious D&D Yellow Pencil Award in 2007 and has published three photography books, two with Nazraeli Press, the other with Kodansha.  She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

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Greg Miller - The Da Vinci Questionnaire - Nostalgic Nods to Ubiquitous Tropes

Greg miller at work in his Austin, Tx Studio

Extracting familiar pictorial codes from the pop culture of his youth, Greg Miller – who divides his time between New York, NY, Fredericksburg, TX and LA, CA, and whose work is featured in numerous museum and private collections, with a volume of his writings, photography and paintings having been published in 2010 – plumbs his own psychological depths only to discover what makes him love work and life.

To view the online exhibition catalog for the show please click HERE.

Once Upon A Time

Exhibition Catalog now available Online and in Print. Please contact the gallery for a copy of the print version.

Opening Tonight, Saturday, April 8, 5-8pm - Jay Mark Johnson: Íslenskir Fossar

Jay Mark Johnson
Íslenskir Fossar

April 8 - May 27, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 8, 5-8PM

“Utilizing sophisticated exposure techniques…Johnson has been touring the world’s nature reserves to produce these critical images and many others like them. The images prove just how serious he is.” - Ingeborg Ruthe, Berliner Zeitung

SELJALANDFOSS #3 (Rangàrthing Ekstra, Iceland), 2021, Archival pigment on paper mounted on aluminum with UV laminate, 43” x 120” frameless Edition of 3; 25” x 64” frameless Editions of 9

Santa Monica, CA - The William Turner Gallery is pleased to present the fourth solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based, multi-disciplinary artist Jay Mark Johnson. Ten spectacular large format images of waterfalls and geysers are selected from the most recent photographic artworks in the artist’s two-decades-long production of paradigm-shifting timeline imagery.

The artworks presented in ÍSLENSKIR FOSSAR were produced in Iceland in October of 2021 towards the end of global travel restrictions. Traversing the stark volcanic landscape, Johnson focused on the atmospheric turbulence of rushing waters and freezing air emanating from the region’s waterfalls and geysers, capturing the dramatic interplay of the spectacular geological events within the seasonal low-raking “golden hour” light. In the Icelandic language, the word “foss” means waterfall—with  roots in the Nordic word for “force”. In his exploration of the possibilities for timeline photography, Johnson has repeatedly turned his attentions to marveling at the forces of nature, specifically the reciprocal physical interactions of light, water and atmosphere found in coastal waves and inland waterfalls.

FAXAFOSS #2 (Faxi, Iceland), 2021, Archival pigment on paper mounted on aluminum with UV laminate, 60” x 60” framed Edition of 3, 30” x 30” framed Edition of 9

Johnson has always been fascinated at how the transmorphisms of his slit scan photographs—because they are both recognizable and strange—challenge the viewer’s expectations, forcing recognition of both the truthfulness and validity of alternative perspectives. Over the years he has worked to exploit both the refraction and diffraction of light waves as they encounter objects out in the environment and within the camera itself. Working close to the billowing plumes of waterfalls he plays with the naturally occurring displays of banded light waves visible in rainbow-like color patterns. He “paints” with the incoming color spectrum emanating from the outer reaches of the waterfalls, from the water as it crashes against rocks, and from the space between the falls and the shear rock face behind. Recorded within his inventive temporal delineations, the resulting artworks are as startling and unimaginable as they are eye-popping and poetic.

Each image in the exhibition bears distinct site specific features. For SELJALANDSFOSS #3, Johnson carried his camera equipment into a giant cavern behind a monolithic, 200 foot high cascade. Turning to look back outward, he captured an ephemeral curtain—a delicate and translucent waterwall—through which one magically views a wide horizontal stretch of the distant azure sky. In SKÓGAFOSS, a rainbow materializes through the viscous spray at the heel of the cataract while the volcanic substrate immediately behind the falls is refracted into muted color striations. In GEYSER #1, an abrupt eruption of a massive thermogenic jet sprays its sulphured-green waters skyward and then, vanishing quickly, dissipates into the low-hanging overcast fog. Two of the images in the show were produced at Stewart Falls in Sundance, Utah while another was recorded on the Big Island in Hawaii.

FAXAFOSS #3 (Faxi, Iceland), 2021, Archival pigment on paper mounted on aluminum with UV laminate, 40” x 106” frameless Edition of 3; 31” x 81” framed Edition of 9

Held by prestigious private institutions and public collections throughout the U.S. and Europe, Johnson’s work has been exhibited and collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Art Institute of Chicago, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Langen Foundation and Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe.                

Johnson was born in 1955 in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA. Since 1996 Johnson has resided intermittently in Paris, Antwerp, Rome and rural Italy.  He maintains studios in both the Arts District of downtown Los Angeles and Uptown New Orleans where he draws, paints, sculpts and writes.

#jaymarkjohnson

Julian Lennon: Atmospheria Catalog Now Available Digitally & in Print

William Turner Gallery is please to present the catalog for Julian Lennon’s exhibition Atmospheria. The catalog is available to view using the button below and a print version (36 pages fully illustrated) is available by contacting the gallery.

Lennon’s photographs serve as allegorical vehicles in this time of heightened awareness for our planet’s peril.In surveilling these ever-changing skies, Atmospheria celebrates the beauty of these vaporous vistas to inspire us to better revere and protect them.

The collection is suffused with a sense of wonder and awe at the majesty of natural phenomena. Each image simultaneously evokes feelings of sweeping grandeur and indefinable yearning. Luminary, shape-shifting clouds, distinguished by the combings and crests of light and shadow, speak with gravitas and elegance.

A portion of the proceeds from Atmospheria will benefit The White Feather Foundation (TWFF), Lennon’s nonprofit organization. Since its inception in 2007, TWFF has championed conservation projects worldwide.The foundation raises funds for Indigenous, environmental, education, health and clean water projects around the world. TWFF has saved native lands from being taken from Indigenous groups; brought clean water to developing communities; provided girls with educational scholarships; helped furnish and build schools in underprivileged areas; brought mobile ambulances to remote villages; assisted with disaster relief and brought meaningful social justice films to light.