Forest/Trees

Texas / Yeshiva

Interested in the human psyche and subjects of community, faith, and spirituality, Thunder recollects and recreates her personal experiences from photographs she's taken. Her practice involves making inkjet color prints of the photos while the printer is low on ink, so that the CYM colors take precedence over the black. She uses the obscured palette to predict unusual coloring in her paintings.

While referenced from real places she’s been, her creations often feel otherworldly, as if she taps into "something bigger than herself" that speaks to "the audience and collective consciousness." The surrealistic scenes based on real moments embody how memories are fragmented, even distorted, as time passes and surroundings change.

This new body of work, inspired by photographs taken at a street parade in Corpus Christi, Texas, and at an all-boys Yeshiva boarding school in Westchester, New York, explores the subject of duality by placing two seemingly unrelated series of paintings in conversation. Fascinated by the energy generated by intentional gatherings of people, whether it’s a street parade or a religious boarding school, Thunder explores this elevated frequency of experience and synergy.

“As someone who spent their formative years in two drastically different communities and environments, it felt natural to investigate these two subjects simultaneously. It’s been a journey for me as an artist to embrace this ‘split’ in my identity through my work and begin turning inwards for information while creating rather than relying on it externally," says Thunder.

In these series of oil paintings, the settings and their interpretation are both visually and aesthetically distinguishable: vibrant and crowded, solemn and deserted. The Yeshiva series serve as an escape from the works in the Parade and Cotillion series, which center around materialism and contemporary social culture.

Texas / Yeshiva is on view through February 18, 2023.

Art

Ceramics, Sushi and Flowers with Darren Romanelli

Off the bat speaking with Romanelli and discussing the projects he's put forth thus far and plans on producing in the near and far future, I notice his humility — an impressive quality for anyone to hold onto at his level of acclaim. He seems to love true collaboration, the idea of building and upholding community, his family both blood and creative, and eagerly dishing out credit to those both in his orbit and beyond. His home is further testiment to his level of support: the walls and surfaces are filled with a mix of rising and well known artists he has come aross, worked or traded with. Another thing I recognize immediately is that Romanelli loves Los Angeles. He tells me about his neighborhood, the surrounding area of Griffith Park, what it means to him and how it's influenced his work, driving him to bring and build projects in the area. With a level of excitement I wish I could better portray with my words alone, Romanelli regaled me with the story of his next foray into curation, which involved a few of the things, or rather the people, he'd been working with and inspired by as of late.

Firstly, came the medium closest to home: ceramics, which his wife Candice Romanelli has been masterfully creating in their own kiln. Next, he wanted to focus on flowers and floral arrangements, which he had been drawn to since happening upon the traditional Japanese florist Toyo down the block. Finally, he hoped to weave the art of sushi making into the mix, an endeavor Romanelli has been involved in on both small and large scales for a few years. And with all of the eccentric brilliance he is deservingly known for, Romanelli brilliantly staged a very special night in Los Angeles last week that seamlessly and respectfully connected these three art forms with nothing but grace.

Ahead of the holidays, for one night, the historic Toyo Florist's flower freezer became a sushi kitchen catering to an evening in celebration of the list of local and renound artists that Romanelli had curated to create ceramic "vessels" which would hold floral arrangements made specifically and on the spot for each piece of pottery, by the family who has owned the Toyo shop for over 72 years. Standing by the edge of it all, on such an inherently Los Angeles night, I observed Romanelli's community of incredible local artists, designers and musicians as they mingled in a physical space itself so drenched in history and cultural significance, surrounded by the array of arcane and modernized mediums in a casual, though incredibly thoughtful and conscious manner.

Over the fresh toro, in the glow of the florist shop lights, Romanelli spoke to how he came to love and know Toyo, telling me, "I discovered the shop while driving by over a year ago, I started buying flowers from them pretty regularly, I was so impressed with their selection and staging abilities. We quickly developed a dialogue. One day, Sandy invited me in the back to visit their flower freezer, and I was impressed with their amazing selection. She explained to me they grow a lot of their greenery on a nearby field. I asked her if I could host a holiday ceramic sale over the month of December… It’s all been really organic… I do the sushi at Sofi stadium for Rams and chargers etc. and the brand was incubated in a freezer space in downtown LA so the idea of having sushi experience in the Flower freezer."

Speaking to Sandy, a member of Toyo's founding family and runs the shop today and was creating said arrangements on the night of the event, she told me, "Toyo has been in business for over 72 years. Where the Los Feliz estates area is currently was where our former flower fields were. My grandparents and father grew flowers and provided wholesale to the Los Angeles Flower Market in Downtown LA. That market had all Japanese growers and my family participated, but we went into strictly retail when a developer bought the fields. In the meantime, my grandparents were interned in the WWII Japanese relocation camps.

...They were released when the war ended and continued the retail flower business — and here we are still. Then my father was drafted to the Vietnam War — even though he wasn't a citizen! Thankfully he lived. Afterwards, he came back and continued the business, and now I myself do the same. Our family managed to go through, live through, and move on from war, from internment on domestic soil/homeland after being unfairly drafted and forced to fight in one of the most fatal wars in history. And thereafter, figure out a way to move on. The floral business was, and is, our family niche. We love it."

Say what you will about what the idea of a "collaboration" means in popular culture these days, this night proved to me that there is still substance to the word — and when it's done right, the potential of that special space where ideas and crafts overlap is infinite.

Art

Objects of Desire: AI Sex Toys in The Art World

December 19, 2022

With recent conversation on social media about the complicated and controversial relationship between art and technology — and the inherent intimacy of it all — artist Pleun van Dijk is flipping the script, so to speak, and using AI to design photorealistic sex toys. In her latest project, Objects of Desire, Pleun investigates our connection to technology through an object we have a close phyiscal relationship with as a form of sexual objectification.

“With the current exponential speed at which technology develops, the thin line between human and technology will continue to blur and might eventually even fully disappear,” Pleun van Dijk said. As integration between the human and non-human advance, we will be confronted with “ethical and fundamental questions” to define our species and what will become of us.

Text by India Espy-Jones
Photos by Bram Van Dijk

In a three-step process, the artist dissolves the distinction between what is real and fake. Pleun translates the relationship between humans and the tool we created, technology, into a tangible scenario of the thin line which separates us two.

In step one, she developed a dataset to contain an input of realistic, human genetalia-like and abstract sex toys. An object in which we have formed a close physical relationship with, to the extent many are designed to replicate our body’s most intimate organs. Which then in step two, the images are fed into a “pre-trained machine learning (ML) model” to generate “a collection of 1,000 new, non-existing shapes” derived from the initial sex toy dataset. In this step, human and technology morph into one.

In step three, the final step, the images generated from the ML model were rendered into a three-dimensional physical reality with the final product an anthropomorphic, human-like sculpture, the embryo of human and technology. “The project confronts the viewer with a speculative scenario and leaves them to decide whether they perceive the outcome as human, non-human or something that exists in between,” Pleun van Dijk said.

Check out our office-excliusive preview of Phase I of their immersive, intimate project below.