Windswept Curated by Genie Davis

Name: Windswept Curated by Genie Davis
Start: 2025-03-21T17:00:00-07:00
Location: 341 South Avenue 17, 90031

Schedule

Fri, 21 Mar, 2025 at 05:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

341 South Avenue 17, 90031 | Los Angeles, CA

Windswept
Curated by Genie Davis
On view: March 21 – April 17, 2025 | Reception: March 21, 2025 5-10 p.m.
Artist’s Talk: March 30, 2025 3-5 p.m.
Curatorial Walk Through/Closing: April 17, 2025 5-8 p.m.
Regular Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Sunday 12-7 p.m.
Location: Wonzimer Gallery
341-B S Avenue 17, Los Angeles, CA 90031
email: [email protected]
Website: https://www.wonzimer.com/

Windswept, opening March 21st in Los Angeles, is an immersive group exhibition featuring over 15 painted works from throughout international artist Susan Ossman’s career in conjunction with sculptural, photographic, collage, video, and installation works by artists including Dani Dodge, Angelica Sotiriou, Beth Elliott, Linda Sue Price, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, Diane Cockerill, Bruce Cockerill, Scott Meskill, Eileen Oda, Jason Jenn, Nancy Kay Turner, and Nancy Voegeli-Curan.
The exhibition explores each artist’s own unique vision of wind, from lush oil and acrylic to potent abstract neon art and otherworldly mixed media. While you can’t see the wind, you can envision what it creates: sand and soil, propagated flowers and seeds, the sails of ships, ocean currents, kites soaring aloft, magical balloons, tossing tumbleweeds, birds drifting on warm ocean currents, the ominous wreckage of storms both natural and societal, or the ungovernable spread of fire and ash.
Wind has always played an enormous role in both the world’s ecology and in the lives of humans.
Wind is a mood and a feeling, a part of our culture, our literature, and our desire for change. In the novella Red Wind, noir writer Raymond Chandler describes the wind in Los Angeles as “…one of those hot dry Santa Ana’s that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” Kahlil Gibran writes in The Prophet, “The breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind.” South African philosopher Mokokoma Mokhonoana says, “To most human beings, wind is an irritation. To most trees, wind is a song.” And of course, we all know that when we question our situation in life, as Bob Dylan sings, “The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.”
The works in this exhibition are all about the pull of wind, encompassing images that traverse the seasons. Conceived as a group exhibition, while not conventionally collaborative, the artwork swirls together in a wide range of mediums, examining how this natural phenomenon and its symbolism affects all aspects of life on this planet.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says, “Matter is spirit moving slowly.” But in the matter of wind, it is spirit moving rapidly, coursing through the world, the mind, the heart, and art.
- Genie Davis, curator

Artist Information:
Susan Ossman
Both an artist and anthropologist, Susan Ossman’s images emerge from her ethnographic and artistic research in Southern California, Europe, Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula, where she currently teaches at New York University Abu Dhabi. Ossman’s painted works are vibrant and visionary. She creates often-themed exhibitions and installations that involve movement and light that emerges from her powerful use of lines, and a hypnotically undulating sense of motion rich with color and soft texture.

Dani Dodge
Dodge uses unexpected sculptural materials to alter spaces that change and challenge expectations, her work playing with surrealist ideas using innovative forms. She shapes often-audience-interactive installations and painted work that merge the rational and the dream state.

Scott Meskill
As a sculptor and painter, Meskill explores the concepts of limitations, obstacles, and hope using abstracted figures. Inspired by artists such as Alberto Giacommetti and Francis Bacon, he often focuses on figurative gestures expressing heavy emotional circumstances.

Nancy Kay Turner
Turner’s work ranges from evocative sepia toned collages to mixed media based in memorabilia. With a graceful focus on unusual materials, she often subjects them to outdoor elements and time, shaping unexpected correlations as well as her own artistic innovation.

Jason Jenn
Jenn shapes galvanizing site-specific immersive experiences that entertain, educate, illuminate, and inspire. His work is often designed for exhibition on stage, screen, page, galleries, and special environments, and focuses on reexamining both familiar archetypes and universally appealing topics.

Beth Elliott
Elliott is a multi-media sculptor, installation and performance artist utilizing experimentation and humor as she employs found, repurposed, and natural materials in a focus on environmental issues. Inspiring viewers to interact with her work and expand creative possibilities is always her goal.

Diane Cockerill
As a photographic artist, Cockerill creates meticulous images of nature and street photography with a compelling eye for composition, color, and finding the magic in any subject. She juxtaposes visuals poetry with thematic elements from gritty cityscapes to sea and desert vistas.

Bruce Cockerill
Photographic artist Bruce Cockerill is drawn to images of nature and light that delight and surprise. His lyric work is subtly subversive and always elegant in approach.

Angelica Sotiriou
Sotiriou shapes a personal journey of uncovering and revealing transcendent pathways and spirit. Her multi-layered contemplative abstract works always find and follow the light. As she says, she witnesses voyeuristic conversations exchanged between her mind, heart, and hand.

Linda Sue Price
Price creates mixed media neon sculpture using abstract shapes bent free form without a pattern, making each shape unique. Her interest is in how people make sense of the world, in which change is the only constant, and how our response to it alters our lives.

Snezana Saraswati Petrovic
Petrovic’s exciting multimedia work features an emphasis on plastic, bioplastic, found objects, 3D printing, video, and augmented reality. The stunning and intimate worlds she creates of radiant flora and fauna all begin with her observations of nature and research of symbolic meanings.

Eileen Oda
Oda’s vibrant work is infused with her lifelong love of nature, shaping art that expresses and shares her passionate and spiritual view of the world. From colored pencil to large-scale oil paintings and 3D-canvas exsculpaintings, she crafts a sweeping yet intimate world both impressionistic and realistic, as an expression of the soul.

David Isakson
Welds, joins materials, makes humorous deconstructions out of everyday objects, and has created video footage that reveals his inventive, self-taught work.

Nancy Voegli-Curran
Curran creates abstract sculptures, drawings, and paintings derived from chance events and forces found in the natural world. A vortex, a tangle of unruly vines, water carving its own path through rocks - all provide a framework with which to explore process and materiality.

Genie Davis
As exhibition curator, Davis brings an exciting collection of museum-exhibited artists to this exhibition, one that will provide a radiant art experience for both collectors and viewers. She curated last year’s Thresholds at Gallery of Hermosa, 2023’s Leaving Eden at Keystone Art Space, and is also an arts writer and publisher at https://www.diversionsla.com/, a creative writer and journalist, who as a curator, believes that the voice of the artist is the most important element in any exhibition.