WORKS

“Nothing but a long street in search of a parking lot.” So a New York Times writer, reviewing Neil Simon’s 1976 play “California Suite,” scoffs about Los Angeles. This summer La Loma Projects offers a counterpoint: “California Suite” gathers new works by L.A.-based artists Kim Fisher, Lecia Dole-Recio, and Nora Shields, all of whom grapple, in mood and material, with the ironies and pleasures of California. The group show opens June 22.

Kim Fisher’s Los Angeles is all dreamy yearning and heat. From afar, her paintings look like traditional cut-and-paste work, scraps and found pieces of vintage magazines stuck onto canvas. Closer inspection reveals a meticulous practice of airbrushed oil paint on aluminum, then adhered to linen supports. Fisher’s approach challenges the bounds of paint and collage. Applying masonry stucco to build shapes on her painting supports, she brings the rich materiality of the city into her pieces. At their grand scale, the finished paintings highlight the minute elements of magazine clippings, the airbrush enticing and evoking a high-gloss glamor.

Lecia Dole-Recio is also a hybrid artist of painting and collage, they have a graphic sensibility all California–spontaneous, ludic, joyous, full of shapely repetition. Their kaleidoscopic constructions are slashing riots of color (red, purples, slate blues) and materials. Dole-Recio’s paintings are constructions of layered cardboard, dirt, vellum, gouache, and homemade natural dyes, drawn and painted over and over. Dole-Recio’s process paintings ask what it means to start and end a work, as one work’s cutouts inevitably appear in the next work. Some feature rescued scraps of cardboard and paper from their studio floor, bearing months of paint smears, drops, and splatters. The grid is transformed from utilitarian rigidity to a platform of expression, where Dole-Recio’s shapes adhere to, disobey, and flow with it. Through this method of reuse and recycling, cutting out and layering, Dole-Recio forges a continuum between the past and present, old and new.

Nora Shields joins the industrial with the boutique, the hard and the soft, in works of eccentric abstraction. Shields manipulates heavy materials like metal, concrete, and stone into graceful wall pieces. She often works with drapery as a form, converting unrefined, organic, and pliant elements into unified expressions. In “You Are the Breeze,” industrial materials like perforated steel are painted vibrant pink, and black ribbon flows through holes punched into a piece of sheet metal. These machine-made objects are bent in such a way to cast delicate shadows on surfaces, allowing the light and surrounding environment to act on the work’s final construction. Her automotive and hand painted finishes signal the lingua franca of Los Angeles.

Kim Fisher’s stucco recalls the iconic siding of Los Angeles homes and the grainy sand of the beaches. Lecia Dole-Recio, a skateboarder in their youth, redefines structure and movement in their works, while pushing the limits of what’s possible in painting. Nora Shields’ bold steelwork is reminiscent of a Pacific Design Center postmodernism. To borrow again from the NY Times review of Simon’s “California Suite”: the sun has not addled their brains or dimmed their wit.