Brainworks Gallery Celebrates the Confidence of Her Intuition

By Genie Davis

 

Brainworks Gallery, Her Intuition, curated by the gallery’s own Erin Adams, includes the work of five Los Angeles-based female artists that are in and of themselves a part of an intuitive zeitgeist. Artists Edi Dai, Yasmine Diaz, Margaret Nielsen, Andrea Patrie and Kristine Schomaker take on the idea of intuition: the brain’s ability to draw on internal and external cues to make quick decisions both consciously and unconsciously.

The exhibition includes a wide range of mediums, from oil painting to video installation. While each work is unique, the through-line of the exhibition is that each work is created through the artist’s own personal and intuitive aesthetic.

Andrea Patrie’s large scale oils are full of depth; dream-like swaths of color laid down in thick strokes. At 60 x 60 inches, Patrie’s “Love and Devotion” is a work both vast in size and emotion. The artist lays down deep layers of color which she scrapes away, sands off, or builds upon. Her work shifts from within, as with this piece, which features gorgeous and ghostly female figures layered over a somewhat abstract cityscape. The female figures are soft, pale, graceful; the city harsh and unyielding. As with all Patrie’s works, her process is pure energy; the result edging on bliss.

Edi Dai explores oppression, considers history, and uses a variety of materials to relate her images to the medium. With “Mothers,” the artist uses glitter, thread, cotton, and paint as well as VHS tape to create a beautiful artistic tapestry that is both moving and mesmerizing. Politically charged, this is a vivid large-scale work that shows a brown-skinned and beautiful woman in sunglasses, profile determined, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. She is emblematic of every woman, of the birth of the future. Dai’s “Us” features a young girl sitting on a multi-colored mosaic of tiles: the tiles themselves feel symbolic of a rainbow of people of which the child is one.

Yasmine Diaz creates work as multi-faceted as a diamond, as broken as glass. With a sharply divided image of a queenly woman, or a jigsaw puzzle of a face, the mixed media collages this passionate artist creates are vibrant and kinetic, perfection and precision in fractured images. Her “Reoriented” divides hands from face, using geometric lines to connect these floating, broken yet resilient elements of anatomy.

Margaret Nielsen’s lovely, mysterious work draws viewers into a world that connects the personal with the primordial, the vast with the intimate. Her use of recurring imagery and stunning attention to detail are both on display in her “Scenes from Above” a glowing work that evokes the unconscious, the universe, and a universal sense of wonder. Oil painting on wood, Nielsen gives us two deeply aware eyes standing watch over a swirl of the cosmos.

Kristine Schomaker works with new media, mixed media, and performance, creating mesmerizing works with a unified theme. Exploring identity, gender, the past, the virtual and the real, Schomaker delves deeply into social perceptions of beauty and the value of these perceptions over deeper values of mind and spirit. Deeply moving, Schomaker’s “Losing Weight” combines video footage with jarred memento mori, profoundly moving reinventions of previous artistic works that are the embodiment of artistic mortality. Schomaker’s work is stirring and inventive, restless and vibrating with energy and an unceasing desire for change.

Strong works by powerful women: that’s Her Intuition. And is there anything stronger, stranger, more wonderful and alive than a woman’s intuition? Experience the wonderful art deja vu at Brainworks, located at 5364 W. Pico Blvd. in Los Angeles.

Closed May 27th