Mar 31, 20173 min read

Dan Callis and Tina Linville at Jason Vass

Ready to See. Installation view. Tina Linville and Dan Callis. Photo Courtesy of Jason Vass Gallery.

The Power of Play: Ready to See at Jason Vass

By Sydney Walters

Through April 15th

Presented by Jason Vass on the east side of the Los Angeles arts district, Ready to See is a new art exhibit featuring the work of Dan Callis and Tina Linville. These Los Angeles based artists pair beautifully within the open gallery space to infuse a spirit of play and humor within a highly calculated playground.

Dan Callis, an abstract painter and graduate from Claremont Graduate University, always allows bits of his under-paintings to peek through. The final and most seen images are only possible via working through and building up a complex color field. Leaning toward the Harold Rosenberg’s “action painting principle,” Callis’s work documents just as much action as meditation. In his cycle of construction and deconstruction, his paintings exist in a state of becoming. These paintings are reflections of the human experience. We are the composite parts of our experiences and memories. In this sense, Callis adopts these paintings as time capsules. In “I’ll meet you (in the morning),” light pink paint curves to resemble a house or gateway. Under this structure, a light blue line meanders on a beige color block. A bulge in the line and tendrils at the ends suggest a corporeal presence. With consideration to the title, “I’ll meet you (in the morning),” Callis suggests that this meeting ground is at the threshold of a doorway, a common metaphor for passiong into a new season. Covert symbols and codes like these are disguised like childlike abstractions. These abstractions generate ample space for engagement and conversation.

Meanwhile, Tina Linville, an MFA graduate in the fibers department at California State University, Long Beach, is preoccupied with masking the ordinary in order to disrupt the immediacy of recognition and subsequently interpretation. These dazzling sculptures are crafted with clever use of material and robust intuition. She conjures landmarks of fabric and found objects into constellations of invention. She has truly adapted the anti-consumerist mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle. Object such as shoes, army men, and tennis balls are glued together by a myriad of fabric such as mesh and nylon and yarn. Most of her standing sculptures have concrete, a pipe or bucket as their base. This serves a logistical purpose for grounding the sculptures, but it is also creates an industrial contrast to the flamboyant outer wear of her pieces. Beads, netting, sequins, and pom-poms adorn these amassed sculptures. Seperated from the whole, these objects revert to their utilitarianism purpose. Prioritzing form over function, Linville crafts a provocative maze of visual excitement.

Ready to See embraces a multi-meaning script. Are the pieces finally ready to be seen after laborious production, or is Ready to See a hopeful request that viewers should enter the gallery with determinate eyes? In either case, attention to detail coupled with a willingness to engage with these pieces allows these artist’s dexterity for play to command viewer’s imagination.

Jason Vass is located at 1452 E 6th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021

Hours Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm