Walkthru and Artist Talk with Merion Estes at Gallery Anais
Walkthru and Artist Talk with Artist MERION ESTES and gallerists ANNA MELIKSETIAN and SHOMAIS GHASSEMI
SCWCA tour and artist's talk on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 to welcome Galerie Anaïs at Bergamot Station.
Galerie Anaïs at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica features emerging and mid-career local artists. The debut show "Lost Horizons" features new works by Los Angeles painter Merion Estes. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Betty Ann Brown.
In her Lost Horizons series, Estes deploys her considerable technical skills as a painter, her collagist delight in patterns, and her passionately engaged feminist politics to mix visual seduction with ecological warnings. The paintings offer fragments of found Chinese calendar landscapes and deliberately artificial depictions of nature with surrealistic juxtapositions of plants, creatures, events and even disasters. Painterly effects, downloaded photos and various drawing fragments are interwoven into the mix to summon a new natural reality that is part pure beauty and part the evidence of decay and destruction.
Estes takes the title of her series from the 1937 film Lost Horizon, a fable about a group of travelers who find Shangri-la, a utopian society in the Himalayas. Romantic and nostalgic, the film combined shots of a set constructed in Burbank with black and white documentary footage of an actual avalanche in China. Much like Estes’ paintings, Lost Horizon merged images of nature suffering destruction with fabrications of the world as we yearn to see it.
RSVP to AvingerNelson@scwca.org by Monday, Sept. 28th. Event is open to members and non-members alike.
About the Artist
Merion Estes was born in Salt Lake City, received her MFA at the University of Colorado, Boulder and has exhibited to constant acclaim since her arrival in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. Her many one-person shows include a five-year survey at the Municipal Art Gallery and a 2006 retrospective exhibition at Pomona College Museum of Art.
About the directors of Galerie Anaïs
Anna Meliksetian is an art historian and art writer who has been involved in the local art scene for the past 15 years. Her background working in various galleries, as a college instructor and writer has culminated in this dream of having her own gallery. Shomais Ghassemi has been involved in the international art world while living in London and Tehran. She has recently returned to Los Angeles after 18 years of living abroad and is excited about launching a gallery in her hometown. Both women are now seeing their vision of a gallery of contemporary art come together at this wonderful space at Bergamot Station.
