Lydia Takeshita Legacy Series: Exhibit 1

October 23rd–November 30th, 2020

Virtual Opening: Friday, November 13th, 7pm

To Rsvp: https://www.eventbrite.com/x/lydia-takeshita-legacy-exhibit-series-1-opening-reception-tickets-128439637413

To make an appointment:

Email: laartcorepress@yahoo.com , Call: (310) 598-8867

Installation of Lydia Takeshita Legacy Series: Exhibit 1 at Union Center for the Arts, Little Tokyo

Exhibiting Artists:

Reneé Amitai 

Michael Chang

Edem Elesh

Velda Ishizaki

Al Longo

Chiyomi Taneike-Longo

Midge Lynn

Ann Phong

Mike Saijo

Nancy Uyemura

Liang Zhang

LA Artcore is pleased to present its first in a series of six exhibits honoring the legacy of LA Artcore’s pioneering founder and director, Lydia Takeshita (1926-­‐‑2019). Takeshita left an exhibition program that extends into the fall of 2021. Lydia Takeshita Legacy Series reconstitutes its former Director’s exhibits into a series of several group exhibits while adding artists who are previously unscheduled into its exhibit program.

The series of six exhibits will continue through the summer of 2021, as a celebration of artistic output in the Los Angeles arts community in the midst of the Covid-­‐‑related lockdown. In a gesture of continuity and community the Lydia Takeshita Legacy Series is both bridge to its past, and a guide for its future. The public is invited by appointment and encouraged to email laartcorepress@yahoo.com to schedule a free visit.

Lydia Takeshita Legacy Series: Exhibit 1, honors its 11 artists whose paintings, works in mixed-­‐‑ media, and sculpture are framed around the edges of post-­‐‑lockdown life.

Renée Amitai explores abstraction through repeated motifs and experimentation between physical and optical space. Amitai’s works on silk organza and on canvas were created in the early days of the lockdown and whose physical and visual levity lay in stark contrast to an era marked by uncertainty.

The mixed-­‐‑media works of Michael Chang trace social histories and collective memories of revolutions in Taiwan and China through the “scarcity of accessible images.” Chang uses his own photos and those in popular culture to not only reflect shared experiences of historical events, but to critique the way in which historical narratives can be manipulated through “erasure, censorship, and revisionism.”

The visionary mixed-media works of Edem Elesh thread autobiography and imagination, and reflect themes on the sustainability of civilization. The works Mnemonica MMXX and Anthropocene Stairway serve as field notes from Elesh’s numerous international travels as an invited artist with the Thai Art Council, Department of Culture Salerno and Agerola, Rijeka National Museum, Department of Cultural Affairs Naknhon Sawan, Ministry of Culture Danang among many others. Elesh’s travels began with an opportunity to join the 2008 Japan/LA Artcore Exchange Show by Lydia Takeshita, and the artist’s experiences with diverse cultures have significantly influenced his retro-futuristic vision of humanity and civilization.

The paintings of Velda Ishizaki coincide with LA Artcore’s Artist Spotlight feature on its website. The works evidence the development of the artist’s abstract formal language during the Covid-­‐‑19 lockdown. Ishizaki’s painting process unfolds as a series of irregular geometrical shapes expressed in line, contour, shape, and color. The artist’s transforming of visual boundaries to generate continual visual dialog is an expression of the nonlinear nature of the creative process.

The paintings of Al Longo enmesh themselves in unconventional representations of landscape. In expanding the conventions of the language of representation, Longo challenges what a representational painting can be through the construction of altered spaces, colors, mark-­‐‑ making, shapes, and forms.

The mixed-­‐‑media paintings of Chiyomi Taneike Longo maps multiple dialogs of the relationships between nature and the built environment. The artist’s command of formal language and expressions of complexity are expressed in ink–or industrial–spillages, bisected– or parceled-­‐‑off–compositions, marks-­‐‑as-­‐‑journey’s taken, areas–or territories–burnt, printed matter–or meaning–that is waterlogged, images that surface–or become salvageable, and geometries–or structures–that hold impossibly. Taneike’s abstracting paintings utilize formal language to totalize the consequential relationships between nature and humanity.

The paintings of Midge Lynn recall religious paintings in the way they use representational imagery symbolically for sublime effect. Lynn’s approach to pairing objects of interest together like figures, birds, and clothing invite narrative immediacy and interpretation.

Water is the central theme in the paintings of Ann Phong, and is represented as the source of danger when the tides are high, a space of calm, a vehicle for reconciling the past, or an object of concern as it becomes threatened by a culture of industrial runoff and pollution. Phong’s works are both textural and optical, blending found objects and refuse together in swirling gestural arrangements. The artist’s paintings convey extremes of scale in their pictorializing of manmade objects within masses of Earth.

The works of Mike Saijo incorporate portraiture on photocopied media. Through the relationship of text and image, the artist examines reading as both an equally visual and cerebral act.

The five paintings on view of Nancy Uyemura showcase a career of formal experimentation, technical and conceptual investigation. A pioneering artist of Downtown’s Arts District, Uymeura’s singular vision maps not only her identity as a Japanese-­‐‑American, but of her place within the history of American painting. Conceived in the 1990’s, Uyemura’s Folded Paintings utilize the aesthetics of origami as an interface with Western-­‐‑centric modes of abstraction. The artist’s Kimono Paintings further extend Modernism as a culturally plural phenomenon.

The sculptural installation of Liang Zhang is composed of numerous ceramic elements detailing a typical Chinese feast. Each element is painstakingly sculpted of stoneware, painted and fired. Zhang’s work comments on the implications of communal gatherings during the lockdown.