Michele StuevenThe new Kasee’s Art Gallery will debut with its first exhibition, Eruption, featuring artists JMikal Davis, Alejandro Gehry, Bob Landström, and Kasee Shambora and will be on view from Sunday, Nov. 17, through Saturday, Dec. 14.
Eruption brings together four artists united by their approach to color, pattern, and abstraction. Through painting, photography, and mixed media, the works in the exhibition explore the emotional response to color, materiality, and the intersection between constraint and spontaneity.
The artists’ inspirations are split between natural and built environments, yet their color palettes show a shared sensibility, each artist saturating their compositions with bold, contemporary hues. Landström’s volcanic rock paintings and Shambora’s abstracted photographs of nature directly reference transformative phenomena found in the natural world and the sublime, respectively, while Gehry’s abstract paintings and Davis’ patterned spray paint works reflect shapes and geometries often found in the built environment.
Courtesy Kasee’s Art Gallery
Eruptions can take on several forms, from volcanoes to graffiti, and their meanings are channeled in the exhibition through both literal and metaphorical mark-making by these artists in a new gallery space.
JMikal Davis, aka Hellbent, is a muralist, painter, and street artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Davis began making street-based artwork in the late 1990s while still in art school at the University of Georgia.
Born in Santa Monica in 1976, Alejandro Gehry graduated in 1998 with a BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is also a teacher of illustration and painting at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. Gehry has primarily worked in oils on a large scale.
Bob Landström is an artist who primarily works with crushed, pigmented volcanic rock. His abstract paintings, with their highly granulated texture and color combinations only achieved through such a medium, reconsider our relationship with meaning by eliciting the iconography of ancient languages, science, religions, and mysticism.
Kasee Shambora is a Los Angeles-based photographer whose work explores alternative perspectives of the natural world and urban environments. He also works in the film industry as a portrait photographer. He has worked with Elijah Wood, Kal Penn, Vivica A. Fox, Nicolas Cage, Pete Holmes, and many others. He recently opened a new art gallery in the San Fernando Valley.
Courtesy Kasee’s Art Gallery