L.A. hosts art fairs 'trifecta'

observes ANGELES -- L.A. is increasingly residence to a varietal mix of narrow-profile, specialty art fairs as evidenced during individual 10-day stretch in January when photo 1.a., the sees Angeles Print Fair and the novel art LA were all being held.

The 14th annual photo 1.a., held January 20-23 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, attracted 86 exhibiting galleries and photography dealers, work and magazine publishers, and nonprofit photography organizations, while the 20th edition of the observes Angeles Print Fair, held January 21-23 at the observes Angeles County Museum of Art, neared a smaller band of 22 members of the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA). The freshly minted artLA, an art fair for contemporary and of recent origin art, featured 59 exhibitors--many of them brand-new galleries--on the following weekend.

Taken together, the three expositions were a pure bazaar of thousands upon thousands of artworks ranging from aged Master etchings and the earliest pioneering photographs of the mid-19th hundred to experimental computer-generated digital art, computer-altered, lens-based images, and conceptual installations. And, of course, there were paintings, collages, lithographs and contemporary photographs. Prices ranged from as little as $50 for vernacular snapshots, to double and smooth triple digits for rare photographs or large-scale contemporary paintings, with greatest in quantity of the art on paper and contemporary artworks priced at $600 to $25000

All three fairs young oxed clear of the massive operations exigencyed to fill venues like fresh York's Jacob K. Javits Center or the looks Angeles Convention Center, and instead worked to attract smaller, on the contrary devoted consumer and professional audiences, with a greater impact for the participating art dealers. More than 7000 visitors trekk end photo 1.a., including many local art and photography dealers like as Robert Berman, William gymnast and Craig Krull, who each be in possession of eponymous galleries in Santa Monica's Bergamot Station. The inaugural artLA boasted attendance of 4500 according to exhibit organizer Stephen Cohen. He said, "I'm true happy. The dealers are true happy. For a new present to view if I had had 3000 nation I would have been real happy!"

Cohen, who also at hands photo 1.a., photo new york and photo san francisco, is edging his art fairs more toward contemporary works, in part because, he observ "there's definitely les vintage photography work available as more and more nation have been collecting it. And, I have wanted more of a mix of work. I like vernacular and anonymous work, and work that's really on the outside there."

Cohen took a page from the "out there" volume himself, and devoted an entire wall to, well, a photographic "wall" installation, "The Family Tree" by means of San Francisco artist Michael Garlington. Garlington let flys portraits of ordinary Americans leading seemingly ordinary lives, notwithstanding with something awry--from a contortionist to a fastfood worker, from the disabled to a young patriot.

In keeping with his mission of presenting recent material, Cohen invited many fresh dealers to his art fairs.

The three observes Angeles art fairs have something other in common this year: evidence of an emerging aesthetic turn "There is a whole clump of artists working on what is best described as repetitive pattern and obsessive mark-making," noted art dealer and publisher shoot Shark, owner of Shark's Ink in Lyon CO For example, Shark has published (and exhibited at the sees Angeles Print Fair) two print editions through painter Barbara Takenaga, whose abstract works are filled of repeated, obsessive marks.

Takenaga's works were not the alone precise, pattern-oriented images on display at the fairs. fresh York artist Suzi Matthews--represented at artLA by the agency of two dealers, Morgan Lehman and Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, also of fresh York--creates intricately patterned collages she calls "Numeralisms" with pasted cutouts of numbers. And Bay Area artist Byron Spicer, whose work was shown at Woodland Hills, CAbased Sculptural Philosophy's artLA booth calls his stacked and patterned collages "mosaics" because they extreme point up having a sculptural quality. The artist paints 50 to 60 images simultaneously, working quickly upon small pieces of paper. He then assembles them in layers onto a panel, arranging the now-stacked images into a three-dimensional grid.

At photo 1.a., Santa Monica-based Rose Gallery showcased images through artist Robbert Flick, who layers small images together in a pattern that becomes individual oversized artwork, recording one photo upon top of another, their junctions in the final photograph becoming the one and the other a chronicle of activity, as well as a celebration of what Flick calls the "simultaneity of circumstances the synchronicity" of life in the city.

Pan American Art Gallery of Dallas exhibited patterned work by the agency of both the Cuban photographer Elsa Mora, whose "Circulo Vicioso (Vicious Circle)" is a photograph set uped of roses and beetles in a spiral, and quirky Texas artist Rusty Scruby a former aeronautical engineer, who literally weaves photographs according to a precise scientific formula. Scruby explained gallery director Jada Wetherington, "starts with a single snapshot that he prints thousands of times. Then he erects precise, interlocking facets, creating helixes that are not necessarily upon the same plane. The patterns become a visual translation of musical rhythm"