The Loft at Liz’s features its formidable lineup of top artists
for their exhibit with a ‘primary’ focus.
The show is simply titled “RED”.

Since the dawn of man we have been driven to create. The color we first chose to work with was indeed, RED.  This oft-intense color defines so much of our creative world, evoking significant emotional responses and representing a vast array of iconic references from passion, warmth and love to blood, violence or tyranny. Red sells political propaganda. It empirically tells us to stop, to take warning.

This group exhibition features a number of renowned visual artists.
With a variety of works on canvas, featured installations and sculptural pieces, guests were exposed to a sensory experience that can only be described as all encompassing.  Featuring a juxtapose between the abstract and the figural, RED offers a diverse and beautiful collection of works.

FEATURING ORIGINAL WORKS BY

Andy Moses, Anna Dusi, Bendow, Mike Street,
Brad Howe, Cielo Pessione, Danny First,
Elana Kundell, Hacer, Jennifer Dozier,
Miles Regis, Richard Turner,
Kenneth Ober, Hadi Salehi
Phil Tarley and Robert Tahar

The works of Andy Moses draw you in with gorgeous waves of color and serene energy.  His concave and convex canvasses offer unique points of viewing, directing the eye in a spectral journey of sorts allowing light to alter the viewer’s perspective and accentuate the finest details.  His atmospheric effects and layering techniques put forward an organic sense of flow and distinctively topographical nature.  Capturing light and motion that transcends traditional landscapes, Andy Moses’ work expands into new horizons and crosses genres with eloquence and seeming ease.

Miles Regis works for RED are visual jazz.  Their free-form radiance and abstraction of both color and movement bring an igniting spark to high-test fuel on canvas.  His choice of painting on red canvas offers a lush backdrop to his figurative characters defined by shades in black and white.  With a style reminiscent of master painters such as Basquiat, Pollock, Gauguin, Dali and Rivera, Miles’ imagination is saturated with notions, ideas, and images, reflective of a world filled with conflicting interests.  The Trinidadian-born painter’s work can be found in the collections of CCH Pounder (Avatar, The Shield), Nicolette Sheridan (Desperate Housewives), American Rag Cie, Senegal’s La Musee Borindar, Isaiah Washington (Grey’s Anatomy) and in several art communities around the country and throughout the world.

Featured (right) is “Blood (Inside Of Me Is Inside Of You)” 26″x33″ mixed media on red canvas.

Robert Tahar brings deep emotion to life on his canvas.  Clear are the influences of luminaries Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg and Eugene Delacroix but his visual summary comes from Tahar’s own timeless sense in capturing beauty and color.  The movement of his works indicates a brush not simply connecting, but dancing upon the surface of his canvas.  With resounding passion and exuberance, Robert Tahar’s paintings are a celebration in visual medium.  Featured (left): “I Wish You Were Here” (dedicated to Steve Jobs)  50″x20″ oil on canvas.

A native New Yorker, now living in Los Angeles, Phil Tarley‘s video work was exhibited in The Guggenheim Museum in 2000 and a thirty hour oeuvre has been acquired by the permanent archives of The New York Public Library. Tarley’s photography and stories have been published in Newsweek, The LA Weekly, Genre and Adventure Journal, among others. His student film, nominated for an Academy Award aired on PBS.  His photographs, videos and films have been featured in festivals, galleries and private collections around the world.

Tarley began studying photography at City College of San Francisco’s Photography Laboratory, where he became intrigued by the kinetic power of cinematography.  The artist studied creative writing and received his B.A. in Film and Drama from San Francisco State University.  He is a Cinematography Fellow of The American Film Institute.  Featured (right): Water Wench – 14″x19″ Metallic print assemblage embedded in distressed aluminum (edition of 13).



Iranian-born artist Hadi Salehi brings a new voice to an iconic image.  His 40″ square work entitled “CHE in my MIND” incorporates a stunning mix of both modern and traditional media formats.  The original image, captured from vintage film and digitally re-processed with an incorporation of hand lettering and other elemental mixed media, offers a sharply distinctive and emotionally supercharged portrait of the famed revolutionary.  Many of Salehi’s works feature a cohesive bond between past and present, through manipulated re-workings of his original Polaroid and Russian Lubitel photographs that he has shot over the duration of his long-standing photographic career.    Salehi continues actively making short films and exhibiting works in galleries throughout the Los Angeles area.

Elana Kundell’s artwork is inspired by the senses, and by thoughts and emotions interwoven in moving color. These oil paintings on panel are often influenced by music. The colors appear to shift, their complexity and subtlety unfolding over time like the sky around a setting sun. There is space, emptiness…a place of nothingness where we dissolve into being. And there are bursts of color, dense, thick and concentrated – zesty moments of life that linger in the imagination.

Elana studied art at the University of California at Santa Cruz and in Bologna, Italy at the Accademia di Belle Arti. She has been the recipient of several grants and has shown artwork throughout California and in Korea. Her work lives in numerous private collections as well as in the collection of the University of California Study Center in Bologna, Italy. She is currently an Artist-In-Residence at Studio Channel Islands Art Center in Camarillo, CA. Featured (above): Submerging Naked #44, #48, #49 – Each is a 6″ square oil on wood panel.

Richard Turner, a Los Angeles native, lived his formative years in the 9th council district in the shadow of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Natural history.  As an art major he co-founded the Black Fine Arts Forum, a college campus organization that encouraged the participation of minorities in art department curriculum. In the mid 1970s Richard set his sights on the motion picture industry as a career. This pursuit eventually led him to realize a solid position as a cameraman for the major motion picture studios for over thirty years.  Over the past decade, Richard Turner has resumed his passion for non collaborative creative pursuits full time.   Whether it be painting, assemblage, sculpture, or installation Turner attempts to portray life’s side effects; the little noticed and subconscious doings of life.  Featured (left): Red Dream 72″x48″ acrylic and ink on canvas.



Danny First – “Despite being influenced by some giants (Giacometti, Hans Josephson, Jean Dubuffet), I do not bring these masters to mind when I am actually working.  They are in my mind, somewhere, lurking, but they don’t speak loudly when I sculpt – they just watch over the process.  The heads I create are not referential, are not abstractions – they are actual beings.  Just like parents do not get to instill their children with the qualities of their heroes upon birth, neither do I get to bring anything more to bear on my sculptures than my own self, the day and the materials at hand.  Anything else is extraneous.”

Featured (right): Jennifer 15″x15″x24″



Jennifer Dozier brings her prowess with fabric to RED.  Dozier offers a unique installation of exquisitely draped fabrics to our featuring of “RED”.  With works on canvas as well as her projects room installation, the artist imagines the possibility of freezing the process of the psyche in a single moment or snapshot. By twisting, wrapping and pulling fabric, she expresses the tension of the interaction between infinite outside stimulus and internal programming. The sensory input bombarding the mind at any given moment reacts and intertwines with old thought patterns, karma, emotion, desire. By covering the entire space, she places the viewer inside her representation, inviting them to glimpse the awkwardness, grace, beauty and contradiction of continually evolving human consciousness.



Anna Dusi‘s series “Il Segno”

The mark is my footprint imprinted on paper, a plot full of feelings sometimes slightly mentioned, barely captured yet indelible, intense, visceral.  My mark is a thread that ties and loosens emotions and every subtle change of the heart is noticed and pinned down.

My journey opens to a white paper, it starts with a line that  tends to gold, then presses the red, the black outlines the figures that interweave, that approach and drift apart with discretion and the dots spread out gently in the space, without disturbing.

But the red has a powerful meaning in my art and my life, because is the first color perceived by the eyes of the children… (click here for the artist’s full statement)



Artist Hacer is an origami master, expanding well beyond the simplicity of paper.  Powder coated steel and anodized aluminum bring his marvelous creatures to life.  His new work “Red For The Sake Of Red” (featured left) takes more of a deconstructive and minimalist approach to his usual figurative works.



Brad Howe is a Los Angeles based artist who began his sculpture career in Brazil. As a student of International Relations at Stanford University, he attended the University of Sao Paulo to specialize in Brazilian Affairs, which led to the discovery of art and architecture. His first exhibitions were in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. To date he has exhibited in over sixteen countries worldwide and his work is in collections in over 32 countries.  In September of 1999, the book “SERIOUS EXUBERANCE” was published internationally, examining over ten years of Howe’s work.

Brad Howe’s most recent works include a continuing series of monumental sculpture commissions for the City of Los Angeles, M.I.T. in Cambridge, MA, the Georgia International Convention Center and an eighteen foot stainless steel sculpture for a corporate client in Biberach, Germany. He also maintains a schedule of international exhibitions, most recently, in France and Germany.

Born in Rome Italy in 1959, artist Cielo Pessione completed her University studies with a degree in Modern Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome. She specialized in “Spectacle” with a thesis on the Harlequin (Arlecchino) of Dario Fo, after having followed the company on tour in 1985 as a result of being awarded a grant.  Since 1983 she has worked as a designer and fiber arts artist, exhibiting in numerous exhibitions of printmaking and fiber arts, completing textile installations and scenographic sets, creating wearable objects for fashion shows and collaborating with costume makers from theater, television and the movies.

Featured (above): Calliope – Heart in Venezia 7″ x 8.5″ Fiber jewel in linen, venetian glass

Mike Street offers up his latest string drawing series for RED.  “We live in a world of perceivable colors and spectral light.  Colors have carried meanings and feelings throughout man’s existence.  The primary color RED is one of the most dramatic.  Within my submission of artwork, I created an ecologically responsible sub-series of endangered and exterminated animal species.  For those pieces, RED is symbolic of caution or danger.  It can also represent the blood of reckless slaughter without being unpleasant.  All of my RED work demonstrates a personal fascination with words, type, and wordplay along with the images.”







The work of Bendow often plays with symmetrical structure, twisting and turning with microcosmic detail within worlds internal.  Venerated structures house a flood of emotion, encapsulated and tidily placed within cupboard-like shrines.  Bendow builds around the simplicity of the line, with raw tribal power yet intricate, modern and balanced.  His sandblasted glass works, currently featured in the gallery, offer a new dimensionality to his style and technique.

Featured (above left): Reaching Abundance Red 18″ x 13 & 3/8″ Screen print on paper
Featured (above right): Transparency 8″ x 10.5″ x 2.5″ Sandblasted glass