Diverted Destruction is back at The Loft at Liz’s.  With our fourth annual installment of this series, we welcome both past and new artists to be featured in this incredible exhibition.  DD4 stays true to its roots, featuring works from castoff materials otherwise often destined for landfill.  Diverted Destruction 4 features the works of artists: Dave Lovejoy, June Diamond, Iva Hladis, Aaron Kramer, Frank Miller, Judith Margolis, Lek Borja, Gordon Chandler, Sandhi Schimmell-Gold and Randall Whittinghill.

Diverted Destruction 4 opens with our reception on Saturday June 18^th (7pm to 10pm) and includes a live artist’s workshop on July 16^th (2pm to 4pm).  This exhibit runs through September 6^th, 2011.

From pit-fired pottery to recyclables and vintage re-appropriation, artist Dave Lovejoy embraces a vast spectrum of raw materials in creating his captivating works.  Part artist, part historian and part mad scientist, Lovejoy creates with a dusting of classic Americana oftentimes evoking a sense of multidimensional time travel within some co-existing alternate universe.

June Diamond transforms the old to new with her contemporary lighting fixtures and functional art, often derived from discarded wine and spirit bottles. Diamond will also be featuring her jewelry designs downstairs at Liz’s Antique Hardware. Over the years she has created and exhibited an extensive body of work, and hundreds of her pieces are held in private collections worldwide.

New works from Czech artist, Iva Hladis, include excerpts from her series “Origins Extinct” which utilizes old computer motherboards and chipsets, botanicals, insects, glass beads, found objects wires and pearls.  Her reverence for the earth and call for ecological balance are clearly depicted in her finely balanced amalgam of the organic and inorganic elements of each work.

Working primarily with recycled materials, Aaron Kramer is noted to have said, “Trash is a failure of imagination.”  Creating from reclaimed hardwoods, old coffee stirrers, strapping material, buttons or old tin cans, Kramer states, “The things I create have an organic soul trapped within a venerated façade.”

Exploring a broad spectrum of art’s history, Frank Miller speaks of his early epiphany with the work of Rembrandt as well as his awe of the work of Richard Serra while mastering his own voice with art that speaks to our contemporary world. Incorporating elements of waste within his acrylic scapes, Miller adheres parts to the surface – mostly plastic and some metal. These parts come from a variety of machinery, which includes VCRs, DVDs, radios, computer keyboards and anything else that has parts that are useful towards his objective.

Hailing from Jerusalem, Judith Margolis finds the nexus point between the political and the spiritual.  Her work is a combined influence of German expressionist figuration, color field expressionism and surrealism / Dadaism. Margolis’ view of life as an unpredictable prankster event results in variations of a three dimensional boxed collage called “the Game of Life” which is, in fact, a playable game with rules. Throughout the duration of the exhibit the artist will set up a studio space in The Loft at Liz’s Projects Room to create new work. In order to maximize viewer participation, she will incorporate into the art, interactions with visitors to the gallery, who are invited to submit their own found images and suggestions for text.  The artist will be in residence three days a week, Tue/Wed/Thurs from 11am to 3pm.

Sculptor and poet, Lek Borja, offers up a statement on human fragility with her series of works created from eggshells.  Her palette is bone white on thin air.  Darkly compelling, this series includes “Ruin”, a revolver fashioned from broken eggshells and “Autobiography”, a cottage home on stilts.

Gordon Chandler:  “I am constantly moving between two extremes: chaos and order. Where there is too much of one I introduce the other. The path between the two is what makes the process interesting to me.”… “I reference our cultural landscape by using materials that others have overlooked. We live in an increasingly disposable world, with an increasing rate of consumption. Broken things are not fixed but rather thrown away. I resurrect these discarded elements and alloy them into sculptural forms. The individual pieces that make up the whole are not immediately recognizable but have an inherent history of other utility. My purpose is to bring new value to these overlooked materials, to create a new form that is greater than just the sum of its parts. I aim to make positive connections between my art and my audience.”

Sandhi Schimmell-Gold creates grand portraiture a la papier collé.  “My work reflects our society’s obsession with beauty through advertising – and the endless images that bombard us daily. It is a purposeful intermix of images derived from advertising and thousands of incongruent pieces – images and text – from advertising that arrives through my mailbox. Assembled like a mosaic; the paper tiles create an entirely new image – an eclectic and tactile portrait reworked in my imagination, utilizing materials that would otherwise go to waste.”

From the wreckage of scrap metal and found objects, artist Randall Whittinghill features his series of fully articulated marionettes. “The majority of my works are made from mechanical, self-wound clocks that were manufactured in the late 1800’s. There’s something about the concept of time coming apart that I find incredibly alluring. I’m fascinated by how things naturally coalesce, and how the work starts to build itself once I find something that fits.…I create these marionettes because I’m curious about people, and I use this medium as a way to communicate.”

As congruous with previous incarnations of Diverted Destruction, Liz will be offering a host of materials from broken hardware to glass, corks, wires, circuit boards, and a plethora of other such castoffs otherwise likely destined for landfill.  We invite our artist friends to incorporate any of these elements to create anew.

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday June 18, 2011 – 7 to 10pm

ARTIST WORKSHOP: Saturday July 16, 2011 – 2 to 4pm

for additional press details or print images please contact our gallery staff
at (323) 939-4403 ext. 6 or e-mail to randi@theloftatlizs.com