JUAN MUNIZ & JASMINE WORTH with Maryrose Crook, Michael Murphy and Bunnie Reiss

August 5-28, 2016

JUAN MUNIZ & JASMINE WORTH with SPECIAL GUESTS
Maryrose Crook, Michael Murphy, and Bunnie Reiss
August 5-28, 2016

 

Juan Muniz  – Postal

Juan Muniz is the cornerstone of the Las Vegas art community. With murals throughout downtown Vegas and in the Cosmopolitan Casino and Resort Hotel, Juan’s toy-inspired paintings have the flavor of graffiti and the appeal of Disney. His paintings often feature cartoon-like characters wrestling with modern life: intrusive technology, dependency, courage, love, denial, and awareness.

 

Jasmine Worth  – Stigma

Jasmine Worth is a San Diego based oil painter with a purely feminine sensibility within a truly Gothic milieu. Her exhibitions have all sold out since first featuring here at La Luz de Jesus Gallery six years ago following multiple group show inclusions from the seminal Kitschen Sync to Laluzapalooza. It’s not difficult to predict that this exhibition will sell quickly also. Contact the gallery director to be placed on the preview list.

 

 

Maryrose Crook – Nigredo

Maryrose Crook is a self-taught New Zealand artist drawing on traditions of surrealism, still life and folk art creating worlds where beauty and brutality exist in close proximity; and a musician, performing and recording along with husband Brian Crook, as The Renderers . Maryrose has been exhibiting in public and private spaces since 1996, and has work held in collections in New Zealand, the USA, Germany and Australia. She has been the recipient of the Wallace Development Award, one of New Zealand’s most prestigious art awards, and has undertaken numerous artist residencies. She is currently based in Joshua Tree, California, in the Mojave Desert.

“I’m calling the show Nigredo which is a word that describes a state of a being in Alchemy, being the blackness you have to create as an alchemist, you have to burn everything till it’s completely black before you can transmute it, and of course there’s all this psychological stuff about it but I quite like the historical alchemical, the old fashioned Alchemy thing so Nigredo is the blackest of the black, and the next stage is Albedo which is the whitest of the white.

The reason I am interested in Nigredo as a stage of alchemical transformation is that it does feel as if the world is continually lurching into darkness, a perpetual state of Nigredo, but unfortunately never moving into Albedo, or whiteness, the stage beyond which transmutation is possible. On a personal level coming to the California desert from New Zealand has moved me through a very dark stage of my life, the desert is acting on me in a very deep way that I find hard to put into words.” –Maryrose Crook

There will be four very limited edition, signed Type C prints measuring 16×20 in. each priced $285:

The artist will be performing live with her band, The Renderers, at the opening reception. For more details, click here.

 

Michael Murphy – Desert Layover

Michael Murphy‘s illustrative paintings are inspired by architecture, built and imagined. Formally educated and trained as an architect, he has taken a professional detour and attempted to re-imagine the built landscape via personal design studies and various avenues of rendering.

Murphy is originally from San Francisco and having spent many years living in London, England he developed an acute desire to interpret to the vastness and solitude of the California deserts and to interject it with a personal interpretation of modern architecture and memory.

Upon returning to San Francisco in 2008, Michael continued this endeavor and was able to reabsorb the influences of the built environment around us firsthand, particularly in Southern California, and present his interpretations via varied rendering styles and sometimes scaleless environments coupled with a non-cynical acknowledgment of American consumerism.

 

Bunnie Reiss – All Our Nature

In this world of constant expansion of technology, how do we go back and behave like our true animal selves? How do we continue to go by instinct? To find courage in a time and space where our connection seems to be forced by computer keys and tiny, glowing screens that show us a world that exists behind a pixelated force. This new work is a story of us, of all our nature, of how we can find our brave selves again and come into the beasts that we are, without fear, without hesitation. It is the complicated simplicity of being the human animal, with our abilities to reason ourselves right out of our true nature. I want us to remember before we could remember where our nature came from, how we all lived in harmony, how we survived on the trees, the air, and the soft moss under our hoofs.

Contact Gallery Director Matthew Gardocki for purchase info:
info@laluzdejesus.com  (323)666-7667