Beginning of the End

Douglas Cason / Dion Macellari / Heath Quiel / Visible Damage /

Myah London-Harwell / Juri Umagami / Bruce Parker / Annette Hassell

La Luz de Jesus Gallery is excited to start the
new year with eight artists curated from our annual
Everything But the Kitchen Sink 2024 Exhibition.

This exhibit opens Friday, January 3rd with an opening reception from 7 to 11pm.
The exhibition runs until February 2nd.

Dion Macellari

Having grown up in New York City in a family of artists, Dion Macellari was schooled early with opinions on what makes for great art from an old school of thought. Macellari deviated from this to more low brow inspiration: Frank Frazetta, Jack Kirby, Robert Crumb. Creating a style borrowed liberally from pulp sci-fi illustration and pop art.

This series is a dialogue about transformation. Dion Macellari describes himself as holding on tightly to the past and floating in ambivalence; “The entities in these paintings are my surrogates: seeking or not seeking answers, they are there, gazing.”

Juri Umagami

Inspired by her experience teaching classical art to young students at Kline Academy, Juri Umagami satirizes the disconnect between today’s youth and traditional art in my work. Her paintings often juxtapose contemporary teenage cultures and behaviors with the subjects and compositions of Old Master paintings. While her theme carries weight, She infuses each painting with a sense of whimsy and humor to create a playful incongruity that makes classical art more accessible and relevant to viewers.

Annette Hassell

Annette Hassell’s paintings came about from her lifelong
interest in supernatural creatures and in magical stories. Her narratives are very personally based, but many connect with her nostalgic, surrealist approach to choosing her symbolic figures.
Annette uses saturated colors and a sense of whimsy to paint snapshots of scenes perceived out of the corner of her eye. Her paintings exist in a place just far enough removed from the everyday, balancing between the mystical and the liminal. Asking her viewers to get close to the boundary, and enter her dark fantasy world.

Heath Quiel

In the know artist Heath Quiel enjoys bringing the satirical tone of internet humor into a bigger zeitgeist within classical painting. Painting pet portraits five days a week to pay rent then painting memes on the weekends to make life enjoyable is a hallmark of Quiel’s portfolio.

Douglas Cason

These works exhibiting at La Luz de Jesus by Doug Cason is a continuation of the series previewed at our Kitchen Sink exhibition in 2024. In this series, Cason explores the bizarre socialization of sexuality and romance through comical failures of the icon of love, cupid.

Myah London-Harwell

Born in Connecticut, earned an BFA and eventually relocated to Southern California, Myah London-Harwell creates narrative works mesh-mashing twee graphic colors and patterns with vintage aesthetics. Many of her series revolve around larger stories often relating to memory, loss, community and communication.

3:30am standing outside a motel west of Denver with my husband clutching my 2 year old. No sign of him, being such an ungodly hour should have brought some tranquility to that half empty parking lot but instead it had an uneasy energy including a manchild on top of a Buick with the windows down. I had an awful realization. “Do you think we will ever go back”? “Of course we will”. We never did. Behind me, a fire on its way to growing to 200,000 acres I hadn’t even noticed until that moment, all my attention taken by the insidious danger that had been to my door that night.The three of us left that motel the next morning, it was raining ash, the mountains were pink / orange, and our clothes stunk like the motel and cheap chemical soap. I don’t know who the person was in that car with my husband and daughter that morning, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t the silly woman who cracks up at Reductress memes, or spent years nesting and building a house for my daughter. I was wearing a mask, so that I could be anything. In that moment I was simply someone that didn’t want to die, hitting the open road buckled up with no destination and starting what ended up being a love story (kind of).

Bruce Parker

Bruce Parker is an artist and woodworker. Growing up in North East England, Parker spent many hours watching films and cartoons whilst drawing his favorite characters. His style further honed through an education on animation and illustration.
His work is often character driven and they range from human, animal, something in between or further beyond. Bruce’s art is a chaotic, euphoric, nostalgic trip littered with memorabilia and iconography. After being diagnosed as autistic late in life, Bruce continues to gain acceptance and understanding of his neurodivergence while exploring and expressing his unique perspectives through his art.

Visible Damage

Visible Damage (a.k.a. VSBLDMG) is a self-taught artist, based in Northern California using mixed media to create a visual language of skulls, strange beings, shapes and symbols, summoning viewers into his creative world.