Vicki Berndt "Idle Worship", Dave Dexter "Round Eye and the Switch", Mark Gleason "Darklands"

Vicki Berndt, Dave Dexter & Mark Gleason

May 3 – June 2, 2013
Artist Reception: Friday, May 3rd; 8-11 PM

Vicki Berndt
“Idle Worship”

May 3 – June 2, 2013
Artist Reception: Friday, May 3rd; 8-11 PM

I was born in El Centro, California in 1961. At School, art and photography were my favorite subjects. I made paintings and photos of my favorite rockstars. “I was the singer in a punk band, the Maggots. When I graduated, I moved to the big city. I printed fanzines with my friends. We would sneak backstage and make bands do interviews with us. When my friends needed photos for their bands, I became a rock photographer.”I worked for magazines, too. I also did a book of tattoo photos for Abbeville Press. All along I kept on painting on jackets and for CD’s, and now I make paintings all the time.

– Vicki Berndt

Idle Worship is Vicki Berndt’s second feature exhibition at La Luz de Jesus.

Dave Dexter
“Round Eye and the Switch”

May 3 – June 2, 2013
Artist Reception: Friday, May 3rd; 8-11 PM

I hope that this series of paintings both provides commentary and invokes discourse. I painted a ‘melting pot’ of symbolic politics; the loaded imagery creates a dialogical platform of ‘viewer-friendly realism’ and reductively simple concepts to evoke complex sensations of nostalgia, and (more importantly) trigger conditioned responses to what appear to be racially insensitive depictions. Thus the artwork creates a collectivity of cultural stereotypes involved in a process of exchange and difference. The paintings attempt to recontextualize learned stereotypes in order to foster a safe non-threatening dialogue between viewer and art object.

– Dave Dexter

Too often, out of fear and guilt, we create barriers to open conversation and nueter the creative exploration of our deepest division.

– Herman Shitlips

Round Eye and the Switch is Dave Dexter’s second feature exhibition at La Luz de Jesus.

Mark Gleason
“Darklands”

May 3 – June 2, 2013
Artist Reception: Friday, May 3rd; 8-11 PM

“I’m going to the darklands to talk in rhyme to my chaotic soul”

-The Jesus and Mary Chain

This recent body of oil paintings reflects Mark Gleason’s preoccupation with the human/animal relationship, outsider figures, and the private places that are a cornerstone of his work. He is constantly investigating the body’s potential to express intellectual and emotional concepts.

Gleason likes to cast characters in the mental landscape of his (and our) own interior environments, and to create figures in that place who are seen during crises. Mark’s inspirations probably draw more from literature, cinema, and music than from other painters.

He enjoys the private act of painting as well as the public process of teaching art in the San Francisco Bay area.

Darklands is Mark Gleason’s third feature exhibition at La Luz de Jesus.

 

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