Bandini Art Gallery - Culver City, CA

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detail, Every Pont Inside, 2007 collage with teabag paper in Riker Mount 14 1/4" x 21 3/8" x 1"	Melinda Smith Altshuler Using the skeletons of old books, bones, tree branches, and ghostly sepia-toned photo etchings of houses, Altshuler’s work invokes nostalgia, mystery, and a sense of wistful romance. In her sculptural work she creates black armatures supporting delicate skin-like membranes that serve as conduits for the play of light and shadow. Altshuler’s work is tender, fragile, and gracefully refined.
Adagio/Andante, 2006 graphite, pigment, acrylic, ink and glitter on panel 30” x 30” (photo: Jeremy Kidd)	Sharon Ben-Tal Ben-Tal’s work weaves an intricate web of painted skeins of lyrical lines that offer a bird’s-eye view of an urban sprawl in which streets, alleyways, corridors, and waterways merge. Below this delicate tangle of lines breathes a richly-worked monochromatic background whose minimal texture broaches a life of its own. Like velvet flypaper, this diaphanous surface absorbs feelings, tickles intellects, and then shrouds itself in mystery.
Tendril, installation detail, 2007 torn paper size variable	Castillo Castillo’s work embraces the peculiar sacredness of our relationship with hair. Legends, rituals, folktales, identities, DNA sampling, stereotypes, value, sacredness, care and attachment are centered on our hair. Semiotically coded, hair as a metaphor embodies its power to both attract and repulse, value and devalue, or become unrecognized weaponry. Castillo challenges the ideal of hair by presenting it larger than life and in unconventional forms. Oppositional tensions are created when the familiar is viewed unfamiliarly.
Boogeyman, 2004 mixed media 19" x 8"	Ashley McLean Emenegger Ashley’s art is about longing, an indescribable yet pervasive desire that does not have a specific remedy or definition. It is a tangible way for her to speak to the individual and collective unknown, to console that which haunts the soul and cherish that which makes us human. Using organic materials and antique photographs, she assembles borrowed sepia-toned memories, distant yet familiar ancestries, and sensations that have yet to be articulated in hazy dream vignettes laden with codes and clues.
Multiplicity, 2007 cast white glue size variable	Mitra Fabian Mitra’s art often appears as aberrant growths and it is unclear whether these “organisms” are benign or malignant. They straddle that elusive line between beautiful and grotesque, asking when and where one becomes the other. She uses common, household tape as a skin – transforming the artificial, throwaway product, into something seemingly natural. This serves as a commentary on the increasingly modified condition of humans, which pits nature against culture and blurs the line between organic and manufactured.
One Hundred Billion, 2006 acrylic on canvas 42" x 42"	Susan Holcomb Susan’s luxurious nightscape paintings explore our perception of the real world as we strive for cognition of the infinite unknown. In her work, the overlay of various diagrammatic identifiers illustrates our efforts to define the indefinable in order to reconcile our existence within its complexity. Susan’s dark seas mirror the universe, constantly reflecting back the mystical infinity as we gauge our significance at its shores.
Unknown and Unbound, 2008 Mixed media on panel 41” x 36”	Bryan Ida By building layers of disparate organic and abstracted images in fields of what looks like swirling and undulating primal matter, Ida creates resounding depth, harmony, and energy between medium and form, composition and movement.
Hair Mare II, 2007 horse hair on canvas 36” x 48”	Robin McCauley In her latest work Robin has jettisoned her former penchant for the found object, relinquishing an ironic and casual vernacular. Her work now reflects her interest in the unexpected relationship between a minimal shape and a process that is very labor-intensive. She is revisiting formal structure, but rather than Spartan quotation, this new construct reveals a passion for the anthropomorphic and the absurd. She is interested in morphing the man-made structure with an unexpected addition: hair.
Scratched to the Sun, 2005 encaustic and rope on panel 32" x 24"	Shauna Peck Working with encaustic and cast bronze, Shauna’s paintings, sculptures, and installations contend with issues of freedom and strength. Her work romanticizes themes associated with the simplicity of her subjects, expressing both their common and precious qualities. Her materials combine smooth, sensual, almost ethereal qualities with rooted, earthy imagery, imbuing the work with an eloquent resonance.
Miss, 2007 watercolor on paper 24" x 18"	Paul Pitsker The miniscule heroes and victims in Paul’s paintings are depicted in tableaus suggestive of moments of impending doom. They dramatize life and death struggles taking place in and around his studio, revealing the hidden beauty and pathos of a world that is all too often overlooked. Much of Paul’s work is concerned with moments of heightened awareness; an epiphany or déjà vu.
Untitled, 2006 pencil, water-based paint media on paper 52" x 74"	Laura Ricci Ricci’s whimsical, post-apocalyptic landscapes delight in imagining a new ecological state where mankind’s rules are superseded and Nature reclaims the environment.
Cone Grove I, for Klimt, 2008 Safety cone, flooring on panel 3' 7" x 4' x 2"	Lana Shuttleworth It is with an incredibly deft grace that Lana carves figures, faces, elephants, and landscapes out of ordinary street cones. Recovered cast-offs of our ‘throw-away culture of commodity’, they are twisted, slivered, stretched, nailed, and knotted to form two and three dimensional images, yet retain their history on their Teflon skins.
08.07.11.1, 2007 steel panel 12” x 12"	Miya Ando Stanoff Utilizing patinas and solvents, grinding and burnishing, Stanoff transforms the steel panel, creating quiet, abstracted landscapes. Her work is the study of subtraction to the point of purity, simplicity and refinement, evoking a sense of serenity and mystery.
detail, Moveable Storm- Nature Memorial series, , 2007 Marble size variable	Elizabeth Turk If man were to become extinct, nature would quickly eradicate any indication of his existence; man’s former impact becoming a hushed rumor buried under roots and riverbeds. Elizabeth Turk’s work takes this notion as its subject, suggesting reverence for the majestic powers and paradoxical fragility of nature. Her multimedia installation, video, graphite drawings on vellum, and delicate marble sculptures give form and inferred expression to the sensations of a world in which man is absent and natures extends itself without constraint. The power, delicacy, and reverberating tremors below the surface in Elizabeth’s work are palpable under her pristine, smooth surfaces.
detail, Hysterical Paradise, 2008 Multi-media installation size variable	Jen Vanderpool Jennifer Vanderpool’s installations are a hybrid of Betty Crocker and the childrens’ game Candyland with a heavy dose of psychedelic and pinch of art world academia. Viewing one of her installations is like standing in a pastry shop in Dorothy’s Oz where all the goodies’ ingredients are purchased from Home Depot. Her studio is her kitchen where she concocts her far-out Bunt and tea cakes out of resin, wax and colored caulking. Jennifer was raised to be an artsy Domestic Goddess, and she wields her wily womanly ways in galleries and museums across the world.
39th and Placid,2007 Acrylic and dye on canvas 52" x 5" x 6.5”	Luke Whitlatch Luke Whitlatch’s paintings translate poignant life passages through formal abstractions on canvas. Melding the real with the abstract, his paintings portray the more esoteric facets of experience. The dichotomy of his hard-edged line work and the free flow of his washes articulates the distinction between the real and the intuited. Exploring and exploiting the full capacity of painting itself, Luke has developed a unique method for the breakdown of imagery.
Perforated # 2, 2004 ink & acrylic on rice paper 8" x 3.5'	Leslie Yagar Individual lives have patterns comprised of the consolidation of moments - positive and negative, charged or docile, momentous and mundane; they come together and drift apart to form the totality of the individual. Yagar’s drawings mimic these patterns through balancing the juxtaposition between the delicacy of the paper, the quiet stain of the ink and paint, and the fierce pinhole gouges that threaten to destroy the solidity of the piece. Like the significant events that reshape the course of our lives, these perforations create a new ebb and flow to the patterns in the drawings, guiding their course and attempting to sustain balance and harmony.