Thinkspace presents a video tour and opening recap from this past Saturday’s reception for our April exhibitions. Many thanks to Ezra, Caroline, Delisha and Willem for believing in our team and delivering such strong bodies of work. Big love to all that came through to support!!!
April 1 – April 22, 2023
Thinkspace Projects 4207 W. Jefferson Blvd + 4217 W. Jefferson Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90016
CAROLINE WEAVER A Gummy Wormhole In The Sugar Dimension
DELISHA Sweet Dreams & Beautiful Nightmares
WILLEM HOEFFNAGEL Similarities
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 1 from 6-10pm * First 150 people through the doors will receive a free t-shirt from Ezra Brown
On view April 1 – April 22, 2023
Thinkspace Projects 4207 W. Jefferson Blvd + 4217 W. Jefferson Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90016
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Gallery I:
EZRA BROWN Trying To Keep It Together
Thinkspace Projects is honored to present ’Trying To Keep It Together’, our debut solo exhibition with Ezra Brown. In this exhibit, Ezra encapsulates his many experiences, emotions, and feelings using his character ‘Happy the Clown’ as a reflection of himself to portray his message. His character, ‘Happy’, is often portrayed as the opposite of his name in Ezra’s work, as his image is instead used as a way to cope with events in the world around us today. Ezra encourages the viewer to use his work as a device to tap into their own feelings, and connect on an emotional level.
“My creative process is really simple, I feel something sad and I paint and vice versa. Creative ideas usually come from personal emotions. So in reality I’m sharing my feelings with the viewer through my paintings. It’s sort of a visual diary of my personal thoughts.’ – Ezra Brown
Artist Bio: Ezra Brown is currently based in San Diego, California, where he mainly creates works with acrylics on canvas, as well as some occasional woodworking. He was inspired by his father, also an artist, and felt encouraged to pursue his own artistic career as he studied at the Academy of Art, San Francisco. He hopes to inspire all generations with his art, which he creates from his personal encounters and struggles, encouraging the viewer to relate to these shared experiences.
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Gallery II:
CAROLINE WEAVER A Gummy Wormhole In The Sugar Dimension
Show Statement: Your eyes land on a tossed wrapper, the stars align and you’re down the wormhole. Back in time, where 20 bucks lasted all night and proximity to your crush was life and death.
It’s not nostalgia, more like a Time Dialation Meditation from a made-up religion for Fatalists.
Artist Bio: Caroline Weaver is a self taught oil painter that has been working in and around the Americas for the past decade. Exhibiting in cities and spots along the way such as Portland, Calgary, San Luis Potosi, San Francisco, Vancouver, Montreal and Baja. Countries, regions, cities, towns, neighbourhoods all taking turns to colour her work. Currently residing on the Sunshine Coast, she is attempting to analyze our arcs of actuality and working to expand her view of the forest floor through multiple disciplines.
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Gallery III:
DELISHA Sweet Dreams & Beautiful Nightmares
Show Statement: The “BEAUTIFUL MONSTER” acts as a security blanket to help us navigate life’s problems and tune out the harshness of the world. It’s easier to tune out the judgement, the abuse, the neglect, and doubt while wrapped in the comfort of scarves.
A BEAUTIFUL MONSTER manifested from a cold world, and is also a reminder to embrace fear, because you may find comfort in uncovering what’s really there.
“It’s a cold world, you better bundle up!” – Freeway
Artist Bio: Delisha currently resides on the Westside of Chicago where she creates paintings of child-like perspectives and narratives. Inspired by Bill Watterson’s comics, and the late great Dr. Seuss, Delisha definitely does it for the kids. She speaks of their dreams and nightmares, their potential and their sadness, and would rather view them as “little people sorting out their emotions”, and not just as “children”. Her imagery of children and toys speaks of those experiences hidden in the adult psyche in detail; evoking imagination in us all.
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Gallery IV:
WILLEM HOEFFNAGEL Similarities
Presented in collaboration with League OTO
Show Statement: “In ‘Similarities’, I draw inspiration from the movements of others, gazing at strangers and those I know, running around my town, or even feeling overwhelmed and the thoughts that feeling brings to my mind. The figures are all seen in different states; some calm, some mid movement. It’s subjects like that, that most move me in paintings I enjoy myself. It suits my personality, I don’t search for more meaning in my works, I look for similarity between the figures and me, or us. For my viewers to see themselves and their everyday lives in my work.”
Artist Bio: Willem Hoeffnagel is a painter from the Netherlands. Born in 1995 in Arnhem, he has always been interested in drawing and painting from an early age. After leaving a bachelor in entrepreneurship in Amsterdam, Willem enrolled in ArtEZ Zwolle to study illustration design. During that time he focused on his personal style while also experimenting with new techniques and ideas.
However, Illustration didn’t end up being his strong pointand he left in year 3 out of 4 but working on his art everyday helped with developing as an artist in general. Soon after that he started to work on his painting full time, to grow in the medium he loves the most.
The recognizable figures that feature in Willem’s work have been close to him for more than a decade. Using the figures as a place holder for a person, whether himself or someone else, it allows him to portray a scene or part of a small story to the viewer without putting to much attention to who it’s meant to be.
The opening reception of Casey Weldon’s ‘Sentimental Deprivation’ and Kisung Koh ‘Long Live the Polar Treasure’ landed on a night Los Angeles was pulsing with interesting art events, yet both artists still drew fans and art lovers to Culver City.
Many pieces from Casey Weldon‘s neon-wonderland sold before the opening, yet some stunning works are still available for interested collectors. KiSung Koh‘s also sold work the night of the opening and his nearly sold-out exhibition still has a few pieces available. Drop by the gallery while both exhibitions are on view now through June 24th.
Fernando Chamarelli – Secret Code August 15th – September 5th, 2015
Thinkspace (Los Angeles) – is pleased to present new works by Brazilian designer, illustrator and artist Fernando Chamarelli in Secret Code, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Chamarelli combines diverse graphic and cultural references to produce stunningly dense acrylic paintings. His distinctive use of line work and color reflect an eclectic graphic sensibility informed by everything from design, tattoos, street art and ancient history. Schooled in graphic design, Chamarelli creates complex mosaic like surfaces, filled with hybrid imagery and symbolism he has drawn from the varied aggregate of aesthetics, visual cultures and philosophies that inspire him. Recurring references in his works include Brazilian culture and music, astrology, occultism, and ancient pre-Columbian cultures. He creates an immersive and storied visual world that with each revisitation offers a new discovery. By merging contemporary influences with ancient and historical elements, Chamarelli creates a visual language that suspends past and present.
Inspired by his Brazilian heritage, Chamarelli channels the disparateness of his cultural environment through his work, tapping into his country’s rich history of contrasts and coexisting diversities. He incorporates elements of Brazilian folklore, carnival, indigenous costume and myth, while borrowing imagery from Aztec, Incan and Mayan histories, among others. Fascinated by sacred geometries and the symbology of ancient cultures, Chamarelli builds beautifully anomalous and surreal iconographies with hidden meanings and intersecting significations. By drawing from different philosophies, and seemingly divergent aesthetics, he creates something entirely transformed from the appropriated parts of existing traditions.
Chamarelli’s works are filled with mystical creatures, organic flora, totemic animals and geometric motifs, knit together in dense interconnected compositions that are brought to life with vibrantly psychedelic color palettes. These compositions are thick with visual information, line, shapes, geometries and figures. Their individual parts, however, are completely absorbed and integrated into the whole of an indivisible design. Incredibly stylized and optically intricate, the work at first reads as seamless overall pattern until, upon closer inspection, the elements are disentangled and individuated by the viewer. Chamarelli successfully unites several stories and traditions into a single image, encouraging a multiplicity of tangential readings and discoveries.
As the exhibition title, Secret Code, suggests, Chamarelli’s works present hidden narratives and mysteriously adapted iconographies. Like intricately constructed tessellations, each minute element in each composition is an integral piece of a larger puzzle. The cryptic symbolism of these works feels somehow infinite and universal; simultaneously contemporary and ancient, historical and yet entirely new. Chamarelli offers us a dense and evasive world of appropriated histories, and inventive new ones, all held together by the harmony of beautifully continuous and uninterrupted lines.
Nosego – Along Infinite River On View July 18th – August 8th
Thinkspace (Los Angeles) – is pleased to present Along Infinite River, featuring new works by Philadelphia based artist Yis Goodwin. An imaginative painter, illustrator and urban muralist known for his work’s unrestrained creativity, Goodwin, or “Nosego”, brings detailed totemic pieces to life. Rich with symbolic suggestion, personal excavation and uninhibited play, his character driven works host countless creature composites, their parts assembled from the fluid intermingling of imaginary worlds. A process inspired by his childhood memory of recombining elements from the characters in his toy box, Nosego creates new forms from borrowed individual parts. Weaving in and out of multiple worlds and references, he combines surreal cartoonish mutations with elements of detailed realism. The resulting bionic universe is made up of anthropomorphic animals, fractured and reassembled figures and spaces, and a child-like nostalgia offset by something darker lurking in adult shadows.
When not creating huge architecturally scaled murals with spray paint, Nosego is working primarily in acrylic on wood panel. Uniting reality with fiction through an intuitive stream of consciousness, he captures his free associations, in defiance of plausible relationships, and playfully allows the works to come to life. A floating wolf head emerges from an orb of flowers, a mountainous expanse is glimpsed through the open mouth of a duck head, a cartoon-like cat emerges high above a forest as a waterfall cascades from its mouth…There are no limits in Nosego’s world and everything is connected. The animals become relatable symbolic vehicles for human impulses and expressions, while the landscapes combine everything from forests to galactic skies.
Nosego’s work conveys something far more profound than inventive “Frankensteining”. It’s personal and explosively emotive. His wonderfully offbeat hybrids of animals, objects and environments are always dynamically evolving; sloughing off and building up new parts and skins before our eyes, revealing a simultaneity of multiple, actively changing, selves. Though an artist who encourages his work to be freely interpreted by the viewer, the idea of capturing a feeling of psychological interconnectedness and continuity is apparent in the work. Movement is literal and figurative, and nothing is static or remains still. Nosego’s work is always shedding layers and pushing new propositions through its newly opened spaces, puzzling together a legion of disparate pieces, places, bodies and selves. Along Infinite River is inspired by this fluidity of consciousness, so integral to Nosego’s process, and by the deeply interconnected nature of life as a journey coming in and out of present and introspective focus.
There is a childlike joy in the way Nosego creates his work; the kind of honest enthusiasm for creation that is so quickly consumed by the cynicism of adulthood. He captures this indiscriminate creative impulse, commingling play with the dark, ridiculous and uncanny….the end result is nothing short of spellbinding.
