J.Scott Smith / Lucas Reiner

Opening Reception Tuesday May 21, 6-8 PM JOE's Restaurant  1023 Abbot Kinney Boulevard,Venice 90291

If you plan to stay on for dinner following the reception, please RSVP to Joe's here: info@JoesRestaurant.com. Joe has arranged to offer a $45 per person dinner including a drink, taxes and tip.  

J. Scott Smith

Born in Baltimore in 1955, J. Scott Smith studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art before relocating to Santa Monica, where he has lived and worked since the late 1970s. In his early career, Smith concentrated exclusively on the rigorous discipline of architectural photography with commissions from Frank Gehry and other internationally acclaimed architects. 
The deliberative practice of creating architectural portraits with a large format view camera influenced his fine art photography, particularly the current series, 29 Palms. 

Smith’s photographs have shown in the United States and Europe, including exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Salon International de l'Architecture in Milan.

About the artwork in the show: "29 Palms"

29 Palms is a mirage of sorts, a photographic re-imagining of the original oasis of twenty-nine native palms around which the desert city of the same name developed. Washingtonia filifera, the Golden State’s only indigenous palm, is featured in this collection alongside a remarkable variety of geographic transplants that flourish in Southern California’s amenable climate. Captured with a large format view camera on 8 x 10” film and rendered in high-resolution 38 x 60” chromogenic prints, the 29 Palms series is both a typological study of individual palm trunks and a shimmering reflection of the region’s ethnically diverse human population.

www.jscottsmithphotography.com






Lucas Reiner 

Lucas Reiner was born in Los Angeles, California in 1960. 
He attended the Parsons School of Design and New School for Social Research in New York, the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and the Parsons School of Design and American College in Paris.

After his first solo exhibition of paintings at Bennett Roberts Fine Art, in Los Angeles, Art in America said Reiner’s works “resonate with emotion, poetry and gritty reportage.” Since 2001, the artist has focused on what he calls “portraiture” of the street-side trees in his native city, exploring the formal collision between organic growth and the sometimes harsh strictures of modern urban life. 

The artist’s most recent work has included a series of tree etchings titled, Stations of the Cross, part of a larger work commissioned by St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. The etchings were completed for a limited edition printing by Clemens Buntig Editionen in 2012. 

Reiner’s work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions in the Unites States, Mexico, South America and Europe.

www.lucasreiner.com

Current Exhibition

Ed Moses / Sandy lajer

April 9 - May 21
 

About the artists

Sandy Lajer
How often do we impose reality upon abstraction? Whether from our own imagination when we discover an animal within a passing cloud or the ancients who recognized Orion in a constellation, long have we translated patterns of nature into images of memory. Conversely, Sandy Lajer draws abstraction from the familiar; be it landscape, object, or figure. Her eye celebrates lyricism, whether derived from the utmost iconic form, the most romantic subject, or the very wrath of nature. Though the scale of her work is intimate, its force is immense. Frequently she enhances the impact of her photographs with a touch of ink or a wash of chiaroscuro.  Here spirituality inevitably supplants realism, and from these dialogues the ethereal magic of her images emerges.



Ed Moses
If any description can characterize Ed Moses it is that his work cannot be relegated to any sweeping classification. Just as his paintings have long challenged the visual constraint of traditional canvas, his art defies such categorization as "gestural", "dimensional" or "chromatic". Though during periods of  his long career, these, among many other adjectives,  have been appropriate, in fact the only predictability within the overall body of his work has been its very unpredictably -- in everything but his mastery of his medium.  Ed Moses, to this day, continues to "push the envelope". Never has he fallen back upon his laurels to become formulaic or  predictable. At no time has he ever ceased  to explore, to risk, and to grow ...... nor is it likely that he ever will.