August with Maidy Morhous, Joyce Culter-Shaw, Fred Tomaselli, Sherry Karver and David Fokos at Oceanside Museum of Art

Maidy Morhous Pear-adise

Oceanside Museum of Art (704 Pier View Way Oceanside CA 92054) gives us five or 6 shows that have staggered opening date, but a three of them are closing Sept 2: Joyce Cutler-Shaw, Sherry Karver Collective Mythologies and David Fokos The Book Pages Project. 

There will be a reception on Sept 22  for Ordinary Stuff  artwork by Maidy Morhous showing until Oct 7 and Fred Tomaselli  showing until Dec 2. plus the newest shows of  The Steel Goddess: Works By Faiya Fredman, 1998–2018 from Sept 1 to Jan 13 and James Hubbell: Seeking Balance from Sept 22 to Feb 3

Ordinary Stuff  artwork by Maidy Morhous 
Morhous takes objects around her and reproduces them in bronze. This enormously time consuming and arduous process does give "weight" to the objects, chosen with care and titled and captioned to give you a clear idea of what her opinions are on a variety of subjects.   The crumbled cardboard box below in bronze cries out that no matter how much abuse the postal service might inflict, it will survive. The perfect pear tops a Zen stack of bronze stones....man's attempt at leaving his mark without harming paradise. The bronze bullet sardines peeping out of a razor sharp sardine can remind us that children are no longer safe and maybe we aren't even trying anymore. And what could be more timely now than the donkey and elephant bone for a dog that will never compromise but sink his teeth in as the country suffers. 

Priority - Special Handling

Child Proof

Like a Dog with a Bone

Fred Tomaselli: After California  is a large selection of works by this Southern Californian artist whose roots are the mind expanding 60's and 70's. My first impression was of a cross between Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights and Damien Hirst's Pharmacy. Tomaselli uses layers of resin to create depth in this collages and painted works. The skill level is high, but it is the highly pattern surfaces that are practically like hallucinations. The use of real pills and images of pills combined with florals (especially of marijuana leaves) and birds and butterflies is right out of the Hirst handbook. But who knows, maybe Tomaselli influenced Hirst and that makes them no less pleasing. It the black and white newspaper images with their added colorful images that I actually found the most original.  

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 Joyce Cutler-Shaw has now passed but what a legacy she leaves us. This show of her bird and bone alphabets was elegantly displayed and gave a wider view of her work than the library commissions that I was familiar with in the past. Seeing the documentation of the deterioration of her handwriting brought me to tears. She works with the subject of death and we can all learn valuable lessons from her still. 

detail of tiny little bronze claws on this cut out drawing....so vital, so charming, so strong. 

In Sherry Karver's Collective Mythologies we are invited into Karver's verbal imagination as she describes anonymous people's invented biographies. The soft focus works created a nostalgic look at some public places but it is the super-imposed words that makes these works exciting. So the digital works displayed on back lit screens are just as effective if not more pure. 

details from above

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David Fokos The Book Pages Project is the first time I have seen some of the source material from this fourth artist in the Visual Narrative series. He draws your attention in a number of ways to text from famous authors. "Thought Police", Zipless Fuck",  "Big Brother". Visually these are large stunning images that grab your attention. 

This is a photograph of a tiny dress blown up and printed so it tricks the eye into thinking it is 3-D.  (Apologies to the artist for the blue reflection of the OMA Stairwell!)

This looks like a censored document made with a black marker, but the words are actually cut out of the page and shown on a black background. But then it is really a photo of that artwork. 

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I took this final show looking down at the way the image is set back into a deep frame. This help reinforce the illusion that the you are looking a real large folded sheet of printed pager. Instead, it is a blown up photo of that small folded sheet.