Launch LA is proud to present two concurrent solo exhibitions of work by artists June Edmonds and A.M. Rousseau.
June Edmonds, recipient of 2018 City of Los Angeles, ‘COLA’, Individual Artist Fellowship, presents vibrantly layered surfaces primarily inspired by meditative practices. This series of abstract compositions explore how color and repetition serve as conduits to spiritual contemplation and interpersonal connection.
Color, space, rhythm and movement play a powerful role in the symbolism of Edmonds’ artworks. Saturated tones radiate outwards through ovoid shapes that resemble the patterning of layered feathers, fringe or undulating rays. Themes of personhood and the complexity of relationship are embodied in these works. The rhythmic, pulsating energy also conveys themes of counting, keeping time, and improvisation.
These motifs are inspired by Ghanian Adinkra symbols, where the circle represents “The Most High”. Expanding on the motif of the circle, many of Edmonds’ works morph to straight lines and micro-perceptions of the circle, with the sacred area of overlapping circles known as the ancient symbol, Vesica Piscis. This sacred geometry conveys associations of divine creation and the passing from the spiritual world to the physical, and invites the viewer to find a personal connection to the visual metaphors.
A.M. Rousseau employs drawing, painting and collage in a new series that integrates her ongoing interest in the subject of line with her earlier work as a photojournalist. As a kind of personal, archeological dig, Rousseau unearths images made decades earlier and gives them new life.
Using fragments of black and white images, often of people in windows and doorways or on city streets, Rousseau expands the notions of line and space in the existing photographic imagery and takes it into the realm of vision, insight, and reverie. Each artwork is a developed exploration of line as an elemental part of everything. Lines, both seen and unseen, are found everywhere in nature, including in the wind, in the trunks of trees, in the sounds of music, in the light of the sky, and in the waves of water. It is in their shaping and shading, their tonal gradations, thinness or thickness, and relation to the shards of photographic images, that her work portrays both a visual rendition of energetic processes of perception, and a display of the inner workings of the conscious and unconscious mind.
Rousseau’s previous photography recorded events in the lives of people in both ordinary and extreme circumstances. In this new work, lines extend and enhance the less visible, hidden, aspects of these same lived experiences to show the possibilities of interior dialogs, subliminal mental activity, streams of feeling, and explicit and implicit memories.