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DOES IT HIS OWN WAY
artist theprofile art of museums
Artists TO WATCH IN
2009
From painters and sculptors to new media masters, fine art photographers, and everything in between, here’s a look at great artists to watch in the year to come
CHERI PANN Cheri Pann started life in the public housing projects of East L.A. At an early age, she began drawing and coloring everything within her reach, but her mother, knowing only about the performing arts, proceeded to send her to piano, dancing, and acting lessons. In her late teens, Cheri went to see a Van Gogh exhibit, which changed her life. “I stood in front of his paintings and said ‘I’m an artist!’” she remembers, and she has never looked back. From the late 60s to the mid-90s, Cheri had more than 20 solo exhibitions in California and Japan, and she participated in more than 50 group shows. Since the mid-90s, she has exhibited exclusively in her live/work studio in Venice, California, where she is continuously at work painting in oil, building mural-sized constructions that serve as political commentaries, and creating vessels, functional items, and tiles out of stoneware clay. Her tiles have found their way into the mosaics decorating her home—reminiscent of the work of Gaudi or the Watts Towers of Sam Rodia—as well as numerous private commissions, all jointly executed with her husband, Gonzalo Duran. Pann’s ongoing project for the past several years has been a series of expressionist oil portraits of Duran, which now take up an entire wall of their home. There are currently 32 portraits in the series, which Cheri plans on expanding with 16 more. In addition, Pann has painted self-portraits and studies of Gonzalo and her together. “I have five galleries of work in our house. It’s always growing, always evolving,” she says. –Alex Simon www.cheripann.com
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Winter 2009
artistthe profile art of museums andy moses A Los Angeles-based artist with a unique take on color and the relationship between space, shape and light, Andy Moses paints with pearlescent pigments on concave canvases, which curve inward like the old Cinerama movie screens of the 1950s. The effect harnesses light and causes the painting to shift in depth and contrast as the viewer moves around it. Moses also works with convex canvases, which utilize an outward curve, causing his pearlescent colors to shift and change as different amounts of light hit the surface at any given point. “All the work I’ve ever done has always been about interacting with natural processes and then reacting to what those natural processes do. So it’s a constant, back-and-forth process until the painting is finished,” Moses explains. Citing Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as an early influence on his visual sensibility, Moses recalls how that film—and how he saw it—went on to inform his own work. “Seeing 2001 at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood when I was a kid blew my mind,” he says. “There was something about being completely immersed in something, rather than just having it be frontal. I never forgot that.” –Alex Simon www.andymoses.com
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Winter 2009
artistthe profile art of museums
KIMBERLY NICHOLS Kimberly Nichols knew she was an artist almost from day one. “I started
call my muse,” the multi-talent details.
doing drawings of women when I was six, and an aunt commented that
The concept for the series revolves around the idea of a futuristic
these must all be pieces of me,” she remembers. As she matured, Nichols’
bordello where anyone can find his or her dream girl, based more on
work became a reflection of her own development.
psychology than on idealism. As Nichols asks, “What kind of raw, primal
“My early works showed girls with no arms during an aberrant time
desire was there before the media machine started feeding you images?”
in my emotional formation; girls with scars appeared during puberty; and
The series shows Lisa posing as a series of female archetypes (Backyard
wings sprouted on the girls of my maturation into adulthood and self-
Babe, Big Blonde, and Money Shot, to name a few) and is a project that the
individuation,” she explains. During this transition, drawing progressed into
artist plans on continuing in perpetuity. “I like the idea that I’ll continue to
photography and a series of self-studies involving female archetypes.
photograph Lisa—one woman—as many. I like the idea that she will also age
A native of Palm Springs, California, Nichols has been hard at work
and grow old beneath my lens as a myriad of women.”
of late on her most recent project, Hundred Proof Bordello. The undertaking
Also in process is a Narratives series, which presents visuals juxtaposed
marks the first time that her work is not solely autobiographical. “It’s based
against each other to show a visual short story about some aspect of a
on an artistic collaboration between me and a woman named Lisa, who I
female in a psychologically charged situation. –Alex Simon
Kimberly Nichols, Image courtesy of the artist.
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Winter 2009