Nature Revisited, Gallery Celebrated

It was about a year ago that Seimandi & Leprieur braved the challenging world of opening a new, serious, contemporary art gallery in Santa Barbara. Set just off of State Street, on Anapamu, and initially oriented towards fine art from the Caribbean (its married gallerists moved here from Martinique), they had their work cut out for them in terms of gaining traction and due attention.

But they are determined, and the space continues to be both inviting and provocative to seekers of serious art in a sophisticated gallery context. To celebrate the occasion of the anniversary, the current exhibition Year One (on view through August 30), presents a summery smattering of work and is also a (pardon the pun) summary show, bringing back work by artists featured here in the first year of the gallery’s life.

It is a healthy and certainly varied assortment of art, but one in which the collected works “hang well” together in the space, conspiring towards collective cohesion as a whole. One recurring theme has to do with consideration of nature as an inspiration and subject, but in a redirected and, in different ways, abstracted way.

Speaking of year one, the exhibition includes a few pieces by Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine, the inaugural gallery subject last summer. His sinuous abstract art, in black and white except for one embedded, signature red dot in the mesh, conveys a sense of natural and organic forms and forces, in the tellingly titled “Gestation” series and “Flowers Island.”

Dora Vital, showcased in January’s exhibition Jardin Nocturne offers the brightest and breeziest palette of the group. In her eye-affable pieces in the “Bliss” and “Canopy” series, gentle sunlit scenes are speckled with floral touches and vegetation themes yet are organized in an extra-natural visual way. The abstracting impulse gives more than a wink.

Nature certainly has her sway in the post-pop-art world of N.Y.C. artist Hunt Slonem, who spoke and exhibited in this space in recent months. His work continues in the vein of visions of nature channeled into personal aesthetics, through his seemingly light-hearted and easy-on-the-eyes imagery of large-eared bunnies and groupings of butterflies. But these works are also equipped with inventive and stylized graphic practices, with purposefully scratched surfaces and rhythmic echoes of form, making a subtle bow in the direction of Warholian visual cool.

On the back wall, the thematic focus shifts with the large “False Flag Washed-Up,” by Pierre Roy-Camille. Although the imagery suggests a rough-hewn, patterned flag, the piece is tattered and worn, as if a dubious representation of a national identity without a firm foundation or back story. We get strong hints of the artist’s interest in colonial misdeeds and forced politics.

Santa Barbara–based artists are also woven into the exhibition fabric. This includes George Legrady, a Hungarian-born, Montreal-raised artist who now is a professor at UCSB’s Media Arts & Technology program, and has some artworld fame in digital and computer-generated art. Here, he goes analog and linear. Almost. In his 2013 “Smoke and Fire,” archival photographs from the 1970s have been layered and airlifted into the optically kinetic “lenticular” photograph process. Subtle changes in the beholder’s perspective in gazing at the piece reveal the six varied images involved, creating a perception-tweaking ghostly parade effect.

Returning to the nature-art duality theme in the room, the veteran and diversely gifted artist Mary Heebner is represented through “Conjuring Rain 5 and 6,” two large, atmospheric acrylic ink on Stonehenge paper works (which hung, incidentally, for a few years in the American embassy in Helsinki). She deftly suggests, and cross-stitches, references to the natural element of skies pregnant with impending precipitation and gestures of an abstract impressionist character.

Heebner’s creative talents also include writing, not incidentally, and her attached text has a poetic resonance and relevance to the images: “conjuring rain, to awake the scent of a storm, to summon moisture and penetrate a sere land, to pour the most precious drink upon the dust. Water: the milk of the earth.”

On to year two … In this moment of transition, the gallery’s plan is to expand out from the original attention primarily on art from Martinique and the Caribbean to a broader field of curatorial possibility. Watch, and visit, this space. See seimandileprieur.com