“Days of Reverie” is the title of a new exhibition at Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge, California. The show at Descanso Gardens' Sturt Haaga Gallery presents new bodies of work by four Los Angeles-based visual artists: Catherine Ruane, Debbie Korbel, Jason Jenn, and Jill Sykes. Accompanying these visual works is a specially composed musical score by Joseph Carrillo, the exhibition’s guest artist. In this video, the curator of the exhibition, Vojislav Radovanović, guides us through the show.
This project was initiated and curated by Vojislav Radovanović, who envisioned each artist creating entirely new works inspired directly by the beautiful environment of Descanso Gardens. The exhibition runs until January 26, 2025.
Descanso Gardens is a botanical garden located in La Cañada Flintridge, Los Angeles County, California. It sits on the northern edge of the San Rafael Hills. Descanso Gardens features a wide area, mostly forested, with artificial streams, ponds, and lawns. It also features the Sturt Haaga Gallery. Its aim is to encourage visitors to contemplate the intersection between contemporary art and garden science. Most Sturt Haaga exhibitions are group shows featuring works based on a single theme proposed by a curatorial advisory committee made up of garden staff, trustees, and art experts from Descanco’s surrounding community.
Days of Reverie / Descanso Gardens, La Cañada Flintridge, CA. October 27, 2024.
This project was initiated and curated by Vojislav Radovanović, who envisioned each artist creating entirely new works inspired directly by the beautiful environment of Descanso Gardens. The exhibition runs until January 26, 2025.
Descanso Gardens is a botanical garden located in La Cañada Flintridge, Los Angeles County, California. It sits on the northern edge of the San Rafael Hills. Descanso Gardens features a wide area, mostly forested, with artificial streams, ponds, and lawns. It also features the Sturt Haaga Gallery. Its aim is to encourage visitors to contemplate the intersection between contemporary art and garden science. Most Sturt Haaga exhibitions are group shows featuring works based on a single theme proposed by a curatorial advisory committee made up of garden staff, trustees, and art experts from Descanco’s surrounding community.
Days of Reverie / Descanso Gardens, La Cañada Flintridge, CA. October 27, 2024.
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CreativityTranscript
00:00Hi, welcome to the Skanza Gardens. My name is Vojislav Radovanovic and I'm a curator
00:17of the exhibition Days of Reverie that is currently installed at Stuart Haga Gallery
00:22here at the Skanza Gardens. The title of the show really resonates with this idea of cross-section
00:32between nature, art and healing and well-being. So everything that you can experience in the
00:39exhibition is really aligned with the broader vision of the Skanza Gardens providing a safe
00:47sanctuary space for not only people who are coming here to enjoy the nature but also to all the
00:55botanical collection that they have here of the living plants. So Days of Reverie also includes
01:03five local LA artists who are all very much familiar with the Skanza Gardens and that was
01:11one of the main ideas to actually have people who are personally connected to the
01:19to the gardens. The first piece that you can see in front of the gallery that it's installed
01:24is an interactive installation by Debbie Corbell who is again a local Los Angeles artist whose work
01:34really goes in a variety of the of the medias but he's mostly famous for her sculptures and
01:44here in this installation you see multiple trees and on the two front trees you see
01:54lapis bantings. This is a species that is local to the Skanza Gardens and they are like a
02:02symbolical messengers or like that connection between nature and people. So on the back
02:11back trees you can see the notes that were left by the community by the visitors
02:18after they resonated with the exhibition and the front birds are here to basically carry that
02:26messages further. Part of the her installation is also like installed inside where she presented
02:34the beautiful life-size sculpture of the deer and it was interesting because just the other day when
02:44we installed the show there was a real deer here coming up to check how the show looks like.
02:53She's using all sorts of like materials that are recycled repurposed and one of the
03:00idea that I had for this show was to artists really collaborate with the horticultural
03:07department from the Skanza Gardens. So a lot of materials that you can see here are actually
03:12collected from the gardens and used in in their exhibitions. So yeah we can actually go again
03:20through that space. After seeing the messengers at the beginning in front of the gallery audience
03:29is meant to actually step through the main entrance where you can see and hear immediately
03:35the work by another artist Joseph Carrillo is a really talented music composer who created a score
03:44for this exhibition titled Dreaming Forest. This is a composition that he created in the last 12
03:52months and it is inspired with the botanical collection of the Skanza Gardens and he also
04:00hired six different musicians to actually play this score. It's a 20-minute
04:05musical composition separated in four parts and after delivering his music he also
04:16gave us opportunity to actually have his musical notebook and even though I'm not able
04:24to read the notes this is open for audience to maybe recognize what is right now playing
04:31and flip the pages and see how really this looks like from that point of view.
04:38Joseph Carrillo is really a prolific music composer. He was involved in several big
04:44projects including Minari film that was nominated for the Oscars. Now we can actually
04:52step in the gallery A where Jason Jenn another Los Angeles-based artist created a beautiful
05:02almost like a sanctuary space for audience to resonate with those beautiful mandalas that
05:10he created. His body of work is titled Arboreal Souls and what is really interesting and what I'm
05:18extremely proud of this part of the show that he collected all this organic materials. This is
05:25leaves or all sorts of variety of the plants that are living here at the Skanza Gardens and over the
05:32course of 12 months he was collecting the leaves. He was then preparing them with the paint with some
05:40kind of acrylic sealant so he would actually stop that decomposing process and preserve those
05:50plant material. Also adding metallic foils and eventually installing the show in the sense that
06:02everything that is on the walls are mandalas and drawings that are really made of this
06:10materials but he also wanted to incorporate like community engagement and let the audience
06:16to experience and maybe create their own designs on that central pedestal. I want to say that also
06:26redwood which is protected species here in California was unfortunately damaged during the
06:33hurricane season and they needed to remove those stumps so Jason decided to incorporate them
06:43in his installation. Besides using organic material like a plant leaves he also used
06:52all sorts of repurposed textiles creating this beautiful almost like a doilies on top of the
07:00stumps where you can see actually those tree rings resonating in another material.
07:12This gallery can become very busy because people really love to interact with his installation.
07:23Now I can show you the
07:25works in gallery B.
07:41So this is the gallery that features works by Jill Sykes and she as well created those
07:50paintings in the last 12 months when she was preparing for everything and
07:55each one of the paintings actually features again something that she
08:02experienced here at the Scanza Gardens. What I like about her paintings it's also like the title
08:09Between Light and Shadow so she was really playing with this like simplifying composition and like
08:17emphasizing on the object or like just the branch or like part of the the plant and then
08:24separating it from the background. What I like about her palette and her way how she builds the
08:31paintings it's really interesting and especially like for example in this polyptych composition
08:40she uses a very translucent paint so the board or the the wood that she was painting on is
08:48actually exposed and you can see this nervature of the of the background almost behaving like a
08:55landscape that is not handmade but it's like actually done by the nature and also in
09:03the blue painting and there is there is that visible
09:10nervature of the of the surface that she's painting on.
09:16We also when I invited her to be part of this show she texted me photo of her kids and her from like
09:2330 years ago so I felt that it would be really important to also incorporate some of her older
09:29works like from 10 and 15 years ago so on this wall we have some older works and the rest of
09:36the show is basically everything that she created in the last nine months. Also she chose to paint
09:47the walls in this pink beautiful warm color I think that she cloned it from this painting
09:54and everything is oil on canvas or oil on wood.
10:00Your audience is meant to actually sit down and resonate and spend time here in each of the spaces
10:08that are here at the Stuttgart gallery actually has that like moment of like just slowing down
10:15sit and resonate with the works and now we are slowly going to the gallery C where you have
10:24where we have Catherine Rouen with the installation titled Botany of Desire.
10:33I see this work as like actually combination of two different types of works but artist is very
10:40particular of explaining this as one installation titled Botany of Desire but you can see
10:48definitely that there are two predominant bodies of work one featuring roses and the other one
10:55featuring branches or leaves or a spiral of sycamore leaves. It is really interesting
11:03fact that at some point when Catherine was raising her children she made the very conscious choice
11:10to stop making a paintings oil on canvases and to go with something that it's more easy to
11:18work with and that's actually graphite on paper and ever since then she actually started to really
11:26flourish in this media and she's kind of like famous for doing this for years and for this
11:34occasion she created this beautiful spiral and I chose two of her notes about the body of work
11:42one is referring to the sycamore leaves which was a sycamore is a species was actually respected
11:52by Tongva people who are native to this land as a species that it's really protecting us from the
12:01evil spirits so she's wrapping out the gallery with this beautiful spiral and also like representing
12:08that wild part of the nature and the gardens in general are like wild being kind of like cultivated
12:16but you know staying in that realm of being wild while on the other side the Skanzo garden has a
12:22beautiful collection of roses that has its that span of like 25 years maybe and every 25 years
12:30they have to replant the rose garden so she chose also to feature these beautiful drawings
12:38that she created that features actually each species or kind of roses that are present right
12:46now in the Skanzo gardens botanical collection she also chose to frame them in this gold
12:55beautiful frames that also kind of like say about this like opposite from the wild species
13:04there is that cultivated species yeah so the audience is really again meant to sit down and
13:12really resonate and hear Joseph's music that it's playing all across the gallery so and as this flow
13:20of the exhibition goes back to the entrance where we were at the beginning and you can
13:28actually get outside of the gallery and then maybe leave your note and I'm really happy to
13:36see actually how our audience we are open for like just three days now this is the third day of the
13:42show and we already have really beautiful resonating messages one of my I see here in my
13:51next life I want to be a tree which is beautiful so days of reverie will be open for next three
13:58months until January 26th and the admission to the gallery is free with the general admission
14:06from the Skanzo gardens everyone is welcome