Last week, Tom Wudl mentioned that he had seen two great exhibits at Bergamot Station; one by the artist Jean Lowe at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery and the other by the Israeli artist living in England, Zadok Ben David at the Shashana Wayne Gallery.

Since my good artist friend Lynn McDaniel was having a reception of her landscape paintings at the Tag Gallery in Santa Monica (well worth a visit to see her atmospheric paintings folks), I thought I’d save myself an extra trip and take in Bergamot Station as well to find out if Tom Wudl was speaking truth.

And to a large extent he was. Jean Lowe’s large enamel paint paintings showing a merging (sourced from her personal trip photo montages) of ornate ceilings of baroque Bavarian palaces on the top half of each painting and racks and shelves of a thrift store on the lower half of each painting is something the viewer will not soon forget. To this artist, juxtaposing high and low cultural spaces is what it’s all about. The piece de resistance however, is her large bookcase holding phony oversize individually painted books which can, I’m told, be bought individually. A bit of Kitsch yes but let us call it high kitsch since it’s definitely not low kitsch. Worth seeing? Oh ya.

Zadak Ben David’s work is an entirely different experience, a gigantic 36 feet by 29 feet floor display consisting of 12,000 half inch to eight inch photo-etched steel plants evenly spaced in a thin layer of sand that you’re warned not to touch. So did I touch it? Look for my thumbprint on one of the corners. The write up in the LA Times really said it best on this exhibit, his “…piece verges on gimmickry, but its sheer optical splendor is irresistible”. And I certainly agree with that.  Is his exhibit worth a look? You bet.

But surprise, surprise, I was more wowed by two photographic exhibits, Terry Evans’s photographs (show titled “Steel”) at Gallery Luisotti and Camille Seaman’s photographs (show titled “The Last Iceberg”) at the Richard Heller Gallery. All right, my picks are not overflowing from a “from scratch” creativity as Tom Wudl’s picks, but they do excel in producing stunningly absorbing images that not only suck the viewer into the photos but push the ordinary into the monumental.

Terry Evans makes monuments out of industrial settings, Furness and ladles used in making steel. Evoking strong dynamic moods, their often duotone manipulations make you imagine that you’re looking at platinum prints on steroids; Powerful, powerful photographs.

Camille Seaman, a San Francisco based photographer, creates the monumental by her photographs of icebergs. They are absolutely haunting in their moods. In fact, one of her icebergs looks like something molded by the architect Frank Gehry. I would have sworn that she went over her photos with either Marshall’s inks or turned a grayscale image into an RGB then lightly over colored the grayscale. I found out, when I met Camille, that I was dead wrong; her photos were completely unmanipulated. How did she capture such subtle and powerful nuances of grayscale and colored tints? Simple really, that’s the way the light filters through the Arctic and Antarctic overcast and bounces around on the icebergs and on the sea.  Her wonderful catalog says it best, “…Turner-like light. The grand ice masses appear to change character as the atmosphere changes- shapes shift from stark white monuments to fantastical structures of blue and emerald green.”

So there you are, two recommendations from Wudl and two recommendations from de Loffre or, seen another way, four great exhibits for you to view. Oh by the way, I learned that Ed Moses will be showing concurrently at both the Frank Lloyd gallery and the Greenfield Sacks Gallery at Bergamot Station from May 9 to June 20; I can’t seem to remember when I had my last two shows at two galleries next to each other at the same time, but you probably remember yours, right?  Happy viewing!