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
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