Dora De Larios & John Humble
Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Building B3, Santa Monica, CA 90404
Saturday, January 12 at 5:00 PM 7:00 PM
Ends Feb 16, 2019
Opening Reception for Dora De Larios "The Studio is My Church" and John Humble "Vermont" Dora De Larios was a native L.A. ceramist born to Mexican immigrants in 1933. Her heritage and relationship to Pre-Columbian Art is evident in her work, which embodies themes of spirituality, nature and mythology. Her ceramic sculptures also reflect her interest in Japanese Art, especially the Haniwa clay figures of the 3rd-6th century. Dora graduated in 1957 with a major in ceramics and a minor in sculpture from the USC School of Fine Art, where she studied under noted ceramists Vivika and Otto Heino. Over the years, Dora broadened her focus to include work in cast concrete, brass, stainless steel, acrylic and wood, completing a variety of large-scale commissions such as the monumental 18,000 square foot tile mosaic designed by Mary Blair at the Contemporary Hotel at Walt Disney World, and "Life Force," a tile wall relief at the Montage Hotel in Laguna. She was honored with a 50-year retrospective at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles in 2010, and her work was prominently included in the LACMA exhibition, "Found in Translation," which was part of the Getty’s 2017 initiative, "Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles/Latin America." Immediately after her passing in January of 2018, The Main Museum in Los Angeles presented the exhibition, "Dora De Larios: Other Worlds." The exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, "The Studio Is My Church," will include a group of 12x9” paintings on paper that Dora completed in the last year of her life. The exhibition will also feature a selection of ceramic sculptures from 1985-2017. Commenting on the drawings in this exhibition, Dora’s daughter, Sabrina Judge, wrote, “watching her create these colorful, graphic, beautiful, bold drawings non-stop while she was not feeling well was like watching life energy and color pour out of an inexhaustible source - the tap was ON…Her brilliance during this time, with light, vision and joy, was pure to her spirit, every moment of it.” Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of recent work by L.A. photographer, John Humble. Entitled "Vermont", the entire series was photographed on Vermont Avenue, one of the longest north/south streets in Los Angeles County, running over 23 miles from Los Feliz to San Pedro. In a similar project, Humble exhibited his "Pico" series at Craig Krull Gallery in 2014. In his photography, Humble aims to avoid any stylistic affectations, presenting the viewer with empirical evidence. He suggests that his images are “reminiscent of geological cross-sections or archeological excavations with layers of disparate natural and man-made elements compressed — a sampling of a visual strata.” John Humble began photographing the “paradoxes and ironies of Los Angeles” in 1979. As a keen observer of this strange and extraordinary sprawl, he was one of eight photographers awarded a grant from the NEA to chronicle the city on its bicentennial. Then in 2007, the Getty Museum mounted a mid-career retrospective entitled: "A Place in the Sun: Photographs by John Humble," accompanied by a major monograph.