LIGHT MATTER x GETTY
PST ART: ART & SCIENCE COLLIDE

Dawn Arrowsmith’s paintings are meditations in color, engaging the viewer in a kind of minimalist luxury – pure, distilled, but also rich, and luscious. Her work is intuitive, greatly influenced by Buddhist philosophy and by her travels to the Orient. These pieces play on the retinal effects from extended viewing, where an image that appeared flat & monochromatic takes on volume and appears to shimmer. Arrowsmith’s paintings, sculptures and installations have been exhibited in the USA and abroad. Exhibitions sites include the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (Barnsdall), the Clark Humanities Museum Gallery in Claremont, CA, the Riverside Art Museum, the Eli Broad Foundation in Los Angeles, the Lidovy Gallery in Prague, Czec. and the Campo d'Osservazione in Gubbio, Italy.  Arrowsmith was born in San Francisco, California and received her M.F.A. at Claremont Graduate School, Visual Arts, Claremont, California.

Larry Bell is one of the most renowned and influential artists to emerge from the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s, alongside Ferris Gallery contemporaries Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses and Robert Irwin. Bell is known foremost for his investigations of the properties of light, reflection and shadow on various surfaces, and how these properties affect our sense of space. Bell’s significant oeuvre extends from painting and works on paper to glass sculptures and furniture design. About his sculptures, he has said: “Although we tend to think of glass as a window, it is a solid liquid that has at once three distinctive qualities: it reflects light, it 

absorbs light, and it transmits light all at the same time.” Harnessing a little known technique developed for aeronautics, Bell utilizes a high-vacuum coating system that allows him to deposit thin metal films, which catch and reflect light, onto a variety of surfaces, which include his glass sculptures, paintings and works on paper. Bell’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including Museum of Modern Art, NY, Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, Los Angeles  County Museum of Art, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, LA, among many others.

Casper Brindle has become widely recognized for paintings and sculptures that invite the viewer into a rhythmic dance with light, as it is reflected, diffused and distilled through his work. Brindle also utilizes a variety of industrial materials - airbrush, auto paints, resin, and pigmented acrylic - to create sculptures and paintings that shift and change as one moves around them. Atmospheric colors are encased in cultural surfaces in a constant push and pull between depth, light and color. Casper Brindle grew up surfing the beaches along LA's coast during the 1970's and 80's, and worked for Light and Space artist, Eric Orr, in the late 1980’s. Brindle’s work is in the permanent collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, CA and has been exhibited at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA and  the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA.

Shingo Francis grew up in Los Angeles, immersed in the intense light and vast ocean vistas of life in southern California. Like many LA artists, Francis became fascinated with the ever-changing qualities of light and how it affected one’s perception and experience of the world. As the son of painter Sam Francis, Shingo also happened to grow up in the heart of LA’s nascent art scene, where artists such as Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Craig Kaufman and Peter Alexander were utilizing new materials to explore the effects of light on perception. Francis has continued this pursuit with a series of gossamer-like paintings with colors that appear in constant flux, changing as one moves about them. Utilizing interference paints – a medium of crushed, titanium-coated mica that refracts light - the colors in these pieces shimmer and shift depending on the angle of the viewer and the reflection of light. Rectangular shapes conform to the shape of the canvas, creating a framework of change as viewers move. What one sees becomes inherently tied to their particular perspective and the character of the light at any given time. Shingo Francis has been the subject of numerous national and international exhibitions. He was awarded the Fumio Nanjo Award from the Mori Museum in Tokyo and is in numerous museum and institutional collections, including The Frederick R. Weisman Foundation in Los Angeles.

Jimi Gleason has spent his career exploring the reflective possibilities of light. Mixing nontraditional materials such as silver nitrate with pearlescent paints, Gleason’s surfaces are highly reactive to light and shifts in the viewer’s position. His silver deposit surfaces act as enigmatic mirrors that are activated by the viewer and the environment in which they are situated. Light, color and form are in constant flux with the external world, inducing an interactive, meditative experience with the viewer. Jimi Gleason was born and raised in Southern California. He graduated with a BA in Fine Art from UC Berkeley in 1985, later moving to New York. Upon his return to California, Gleason worked as a studio assistant for renowned painter, Ed Moses. Gleason’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, CA,  the Laguna Art Museum, CA, and has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, CA, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum and the Tucson Museum of Art.

Eric Johnson utilizes polyester resin and color-shifting pigments, to create sculptures that are exquisitely sensual and dynamic in how they reflect and absorb light. They recall the materials of the surf and car culture of the late 60s and early 70s in Southern California, employed by many artists like DeWain Valentine, Craig Kaufman and Billy Al Bengston. Johnson embraced the hot-rod culture as well and has made customized car bodies for the Porsche 962 and has lovingly overhauled vintage cars-as evidence by the two toned 1939 Chevrolet panel truck and fire engine red 1934 Ford pickup that sit to one side of his studio. As often was the case for many artists working in the 1970s, industrial products found their way into Johnson’s early studio practice and have remained there ever since. “I’ve translated all that automotive knowledge into making my artwork”,” he says. “I use the full array of auto tools and pigments.” The handcrafted abstract works are sheathed in resin skins, often revealing glimpses of skeletal armatures and hidden architectures. Other influences have been the aerospace industry and an ancestral boat builder heritage. Initially the constructs hid their “bones” under a “skin”, time capsule artifacts within. Over the past twelve years, the structures have become more organic and revealing. The current work merges Johnson’s passion for depth and structure with an obsession for color and surface. Johnson’s work is in the collections of the Oakland Museum, CA, the Laguna Beach Museum, CA, the UC Irvine Museum, CA and the Hamano Institute, Tokyo, Japan.

Jay Mark Johnson has rigorously pursued the possibilities of timeline photography over the last decade,. His artwork captures the fluid gestures of Tai Chi and dance, the rush of cars, trains and people, and the infinite cycling of beachfront waves. But within his images the rules