BANDINI ART
2635 S. Fairfax Avenue,
Culver City, CA 90232
Open Tuesday thru Saturday, 11am – 5pm
Phone – (310) 837 6230
www.bandiniart.com

You Are Here, at Bandini Art from November 3, shows work by two artists whose attention to the unheeded things in everyday life bestows them with a magical quality. These small subjects engage with major themes; death is a presence here, memory, beauty, and a longing for transcendence.

The creatures that appear in Paul Pitsker’s pristine watercolors seem positioned to be the victims of misadventure, straying from the freedom of the wild into shiny man-made environments. In his work butterflies alight on toasters or, in a premonition of the fate that often befalls their species, nestle on a board pinned by darts. A dark humor infuses the work as wasps are trapped under upturned glasses and caterpillars reach out to make the connection between naked electrical wires. Casual casualties of the human world, the passing of these small lives points to the beauty and brevity of all life.

Ashley McLean Emenegger’s assemblages seem like messages from another time and place. Dried flowers, toys, mirrors, seeds, pearl buttons, thread, gold leaf and beeswax - echoing the symbolic language of mementi mori – are bound together in complex explorations of “the tender parts of the soul”. The work is gendered, exploring the atavistic feminine and masculine through organic and manufactured elements, and constructed using books, twig structures and wooden boxes. In this new body of work each talisman adds meaning to build a series of coherent, emotionally-charged, miniature worlds.