Vanessa Atlan Interviewed by VoyageLA
This post was originally published on VoyageLA here.
Today we’d like to introduce you to Vanessa Atlan.
Show Gallery presents Hollywood Diaries by Vanessa at their contemporary art space in Los Angeles. The two-part exhibition includes watercolor paintings, collages, photography and poetry inspired by the artist’s everyday life in Hollywood where she has been living for the past ten years.
The artist will be showing her first watercolors — figures and patterns appear to float in unknown or unidentified spaces, where the space-time continuum is transcended. Vanessa is inspired by Old Hollywood—motel rooms, cars, architecture, as well as the wildness and erratic lifestyle of Los Angeles. The second part of the exhibition reveals the artist’s most recent work: a series of abstract collages and hand-painted watercolor notebooks. Experimental and autobiographical, this body of work is more free and instinctive. The artist explores her intimate emotions through a series of poetic explosive sunsets and sunrises. Referencing the Californian skies and light, the artist expresses movement, change, catharsis, a certain instability and the fragility of the moment.
Vanessa invited April in LA to collaborate on Hollywood Diaries as their aesthetics and inspiration collided into a shared universe. Both look at life through the prism of poetry filled with vintage objects that are site-specific to Los Angeles with the unique blend of Mexican and Native-American influence, and an Old-Hollywood aesthetic. In this atmosphere, April in LA imagined and created a motel room in the gallery mezzanine. Ceramics, pottery, wood objects and plants will also be installed by April in LA in a dialogue with her work in the main exhibition gallery.
About the Artist:
Originally from France, Vanessa lives and works in Los Angeles. she has a Masters in Art History from the Sorbonne and has been drawing and writing poetry since she was a child. Deliberately experimental and multi-disciplinary, the artist uses various media, including photography, paintings, writings and sound.
From her first photographic series, Paris-Méditerranée, to Wonderland Stereo (an imaginary record label created as an ongoing work over the past seven years) her vision is immediate and visceral, profoundly connected to an emotional immediacy, balancing the fine line between fiction and reality like an existential thread. She has exhibited in the United States and Europe including Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York, HIE Gallery in Los Angeles, Galerie Philippe Chaume in Paris, Galeria Tagomago in Spain, and Palazzo Spinelli in Naples.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It has been a long way to express myself into paintings.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Show Gallery story. Tell us more about the business.
Show Gallery is an art gallery and artist residency located in the heart of Hollywood which showcases local and international contemporary artists.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
I have been very lucky because born in an artist family, father photographer, grand-mother painter. Then the luck to meet good people at the good times. And also turn the bad luck such as illness as a luck. The bad luck moments gave me the opportunity to search more into myself and reveal new ways of expression.