Our Pick of the Week takes place at Bergamot Station. Skidmore Contemporary Art presents two new exhibitions…”Lost Holiday,” featuring artist Tracey Sylvester Harris, and “Pop Geometry” featuring Todd Gray. There are several other openings taking place at Bergamot on Saturday.

See image: Tracey Sylvester Harris, The Deep End, 2015, oil on canvas, 30″ x 24″

Here is some info from the gallery:

Anonymous snapshots found at flea markets, yard sales, and on the internet provide the diving board for Tracey Sylvester Harris’s transformation of black and white memories into alluring light and color. The paintings are colorful but bittersweet in their depiction of fleeting moments of summer – one of stylish red swimsuits, flowered white caps, and scarlet lipstick – captured almost a lifetime ago.

Merging the past with the present, Harris states, “The exciting challenge is to keep the paintings relevant and current, even though the subjects come from another era. To avoid sentimentality, I keep the compositions bold and cropped, and the paintwork loose, drippy, and rough, even pushing some areas into abstraction…”

Todd Gray deconstructs classic Pop art themes and re-synthesizes them into sculpture with wit, style, and reverence. His work is impeccably crafted, richly colorful, and enthusiastically optimistic. Gray quotes 60s images and presents post-google, post instagram musings on the continued eminence of Pop Art in our mass cultural vocabulary.

See image: Todd Gray, Wocket, 2015, acrylic on wood, 27″ x 34″ x 12″

In addition to his visual tweets on Warhol, Lichtenstein, Indiana, and Johns, Gray’s work zaps us with flash-card numbers, ben-day dots, day-glow colors, superhero emblems, and laughs with the vibrant, universal exclamations of Pow, Wham, and Zap. In his hands, Pop is as fresh and exuberant as it was in the 1960s.

On view: July 18 – August 22

What: Opening reception 
Where: Skidmore Contemporary Art, Bergamot Station 2525 Michigan Ave., B-4 Santa Monica, 90404
When: Saturday, July 18, 2015, 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Phone: 310-828-5070
Website: http://www.skidmorecontemporaryart.com