OK….so for those of you that care….the Super Bowl happens this Sunday. Ladies, get out there are partake….you may not be able to find a chicken wing due to the shortage….but I can bet there will be som hunky drunk men. See Sunday’s Events.

Or skip the whole thing and head to an art opening….Be sure to catch our Pick of the Week on Saturday….it’s a wonderful exhibition.

“Not Your Mother’s Landscape,” a new solo exhibition by Gina Stepaniuk. Presented by LAUNCH Gallery, the exhibition focuses on the plight of our world.

In these unstable times, so many of us are focused on the economy and global warming and the future of our earth has taken a back seat. I applaud Stepaniuk’s efforts to make a differnce with her work. 

Gina Stepaniuk paints the world as she sees it – a convoluted beautiful place. A place run raw by our existence.

Gina explains, “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the earth”, Neil Armstrong once said about our planet. Stepaniuk reminds us that things have changed: “It has become virtually impossible for me to paint or even look at an image of a landscape without regarding earth’s plight”.

Ecological disasters and centuries of human civilization have left their mark on our planet so indelibly that if we look closely enough, we can see these fingerprints from space. Her macro-landscape paintings, from the vantage point of spy satellites or other omniscient beings, bear such marks. Layers of charred brown, oily black and metallic gray permeate her vision – are these burned wildlife preserves, wasted crops, pit mines or chemical spills? Obscuring clouds mirror clouds in our own judgment.

Stepaniuk’s technique is variable: at times realist in her careful molding of the planets surfaces and textures, at times emotively rough. Thick dried globs of oil paint in un-natural shades are jarring, like towering electrical pylons in unspoiled scrublands. Planetary patterns are melded and abstracted, applied to the canvas and then covered up – a world in flux.

Change is what matters here, how we have changed things, how the planet will continue to change.

What: Opening reception
Where: LAUNCH, 170 S. La Brea Ave., 2nd floor LA, 90036
When: 6:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Phone: (323) 899-1363
Website: www.launchla.org