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ART IN THE ARTHOUSE presents: THE LOCAL SEEN in Santa Monica June 5

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Laemmle’s Art in the Arthouse presents The Local Seen, featuring the compelling works of three Santa Monica artists, Paula Goldman, Gwen Samuels, and Michal Story. Please join us for our opening reception Wednesday, June 5 at the Monica Film Center. Check out our bonus show, Paula Goldman’s Monuments, upstairs in our Mezzanine. Meet Paula, Gwen and Michal and enjoy the wine, cheese, and conversation Art in the Arthouse is known for. A portion of the sales benefits the Laemmle Foundation and its support of humanitarian and environmental causes in Los Angeles.

About the Exhibit
Artists often see things differently than others, and have a way of revealing new vistas of places that we think we know well. In The Local Seen, three artists—each of whom employs photography in distinctive ways—share their singular visions of Santa Monica’s local landscape.

Paula Goldman collected trash on Santa Monica State Beach between lifeguard towers 1 and 2 and composed the detritus into still lifes. Her intriguing photographs hint at the diverse lives and activities of beachgoers, and also evoke concerns for the environment. Gwen Samuels takes pictures of iconic Santa Monica landmarks and common flora and transforms them into patterns for sculptural dresses and panels, while Michal Story reworks her images of nearby buildings into portrayals of fantastical structures that are at once familiar and surprising. Together, these works offer an unusual, insiders’ take on our local scene—a far cry from stereotypical postcard-perfect shots of the coast or the pier—insights that come from living and working here everyday.

Paula Goldman’s Monuments is a separate show featured on our Mezzanine. Photographer Paula has long been interested in collecting and the role of photography in memorializing artifacts. In Monuments she plays with scale, juxtaposition, and modes of presentation to challenge commonly held ideas about the things she photographs, and to create new interpretations. Small porcelain figurines fill the frame taking on seemingly grand proportions, a “portrait” of a plucked head of lettuce brings new meaning to the term “headshot,” and everyday objects like plastic cups are photographed reverentially. The size of these images—20” x 24”—is a reference to the Polaroid 20×24 camera, Goldman’s personal monument to the vanished medium.

–Stacey Ravel Abarbanel, Curator

Artist Reception
RSVP HERE
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
7:00-8:30 PM
Monica Film Center
1332 Second Street
Santa Monica
Refreshments Served

LAEMMLE LIVE presents Mostly Kosher May 19 in Santa Monica

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This is a Free Event!
RSVP via Eventbrite

LAEMMLE LIVE presents acclaimed klezmer gypsy-rock band Mostly Kosher, reconstructing Judaic and American cultural music through ravenous klezmer beats and arresting Yiddish refrains. Mostly Kosher is a musical feast that “explodes into a global food-fight of Jazz, Latin, Rock, and Folk.”

In response to the poetry and folk music of Judaic roots, their original voice resounds with themes of social justice, human dignity and mutual understanding. Led by frontman Leeav Sofer, one of Jewish Journal’s “30 under 30” most accomplished professionals in the Los Angeles Jewish diaspora, Mostly Kosher is comprised of some of the highest regarded Los Angeles musicians: violinist Janice Mautner Markham, drummer Eric Hagstrom, bassist Adam Levy, and on guitar, Will Brahm. Guest artists include Aníbal Seminario, Gee Rabe, Taylor Covey and Lorry Aaron Black on xylophone.

Mostly Kosher is a fixture at renowned Southern California stages such as the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, Skirball Cultural Center and The Torrance Center for Performing Arts. They have also graced the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for a live television broadcast to over half a million viewers in 2015 and once again in 2017. The ensemble has headlined multiple summer festivals such as Silicon Valley Jewish Music Festival, Claremont Folk Festival and more. Mostly Kosher had the honor of being the first Jewish music ensemble at the Disney parks and with 2018/2019 marking their third season performing during the 2-month long Festival of Holidays. Mostly Kosher was credited for “stealing the Festival of Holidays Show” by the acclaimed Fresh Baked Disney podcast. For the 2017/2018 holiday season, Mostly Kosher added Epcot Center in Florida to their list of holiday performance venues, becoming Disney’s first Jewish cultural music performed on both coasts.

Staying true to giving back to the community, Mostly Kosher is proud to be teaching artists for Urban Voices Project, performing and educating in underserved areas in and around Southern California including prisons, community clinics and shelters serving men and women suffering from homelessness. Mostly Kosher is also mentor ensemble to the Jewish Youth Orchestra, a project of the Jewish Federation of San Gabriel Valley,  offering performance opportunities and ongoing workshops for the middle school and high school musicians.   

The band’s self-titled debut album has won international acclaim by World Music Network, Songlines Magazine, and BBC radio. The first track, Ikh Hob Dikh Tsufil Lib (I Love You Much Too Much), was recognized as one of World Music Network’s Top 6 Songs of 2014. Mostly Kosher’s music videos have been garnering accolades on the film festival circuit, receiving two nominations at the Idyllwild International Festival of Cinema and Best Music Video at the Glendale International Film Festival. This year Mostly Kosher is touring nationally and internationally through 2020 to support new original music and videos culminating in a full album release. Learn more: mostlykosher.com @mostlykosher

This is a Free Event!
RSVP via Eventbrite

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Monica Film Center
1332 2nd Street
Santa Monica
11am – 12 pm

 

 

LAEMMLE LIVE PASADENA presents Caesura Youth Orchestra May 5

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Laemmle Theatres proudly presents LAEMMLE LIVE PASADENA, inspired by Laemmle’s popular concert series in Santa Monica. Laemmle Live showcases emerging musicians and professional performers from local schools and organizations, celebrating our diverse community with live performance. Laemmle Live Pasadena’s free Sunday morning concerts take place in the courtyard between Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 and Vroman’s Bookstore from 11am to 12pm. A light reception will follow the concert.

This Sunday morning concert features the Caesura Youth Orchestra. Based in Glendale, California, the program provides music education, group lessons and free instruments to under-served elementary students.  After completing an initial basic music course, the students are able to choose from the following instruments: violin, viola, cello, flute, clarinet and trumpet.

The Caesura Youth Orchestra follows the El Sistema model for providing music to under-served students.  The program is now in it’s fifth year as an after-school program. Elementary students begin the program with a basic music education class, learn to play the recorder and the importance of caring for an instrument.  Students may then select an instrument.  Each of the ensembles meets for 1 1/2 to 2 hours three times each week.  Students perform regularly at events in the Glendale area.  Class room teachers at the end of each year evaluate the effect the program has on students in their class rooms.  They indicate that these students have become team players, student leaders and display increased academic skills.

For more information visit: www.mycyo.org

This is a Free Event!
RSVP via Eventbrite

Sunday, May 5, 2019
Playhouse 7 Courtyard
673 East Colorado
Pasadena, CA 91101
11am – 12pm

LAEMMLE LIVE presents Cellist Armen Ksajikian with Host Rich Capparela in Santa Monica

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This is a Free Event!
RSVP via Eventbrite

LAEMMLE LIVE presents cellist Armen Ksajikian in a solo recital with music by composer/friends. Rich Capparela returns to host this robust program which includes pieces by Sulkhan Tsintsadzè, J.S. Bach, Alan Hovhaness, James Horner, Haim Shtrum, Gabrielle Rosse Owens, Leslie La Barre, Peter Schickele and more.

Admired as much for his artistry and his sense of humor, Armen Ksajikian joined Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra as Associate Principal cello in the 2001-02 season. He is also Associate Principal cello of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. He started out his professional career at age 12 with the Abkhazian State Philharmonic in the former Soviet Union. Since 1976, Armen has been very active in LA’s musical life, working with such notables as Heifetz, Rostropovich, Van Cliburn, Pavarotti, Rosza, Giulini, Baryshnikov, Cage, Mancini, Corea, Dudamel, John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Randy Newman, Zubin Mehta and James Cameron, and with groups such as the Eagles, Incubus, System Of Down, and with the Duke Ellington, Dancing with the Stars and Academy Awards orchestras.

Armen has appeared as a soloist with the Nacional Orchestre du Brazil, Pacific Symphony, and Hollywood Bowl and Los Angeles Chamber orchestras, and regularly subs with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He is a member of several ensembles including The Catgut Trio, The Rio Trio, California String Quartet and the award-winning Armadillo String Quartet, with whom he performed Haydn’s complete string quartets in a 34 ½ hour marathon. He made his Carnegie Hall debut premiering a quartet by PDQ Bach in 1999 and has appeared in the Cabrillo, Colorado, Banff, Sitka Summer, Oregon Bach, High Desert, Park City and Venice Film festivals; the Rio International Cello Encounter and Jasper Festival of Music and Wine.

In 1993, Armen made his ‘limousine-driving” debut in James Cameron’s True Lies with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis and played his own death scene in the movie. Also a busy recording musician – he has over 1,100 movies to his credit. Armen’s performances in less conventional venues include 16-day whitewater tours down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, “concerts for grizzlies” inside a clarifier tank of an old pulp mill in Sitka, Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro and at Neverland Ranch. He is particularly proud to have soloed with the Hiland Mountain Women’s String Orchestra at the Hiland Mountain Correctional Center.

This is a Free Event!
RSVP via Eventbrite

Sunday, April 14, 2019
Monica Film Center
1332 2nd Street
Santa Monica
11am – 12 pm

 

 

LAEMMLE LIVE PASADENA presents Pascale Music Institute April 7

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LAEMMLE LIVE PASADENA, inspired by Laemmle’s popular concert series in Santa Monica presents nationally acclaimed Pascale Music Institute on April 7. Laemmle Live showcases emerging musicians and professional performers from local schools and organizations, celebrating our diverse community with live performance. Laemmle Live Pasadena’s free Sunday morning concerts take place in the courtyard between Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 and Vroman’s Bookstore from 11am to 12pm. A light reception will follow the concert

Award-winning Pascale Music Institute, founded by Susan Pascale, teaches aspiring musicians as young as three and half years old to play the violin, viola, cello, bass, and piano. The Sunday concert will feature the Los Angeles Children’s Chamber Orchestra conducted by Los Angeles Philharmonic violinist, Mitchell Newman. Students of the Pascale Music Institute, or PMI, are taught using the innovative The Pascale Method®, a systematic approach that sets young children up for success from the beginning. Detailed directions, fun exercises, rapid progress, coupled with a delightful reward system motivate students to master skills quickly and correctly. From the beginning, the Pascale Method and Institute stress the importance of music reading, and within 12 weeks, the student is ready to perform for friends and family, and advance to the next level of instruction. For more information visit pascalemusic.com

This is a Free Event!
RSVP via Eventbrite

Sunday, April 7, 2019
Playhouse 7 Courtyard
673 East Colorado
Pasadena, CA 91101
11am – 12pm

ART IN THE ARTHOUSE presents: DANCING WITH COLORS in Pasadena

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Swing, samba or shimmy on over to Art in the Arthouse’s newest exhibit in Pasadena, DANCING WITH COLORS. This bold festival of color from artists Nancy R. Wise and Raymond Logan runs till June, 2019.  Sales benefit the Laemmle Foundation and its support of humanitarian and environmental causes in the Los Angeles region.

About the Exhibit
NANCY R. WISE: Oil painter Nancy R. Wise is enchanted by color. She views her art as daily reality transformed by color and texture, woven on the loom of light. She states, “I love the vibrancy of bright colors, thick impasto-like textures against thin washes and strong forms to communicate an experience of a subject’s essence. It is my way to abstract and transform our ordinary experiences and reawaken life’s vibrant aesthetic.”

RAYMOND LOGAN: Don’t call Raymond Logan a “realistic artist.” While his work depicts real-life subject matter, it is grounded in abstraction and intuition. His true goal is to create a dialogue with you, the viewer, where a mutual discovery and re-imagining of “the self” can take place. Logan uses deft strokes of thick paint in surprising colors extrapolated from what he sees in the object – enhanced by how he wants those colors expressed. Get close up and you’ll find that his representational art becomes fully abstract.

Logan and Wise are connected through their mutual love of color and the ways they apply that color to their artwork. Logan spares nothing as he lavishly slaps thick globs of paint onto the canvas, while Wise contrasts impasto with thinner areas to create dynamic separation. From the first moment I saw their vibrant artwork, I knew their pieces would dance well together.

– Tish Laemmle, curator

 

ART IN THE ARTHOUSE presents: JEFFREY SKLAN: ELEGY in Glendale

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ART IN THE ARTHOUSE  proudly presents a timely and important exhibit, JEFFREY SKLAN: ELEGY in Glendale. The art is for sale and on display till June 2019. Sales benefit the Laemmle Foundation and its support of humanitarian and environmental causes in Los Angeles. Stop by our gallery –  no need to buy a movie ticket to view.

About the exhibit
A seasoned photographer, JEFFREY SKLAN understands the essence of his subjects, allowing them to reveal themselves and honoring their light. Born in Miami in 1954, Sklan is self-taught. From the moment he absconded with his father’s camera to photograph Hurricane Betsy (1965) at age 10, Sklan has been drawn to dramatic, moving incidents. Now with 45 years behind the lens, Sklan has created a significant body of work. Each image is deeply concentrated and form-driven, with his still-life and portraiture especially resonant. This powerful series entitled ELEGY is part of larger traveling exhibition. Calla lily flowers are developed into bruised, poetic, and stunningly beautiful imagery and then juxtaposed against the idea of brutal tragedy. According to the artist: “It pays homage and respect to those who have been taken from us by unjustifiable acts of violence – starting with the Pulse Nightclub/Orlando shooting in June, 2016 and ending with the local Thousand Oaks murders in late 2018.”

“The show came to life through an amazing series of synchronicities. I knew two of the victims of homicides. This project is meant to be a teaching aide, a catalyst for dialogue and civil discourse, and a call to action.”

Sklan’s recent exhibitions include a show at PhotoLA and solo exhibits at The Icon and Gabba Gallery. He is currently working on a book project called Brush Off featuring 200 artist portraits that will coincide with a solo exhibition in 2020. He works daily at his studio in downtown, Los Angeles.

– Joshua Elias, curator

 

ART IN THE ARTHOUSE presents: ISABELLA KELLY-RAMIREZ now in NoHo

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Art in the Arthouse’s exhibit, ISABELLA KELLY-RAMIREZ: WHO IS SHE, has moved to NoHo! Explore the bold, dynamic works of Kelly-Ramirez on display until the end of June. All of the art is for sale and a portion of the proceeds benefits the Laemmle Foundation and its support of humanitarian and environmental causes in Los Angeles.

About the Exhibit

Isabella Kelly-Ramirez creates paintings and collages that introduce a host of fascinating females. Modern-day saints and superheroes, champions of the avant-garde, and fashionable figures to be reckoned with; these are icons of a new mythology from the imagination of the artist. Her arresting collages are playful acts of defiance. Kelly-Ramirez coopts images from fashion and art magazines, repurposing them to create surreal urban legends and ironic emblems of commercialism.

The works address the unattainable standards of beauty in fashion and life by reconstituting mainstream imagery into something quirkier and more humane. Kelly-Ramirez’s visual world continues in the striking paintings framed in soft sculpture. Bright, colorful portraits of humanoid figures appear in whimsical, unearthly settings. Somehow this creative, alternative place is more human, more generous, and more authentic than our curated “reality.”

Isabella Kelly-Ramirez lives and works in Los Angeles. Born in Santa Barbara, she has been involved in the art and theatre communities since she was a child. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008 and works primarily in painting, collage, soft sculpture, and assemblage—with a pop surrealist flair.

– Stacey Ravel Abarbanel, Curator