Christian Sampson’s Ocean Ions is a bridge between scientific inquiry and artistic expression, drawing connections to color theory, spirituality and abstraction, site specific land art projects and sublime and utopian ideals of the American West. The exhibition investigates the complex interplay between light, color, and movement, and explores the concept of ions—molecules that have gained or lost an electrical charge through movement—and their effects on the environment and spectator.

In conjunction with LAM’s yearly Art + Nature series, Sampson in planning a performance and art installation right on Laguna Beach that will incorporate dance movements within his artworks. He has envisioned a display of colorful circular sculptures and forms set in motion and animated both by the light of the sun and movements by dancers from Volta Collective draped in costumes painted by Ariel Dill.

Christian Sampson uses light as a medium to create site specific installations of color, form, projections and reflections that create playful illusions that oscillate between dimensional boundaries. His installations are created in response to the architectural space–from museum galleries, to public gardens, to performance spaces, to intimate settings.

For Fred Tomaselli, the natural beauty and fantasy culture of his native Southern California have always inspired and informed his explorations in life and in art. A Cal State University Fullerton graduate (BA, 1982, Painting and Drawing), Tomaselli has lived and worked in New York since 1985, where he developed his trademark style: crafting mashups of explosive and hallucinatory images and patterns into resin paintings that suspend collaged and hand-painted elements within layers of clear resin. The tension wrought by his fusion of materials and ideas is seductive and unnerving. Through his work, Tomaselli wrestles with the calamities of the moment: the pandemic, police brutality, race relations, climate emergency and other pressing issues.  The results are pointed towards the full spectrum of 20^th– and 21^st-century life, from its ugliness to what is absolutely sublime.

Fred Tomaselli: Second Nature features nearly 50 new and recent works that highlight the varied and wide-ranging intersections of art, nature, popular culture and current events that run through his practice.

Tomaselli’s resin paintings will be presented alongside selections from his New York Times series—marking the start and progression of the Coronavirus and the worldwide pandemic it caused. Drawing on and altering the front pages of the daily newspaper, these works mark the passage of time and document in diaristic fashion the urgent issues of the days, weeks and months unfolding throughout the world.

Fresh from more than a year spent in Europe and North Africa, artist Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) returned home to Northern California in 1953. In her Berkeley studio DeFeo looked to nature as inspiration, employing the artistic language she developed while in Florence to fuse modes of representation with approaches to abstraction in a group of drawings that make up Jay DeFeo: Trees.

Trees also features a selection of DeFeo’s photographs of trees captured in the Bay Area during the early 1970s when she began focusing on black-and-white photography. DeFeo took this aspect of her practice with the utmost seriousness, and it was integral to her artmaking. Accompanying these artworks will be a selection of archival materials highlighting the artist’s enduring fascination with trees and nature.