By Andrea Serna, Arts and Culture Writer
The figures at the Transvagrant Gallery imply a sense of undulating bulbous forms. Your instinct wants to interpret them as representational of familiar forms, while your eyes remind you that this is an abstraction.
The figures make up Ann Weber, Sculpture; it is a reflection through a looking glass.
“As nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t,” said Alice in Alice Through the Looking Glass.
There are abundant hints of figuration and recognizable objects — think chess pieces, balloons, human torsos, plant forms and graphic ciphers. Weber’s sculptures are organic. Even though they are created from discarded cardboard, fished out of dumpsters along her walks, they come across as abstract and elegant. She cuts, strips and staples the retrieved material until it requires a keen eye to see that none of her work requires paint or any other form of enhancement to create works of beauty.
Weber is a transplant to the San Pedro art community. In 2015, she relocated to San Pedro after living and working for 30 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a chance meeting with another artist, she was encouraged to visit Los Angeles. She was told that the city had recently built a reputation as a formidable place for the arts. Her friend had more attention in eight months in Los Angeles than he had in 12 years in San Francisco. She began researching studio spaces in Los Angeles almost immediately.
Another sculptor, Eric Johnson, invited her to visit his studio in San Pedro. She was dazzled by what she saw.
“It was just so incredibly beautiful,” Weber said. “This is what I had set my heart on. Nothing makes my heart pound faster than seeing the industry and those beautiful Trojan horses of the cranes. The things that inspired me were the ships and the port and the big pile of nets.”
Mixed in with the natural beauty of the ocean and city scapes, it began to fall in place.
All this came together to inspire her show.
The work was created in the two years she has lived in the port city. Pieces such as Moon Over San Pedro, which shows a dark moon reflecting on the harbor waters, display the influence of her new environment. With Hallelujah, the intertwining appendages in her sculptures reach out to grasp each other, imparting not only a sense of joy but of awe. The towering stately figures in Personages, Santa Monica are contrasted by the embrace of Personages, San Pedro.
Weber quickly came to the attention of Ron Linden, curator of the newly relocated TransVagrant Gallery. Linden says her technique is disarmingly direct, referencing arte povera’s preference for unconventional materials.
Much of Weber’s inspiration for her art came from her radical move. Leaving the community that she had called home for 30 years left her conflicted over the positive and negative aspects of her choice.
“I started playing with the conflict of the positives in coming to Los Angeles and the negatives of leaving my homeland,” Weber said. “A lot of pieces that are in this show have to deal with positive and negative space.”
Walking through the exhibits, you notice areas that seem to have a space cut out, leaving a void in the background. It began to look like portals that you see in ships, but Weber said that the word portal refers to the door to a new place. She is working with both the environment and events in her own life, creating a metaphor for her life experiences.
Ann Weber, Sculpture runs through April 30. TransVagrant Gallery is hosted in Gallery 478 for this exhibit.
Time: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, through April 30
Details: (310) 600-4873; www.transvagrant.com
Venue: Gallery 478, 478 W. 7th St., San Pedro