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LA Alternative Press, "To Do" October 12 - 17, 2006
[Article copied here with curator's notes in grey]

Malflourished at Gallery Revisited
OK, so looking at the press release we received from Gallery Revisited about the new exhibition opening this Saturday, we had to highlight some of the key words used:

“Feral Art, Gallery Pox, Meat Flowers, Corpuscles, Bowels, Religious Connotations, Hanging Flesh”

What the hell?? But holy crap, looking at the pictures of the pieces, it's a disgustingly awesome display of digital art [the photographs of Bug's Eye Views] and miniature sculpture that is supposed to be a pseudo-environ of repulsive flora and fauna. Malflourished looks like something you'd find on the cutting room floor of the free clinic. Nausea can't be helped or contained when thinking about this exhibition, beautifully done by collaborators Pete Goldlust and Julie Hughs [Hughes] (think about how you felt around hour three of Matthew Barney's Cremaster).

Reacting to the widespread use of fruit in religious art, Hughs [Hughes] and Goldlust wanted to heighten the carnality fruit and draw away from its religious connotations, creating this monstrously bizarre and contagious installation of inedible fruits, mutant fruit flies and intestinal slicks.

In addition to all of this fresh and blood colored madness, the use of mirrors [No actual mirrors are used - I believe they are referring to, 'figuratively speaking', about the photos that can be perceived as mirrors of the installation] and 3-D painting screws with the viewer's vantage point, making it an even more bewildering sight. Seriously, viewers should be wearing HazMat suits. Malflourished is deliciously on the brink of decay. Artists Reception 6-10 p.m. Gallery Revisited, 3204 Sunset Blvd., Silver Lake. FREE. (626) 253-5266. www.galleryrevisited.com. (Tiffany Lee)

LA Times, August 26th
by David Pagel

Reality shakes hands with fiction
When the word "landscape" entered the English language in 1598, it referred to pictures painted by artists who went into the countryside and depicted what they saw. The term's meaning soon expanded to include the countryside itself. Today, it encompasses even more, describing the zeitgeist or outlining distinctive features of times, places and attitudes.

At Bamboo Lane / Revisited, "Enter / Exit: the uncommon landscape" treats the idea of landscape even more loosely, using it to convey dreams and realities and various intersections of the two.

The best works in the small group exhibition are indirect and slippery, poetically melding fiction and realism.

Pete Goldlust and Julie Hughes have collaborated to make "Polyponesian = Tuberfoil Mangrove," an abstract mural in which two-dimensional shapes and 3-D forms cavort playfully. Goldlust's whimsical figurines sculpted from plasticine and Hughes' writhing images printed on acetate stage a story worthy of Dr. Seuss and Sigmund Freud, in which eating and excreting belong to a sensuous, sometimes scary continuum.

Tyler Hudson has transformed a shopping cart, lawn mower motor, wine rack and serving tray, among other mechanical odds and ends, into a pair of wheeled vehicles. "Vons #30" resembles the mutant offspring of kids' go-carts. "Metro-sexual Cart" looks as if it belongs alongside old-fashioned lawn furniture. Both suggest that conflict and compromise rule the day.

Competent but conventional works by Susie White, Sandra Low and Cindy Suriyani (in collaboration with Paul e Magalad) lack the multilayered resonance of the show's most engaging works.

So do half of Sam Gezari's eight panoramic photographs. The four that depict alienated laborers bring little insight to modern life. On the other hand, the four that show suburban homeowners cutting their grass with riding mowers adroitly capture the peculiar way pleasure and productivity fuse in America. In a country where two-fisted multitasking is venerated, leisure and labor bleed into each other, forming a landscape where relaxation is frowned upon and work means far more than a paycheck.

Long Nguyen
asiaarts.ucla.edu
by Jennifer Flinn

Taking you down to Chinatown: Asian Art's Best Kept Secrets
In recent years, the Los Angeles Chinatown has become a hotbed of activity for the arts, and in harmony with the location, much of the art is created by Asian and Asian-American artists. Concentrated on Chung King Road, but also scattered throughout the rest of the historic district are small galleries -- some that specialize in Asian and Asian-American art, and many more that work hard to make sure that such artists are included in their shows. Their neighborhood and density of the galleries makes it a convenient and intriguing way to see a great diversity of exciting works in a single stroll, and adds immeasurably to the artistic presence of Los Angeles. With most galleries changing their exhibits every six to eight weeks, coordinated openings frequently occur and give the evenings an festival air as art lovers stroll from gallery to gallery to see the new works.

Continuing at Bamboo Lane / Revisited are “Open to the Four Winds,” featuring paintings from the series “Tales of Yellow Skin” by Vietnamese-born artist and actor Long Nguyen. Going beyond the stereotypical connotations of “yellow skin,” Nguyen’s work attempts to find a universal theme through his own personal history. The paintings glow in various tones of yellow and are bracingly textural, using seed pods and other organic matter to build up some areas of the canvas and referencing both Taoist and Eastern medicinal philosophies. Many of the works are from the later stages of the series, and have a mellowness and softness that make them almost soothing --an artist coming to terms with a painful past.

Long Nguyen recent press
Artscene, April 2005 Recommended

The color yellow appears to begin as a simple field in Long Nguyen’s “Yellow Skin” paintings. But by the time he works it over anything can, and seemingly does happen. In Nguyen’s hands hat monochrome field is fecund with biological and floral associations, fantasy musings, topographical meanderings and more. It seems that Nguyen has recently pushed the level and quality of detail well beyond earlier work, with its stronger emphasis on bringing forth wounds of his youth (perhaps to help excise them). The greater intricacy and delicacy achieves a feeling of energy that is in harmony with itself. Not only are the results inviting to view and delve into, but they convincingly document a slow journey out of a personal hell (Bamboo Lane / Revisited, Downtown).

LA Weekly, April 14, 2005
Pick of the Week by Peter Frank

Long Nguyen has distilled his earlier haunted landscapes and blasted figures into fields of a single color. It’s a rich, golden hue, and one that literalizes the title of his current series, "Tales of Yellow Skin." The title retains its complicated reflection on racial identity, and the paintings retain Nguyen’s sense(s) of his selves — his turbulent memories of his childhood in a war-torn Vietnam and the awareness he gained once he came here of his philosophical, and even medicinal, heritage. On each canvas, the mottled, worked yellow coalesces into what seem like gnarled body organs, circulatory vessels, or the veins and stems of plants. But rather than seem hurt or diseased, these eruptions of viscera maintain a powerful vitality, as if we were looking at, and into, a fragile and translucent but healthy creature. At Bamboo Lane / Revisited, 418 Bamboo Lane, Chinatown; Wed.-Sat., noon-6 p.m., thru April 23. (213) 620-1188.

flavorpill, August, 2004

Paint, Paint, Paint
Jen Angeloro, Steve Jackson, and Paige Wery don't have much in common, but they do share a kind of fatal attraction to paint. You get the feeling that if they could eat it, breathe it, and marry it, they very well might. Angeloro literally paints with her fingers, seeking a childlike directness in her surprisingly adult and sensual near-abstractions, while Jackson isn't concerned with theories of color or expressionism, though his complex, tactile paintings could certainly support lofty ideas. Wery makes free use of allegory and narrative while keeping her distance from autobiography, and clearly relishes applying paint to any surface she can get her hands on.

flavorpill, March, 2004

Return to... Ins & Outs
Featuring local artists-to-watch Paige Wery and Vito Lorusso, this latest installment in experimental thematic gallery Revisited explores "augmented interiors and alternative landscapes." Wery's mixed media expressionism incorporates elements of nature, industry, and the everyday in complex, evocative visual juxtapositions. Lorusso, on the other hand, goes deep into detail, reproducing autobiographical moments with subtle psychological twists. This transgression of conventional forms is expanded upon by Brenda Grajeda (abstractions from nature), Scottie Epstein (graffiti on industrial material surfaces), Diana Jacobs (thick, emotive landscapes), and Lori Needleman (hyper-manipulated flora)