Presenting the exhibition Trichromic featuring a striking new body of work by painter Cherie Benner Davis. Davis playfully riffs on the botanical forms and cultural associations of Cannabis, desert landscape, psychedelia, and hard-edge painting. The work is on view Edward Cella Art+ Architecture at the Thomas Lavin Showroom at the Pacific Design Center from January 31 through March 25, 2022.
In her work, Davis examines the significant shifting social acceptance and broader legalized use of the potent flowering Cannabis herb by setting out to create fantastical and optically active compositions. She draws from a diverse range of visual sources from the rose windows of Medieval cathedrals to contemporary fractal theory. Oscillating between hard-edged abstraction, magical realism, and pure sensation; the series of paintings posits the role of the artist in visualizing the shared social phenomenon as political and cultural boundaries change rapidly.
Trichromic advances a system of paintings Davis calls Super-Natural that stems from the artist’s intense foray in transforming Southern California residential landscapes into drought-tolerant gardens, designed in response to the ongoing drought. Inspired by the sculptural forms and bombastic colors of the succulent plants, Davis sought to transform through oil paint their metaphorical qualities, considering relationships in the language of artmaking between form and abstraction; figure and ground; and image and meaning.
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Cherie Benner Davis
Phoenician Dreams, 2021 -
Cherie Benner Davis
Daze of Fire and Ice, 2021Following her interests in plants that survive in tough conditions like succulents and Cannabis—still considered a Schedule 1 drug—Davis shifts her attention to the sacred plant to find a way to hold disparate modalities together at once in her paintings. She set out to use the plant’s palm like serrated leaves as a motif that in the artist’s words:
Exploit the various elements of painting: color, materiality, processes, image and abstraction, into an image in which all parts interact, often exuberantly, in the same field.
While marijuana is not so strongly associated with a hallucinatory experience, these paintings are highly stylized, and the psychedelic color palette references aspects of Southern California counterculture of the 1960s. Executed in eye-popping saturated colors, the paintings are designed digitally using collage and photographic source materials, then interpreted into oil paintings that embrace the use of exaggerated or arbitrary color.
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Cherie Benner Davis
Hail Mary, 2019 Oil on panel
30 x 30 in.
76.2 x 76.2 cm
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Cherie Benner Davis: Trichromic
A New Documentary by Eric Minh Swenson Filmed in the Artist's Los Angeles Studio -
In one form or another, my works are conversations between the personal and the political. These times feel especially fraught and have been challenging for many. My own response to this state of affairs is to insist on beauty – a sexy, high-chroma, delicious, possibly indulgent, beauty.
Cherie Benner Davis early experience in France fostered a strong appreciation of art, art history and language that has added to her training and practice as a painter. Davis earned her BFA at Brigham Young University and her MFA from California State University, Long Beach and received the Marilyn Werby MFA Exhibition Scholarship and the Outstanding Graduate Award. She is a lecturer in Fine Arts at both California State University, Long Beach and at Mount San Antonio College in Walnut. Not discriminate between image and abstraction; Davis seeks to make these disparate modalities to cooperate in the same painting with an eye toward opening conversations between the personal and the political.
Recent solo exhibitions include Super-Natural, Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio (2017); and LA Pastoral, LAUNCH LA, Los Angeles, (2017); Colony Collapse, Boston Court Playhouse, Pasadena, CA (2016); Righty-Tighty, Loosey-Goosey, PØST, Los Angeles (2009); Best Laid Plans, Solwayjones, Los Angeles, CA (2007); and Sensate presented at the W. Keith & Janet Kellogg Gallery, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (2001) among others. Her work has been featured in many group exhibitions including Funhouse: A Celebration of LA Painting, Rory Devine Fine Art, Los Angeles (2021); Cautious Optimism, Durden and Ray, Los Angeles (2021); LA Stories, Leo Castelli Gallery, Brenau University, Gainesville, Georgia (2020); Scream, Long Beach City College Art Gallery, Long Beach (2020); Desert/Dessert, Coastline College Art Gallery, Newport Beach (2019); Lift Off, Rio Hondo College, Whittier (2017); Rosette, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles (2016); and Setting Forth, Pasadena City College, Pasadena (2015) among others. She has curated the exhibitions of other artists and operated the home-based gallery The Attic from 2008-13. Her work has been featured or reviewed in numerous publications including The Los Angeles Times, Artillery, LA Weekly and Art Scene among others. Cherie Benner Davis currently lives and works in Los Angeles California. -
Cherie Benner Davis
Souvenirs of Rose y Bleu, 2021 Oil on panel
44 x 44 in.
111.8 x 111.8 cm -
Trichromic is installed at the Thomas Lavin Showroom at the Pacific Design Center and curated by Edward Cella; the exhibition is available for viewing Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 5 PM. Appropriate social distancing measures are required. To schedule your personal tour with Edward Cella, please email director@edwardcella.com or telephone 323 525 0053.
Please visit the Contact page for more information.
Please keep an eye out for the announcement of a special in person conversation between Cherie Benner Davis and galleriest Edward Cella.
