LONG BEACH, CA.- The Long Beach Museum of Art will welcomes three new exhibitions to its Hartman Pavilion and galleries, including CARTOMANCY: The Seni Horoscope Re-imagined by Shay Bredimus, Time and Space: Abstractions from the Long Beach Museum of Art Permanent Collection, and Christy Matson: Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Shay Bredimus
CARTOMANCY: The Seni Horoscope Re-imagined
Exhibition dates: February 24 – May 13, 2018
This exhibition of unique works by figurative painter and notable tattoo artist, Shay Bredimus showcases the largest single body of work by the artist to date. Nearly two years in the making, the full series of CARTOMANCY: The Seni Horoscope Re-imagined will debut at the Long Beach Museum of Art which bridges tattoo graphic art with that of traditional fine art.

CARTOMANCY: The Seni Horoscope Re-imagined is inspired by the 17th century German fortune-telling system created by Italian oracle Giovanni Battista Seni – a tarot deck of cards with 72 images – like hearts, moon, and sun – that represent predictions for life. Seni served Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, a major figure in the Thirty Years’ War. The Seni Horoscope cards were used for divination, as well as a guide to spiritual pathways.

In this body of work, Bredimus has re-imagined a version of those historic cards, a visual mixture of pictographs and portraits, with iconic and mystic symbolism. The artist has created 72 pieces, each representing a horoscope tarot card fortune – not only to be viewed as artwork, but also to be seen as an interactive conduit to understanding man’s position in the universe.

The Museum’s installation includes 70 medium-sized and two large-scale pictographs set in a cathedral ambiance. Each piece represents a fortune-created in his signature black tattoo ink on drafting film. A quiet female portrait emerges from a central mystic icon such as a ship, crown or nature symbol. Each piece is encased in a wood pediment fenestration, which complements the parallel visual conversation in the reading of the cards.

Shay Bredimus earned an MFA in 2008 from the Laguna College of Art and Design in Laguna, California and a BFA in painting from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada in 2004. He has studied under mentors F. Scott Hess, Stephen Douglas, and Wes Christensen, among others. In recent years, Bredimus’ work was featured in three solo exhibitions at the Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Culver City, CA and has been in solo exhibitions at San Luis Obispo Art Center, CA and Fresno City College, CA and numerous group shows in Hong Kong, Seattle, Las Vegas and Carlsbad, CA. Bredimus has earned critical praise with featured articles in the Huffington Post, Culture Magazine, Evolved, Prophets & Poets, Arts Journal and Inked. Bredimus was also voted as one of 10 local artists to watch in the OC Weekly’s Artopia 2014. Shay works full time as a tattoo artist at Kari Barba’s Outer Limits in Long Beach, CA, the oldest continual operating tattoo parlor in the United States, and paints non-stop on his days off.

Time and Space: Abstractions from the Permanent Collection
Exhibition dates: February 16 – May 6, 2018
This exhibition of contemporary art from the Museum’s permanent collection showcases over 35 paintings and sculptures across the span of the 20th century from 1923 into the 21st century through 2007. The exhibition explores the multiple visions possible when artists are not focused on portraying the physical world and instead create new visions for our imaginations to explore. Some of the featured artists include: June Harwood, Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Bettina Brendel, Karl Benjamin, ceramics by Wouter Dam and Peter Shire, works in wood by Connie Mississippi and Hayley Smith, as well as a new gift to the collection, a screenprint by Laddie John Dill.

Christy Matson: Rock, Paper, Scissors
Exhibition dates: February 16 – May 13, 2018
Los Angeles-based artist Christy Matson is internationally recognized as a specialist and innovator in the area of Jacquard hand weaving. In this exhibition, she intentionally pairs ceramics and textiles that make reference to the traditional functionality of ceramics and textiles in her non-functional artworks. This pairing is Matson’s first presentation of the two media in the same exhibition. The slip-cast porcelain ceramic forms are made from discards—including the varying types of cones or cylinders normally used to wind yarn. Usually, once the yarn is used, the plastic or cardboard cones are tossed away, however, Matson saw that these simple, abstract, conical forms could be transformed and become metaphors—Vessels--for transportation and journey in the Museum gallery that opens to the vast Pacific Ocean.

The textiles in the exhibition have a similar color palette as the ceramics and all are hand-woven on a jacquard loom using traditional yarn—a cotton/linen blend, or alpaca/linen bend—as warp, combined, in most cases, with the weft of un-spun paper yarn. Working with the paper material allowed the artist to approach this work as a drawing or mark-making practice. Matson painted or spray-painted the paper before weaving it and then could literally “draw” line-by-line into certain areas of the weaving to create different color compositions. Matson quotes German artist Paul Klee as having said, “A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.”

The yarn is literally “walking” back and forth to construct both the surface and the structure of her art. Like the molds from which the casts were made for the porcelain Vessels, the un-spun paper yarn is also a surplus material, purchased long ago in Japan by a colleague. And like the porcelain, many of her weavings draw on simple geometric motifs to create abstract compositions, thus, leaving the work open to a range of interpretations.

There is an improvisational spirit in working with the painted paper and the piecing together of woven sections that Matson considers to be an important counter-point to the amount of pre-planning that is often required in hand-weaving. Matson’s combinations of muted colors, surprising materials and geometric shapes combine to create a meditative space on view in the Lane Oceanview Gallery.

Matson received her MFA in 2005 from the California College of the Arts in California and a BFA in 2001 from the University of Washington. Matson's work has been included in recent exhibitions at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Arts Houston, The Milwaukee Art Museum, The Knoxville Museum of Art, the Asheville Museum of Art, and The San Francisco Museum of Craft+Design. Her work is in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Renwick Gallery in Washington D.C. and the Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland, Oregon.