Maria Luisa Morando Featured on Lenscratch

Check out this awesome Lenscratch blog about Maria Luisa's Aqua & White exhibition here at DNJ Gallery!

I remember when I first came across Maria Luisa Morando's exquisite work. It was in 2008 at Photo LA, in the photoeye Gallery booth. Her large, all white prints were framed in white and a contrast to the riot of imagery that surrounded it. The images were quiet, bleached out, as if looking at a dream, and I was completely transfixed. Whatever shapes or colors were able to emerge from the whiteness were like jewelry, tiny slivers of turquoise and rose, with washes of pale aqua and butter so faint that you had to work hard to see them. Those images stayed with me.

Several months later I invited Maria Luisa to speak in one of my classes, and she was anything but bleached out. Maria Luisa is a lively, beautiful British photographer, full of intention and intelligence. She spoke of how The White Series came out of the horror of 911 and as a reaction to these traumatic events, she wanted simplicity in her life. Now living in Los Angeles, Maria Luisa uses the coastline to find the the visual restraint and clarity that suits her vision.

Her new addition to this work, The Aqua Series, will be shown along side The White Series at an exhibition at the DNJ Gallery in Los Angeles. The show opens tonight and runs through January 16th.

Our lives are defined by moments.

Our memories are a series of moments that capture our lives and frame the emotions that surround them. The emotions are fluid, but the moments are both singular and eternal.

These timeless photographs capture a series of moments and allow the viewer to explore the emotions that ebb and flow with them. Like memories, these images have the seemingly counter-intuitive qualities of being highly defined, yet at the same time, being impossible to get close to, no matter how much the viewer tries.


Maria Luisa Morando, Aqua VI, 48" x 48," digital c-print, 2009

Please be sure to stop by DNJ Gallery to see Aqua & White by Maria Luisa Morando and Going Home: Toronto by Annie Seaton. The show will run through January 16, 2010.

View photos from the opening below:

Miracle Mile Art Walk and Artist Talk

Be sure to join us for this month's MM Art Walk hosted by DNJ Gallery this Saturday, November 21, 2009 from 4 - 7 pm! Along with refreshments, both Maria Luisa Morando and Annie Seaton will be giving artist talks at 4:30 pm, so please be sure to stop by for some fun, food, and art!


Maria Luisa Morando, Aqua V, digital c-print, 2009


Annie Seaton, Harbord St., c-print with acrylic inks, 2009

Maria Luisa Morando Featured in the November Issue of ArtScene

DNJ Gallery artist, Maria Luisa Morando, is a featured artist in this month's ArtScene.

This exhibition runs from November 14, 2009 - January 16, 2010 so please stop by the gallery for a visit!


Maria Luisa Morando, Aqua V, 2009


by Michael Buitrón

In theater design, it is often the barest suggestion of an image that suggests a particular time and place. A few bricks sketched on a dark wall, and the stage is transfigured into a dark and foreboding alley. In a similar way, Maria Luisa Morando’s photographs are so washed in light that only the barest traces are left to represent landscapes where sand and water interplay to form the shore. From her early years in theater and costume design, Morando brings an eye that is skilled in developing the essential, leaving details to be fleshed out in the mind of the viewer.

“Aqua and White” is a series of large-scale prints that, installed in the long and narrow exhibition space transform the room into an installation, beckoning the viewer to step into the image. With her cool gelato colors and sunlight reflected off the sand and celadon waves, she evokes fond memories of summer days. Because of the lack of sharp detail, it becomes impossible to explore the images for their specificity, and instead they open up and play to any seaside memory the viewer cares to pour into them. In “Camera Lucida” Roland Barthes referred to photographic details that create an intense, personal response, as the punctum. For images that are essentially punctum-free, Morando moves out of the way, allowing the viewer to find their own point of entry into the briny blur.

Having grown up in a small village in Great Britain that was, “as far from the sea as one could possibly get,” Morando’s childhood holidays created her first memories of the seaside as a place of retreat and contemplation. In the anxious and stressful days after September 11th she journeyed to the French coast at Biarritz, where she found both solace and her photographic muse in the shoreline. Like land and water’s eternal compromise that interplay and define the shore, these early works were titled with words from the Lord’s Prayer translated into Arabic, and the geography of the coast became a hopeful metaphor for the peaceful potential of East meeting West.

In the years since then, Morando’s seascapes have expanded the opportunity for a multitude of associations. By draining her photographs of color, the artist has allowed room for the viewer to fill her work with their own associations. For “Aqua & White” her point-of-view completely removes the horizon, offering only sand and sea, punctuated by the occasional blurry cipher that stands for a beachgoer or child at play. The square picture plane, like a Tibetan Mandala, offers the viewer a point of focus and contemplation.

Maria Luisa Morando and Annie Seaton Artist Reception

DNJ Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition “Aqua & White” featuring the photographs of Maria Luisa Morando. Gallery II presents “Going Home: Toronto” displaying unique acrylic and photographic works by Annie Seaton.

The artist reception will be held on Saturday November 14, 2009 from 6 - 8pm, and the exhibitions will run through January 16, 2010.



Maria Luisa Morando, Aqua IV,
2009, 12 x 12 inches


Annie Seaton, Island Ferry with Two Bouys,
2009, 36 x 24 inches

Jona Frank exhibition featured in this Sunday's LA Times

DNJ's current exhibition, of work by Jona Frank, is a featured exhibition in the Entertaimnent section of the Los Angeles Times. Look for the article in this Sunday's paper.

This show is running through November 7, 2009, so please stop by to see Jona's work in person!


Jona Frank, Simon 10, Santa Monica
2005, c-print, 11 x 14 inches


Jona Frank's 'Boys in Progress' at DNJ Gallery
Capturing the different stages of adolescence

By Liesl Bradner
October 11, 2009

As the youngest of four children and the only girl, Jona Frank spent a fair amount of her youth forced to sit and watch her older brothers at hockey games, piano recitals or at church as they served Mass as altar boys. And those observational skills would serve as a steppingstone to a career as a photographer.

Frank's exhibit at DNJ Gallery, "Boys in Progress" is a homage to those days watching her siblings maneuver and figure out the world. On view are 20 photos of boys ages 8 to 22 taken at different phases of their adolescence, be it a surfer boy, a Boy Scout or a young Mormon proselytizing.

Frank shot some of her subjects a few years apart in this ongoing project focusing on the phases boys go through as they explore their identities. One example, "Simon," was initially shot in 2005 of a 10-year-old boy on a playground with wild blond hair in a Metallica shirt. She revisited him a year later; in "Simon One Year Later" he had clearly grown in size and was still into skating with a "Skate and Destroy" helmet but with less attitude. Boys seem to follow the Santa Monica-based photographer around. For a time Frank lived down the street from Lincoln Middle School and every day at 3 p.m. hoards of them would walk by her house. Then in 2001 she had a son of her own and would sit in parks watching him play, learn and interact.

"She connects with her subjects, and it's evident in the photos," said Jennifer Chrzanowski, director at DNJ Gallery in West Hollywood. "They are posed yet candid at the same time because they have that trust."

Her eye captures those last fleeting remnants of innocence, which is evident in Frank's previous projects; "High School" a photo book of teenagers from 18 suburban high schools across the country and "RIGHT: Portraits From the Evangelical Ivy League."

"There's a definite West Coast vibe in her photos," added Chrzanowski. "John Henry" was the result of Frank's driving one sunny day when she spotted the then 14-year-old on a skateboard with a surfboard under his arm. "Just the way the sun was in his hair was like this ultimate California moment," recalled Frank. Frank's California dreams stemmed from growing up in New Jersey sitting in her Hang Ten shorts leafing through Skateboarding magazine. "I had this iconic ideal about California as a child and wanted to capture that in this project."

Frank moved to the West Coast to attend USC where she studied English and earned a masters in film production. "I am not looking to define one moment in the lives of these boys, I'm looking for a blend, for the textures, the shifts in their interests and obsessions as they progress through childhood," she explained. "My hope is that through these images one reflects on their own experience of once being a young boy or girl."

Chris Verene Featured in October Issue of ArtScene

DNJ Gallery artist, Chris Verene, and his exhibition titled, Family, is a continuing and recommended exhibition in this month's ArtScene. Please be sure to stop by the gallery and check out the work in person! This exhibition is running now through November 7, 2009.



By: AM

“Family” is a new book and series of digital c-prints by Chris Verene that offers a window into the artist’s past and documents a present that is at the mercy of alcoholism, poverty, and unemployment. Galesburg, Illinois, a small town where Verene’s family has lived for the past three generations, provides an endless source of fascination that is at the heart of his work. The artist writes the names of people and locations directly on the prints, transforming the faces of perfect strangers into identities that we come to know. This he does by capturing all walks of life, from “Max the Bachelor,” a balding elderly man with thick plastic glasses seated on a exercise bike, to “The Pregnancy Test,” where a young couple seated on a swinging bench either waits for or has already received the results. A young boy named Billy stands proudly in his room, his arms crossed over his chest, but the walls behind him have deteriorated and are covered in graffiti and handwriting more likened to a seedy bathroom stall than a young boy’s bedroom. The landscape is covered with junkyards, clothing lines with denim and corduroy flapping in the wind. Double wide trailers are supported by concrete blocks and adorned with twinkle lights.

A white clapboard house is crushed by a tree and the title explains, “the same day they signed the divorce papers, a tornado hit the house.” In the Galesburg presented here there are no homes behind white picket fences, only those who have very little and are struggling to do the best they can.