People complain a lot about Los Angeles: It’s too big, too spread out, and the traffic is terrible. But local artist Susan Logoreci sees a different side of her city that she conveys in her large-scale mosaic-like colored pencil drawings. Her images of the urban sprawl are drawn by hand and without a ruler or projector, giving her work a hand-made or in her words, “elastic”, quality that breaks the first rule of drawing architecture.
Logoreci’s “imperfect” drawings focus instead on the compelling abstraction and drama that plays out in the emotional aspects of landscape; city landmarks like the Griffith Observatory, Downtown skyline, and the Expo Train Line, for which her work most recently been recreated as mosaic tile, are mapped out in impressive 4×6″ spreads. Her work will next be installed in one of the new metro stations in Los Angeles that opens on May 20th.
“As Los Angelenos, New Yorkers, and big city dwellers know well, the view out of your airplane window when you arrive back in your city is often one that is at once overwhelming and bittersweet. I love the feeling of coming home and am at once warmed over by the minuscule aerial view of my large hometown, though I have panged feelings of being simultaneously shocked and awed at its sprawling enormity,” she says.
As inspiration, Logoreci uses photographs that she and her friends take from helicopters. From such a high distance, cities look more like a buzzing honeycomb, where all the small blocks, tiny windows, and sparkling lights come together to make a whole: “I wanted to capture that somewhat creepy, awe inspiring feeling you get from seeing a swarm of bees on the move; the collective power of all those little pieces.”
Though abstraction typically embraces simplicity by reducing what we see into simple forms, Logoreci’s drawings are just as complex as a real city. Her compositions of lines and wobbly planes of buildings in bright colors are expansive and allow the viewer to imagine the millions of lives that exist within these bustling spaces. All of the different elements come together in what she describes as a “disruption” of the world we are used to seeing, a re-imagining that is more than blocks of buildings. Logoreci is currently showing new work at PYO Gallery in Los Angeles through April 9th.
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