ENVZN24 paired our latest work, “The New Age of Enlightenment,” with San Diego Fashion Week! This piece is one of the largest 3D Printed artworks that we have seen and it invited lots of public interaction, including hundreds of new messages placed inside the Buddha column by visitors. We will post these ‘hopes and dreams for the future’ on social media daily.
Susanna Peredo Swap talks about the ENVZN 23 Urban Art Takeover, transforming two city blocks into a showcase for film, theater, dance, visual arts and music, from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border:
“Debby and Larry Kline‘s piece is installed in a screen printing shop, transforming the space. It talks about over-consumption and recycling and the cycle of living trash. It’ll be like a temple.”
Much thanks to all the folks at Mesa College art gallery for printing our woodblock, United States Hostage, at ENVZN23 Urban Art Takeover. Their crew “crushed it” on the streets of Logan Heights for about 12 hours. We sooooooo wanted to drive the steamroller!!!
We were thrilled to be part of this visual and performing arts festival that transformed warehouses, industrial spaces, and other urban areas of the Commercial Street corridor in Logan Heights. Two full city blocks were activated with multi-sensory art interventions by creatives from both sides of the U.S./Mexico border. Here is the Malashock Dance troupe tearing it up at ENVZN23 Urban Arts Takeover. The Alchemist is pleased.
The Klines’ Alchemist has appeared in different iterations in various locations. This newest version—now legless but taller than ever—will be surrounded by drawings that illustrate the four elements of the alchemical process: Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. You’ll find him in a space that welcomes meditation, with a soulful soundscape by Tijuana-based multimedia music artist MALU and an offering bowl for you to share your hopes and dreams.
Edgy and surreal, witty, and, well, expansive, the show includes an eight foot ink drawing (just one panel in a larger piece) by the Klines, “The Dark Side of the Moon (Phase 3)
Columns on either side, made of blue masking tape, present Schomaker as a Samson-like figure pulling down the pillars of body-image orthodoxy. “This is an image of her pushing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable,” Larry said. “We tried to make an image of her that shows her inner strength instead of her foibles and weaknesses,” Debby added.
“The Klines worked with Dr. Thiomas Albright, Chair of Vision Research at the Salk Institute, whose research is studying perceptions and our brain’s ability to fill in what it thinks it has seen. His research is finding that things like cultural expectations, personal bias and even religious beliefs have more impact on our perception than what we see with our own eyes.” This work also incorporates poetry by David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg, and readings by Eleanor Antin and Jerome Rothenberg.
The Alchemist is the original “maker”, an icon for a world that demands cheap, readily available material goods, without concern for the byproducts of manufacturing. But our relationship with industry is a complicated one. At its core, the Alchemist also represents our need to design, build and change our environment through understanding the principles that guide our world.
As the Joyce Cutler-Shaw Artists in Residence at UCSD School of Medicine, we are honored to have the opportunity to create artworks for display. We recently created/and or installed two large sculptures and one large drawing in the Biomedical Sciences building, each about 8 feet in height or length.
In the final panel, The Dark Side of the Moon, the Earth has become a defunct rock in the sky and rabbits, the victims of testing, have escaped and repopulated the moon, doomed to repeat the same mistakes as their human counterparts.
We created a Patreon account so that people who love what we create can help support our work.
Audubon documented as many American birds that he could find in his lifetime. He was an avid hunter but appreciated the diversity, abundance and beauty of birds. He often would kill the birds, position them in such a manner that they looked alive and then document them in drawings and paintings. We picked up his pen and followed with images of birds that are now extinct.
We have created a short video to encourage voting in this crucial US Presidential election. To save our Democracy, we must all do our best to counteract voter suppression and Fascism. If our cat can do it, so can you!
Weeks 1-6 of my self-confinement residency which will culminate in a performance and exhibition at Building Bridges Art Exchange Los Angeles. I am building Patrolling the Perimeters, featuring sugar tanks riding robotic vacuums which clean up their own messes as they collide.
We are honored to be interviewed by Heritagefuture.org for our work illustrating stories for Write Out Loud’s Kamishibai presentations. The latest project was told from the viewpoint of a Japanese-American child, who endured loss and displacement as his family was forced into Japanese internment camps during WWII.
Larry Kline discusses his work with Debby Kline in a virtual chat at Building Bridges Art Exchange, Los Angeles. This conversation is part of the “Self-Confinement Residency,” developed by arts organizations in Spain, Columbia, Costa Rica and the United States to address the challenges facing artists who continue to create in the face of covid-19.
We create everything from large installations to micro-drawings. The materials that we use are always dictated by the idea, so our media ranges from the traditional like graphite, clay and paint to the unusual, such as fluorescent light bulbs, mud from the Dead Sea, ketchup and salt. Much of our work is a reflection on politics and social justice.
Curated by Dani Dodge and Alanna Marcelletti, “Disclosure: Confessions for Modern Times” features artists Kim Abeles, Jorin Bossen, Kimberly Brooks, Joe Davidson, Dani Dodge, Donald Fodness, Kathryn Hart, Debby and Larry Kline, Conchi Sanford, Ed Tahaney and Steven Wolkoff.
SAN DIEGO – The contemporary art exhibit, “Beyond the Age of Reason,” curated by Larry and Debby Kline, is nearing the end of its run at the San Diego Art Institute in Balboa Park. If you want to be intrigued, or even possibly enraged, by various artists’ visions of religion and spirituality, you’ll need to get to the museum space before the exhibit closes on October 31st.
The myth-master is Eleanor Antin, one of the founding members of UC San Diego’s Visual Arts Department, and an internationally-admired artist, or as the Klines put it: “an artist of the world.” Shown here is one of the pieces from her “Roman Allegories,” a series of large-scale photos staged in Del Mar and La Jolla that re-envision the last days of an ancient civilization remarkably similar to ours.
Debby and Larry Kline’s lush black and white works, the phrase “3 EYES” running vertically between two images, one of which features the eyes of a potato, while drones circle a rather apocalyptic landscape; the other a man with a singularly long lensed telescope or perhaps a periscope, pointed down, with an eye at its lens. The frame above the work features eye-like shapes. We are encouraged to look within, and to truly “see” our way of life. Beautifully, realistically detailed, the humor and absurdist quality of the subjects create a rich dichotomy.
“Myth is open to interpretation, and unfortunately, so are truths, but they are still the underpinnings of religious belief. The nuances of belief can either unite or divide individual, families and nations. The nuances can lead to peace or more often, war,” the Klines relate. “We believe -pun intended – that the artists reflect the larger populace that struggles with the concept of belief.”
Conceptual power-couple Debby and Larry Kline worked on five different projects during SS2 including the crowd-pleasing Poor, Poor Artist, which asked the public for stock tips (the Klines had invested their $500 stipend from the residency into the market).