Aviva and I wanted to see a show up at Billy Shire Fine Arts, so we went to Culver City and visited a few galleries.  There were two shows worth seeing.

The first is Billy Shire Fine Arts – he’s got two shows in his gallery right now, one by Miriam Wosk and the other by Tim Tate.

Ms Wosk’s work is all large and in various mixed media; some are paper collage and some are painted with glitter and additional objects attached.  There’s also on sculpture and one tapestry.  The images do not do the work justice, you have to see them to get the three-dimensional flavor of some of the work.

Mr. Tate’s work is small video mounted inside a glass jar with a decorative cap related to the video playing in the jar.  Two of the devices have cameras and so, in a sense, play you as their subject.  I thought these were wonderful and playful.

The second show of interest is at David Gallery, and its a one person show of the work of Nick Veasey.  Nick’s work is pretty unique; he’s occupied an isolated building, created a “safe” x-ray facility there and taken x-rays of various things.  He’s then converted them to digital and created digital prints on glass.  In some cases he’s tinted the images, and in one case he created a progression from the full x-ray to the full visible image.

Afterwards we drove to Santa Monica and visted our favorite bookstore again, Hennessey + Ingalls.  I of course bought two books and yet another d-torso cardboard kit, this time of a rhinoceros.  We ate dinner at an Italian seafood restaurant, I Cugini, which I can’t recommend – the food was not that tasty and the prices were high (as they seem to be at most of the restaurants in Santa Monica).

The Steelcase store has a cool sign in the window

There were two dogs having a playful time at the Promenade in Santa Monica