October 30, 2006

Posted October 30, 2006

The Lev Moross Gallery is proud to present “Green Flag Song,” an exhibition of sixty new artworks by artist and musician Joni Mitchell. This is Mitchell’s first public showing of her artwork since her retrospective at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 2000, and the first exhibition Mitchell has created on a single motif.

Best known as a vastly popular and influential singer and songwriter whose blend of folk, rock, jazz, and classical music helped to shape both, her own, and subsequent generations of musicians and audiences, Canadian-born Joni Mitchell has always been an artist. She attended the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary before moving to Toronto, and then the United States, to follow a musical career. Like other major musicians of our time (such as John Lennon, David Byrne, Miles Davis and Herb Alpert), Mitchell’s visual sensitivity informs her musical output, and vice versa. The exhibition “Green Flag Song,” with its ruminations on war, politics, and the power of images, is based in part on Mitchell’s 1985 song “The Beat of Black Wings,” but promises in turn to lead Mitchell to further musical, artistic, and even theatrical creation.

The sixty panels comprising “Green Flag Song” grew out of an experimental series of photographs Mitchell began taking about a year ago, photographs made with a camera and taken off of a malfunctioning television set. The images, transferred to canvas, are of current events, historical events, and fictional events – all of which interrelate both thematically (through war and ritual) and visually (through their green cast and negative reversal of light and shadow). Very different from Mitchell’s previous paintings of figures and landscapes, best known from their appearances on her album covers, the panels of “Green Flag Song” nevertheless continue to address major moral and political issues in a highly distinctive, personalized voice.

The current series grew out of Mitchell’s interaction with gallerist and printer Lev Moross, who has known Mitchell and done printing work for her for several years and with whom Mitchell has maintained a fruitful dialogue about contemporary art and life. “Green Flag Song” is to be the first of a number of such series, in which Mitchell intends to address a wide array of topics, from modern diplomacy to Shakespeare, and to expand upon her experimentations with various techniques. Most immediately, images from "Green Flag Song" will comprise the centerpiece of the decor for a ballet based on her music, choreographed by Jean Grand-Maitre for his Alberta Ballet Company, to premiere in Calgary on February 8th, 2007.

A catalogue to "Green Flag Song," with an essay by Peter Frank, accompanies the exhibition and is available for purchase.

GREEN FLAG SONG
New Paintings at Lev Moross Gallery
November 10-December 18, 2006
962 N. La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles CA 90038
(one block south of Santa Monica Boulevard)
(323) 512-0151
levmorossgallery.com
Regular Gallery hours: 10am – 6pm
Tuesday – Friday (10-5 Saturday)