“Road Trip” curated by David Pagel 2024 Art Installation at Tamarisk Country Club, Rancho Mirage, California

Tamarisk Country Club Living Room, (front left) Lari Pittman, “Untitled #6”, Cel-vinyl, acrylic, and lacquer spray over gessoed canvas over wood panel, 102 x 88 inches, 2008, Navi Toly, (rear left) Find the Red Basket, Acrylic on Canvas, 144 x 96 inches, 2023 and (right) Sofia Enriquez, What Happened, Acrylic paint on doors, 96 in x 288 inches, 2020, photograph by Lance Gerber, courtesy of Tamarisk Country Club

“Road Trip” curated by David Pagel
2024 Art Installation at Tamarisk Country Club,
Rancho Mirage, California (through August 4, 2024)

By Lorien Suárez-Kanerva July, 2024

Curator David Pagel’s 2024 show “Road Trip,” currently at Tamarisk Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California, is part of an annual program. Since 2021, ART AT TAMARISK has featured rotating contemporary art installations, curatorial talks, docent-led tours, and seasonal visits to museums, artists’ studios, and galleries in Southern California. Tamarisk was founded in the early 1950s to counter religious and cultural discrimination. Jack Benny, George Burns, and the Marx brothers (Groucho, Zeppo, Gummo, and Harpo) were among Tamarisk’s visionary founders. President Gerald Ford and actors Kirk Douglas and Frank Sinatra were members. Tamarisk’s early guests included actress Lucille Ball, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower, First Ladies Nancy Reagan, Rosalynn Carter, and Barbara Bush. 

During the pandemic, Tamarisk embarked on a renovation to contemporize its clubhouse. Award-winning architect Steven Harris and Interior Design Hall of Famer Lucien Rees Roberts, Tamarisk members, led the 2021 renovation honoring Tamarisk’s mid-century modern heritage while updating functionality and aesthetics.

To complement the renovation and bring art enthusiasts and artists together, seasoned collectors Susan and Rod Lubeznik, Tamarisk members, devised a cost-effective plan for the club to borrow significant work from acclaimed contemporary artists and galleries. On behalf of the club, they engage annual curators to create a concept, identify artists, and select and install art throughout the clubhouse. Members and their guests engage with the art daily, while the artists have the unique opportunity to show their work in an intimate setting for a year.

The full impact of the visual experience of 15 artists collected artworks and its curation by David Pagel for “Road Trip” is augmented by the spacious, lighted quality that permeates Tamarisk’s halls, bringing the exhibition together seamlessly in a living and active architectural setting. Pagel’s curation aims to address the myriad evocations a “Road Trip” elicits as a human experience. Whether fanciful or factual, hard-to-believe or hard to ignore, unsettling or joyous, the adventures Road Trip elicits are endless. (David Pagel) The process of beholding a work of art like travel stimulates a sensorial experience imbued with the author and the beholder’s meanings. Pagel proposes an experience at Tamarisk similar to a personal quest of discovery toward what has yet to be known.

The pursuit of seeing and perceiving reaches phenomenological dimensions for humankind. The experience itself, amongst other philosophical factors, can draw forth meanings powerful enough at times to alter and create new landscapes and journeys. Human faculties touch upon art and seek to know art while investigating the impressions that spring forth from facets still unknown in the human psyche. For this installation and beyond, the elements of travel and journeying can take on an archetypal Jungian quality that reveals inklings of our unconsciously shared, collectively owned revelations over existence itself.

Navi Toly, “Oh Crow, What are you Watching? The Tulip is Gone”, Acrylic on Canvas, 74 x 48 inches, 2023. Photograph by Lance Gerber, courtesy of Tamarisk Country Club.

Amongst the works of the fifteen artists, Navi Toly, Sofia Enriquez, Lari Pittman, Merion Estes, Roy Dowell, and Spelman Downer each address specific aspects that touch on “Road Trip’s” curatorial concept. Iranian-born Navi Toly’s artworks align closely with the visual narratives’ memory fashions from her experience. The center stage is a child-like square-shaped house vibrantly lit with an inner-outer spatial reversal lit by the fireplace. The crow’s centrality in the scene presents a question. In answer, phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard’s statement presents a limitless universe of possibilities. “Thus, an immense cosmic house is a potential of every dream of houses.” (The Poetics of Space: Chapter 2-House and Universe) A multilayered reality through which Toly moves and breathes and finds her being draws from the universality of her humanity.

Merion Estes’ “Drink Me” reveals an aqueous expanse of living creatures drawing sustenance from water. Here, an appreciation of the meaning of nature as a collective of organic processes, each dependent on the other, opens that vision of the lake—disclosing living organisms, amphibians, and reptiles, plant life, along with humankind imbibing into that liquid essence of life that’s indistinguishable from itself. 

Merion Estes, “Drink Me,” Paint and transfers on fabric, 60 x 87 inches, 2016

Sofia Enriquez’s “What Happened” is monumental in scale and reminiscent of Diego Riveras’ murals depicting humanity’s dramas. Enriquez’s work delves into the psyche and the image as a pictogram and advertisement spanning the narratives coined amidst a diverse dialogue of thematic elements with myriad interconnections of an ageless anthropocentric drama.

Sofia Enriquez, “What Happened,” Acrylic paint on doors,” 96 x 288 inches, 2020

Lari Pittman’s “Untitled #6” expands on a human drama to take up the objects and animate them. A barrel has feet, and is it reaching to dust a lightbulb? A multiplication of seven, price tag, and decorative bulbs are the mish-mash of contemporary objects, each as an iconic disparate element of modern life. Pagel poignantly observes: ”Decoration never looked better, nor did stuff that it wasn’t supposed to.” 

Roy Dowell, “Untitled #681”, Glass mosaic on board, framed, 54 x 36 inches, 2015

Roy Dowell’s “Untitled #1074” draws on the appeal of a shape and color and the combination of these elements taken from their original purpose. A field of possibilities arises through its rediscovered potential towards a new assemblage, where the sum of the parts grooms the whole. The inventive context is beyond the elements’ original functionality.

Spelman Downer’s “Azovstal Steel Plant April 2022 #1” reveals a rich textural indulgence– a layered manipulation of enamels, pigments, and paint in its material viscosity through the layering application, both pouring and scraping, to unearth traces of an underpainting. All undergo a transformation where the intricate textural application of the media as fractal assemblages arise visually to resemble other fractal patterns at work in the geological landscape that appears as its features, including coastlines, rivers, mountains, and plains.

 Spelman Downer, “Biggest Best Lithium Valley,” Oil, enamel, fractured glass, and glitter on panel, 48 x 60 inches, 2022

The artists share salient and poignant dimensions that address an innate cognitive and intuitive creative language and vision. The experiences bring shape and reveal an art-making creative meaning. Themes appear in the show in the form of maps, physical landmarks, cityscapes, neighboring living scapes, landscapes, natural settings, dreamscapes, and memory lanes, alongside the means for journeying. Particular vehicles imbue travel with a distinguishing kind of experience. Fashioned amidst the motion and the environs, the travel process imparts innumerable sensations. A liminal experience between leaving and arriving at its juncture as a “Road Trip” finds a richly poignant diversity within the variability of expressions in Tamarisk’s show. WM