Three new exhibitions will have an opening reception at the Long Beach Museum of Art (LBMA) on Friday, February 23 from 6:00PM to 8:00PM. On display will be abstract works from the museum’s permanent collection, a reimagining of tarot cards by figurative painter and tattoo artist Shay Bredimus  and artist Christy Matson’s ceramic and textile works.

Time and Space: Abstractions from the Permanent Collection opened on Friday and will run through May 6 with over 35 paintings and sculptures from 1923 to 2007. Works by June Harwood, Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Bettina Brendel, Karl Benjamin, and ceramics by Wouter Dam and Peter Shire, to name a handful, explore “the multiple visions possible when artists are not focused on portraying the physical world and instead create new visions for our imaginations to explore,” according to the LBMA.

Christy Matson: Rock, Paper, Scissors also opened last week and will run through May 13. The exhibition features ceramics paired with textiles. As an internationally recognized specialist in Jacquard hand weaving, this will be the first exhibit the Los Angeles-based artist has combined the two media in the same show. Matson uses slip-cast porcelain ceramic forms made from discards, including the varying types of cones or cylinders normally used to wind yarn.

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“Usually, once the yarn is used, the plastic or cardboard cones are tossed away, however, Matson saw that these simple, abstract, conical forms could be transformed and become metaphors—Vessels—for transportation and journey in the museum gallery that opens to the vast Pacific Ocean,” stated the release.

The textiles in Matson’s exhibition are all hand woven on a jacquard loom combined with unspun paper yarn. Many of the weavings use simple geometric forms to create abstract compositions, an intentional method that “Matson considers to be an important counterpoint to the amount of pre-planning that is often required in hand-weaving.”

CARTOMANCY: The Seni Horoscope Re-imagined is set to open this Friday and will be on view through May 13. Bredimus’ background as a figurative painter and tattoo artist—he works full time at Kari Barba’s Outer Limits in downtown—shines through the artist’s largest single body of work to date. Nearly two years in the making, CARTOMANCY is inspired by the 17th century German fortune-telling system created by Italian oracle Giovanni Battista Seni, a tarot deck of 72 cards.

Shay Bredimus, Plant Venus (Dove), 2016, tattoo ink and wax crayon on drafting film. 17″ x 11″. Image courtesy of the Long Beach Museum of Art.

Bredimus reimagines a version of these historic cards into two large-scale pictographs and 70 medium-sized portraits. Seventy-two pieces each represent a horoscope tarot card fortune to be “seen as an interactive conduit to understanding man’s position in the universe,” according to the museum. Each piece is encased in a wood pediment fenestration and created in the artist’s signature black tattoo ink on drafting film.

The museum is free on Thursday evenings from 5:00PM to 8:00PM and all day on Fridays. The galleries and store are open Thursday 11:00AM to 8:00PM and Friday through Sunday 11:00AM to 5:00PM. Admission is $7 for adults, $6 for students and seniors age 62 and older and free for members and children under 12.

For more information, visit the website here.

Asia Morris is a Long Beach native covering arts and culture for the Long Beach Post. You can reach her @hugelandmass on Twitter and Instagram and at [email protected].