On Saturday, May 22nd, 18 galleries in the Culver City Art District celebrated openings, giving Culver Citizens a preview of the artworks that will be on display during the Culver City Art Walk on June 4. Over the last two weeks, I have shined a spotlight on three shows that you should be sure to check out on the 4th. The first was Wayne White's show at Western Project. The second was Terry Thompson's show at George Billis Gallery. The third was Zhang Huan's show at Blum & Poe.

Today, I'm going to recommend one more must-see show: "Falling Petals and Will You Dance For Me," an exhibition of photography and film by Ori Gersht -- at Angles Gallery at 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd.

Gersht's images are beautiful, luminous, rich and mysterious. The point of view often seems to be from someone peering and peering into the void, attempting to resolve an image -- to find some meaning, rescue, or balm.

To produce the series, Ori Gersht visited Japan during the spring of 2010, photographing the cherry trees as they bloomed in cities and in the countryside. The resulting images are lush, but there is a touch winter in them as well. These branches are sometimes spectral. Other images blur and fog, the world paling toward the monochromatic. 

Other works in Falling Petals seem to interrogate the medium of photography itself. Since many were shot at night, we see the results of the camera attempting to create a stable image, filling in optical information where it must, occasionally resulting in some really lovely distortion. 

The colors Gersht uses occasionally resembles those of hand-colored photographs from the late 1800s.

For reference, here's an example of such a hand-colored photograph. Apropos of the themes of this exhibition, this is a typical image from the Meiji Era in Japan, which includes the period from the importation of the first camera into Japan in 1848 through the death of the Emperor Meiji in 1912.

Other images in Gersht's show are Blake-ian in their evocations of ecstasy and darkness.

Ori Gersht lives and works in London, England. His works have been exhibited and collected by the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Modern, and The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, among others.