Nordhoff Station Mosaics

Today's featured mosaic is in Chatsworth, at the Nordhoff Metro Station of the Orange Line. Anne Marie Karlsen designed the 27-foot-long oval, which was installed in 2012. Here's what The Source--Metro's newsletter--has to say about it:

Anne Marie was inspired by the surrounding residential and natural landscape, including the landmark Stoney Point in Chatsworth. She approached the station platform as an outdoor living room, creating wallpaper-like porcelain enamel steel art panels alongside the platform seating areas, and glass and stone mosaic paving patterns designed to read like cozy ellipse-shaped area rugs. The title, Strati, refers to the geologic stratification and formation of the rocks in the northwest San Fernando Valley.

Here's what I learned about artist Anne Marie Karlesen, mostly from an article in Muses, an alumni magazine of Michigan State University. Karlsen was the youngest ever faculty member hired by UCLA's Art Dept back in 1979, and she's been teaching there and at Santa Monica College. In the 1990s she began creating Public Art around town.

That led to her 14 ceramic tile pictures at the North Hollywood Metro Station. "Kaleidoscope Dreams." It's almost a mosaic, and I've certainly covered pictures made of specially painted ceramic tiles before--but since we have an artwork that's unquestionably a mosaic already I'll only include a link to that installation.

She designed the relatively new stained glass artwork at the  Lawndale Library (which won an award), a tile wall titled "Ogling" outside the Pavilions in West Hollywood, and the two tall mosaic panels ("Revival") set into the brickwork at the Raymond Theatre Renaissance building at Holly and Raymond in Pasadena.

She is also the artist responsible for the huge, striking tile panel called "Wheels" on 2nd Street in Santa Monica, north of the 10 freeway. It's on a parking structure. And there is more, outside of Los Angeles County.

At left is a picture of the mosaic as it was being fabricated and laid out at Perdomo in Mexico. Karlsen does not have a webpage showing pictures of her work--at least not one that I could find, sadly.