She thought it’d be natural for the gallery to collaborate with the school less than three miles away.
The exhibit started out with a handful of the region’s Masters of Fine Arts programs involved, including Cal State Fullerton, Cal State Long Beach, UC Riverside, Claremont and UC Irvine. That number is up to 10 this year, including CalArts, Cal State Northridge, Cal State Santa Barbara, UCLA and Otis College of Art and Design.
The show happens every other year, the last one being in 2014.
This year, 50 students applied to the show and 21 were selected, some showing works they’ve exhibited at their colleges, others creating pieces specifically for the gallery.
Brian Johnson, an art teacher at Valencia High School in Placentia, is one of those who created a piece just for the show.
Johnson, who is finishing his MFA at Cal State Fullerton, spent nearly 15 hours inside the gallery, panting a mural on an exhibit wall – not with a brush, but with mat board. He had a concept, but at the end of the day, had no idea what would end up on the wall.
“He wasn’t using any reference photos, that just came from his brain, which was crazy,” Mercer said of watching Johnson work. “The first couple strokes you could instantly see perspective and depth.”
After the show’s close in March, the mural will be painted over.
Johnson has another piece in the show, an immersive installation called “Space 44” that conjures his childhood, with a replica of the crystal matrix table from TV show “Land of the Lost,” loungers on AstroTurf on a wall and a projection of the moon. It’s inspired by his teenage years in a Glendora mobile home park, where he was fascinated by artificial and synthetic materials and how that distorts the idea of real and fake.
“It looks like a really cheesy sci-fi movie set in a lot of ways,” he said of the installation. “People love that because they want to interact with it. They want to be inside of it.”
Some students tried to subvert the idea of art, such as UC Irvine’s Eduardo Aispuro. His piece “Untitled 4” is described by many as a sculptural painting, because the piece’s structure has as much prominence as its painted front. Aispuro’s piece questions what a painting is. A painting isn’t just the front of the canvas, but the structure itself too, he said.
“It’s thinking about painting, what a painting is, and how some aspects of painting get privilege over others,” he said. “I’m hoping to allow people to talk about issues of structure – what kinds of people are working to make other things possible for other people.”
La Habra resident Candice Chovanec’s paintings on display are personal. Her painting “Cloris and Flora,” borrows classical styling from “Primavera“ by 15th century artist Sandro Botticelli, adding her own contemporary twist, she said. The classic painting shows the transformation of maiden to goddess, whereas hers shows her friends, who are twins, going through a transformation of their own.
“They’ve always been one unit and are kind of moving into being two different people,” said Chovanec, who is studying at Cal State Fullerton.
Chovanec said the show gives her and the other students a rare glimpse into other programs.
“I think it’s a great opportunity for artists that are starting to come into their own,” she said. “Especially with MFA programs, it’s a time when artists will explore or do something they wouldn’t ever do on their own. They’re pushed and challenged in different ways.”
Brea Cultural Arts Commissioner Tom Donini agreed.
“For some of them,” he said, “this is the next step – the professional world of fine art.”
Resource: http://www.ocregister.com
No comments:
Post a Comment