|
 |
|||||||
| Information | |||
ART
FORUM Speaker Series ART FORUM celebrating 25 years of art education through open forum, dialogue and discussion of contemporary issues in art and architecture. We welcome back as moderator to ART FORUM in the fall of our anniversary year 2004 our distinguished founder, Professor Gene Isaacson. The statements presented here are the artist, architect, speakers, who will be appearing in the forthcoming weeks at the ART FORUM Speaker Series, held Mondays at 12:30 PM – 1:50 PM, Lecture Hall C-104, at Santa Ana College, 1530 W. 17th St. Santa Ana, CA 92706. For more information about the ART FORUM Speaker Series at Santa Ana College, Phone:714-564-5625 and visit our web site for a map and directions to the campus at www.rsccd.org. ART FORUM Quarterly Journal and Biography now available! This series is free and open to the public. However, this schedule is subject to change without notice. Nancy Mooslin, October 18, 2004 My work is interdisciplinary and investigates musical concepts and theories, the relationship between color, form, texture, proportion and pitch, harmony, timbre, and rhythm. The content of my work also includes symbolic references to infinite cycles of time and planetary motion and the ultimate interconnection of all our perceptions. As an artist, I feel the links between visual and audio media very deeply. I believe that abstract art and music are closely related aesthetically, conceptually, scientifically and intuitively. I have also investigated the mathematical relationship between the ratios found in planetary motion and the ratios of the diatonic and chromatic musical scales discovered in the seventeenth century by astronomer Johannes Kepler and inspired by theories that have their origins in the ancient Greeks, Babylonians, Egyptians, Latin Americans and Chinese. I am attempting in my work to make the relationships between these physical and aesthetic phenomenon, the scientific and artistic, visible and tangible. I would like my work to present new ways of looking at nonobjective painting and sculpture and new insights into the structure and elements of music. In addition to my studio work, for the last ten years I have been active in the public art arena completing projects for the cities of Reno, Nevada and Sunnyvale, Anaheim, Escondido, Laguna Beach and West Hollywood, in California. I am currently working on a project for the City of Los Angeles. I have spent fifteen years producing large interactive, three dimensional, interdisciplinary installations that were used for performance works in collaboration with choreographers and composers. The majority of the time they were on view, however, they formed participatory visual/sound environments for the viewing public to “perform in”, play in, and investigate. I have continued to look for ways to include these ideas in my public projects. Several of my large public art works have audio elements are participatory and interactive as well.
Robbie Miller, Santa Ana Seven, October 25, 2004 Santa Ana Seven is an umbrella under which artists and curators work together to bring contemporary artwork to an audience. Our goal is to bring new ideas, combined with an understanding of traditional practices, into installations and gallery shows. The first step in creating a show as a concept that drives the collaboration to either create one piece as a whole show, or a combination of individual pieces that explore different aspects of that one concept. The majority of the shows we have done so far for the Santa Ana Seven we have stepped out of the studio to explore a broader range of practice in creating art. We feel this free range approach is the best way of bringing traditional ways of creating work to a contemporary place.
JonMarc Edwards, November 1, 2004 To paint is to create and resolve conflict in the world. I feel my work exemplifies the need to communicate in a world culture. In moving to Los Angeles in 1990 it was important for me to justify the ‘act of painting.’ It seemed at the time absurd to paint in a studio. I felt that painting had to give back, demand attention and resonate with the viewer. During my first few months in Los Angeles, I had an epiphanal fainting moment. I woke up on the floor of my Pico studio and transcribed what I perceived as a visual breakthrough, from painting images as text (sign) to painting text as image, simple. My work is essentially a simple algorithmic recipe, five principles that can compress, compose and translate textual content into most languages on the planet. However, this recipe is only a key to more layers of information, observations or anomalies. The act of re-thinking our words into images or patterns of information expands the mind’s eye to see the big picture, peace, love, freedom and revelation. This reconfiguration is not limited to English: Monosyble has been translated into sixteen languages including; Hebrew, Korean, French and Spanish. Visually abstract but legible, the text resembles Chinese characters, Arabic calligraphy or Mayan script depending on the intent or context of the piece. This simple construct challenges the artist and thereby the viewer to look deeper into the content and form of words, images and ideas. “My painting reveals the poetic landscape inherent in everyday words.”
Doug Meyer, November 8, 2004 I find myself in a curious place in my art where I just exhibited figurative paintings that involved photo and digital processes that I haven’t used before. I surprised a lot of my audience by turning from a non-objective approach to something highly subjective and image-based. I can identify somewhat with de Kooning when he began his WOMAN series in 1950, returning to a centralized figure at a time when he was seen as an advocate of the new abstraction. My own work for a number of years has critiqued the purity of minimalism by allowing figurative, symbolic, and decorative references to interrupt its autonomous rationality. Last year while working on converting deconstructed calendars of golf courses and sunsets to Adobe Photoshop I became frustrated with the digital response to subtle nuances of color. As a diversion I scanned in some defaced photo ads for call girls that I had messed around with. What I saw on the screen led to the series I exhibited this June entitled “Gentlemen’s Pictures”. The medium-to-large scale paintings that resulted look like some bizarre version of Manet meets Warhol. I found that by enlarging and isolating these debased sex-industry stereotypes that I could re-configure their humanity. At times the images seem to assert the most banal aspects of their commodication, while others take on a darker twist upon their obscured identities. I continue to examine this multi-media process with new and different images pulled from popular media and reworked to be visually exhilarating while offering up a mirror to an individuality that has been debased and subdued by our culture’s desire for simplistic classification.
Mat Gleason, November 15, 2004 I was raised in middle class suburban La Mirada, where much of my family still resides. I was exposed to a creative moment known as the punk scene in 1979 and woke up to a radical method of thought and expression loosely defined as art. There was no art in the suburbs back then. It took years to overcome the unintentional lessons learned growing up in a safe, sanitized environment. My art, be it writing or visual expression is primarily a deconstruction of culture. I am opposed to all institutions, bureaucracies and structures that privilege administrators and insiders ahead of the deserving. I have published an art magazine, Coagula Art Journal, since 1992. The magazine has supported itself solely through advertising and my initial investment of five hundred dollars. It is not associated with any institution or patron and has never accepted a grant. I guess this makes me a capitalist, but not the bloodthirsty kind. The magazine is a national publication with a print run of 12,000 copies distributed throughout Los Angeles, New York and most big cities in America at art schools, galleries, museums and exhibition centers, as well as the occasional coffee shop and book store. My art uses the language and imagery of baseball to explore larger themes. As my primary position in the art world is as an art critic, I hardly pursue exhibitions as some relationships might compromise the integrity of the magazine. I have curated many art exhibits at galleries in Southern California, including ABJECT EDGE, a group show at Ruth Bachofner Gallery at Bergamont Station in Los Angeles in 1998 and CHICA CHIC, an exhibit of four Chicano artists also in Los Angeles working in different media, at the Patricia Correia Gallery in 2003. As a curator, I am most interested in how artworks interrelate in an exhibition. As a writer I am most interested in using the verbal to weaken verbal communication’s precedence over non-verbal forms of communication.
Bill Gallagher, November 22, 2004 “Clean” is the word I hear most often when people comment on my work, especially other jewelry makers. All metal surfaces are very finely finished front and back with very little surface texture. All my connections are clearly visible and solidly constructed. I cut gems from a wide variety of natural stone materials such as lapis lazuli, chalcedony, agate, or jasper into simple, geometric shapes and use those gems in jewelry items such as bracelets, earrings, or pendants. I use either silver or gold to make these pieces. Generally I won’t mix metals; rather I’ll make the piece either in all silver or all gold. I combine the stones I cut with commercially-cut stones or pearls. I like to mix two or three or more colors in each piece. I think of my jewelry pieces as abstract color compositions; however, they must first succeed as jewelry. They must be wearable and durable, and complement, rather than distract from the wearer. I work mainly as a freelance jewelry designer. I consign to several galleries and I also sell my work at a few local craft shows each year.
|
