San Diego Mesa College Faculty Exhibition

Faculty Exhibition

San Diego Mesa College, San Diego

Through September 28^th

Article by Cathy Breslaw

The faculty exhibition at San Diego Mesa College has a wide range of works including ceramics, oil and acrylic painting, installation, collage, mixed media, video, photography, photomontage, and pastel paintings. Some artists include self portraits, paintings exploring many ways the human form can be transformed, while others have differing intentions examining identity,  interests in archaeology, statements on the status of college costs, works that stem from the ordinary and the meaning of the mundane, observation and wonder over simple things, the communicative power of objects while still others examine the many ways materials can be utilized.  John Chwekun experiments with using white on white surfaces and creates a tiny scene of a playground with wire and post-it notes,  Georgia K. Laris transforms the support of paintings out of the ‘rectangle’, using acrylics on papers with cotton threads, Kraig Cavanaugh  calls his works paintings but uses acrylic and wire to create 3-D sculpture-like forms that hang off the walls, and Nathan Betschart creates porcelain raku.  Wendell Kling exhibits an interactive ‘camp fire’ installation along with a stop motion animation. Juan Carlos Toth exhibits a large scale red painting and offers others to add their own marks to his canvas using colored oil sticks  he provides for visitors to use – encouraging free expression.  If students ever wondered about all the ways art can be made, they won’t after seeing this exhibition – the possibilities are endlessly expressed with this show that are worth a visit.

Allesandra Moctezuma   Crushed Dreams    clay, mixed media

Barbara Sexton     Common Denominator #2     photomontage

John Chwekun    Still Life    mixed media

Christopher Ferreria    Hawk    pigment print

Georgia K. Laris    Unspoken   acrylics on papers with cotton threads

Cindy Zimmerman   Daily Self-Portrait  ink on paper

Moris's Installation Hermoso Paisaje at Museum of Contemporary Art, Downtown San Diego

(Israel Meza Moreno) known as Moris:  Hermoso Paisaje series

MCASD, on view thru November 27^th

Article by Cathy Breslaw

Mexico City artist Israel Meza Moreno – otherwise known as Moris, created Hermoso Paisaje, an installation in the center lobby of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Downtown San Diego.  An unfamiliar artistic

eye may initially react to Moris’s art with the question: what are all these used taped and flattened cardboard boxes, sand, old stacked newspapers, rocks, and drawings on thinly painted hanging tarps doing in the center of a museum space? Moris presents us with a replica of common encampments found throughout Mexico City, highlighting the urban poverty of many of its residents.  Of course, the items in the installation are used by these residents to provide shelter and safety, creating make-shift boundaries to protect themselves from possible crime and inclement weather. Moris’s selected materials are not in any way different than the ‘real’ world, but actual items typically used by the poor. The use of the Mexican flag provides the country’s location for Moris‘s ‘urban home’, but could easily be a stand-in for many urban areas of U.S. cities, where homeless people abound.  By the change of context, moving these enclosures to the stark and meticulously managed rooms of a museum or gallery, the issues of poverty and homelessness can be scrutinized, studied and focused upon. What is missing, however, are the actual people who inhabit these spaces on a daily basis. This disparity emphasizes the differences between the street world and the art world – one is merely a diorama of reality while the other describing a truly devastating life. Perhaps Moris’s constructions can someday accomplish more than a demonstration of the ills of street life and can become a catalyst for social change.

Homage/Sublime - Exhibition of Artists Jeff Irwin and Rex Yuasa at R.B. Stevenson Gallery, La Jolla, CA

Homage/Sublime

Jeff Irwin and Rex Yuasa

R.B. Stevenson Gallery, La Jolla, CA

Article by Cathy Breslaw

Jeff Irwin’s sculptures are in stark contrast to Rex Yuasa’s paintings, yet viewing their works together provide some intriguing contrasts. Irwin’s clay material feels humble and natural while Yuasa’s paintings use more man-made materials – acrylic, oils and alkyd on canvas. The surfaces of Irwin’s sculptures are roughly hewn, his simulated nubby wood surfaces emphasize some textured sawed off “imperfect” areas while Yuasa’s surfaces are slick and shiny with resin. Irwin’s color palette is white and off-white while Yuasa’s color palette is all-over-the-place. The palette used in his paintings represent seemingly all ‘colors of the rainbow’ in richly bright and bold, sometimes neon and intense colors that almost make you want to look away. Irwin’s sculptures have a humble, quiet, meditative and focused quality while Yuasa’s paintings are barely hanging on to a sense of order and composition with their repetitive use of the ‘circle’ symbol.  The subject matter of Irwin’s sculptures are based in the animal world and nature, commenting on the connections between the two. His 96” x 108” circular installation of many small extinct animals made of earthenware and glaze, form Irwin’s featured work in his portion of the exhibition.  Yuasa’s works range in size from 18.4” x 12” up to 48” x 48”, not especially large, but surprisingly have the feeling of inhabiting way more physical space in the gallery due to their visual explosions of color and loosely organized arrangements of objects.  Yuasa’s abstract paintings appear to be investigating space. Using similar-sized multiples of three-dimensional circles in a repetitive manner, Yuasa provide viewers with visual stimulation and a variety of sensations. The work of Jeff Irwin and Rex Yuasa are a strong counterpoint to one another, providing viewers with a lot to talk about.

Jeff Irwin    40 Extinct Trophies  earthenware, glaze sculptures  96" x 108" x 8"

Rex Yuasa, SMR. Renn. 8, acrylic, oil, alkyd on canvas over wood panel, 23 1/2" round

Rex Yuasa, SMR. Renn. 8, acrylic, oil, alkyd on canvas over wood panel, 23 1/2" round

Rex Yuasa, SMR. Renn. 8, acrylic, oil, alkyd on canvas over wood panel, 23 1/2" round

Rex Yuasa, SMR. Renn. 8, acrylic, oil, alkyd on canvas over wood panel, 23 1/2" round

Rex Yuasa, SMR. Renn. 8, acrylic, oil, alkyd on canvas over wood panel, 23 1/2" round

Rex Yuasa, SMR. Renn. 8, acrylic, oil, alkyd on canvas over wood panel, 23 1/2" round

Cathy Breslaw's New Exhibition, Vibrations - Viterbo University, La Crosse, Wisconsin

Letting people know about my upcoming new exhibition - 'Vibrations'...Here are the details...

Vibrations Opens at Viterbo University
Art Gallery

Exhibition Runs September 14th through October 28th

Cathy Breslaw invites you to attend the Closing Reception
on Wednesday, October 19th 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm

Artist lecture Thursday, October 20th at 9:30 am
followed by a Creativity Workshop - "Tapping The Well" for students, faculty
and the general public from10:15 am - 12:00 noon.

Works in this exhibition are multi-layered richly hued textural transparent industrial mesh wall works, mixed media drawing works on plastic and a circular floor art piece. Also showing is a video inspired by the power of the ocean - abstract imagery reminiscent of color field painting.

Artful Life By Cathy: PLEASE DO TOUCH: Sweet Gongs Vibrating: A Group Ex...

Artful Life By Cathy: PLEASE DO TOUCH: Sweet Gongs Vibrating: A Group Ex...: Sweet Gongs Vibrating Group Exhibition: Curated by Amanda Cachia, SDAI Curator-in-Residence Through May 29 th Article by Cathy...

PLEASE DO TOUCH: Sweet Gongs Vibrating: A Group Exhibition at San Diego Art Institute

Sweet Gongs Vibrating

Group Exhibition: Curated by Amanda Cachia, SDAI Curator-in-Residence

Through May 29^th

Article by Cathy Breslaw

www.cathybreslaw.com

Stefani Byrd with Amy Alexander   DIVA: Redux   Video Installation  2013

Please DO Touch is the credo of this multi-media, multi-sensory group exhibition curated by Amanda Cachia, San Diego Art Institute’s  Curator-in-Residence. This exhibition is as much about Cachia’s passion to “combat the ocularcentrism in our gallery and museum system”(curator’s essay), as it is to present the art of the 20 local, national and international artists using multiple modes of expression in their works. 
Cachia’s focus is on altering the viewer’s perception of ‘art’ – a shift from the solely visual as is the standard in our institutions of art culture, to art that includes all the senses – including touch, hearing, smell and taste. The result is a collection of works giving audiences an opportunity to fully engage – to interact to create sounds,using mallets hitting metal-casted objects (Aaron McPeake,’s Vibrating Gongs, 2007-2010),  to make sounds by simply picking up McPeake’s Singing Bowls(2011) and listening to sounds created by touch, to activate lights through the creation of making sounds (Cooper Baker’s Giant Spectrum 2016),  activating sounds by spinning wheels made of wood to produce various clicking sounds made by plastic straps and rods placed behind the wheels (Aren Skalman, Wheels, 2015),  and Margaret Noble’s works A Score for Conversation (2014) and Head in the Sand (2015), which asks audiences to activate sound and reverberations based on the speed of touch.  A series of videos highlight sensorial experiences such as Diane Borsato’s video Cemetery (2015) in which viewers observe a woman eating an ice cream cone from start to finish, hearing repetitive ‘licks and slurps’, as well as other listening to environmental noises.  In the video performance by an operatic singer, DivaReDux(2013), Stefani Byrd and Amy Alexander use music to speak about expressing the emotions of love, sorrow, joy and grief emphasizing the face as one of the most expressive part of the body.  Through these and many more significant art works, Cachia convinces us that we are capable of experiencing and perceiving art on many levels through more than the visual – including auditory, tactile and olfactory sensations that have the capacity to deepen and expand our connection to art and to the world around us.

Aaron McPeake   I Broke Her 78 Records   bronze gong with clapper   2007

Francisca Benitez   Son en Senas    video     2015

Raphaelle de Groot   Study 5, A New Place   video   2015

Cathedrals: An Exhibition by San Francisco Bay Area Artist, Jeff Ray at SDSU Downtown Gallery, San Diego

Jeff Ray: Cathedrals

SDSU Downtown Gallery, San Diego

through June 12

Article by Cathy Breslaw

www.cathybreslaw.com

  Jeff Ray  Saint Mary's Cathedral, San Francisco, CA(detail)   mixed media including musical composition   2016  

An atheist who loves cathedrals??  Hmmm…, yet that is what San Francisco Bay Area artist Jeff Ray told me

when I visited the pre-opening installation of his works.  His is a multi-sensory exhibition including photography, video, sculpture and multi-media works that combine drawing, photography, and sound compositions created by Ray. Ray expresses his love of architecture and nature by weaving landscapes together with acrylic paint, pen and ink line drawings.  Using photos of both interiors and exteriors of cathedrals, houses, commercial buildings, ships, and bridges, Ray overlays multi-colored ‘lines’ , creating geometric shapes, and thick and thin straight lines. Many of his works on paper are created on graph paper and some with LED backlighting, which feature Ray’s narratives and investigations of architectural spaces and underlying structures as they interface with the landscape and surrounding environment. The geometric ‘overlay’ drawing atop and within these photos stretches the depth of these works and it appears that Ray is on an obsessive search to locate the multi-dimensional layers found in the both visible and invisible spaces around us.  Some of the works include Ray’s sound compositions – these musical scores punctuate timing, movement and rhythm within the visual compositions and offer additional information to viewers about Ray’s central artistic concerns.  Two large-scale long and narrow inkjet prints on paper have a spiritual feel and are the foundation of this exhibition. These are site-specific works on tall and separate columns within the gallery space. Cathedral of Light,Oakland #1 is a dramatic interior image of a cathedral and the other related work is an outdoor image School with Redwoods,Canyon,Oakland #1 of tall trees that form a ‘natural’ cathedral.  An Untitled Video Montage, 2010 – 2016 of digital video, composition and sound round out this multi-sensory exhibition.

Jeff Ray    Decaying Bunker,Pacifica CA   Mixed Media including musical composition   2016