Art galleries really exist for one reason alone: to showcase
the work of emerging artists. If you want to see a master—say,
Van Gogh or Pollack—go to an art museum. College-based
art galleries always show off new work, of course—it’s
part of their job—but getting commercial and even
independent spaces to do it, ones that need to actually
sell artwork once in a while, can be a feat. Fortunately,
there are places like the dA.
While established artists who continue to redefine the
world for us through their own particular lens are always
a welcome and necessary staple at the dA, curator Rolo
Castillo is a unique champion of new student work and
always energized to break new talent. When he does, it
seems like the world isn’t so bad after all.
In his latest pioneering show, The Leak of Contemporary
Artists, Castillo has cherry-picked some incredibly fine
work from promising Claremont Graduate University students.
As usual, he didn’t want to cut anyone’s arms
off with a stringent theme, but there is a theme of sorts,
as Rolo points out: While each work viewed alone seems
composed of isolated tendencies, when hung together, there
is a clear connection of colors and medium. There is a
specific shade of green that is stems through many pieces,
as well as use of a blackish insulation foam that is unnerving
at first sight.
Justin Bower’s Blue Boy: Body Electric, an enormous
portrait of a face in motion, is one such piece steeped
in that special green. Looking much like a still frame
from some avant garde movie—the perspective of someone
on high-powered acid, in fact—the doubled eyes,
nose and lips, aren’t all immediately clear due
to our own eye trickery; once we see them, however, a
vibrating reflection of subtle chaos shrouds the face
of an otherwise pleasant-looking youth. Laurence McNamara
also plays with our vision, his two canvases Portrait
7 and Portrait 8 at first appear to be solid blocks of
blue and pink respectively, but focus more intently, and
the invisible becomes visible in the faces of a dozing
and a yawning girl.
That crazy Curious George is also on hand in two pieces
from Dion Cuevas, swinging from tires and flying through
the air over flashy, splashy graffiti and geometric chalk
drawings—and this is our initial introduction to
that odd black foam, which both outlines George and creates
his tire swing. The foam takes on a life of its own in
Jennifer Scrivani’s Burying the Dead. This triage
might immediately remind one of something unseemly that
only the olfactory senses could pick up before it’s
too late, but wait a moment and look again. Are those
actually three former residents of Pompeii who’ve
yet to be freed from their ashen tombs? Somehow that’s
much more comforting and the piece is courageous, to say
the least.
Probably my personal favorite is Eric Ward’s Portrait,
an antique frame with a flood of charred wood spilling
out from its center. I don’t know, perhaps I’ve
seen too many great horror films from the ’70s (Burnt
Offerings, anyone?), but this piece screams backstory
and made me want to visit the Haunted Mansion again.
On the softer, more colorful side, Whitney Hanlon’s
trio of hanging plastic sheets, Orange, Blue, Pink, with
delicately placed bird cutouts is both whimsical and modern,
and her Pill Buddha: Medication Meditation with “the
awakened one” covered in hundreds of pills (pain
relievers and others) is sui genius. (Surrounding the
Buddha in his enclave are a dozen books on pills and vitamins,
and empty drug bottles!)
Other small delights are Karen Chu’s Spoons—a
collection of bent and melted seaweed soup sippers climbing
up one of the gallery columns, and Mike McLain’s
length of plywood stretched over by colored rubber bands,
called Thirds.
Playfulness is at its peak with Jay Merryweather’s
Homesteaders, a honeycomb log torn between territorial
brass squirrels with knitted bee covers over their tails
and a forlorn deer in a nest on top, and Stephen Wong’s
enormous squid-like-thing constructed from empty water
bottles and trash swimming above rows of-filled water
bottles should absolutely be the next logo for a “Keep
Mother Earth clean” PSA.
The next generation of artists looks promising, indeed.
Leak of Contemporary Artists at the dA Center
for the Arts, 252 S. Main St., Pomona Arts Colony, Pomona,
(909) 397-9716; www.dacenter.org. Thru April 27, closing
reception April 25, 6-10PM. Free
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