Long Beach Arts Month - October 2012

BE A PART OF ART LONG BEACH ARTs mONTH OCTOBER 2o12 1

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A series of exhibitions in October, 2012, produced by the Arts Council for Long Beach: Transformative Visions 2: curated by Slater Barron NOW: curated by Hilary Norcliffe Experience the Book: curated by Jean Clad A Sense of Irony: curated by Kay Erickson Trace EVIDENCE: curated by Jeff Rau OF SIXPACK PROJECTS AFTERLIFE: curated by Kimberly Hocking, Jamie Kivisto, and Traci A. Durfee

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TABLE of CONTENTS

T SU S O S

P. 16-โ 67

TRANSformative visions 2 U S T ย ย ย ย ย ย Tย

P. 68-โ 91

NOW U S T ย ย ย ย ยก ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย

P. 92-โ 105

experience The book CurATED BY JEAN CLAD

P. 106-โ 119

A SENSE OF IRONY CurATED BY Kay Erickson

P. 120-โ 133

TRACE EVIDENCE Uย ย S T S SU U

P. 134-โ 147

AFTERLIFE Uย ย S T SU 5 S I T ย ยก ย ย ย ย ย I

ย ย ย ย ย ย

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FEATURED ARTISTS

T SU S O S

ARTISTS INCLUDE Sandy Abrams Slater Barron Terry Braunstein Sheriann Ki Sun Burnham Judy Chan Michiel Daniel Jen Grey (aka Jen Zen) Betsy Lohrer Hall Mayde Herberg Ilee Kaplan Karen McCreary John Montich Pia Pizzo Robert Potier Sue Ann Robinson Carol Roemer John Hillis Sanders Joan Skogsberg Sanders Uran Snyder Craig Cree Stone Annie Stromquist Alice Foss Thorne Gail Werner Jaye Whitworth

Carleton Christy Jocelyn Foye Jeff&GORDON Cindy Herrera Nathan Huff Tina Linville Becca Shewmake Noah Thomas Vav Vavrak Carrie YurY

Terry Braunstein Tini Miura Pia Pizzo Sue Ann Robinson

Ellen Butler Kay Erickson Lewis Francis Chris Grinnell Ron Javorsky John Montich

Jocelyn Foye Virginia Katz Jeff Rau Jennifer Reifsneider Rebecca Sittler

Traci A. Durfee Kurt Hantzsch Kimberly Hocking David Hocking Jamie Kivisto Michael Mercurio

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ACKNOWLEDGeMENTS S T SU O S

This series of Arts Council-produced exhibitions would not have been possible without the generous support and active participation of our collaborators. We would like to thank them and acknowledge their ongoing contributions to strengthening the arts in Long Beach: FOR PROVIDING EXHIBITION SPACE:

Cultural Alliance for Long Beach (CALB) EXPO ART CENTER Long Beach Main Library Greenly Art Space

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We would like to acknowledge the leadership and support of Arts Month by the Board of Directors, Arts Council for Long Beach: S T T

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INTRODUCTION In early summer 2012, the Arts Council for Long Beach convened a task force of local artists, arts advocates, and members of arts and educational institutions, to plan a series of exhibitions during October, National Arts and Humanities Month. The six resulting exhibitions have been organized under the umbrella of Long Beach Arts Month.

Long Beach hosts one of the most diverse and thriving artist communities in southern California and is home to California State University Long Beach, with its large and prestigious art department. In spite of the heavy concentration of practicing artists, there are few commercial galleries in Long Beach. This lack of available exhibition space often requires our emerging and midcareer artists to venture elsewhere to exhibit their work. The shortage of conventional gallery space has created opportunities for artists and art advocates to seek alternative, often hybrid exhibition spaces. The exhibits featured in this catalogue take place in such spaces, namely the Expo Building in Bixby Knolls, Bungalow Building in Downtown, Greenly Art Space in Signal Hill, and our Main Library. Featured are over sixty established, mid-career and emerging artists — a majority of whom call Long Beach home, with the remainder having some association with the City’s learning institutions, either as alumni or as instructors.

This catalogue is by no means a comprehensive study or representation of the local visual art scene but, rather, scratches the surface as we attempt to create more local opportunities for Long Beach artists to exhibit their works. These exhibitions were made possible by the dedication of our artist-curator teams along with the participating artists who contributed works for the exhibitions.

We’re thankful to all who assisted in getting these exhibitions together so the community could enjoy an extraordinary sampling of the fine visual art work being created right here in Long Beach. This catalog would not be possible if not for the vision of Kamran Assadi and the tireless efforts of Victoria Bryan.

With continued appreciation,

John Glaza, Interim Executive Director and Larry Rice, Board President Arts Council for Long Beach

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ART IN THE HERE and NOW T U S T S I 5 5 You’ll often hear it said that the City of Long Beach does not contain enough gallery space for our artists to show their work.

It is also said that there aren’t enough audiences to support the excellent galleries we do have and that to open a gallery is a very risky business. This is confirmed by frequent gallery closures. What Long Beach does have in abundance, however, is artists—artists of all kinds, at all stages of their careers. Each year, students finish their undergraduate and graduate art programs and provide an influx of new talent when they merge into the vibrant local art community. As well as recent graduates, we have artists who have been out of school for three or five years, whose work is achieving recognition in southern California and far beyond. We also have nationally and internationally known artists, whose resumes span forty, fifty and even sixty years of artmaking. We are rich in artists.

Over 60 of those artists are featured in the six exhibitions under the umbrella of Long Beach Arts Month: Be a Part of Art. Those artists are diverse in age, medium, and viewpoint, but linked through their strong relationships to and within Long Beach. This series of exhibitions creates a snapshot of Long Beach art in the here and now—that moment which is the starting place for NOW’s curator Hilary Norcliffe, who describes the artists in her show as “Long Beach-based graduate students and alumni from CSULB and UCI who are stirring the contemporary pot and infusing the Long Beach art arena with exciting and challenging visual poetry.�

In Trace Evidence, Jeff Rau has assembled the work of artists who “explore and make sense of the world through systematic processes of measurement, quantification, and documentation,� while Kay Erickson chose photographers for A Sense of Irony, whose images “draw the viewer in closer, and hopefully elicit an ‘aha’ moment or at least a smirk,� through the juxtaposition of two elements that contradict each other.

Taking inspiration from the autumnal season, Kimberly Hocking, Jamie Kivisto, and Traci Durfee bring together artists to explore AFTERLIFE, as we get ready to celebrate Halloween and Day of the Dead, significantly art-full occasions in the annual Long Beach calendar.

In Experience the Book, Jean Clad continues the curatorial love affair with book art that she first expressed in a similarly themed Long Beach exhibition in 1995, shown at the same space, the Long Beach Main Library.

For her exhibition Transformative Visions 2, Slater Barron brings together 24 artists whose “viewpoints have opened my eyes to beauty, new ideas, freedom of expression, and new media.� She finds “the experience transformative in my own life (and) I expect that viewers will also be transformed.�

The series provides a rich exploration of what it means to be right here in Long beach, right now in Arts Month, October 2012.

The six shows, produced by the Arts Council for Long Beach, represent just a fraction of Long Beach’s visual and performing arts programming during Arts Month; a look through the calendar of events at http://longbeachartsmonth.org/calendar fills in a more complete picture.

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So, in our here and now, we are artist-rich but gallery-poor; plenty of art and artists to be found but a scarcity of gallery walls, which foregrounds the question of how to bring together the makers and viewers of art?

Rather than bemoan what we don’t have, a more effective way forward is to identify existing Long Beach space resources and re-purpose them to host the interaction between artists and audience. “This is just what the curators of the six Arts Councilproduced exhibitions are doing; the shows take place in converted downtown store fronts, a 35,000 square foot former furniture showroom in north Long Beach, an industrial/commercial business park space in Signal Hill, and the Long Beach Main Library.”

This use of commercial, industrial, and bibliographic space extends our expectations of where we may encounter art; it is no longer limited to formally designated galleries and museums. We can now drop into quotidian, more accessible spaces that catch our eye while we are doing something else – maybe checking out First Fridays in Bixby Knolls, checking out a book at the library, or after settling the check for lunch on Pine Avenue. This positioning takes away a little of the separateness of art, moving it into the everyday world, the world of running errands, and “oh, that looks interesting. I’ll pop in and see what it’s about,” instead of “I wonder what the dress code is to go into that gallery?”

Stumbling upon art in our everyday life may be the catalyst for some good news in the “City by the Sea.” For artists, opportunities are increased for their work to be seen, appreciated, and potentially bought. For audiences, it is more likely they will engage with artworks that offer the possibility of an “aha” moment, increased awareness of beauty, new ideas, freedom of expression, or even transformation. Not a bad bargain for the price of admission—free! And for the city, our sense of where we live is strengthened by these conversations taking place between makers and consumers of art, resulting in a richer understanding of our common habitat and shared experience. Just as our iconic art institutions, public art, and architecture help create a sense of Long Beach identity, placemaking also occurs through individual, everyday encounters with art.

These six shows for Arts Month are certainly not the first time that spaces have been re-purposed for art in our communities but through this series, the city’s arts agency, building owners, curators, and artists have given us a city-wide forum to take a look at what it means to live in our here and now.

This needn’t end with October—Long Beach is full of other spaces, just waiting to open up and extend art-based conversation further into our communities. Lobbies…post offices…buses? The possibilities are intriguing and this community centric approach to art will continue to flower in the coming year through a series of events under the title A LOT, to take place in open spaces throughout the City. Supported by a National Endowment Agency (NEA) grant, the Arts Council for Long Beach will initiate creative placemaking projects designed to help transform communities into lively, beautiful, and sustainable places with the arts at their core.

Watch out—you never know where you’ll run into art next!

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“...beauty, new ideas, freedom of expression...�

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BY SLATER BARRON When  I  was  asked  to  organize  an  exhibition  of  artists  who  live  in  Long  Beach,  I  invited  the  artists  whose  work  and  work  ethic  I  have  admired  for  several  years.  These  are  the  friends  I  count  as  my  support  system.   Their  viewpoints  have  opened  my  eyes  to  beauty,  new  ideas,  freedom  of  expression,  and  new  media  used  in  unexpected  formats.  Their  professionalism  VKLQHV WKURXJK , ¿QG WKH H[SHULHQFH WUDQVIRUPDWLYH LQ P\ RZQ OLIH EHFDXVH RI WKHLU YLVLRQV , H[SHFW WKDW WKH YLHZHUV ZKR take  the  time  to  think  deeply  about  what  these  artists  are  saying  visually,  will  also  be  transformed.   Each  artist  has  written  a  statement  about  their  work  which  will  hang  near  their  contribution  to  the  show,  but  I  think  the  viewers  should  make  their  own  decisions  about  what  they  are  seeing  before  reading  the  statement.  We  all  bring  our  own  H[SHULHQFH WR VHHLQJ DUWZRUN RIWHQ PDNLQJ LW GL̆HUHQW WR HDFK YLHZHU $V WKH H[KLELWLRQ FDPH WRJHWKHU , EHJDQ WR VHH FRQ-­ nections  and  contrasts  in  a  few  of  the  selections  that  can  only  add  to  the  enjoyment.  The  fact  that  the  exhibition  is  housed  RQ $WODQWLF $YHQXH DQG ZLOO EH VHHQ E\ D ODUJHU DXGLHQFH DOVR LQÀXHQFHG FKRLFHV , KDG WR PDNH %HOLHYLQJ WKDW FKLOGUHQ ZLOO be  part  of  our  audience,  we  are  planning  activities  about  the  art  that  will  engage  them  into  responding  with  a  vision  of  their  own  thinking.

-­  Slater  Barron

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Sandy Abrams Pattern, color, shape, energy, time, life. When my daughter announced the future date of my first grandchild, I was enthralled. To serve as an active reminder of this maturing event, I knit a form a day until beautiful ISLA was born on August eighth.

One winter I knitted a pair of gloves for myself and before long friends were requesting a pair. At first the assignment was fun because I could use up bits of yarn and the project was not too time consuming; however, after about five pair I grew to HATE making gloves! Moreover I loathed knitting the fingers. This piece stems from that winter project. I have pushed the idea of the glove. Since then I have made gloves with ten fingers on one glove, gloves with miniature fingers and gloves with all thumbs! Don’t ask me why…it’s just too strange.

Sandy Abrams, a mixed media artist who uses felt, clay, wood, various fibers and digital images, was born and raised in New England. After receiving her undergraduate degree, she moved to Los Angeles. Her Masters of Fine Arts with a concentration in ceramics was awarded from California State University at Long Beach. Her career of teaching ceramics included a local university, junior colleges, and private high schools. In addition, she has been an artist-in-residence at Art Farm, Marquette, Nebraska, and Aras Eanna Cultural Center on the Aran Islands, Ireland, and studied with renowned Irish basket makers Joe Hogan and Alison Fitzgerald. She presently maintains a studio in Long Beach, where she lives.

She oftren makes non-functional objects that echo a connection to nature or to the “ordinary” or mundane routines in life. Interested in process, she finds repetitious movements rewarding, revealing, and relaxing.

{ www.sandyabramsartist.com }

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Gestation 274

various fibers, 12’x12’, 2011

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Sometimes She Was a Stranger Unto Herself felted wool, 22”x12,” 2012

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SLATER BARRON When the family wash for four teenagers and two adults produced an abundance of dryer lint, I began using it as my primary medium in 1975.

As a painter, I was intrigued by the mixing of colors and textures, impossible to get on my canvases. The first works were simple abstract compositions made by folding several pieces from the lint screen and were named for the soap operas my daughters often watched after school.

With the addition of other soft recycled fibrous materials, I was able to create large installations that took on the appearance of three dimensional impressionistic paintings often with a narrative of social commentary. Through the years, the intrinsic nature of the faded and soft focus of the edges of the lint made it a metaphor for memory as it was used for portraits.

More recently, using lint’s true but unappetizing nature containing hair, bits of tissue and other detritus, I have been making food that appears to be delicious. Chef ’s Specials is a new series of invented delicacies that could be found on upscale menus. I love sushi but there are people who think raw fish or unknown ingredients are as bad as lint. Stereotypical heart shapes for love are ubiquitous, even though all lovers seem to think their experiences are unique. On closer examination, the reality of life and its imperfections and surprises of added elements are to be savored in art and in relationships. I thank my many friends who give me their lint.

SLATER BARRON works in many media including dryer lint, installations, collage, books, assemblage, paint and performance, choosing the medium that works best for her concepts. A degree in sociology and psychology, as well as her art degrees, inform her work with social commentary and often humor.

Because of the unusual nature of her work in dryer lint, she has appeared many times on television including the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Real People with David Ruprect and more recently Visiting with Huell Howser.

Barron’s resume lists at least twenty selected solo exhibitions and over seventy group shows nationally and internationally since 1975. Reviews and interviews have appeared in many newspapers and magazines including Art in America, Southwest Art Quarterly, People and Time. Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museums have a large collection of her work and have commissioned portraits of celebrities for international sites.

Honors have included being Distinguished Visual Artist of the Year in Long Beach, representing the city in the first Senate Collection Exhibition in the California State Capital and special recognition by the City of Los Angeles for her work at the IGM Gallery at USC. Barron taught art classes at colleges and universities for twenty-five years.

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What the World Needs Now is Love Sweet Love, 2012 Dryer Lint and Found Object, 20� x 16�

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I love Sushi, 2012

Dryer Lint and Found Objects, 20” x 16”

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Chef ’s Specials Small Plates and Amuse Bouche Series, 2012 Summer Fruits, Dryer Lint and Found Objects, 13” x 17”

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Terry Braunstein The common thread through my work is a kind of visual archaeology: begun by exploring the world through research and challenging the viewer to find meaning by delving into the work, as I do in finding my material.

I am a collector, constantly acquiring images from books and magazines, and various kinds of ephemera. Old magazines, encyclopedias, books, maps, dollhouse furniture and bric-a-brac form my archive materials. My resulting images address issues of daily life and personal memory about the larger forces of the universe and human history.

Over the years, through the use of new technologies, such as higher speed computers with greater amounts of memory and electrostatic printing, the recycling and recontextualizing of material has taken on new dimensions for me, thus increasing even further the potential of new audiences for my work.

My artistic goal is, first and foremost, to be true to my internal vision, and to follow it into whatever medium it may lead me. Second, I would like to show this work, as widely as possible. In the creation of my work, I make discoveries that reveal profound truths to me, and I want to share these unique views with the rest of the world.

Terry Braunstein was born in Washington, D.C., and has lived in Long Beach for 26 years. She is a multi-media photomontage artist, whose work is shown in museums and galleries including Centre Pompidou, Paris, Gallery Miyazaki, Japan, L.A. County Museum of Art, Sala Arcs gallery, Barcelona, and Museo Civico, Italy. Her one-person exhibitions include Long Beach Museum of Art, Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, Washington Project for the Arts in Washington D.C, Franklin Furnace in New York.

Her work is in numerous collections, including the Getty Center, National Museum of American Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, L.A. County Museum of Art, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and Long Beach Museum of Art. Commissions include Los Angeles MTA, Navy Memorial Heritage Association, Redevelopment Agency of Long Beach, Long Beach Transit, City of Cerritos, L.A. County Arts Commission, and Los Angeles Museum of Art, among others. She recently collaborated with Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske on art for Long Beach’s Rosie the Riveter Park.

Terry Braunstein received the National Book Award of the Library Fellows, National Museum of Women in the Arts, an Artist’s fellowship from the City of Long Beach, a Durfee Grant, and a Visual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

{ www.terrybraunstein.com }

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In a Day’s Work III, 1988

photo made from photomontage, 20” x 16”

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In a Day’s Work VII, 1988

photo made from photomontage, 20” x 16”

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In a Day’s Work VIII, 1988

photo made from photomontage, 20” x 16”

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Empty Nest II, 1988

photo made from photomontage, 20” x 16”

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Sheriann Ki Sun Burnham My art is an exploration of structure, expressing the essence of ideas, places and things through abstraction. I am interested in how structure can define form; how form can define space. I am also interested in the manipulation of visual elements through systematic processes and utilizing computer technology to extend and enhance the visual complexities within the works I create.

The Strata series of sculptures and derivative digital paintings combine the natural with hand and digitally made elements. Various plant materials primarily twigs and branches - are used in forming structural frameworks for sculptures and images.

Strata presents itself in many forms. Some works are direct constructions of materials. Other works are more complex, where pieces are constructed, then photographed, and the resulting imagery used as source material for digitally manipulated imagery that is printed and collaged back onto the construction it came from.

Strata represents how structures, whether from nature or man made, have inherent relationships that intertwine and reflect back on themselves.

The natural world is caught between the structures of the man made world, yet it is the man made world that relies on the structures of nature to live and breathe.

Sheriann Ki Sun Burnham was born in Seoul, South Korea and came to the U.S. at the age of two. Her artist mother encouraged her creativity from a very early age. While in college Sheri became interested in computers and was in the first computer graphics class offered in the CSULB Art Department. She received a B.A. in Studio Art from CSULB in 1982. Since then she has pursued a dual career in fine art and design.

Burnham’s digital/mixed media paintings and wall sculptures have been widely exhibited and published, including: seven ACM SIGGRAPH Art Shows; Graphite in Dunedin, New Zealand; and Artware: Kunst und Elektronik, Germany. Other exhibitions include: The Biennial Symposiums for Arts & Technology, Connecticut College; The New York Digital Salon; Darkroom & Digital, John Wayne International Airport. Her digital painting, Nomad was reproduced in the McGraw Hill college art text book, Art Fundamentals: Theory & Practice. Burnham received an Individual Artist Fellowship from Long Beach Public Corporation for the Arts in 2004.

Burnham has run an independent graphics service since 1993. In 2010 she joined a long time creative colleague in forming Pepe & Sherina Designs (www. pepesherinadesigns) focused on developing creative upcycled products.

{ www.studiokisun.com }

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Strata #11, 2010

Digital Painted wall sculpture: ink jet prints and acrylic on rice paper over branches, 20” x 20” x 9.5”

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Strata #12, 2010

Digital Painted wall sculpture: ink jet prints and acrylic on rice paper over branches, 25” x 29” x 6.5”

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JUDY CHAN I am currently working on charcoal drawings covered with encaustic (Bee’s wax). With charcoal I can create visually deep spaces beyond the flat surface of the rag paper I work on. After previously working on large charcoal drawings, I wanted to experiment with encaustic to add another layer of depth.

The encaustic not only added to the depth it gave the work a rich surface.

Judy Chan is a mixed-media, work on paper artist. Most of her work begins with graphite, oil, charcoal or prints on paper, combined with found or hand-made objects. This series is charcoal on paper coated in encaustic (hot wax).

This work follows a series of large charcoal drawings on paper that she created earlier. She was experimenting with the creation of space and random images that are buried in the paper. (Similar to finding the sculpture in a block of marble.)

Judy Chan holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from California State University, Long Beach. She began her career as a ceramist and then became interested in Printmaking. She taught, as a part-time instructor, in the Fine Arts/Printmaking Department, at CSULB. From 1993 to 2009, she taught in the LBCC Fine Arts Department: Fine Art Printmaking, Experimental Drawing, and Figure Drawing.

Chan’s awards include: National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Artists Fellowship; Studio Fellowship by the Pouch Cove Foundation, Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Canada; Studio Fellowship by Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, CA. Eleven solo exhibitions have included: Long Beach Museum of Art, SCA Gallery, Pomona, Rogue Gallery, Medford, Oregon, and Merging One Gallery, Santa Monica. She has also been in numerous group exhibitions.

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Continuance, 2006

Charcoal drawing, 30” x 22”

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Depth in Bee’s Wax #16, 2012

Charcoal drawing w/encaustic, 13” x 11”

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MICHIEL DANIEL My current body of work was started seven years ago after a number of years working as a Realist painter. These abstractions are inspired by ocean life at extreme depths. With this work, I have employed a broad range of influences including: the work of the Pattern and Decoration Painters, Pop Art, California Finish Fetish, and Surrealism. Popular cultural influence include: Disney and Warner Bros. cartoons from the 50’s and 60’s, black velvet paintings, Chinese brush painting, and Japanese comics and illustration Michiel Daniel is a painter, working primarily in acrylic, oil and watercolor. He has completed a B.A. and M.A. in Fine Art from California State University at Long Beach and a M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate School of Fine Arts. Daniel recently retired from a tenured teaching position in the Art and Photography Department at Long Beach City College and, since retirement, he has opened Stone Rose Gallery on 4th Street in Long Beach.

Daniel has exhibited his work in 26 one-person exhibitions and over 100 invitational group exhibitions. He has received several honors and awards including the city of Long Beach’s Individual Artist’s Fellowship Grant, Artist in Residence, Saddleback College, Mission Viejo, and the Smithsonian Institute’s Archives of American Art. Daniel has also been invited to be the juror for numerous exhibitions including the International Acrylic Society and the National Watercolor Society. He has work in several public and private collections including the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Laguna Beach Museum of Art, the Downey Museum of Art, Bank of America, and the City of Huntington Beach.

{ www.1ondesign.com }

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Pink Sub, 2007

Acrylic on canvas, 30” x 20”

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Jen Grey (aka Jen Zen) Centaur is a mythic metaphor suited to the fusion of identity in human-computer interaction. Centaurs bridged the age of men and giants, as cyborgs now bridge the age of human and artificial intelligence - affording poignant speculation on the paradoxical nature of life on earth. “Rockman” is a haptic cyberglove tracing of a live human model (my intrepid friend Tyler Stallings), resized, textured, lit, rotated and adapted to new perspective viewpoints in composite collages created in digital post-production. Fires and backdrops are hand-painted digital fictions, not photos. By customizing tools, palettes and processes, I created hyper-realistic illusions. In later years, mechanical ‘Old School’ techniques I developed independently became available as standard more user-friendly software plug-ins. This work would not have been possible a few years ago, yet it respects influences by past artists: Ansel Adams, Picasso, and Severini in particular.

These artworks are part of the “Cybertouch” series, sponsored in part by the Computer Research Lab at Cal Tech 1999 – 2004. Each piece was generated as a hi tech 5D figure using the CalTech Workbench – an interactive ‘semi-immersive’ work station that allows the artist to draw with ribbons of light that seem to pour from the fingertips! 3D forms appear to float in air while being created! The process is fantastically synergistic. The purpose was to betatest tangible tools linked to experimental software “Surface Drawing 1999 @ 1999” by Steven Schkolne and Michael Pruett. Later, figures were downsized and converted for use in formats I could edit in conventional software packages.

Footnote 1. Schkolne, S., Pruett, M., and Schroder, P., Surface Drawing: Creating Organic 3D Shapes with the Hand and Tangible Tools, Proceedings of CHI 2001, 261- 268.

JEN ZEN (a.k.a. Jen Grey) is Professor Emeritas from the Drawing and Painting Program at California State University, Long Beach, where she maintained a balance between teaching, creative research, and public exhibition, together with active community service as a curator, writer, and arts consultant. She founded and directed the CSULB Mural Program, the first public art program offered in the CSU System. Grey currently serves as Founding Director for the CSULB Joy of Life Awards. Continuing studio art is focused on a synergistic combination of drawing, healing sound, and digital multi-media work. A life-long interest in Native American Indian Flute music complements these investigations. She has received many grants, awards, and public art commissions, including Artist’s Grants from The Fulbright Program, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Public Corporation for the Arts. JEN ZEN is an active member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Los Angeles Chapter. She exhibits nationally and internationally, including shows in Korea, Mongolia, China, England, Scotland, France, Sweden, Morocco, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, the U.S.A. - and most recently (as the avatar Flute Rang a.k.a. JEN ZEN) in Second Life, a massive multiplayer game world. Her cyber work is featured in the book CGI: A 21st Century Art Form by Peter Weisher.

{ art.csulb.edu/faculty/profiles/index.php?fullname=Grey_Jen }

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Centaur, 1990-2009

Charcoal drawing, 30” x 22”

Hardware: Caltech Workbench, Cyberglove, ChrystalEyes, PC & Mac Computers Software: Bryce 4.0, Painter 6.0, PhotoShop 5.5, “Surface Drawing” @1999 S. Schkolne & M. Pruett Printer: Jack Duganne Ateliers

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Rockman, 1999-2009

Epson Print on Velvet Somerset paper, 33” x 47” framed

Hardware: Caltech Workbench, Cyberglove, ChrystalEyes, PC & Mac Computers Software: Bryce 4.0, Painter 6.0, PhotoShop 5.5, “Surface Drawing” @1999 S. Schkolne & M. Pruett Printer: Jack Duganne Ateliers

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Betsy Lohrer Hall These works are a non-numerical counting. Visual sound patterns. They are systems, and systems forgotten or broken. A record of attention focused, then wandering.

They are about relationships—between that which is on the surface, covered over, peeking through, and untouched.

They are the record of time passing. Traces made by a hand across the landscape of the paper.

As with so much, they are the accumulation of simple acts.

Betsy Lohrer Hall makes mixed media works on paper, installations, performances, and ephemeral object works. She has a longstanding fascination with process and impermanence, often using simple, fragile materials such as thread, eggshells, or collected cast off objects. Her works often allude to unnoticed aspects of everyday life, as well as to current socio-political events. Most often, these are approached in an abstract, lyrical way.

Hall earned her B.A. from Colorado College, and her M.F.A. from California State University, Fullerton. She studied art history, literature, architecture, and theatre in London and Florence, and developed her printmaking techniques and imagery at El Camino College, Torrance, and Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro.

She has exhibited her work in solo and group shows along the west coast, several other states in the U.S., and in Thailand. In recent years, Hall has been awarded a solo project at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), an artist residency at the Huntington Beach Art Center, a printmaking residency at Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, and a Professional Artist Fellowship grant from the Arts Council of Long Beach. A catalog of her 2011 solo exhibition, The Spaces in Between, is available through Blurb.com.

{ betsylohrerhall.com }

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Untitled (floating), 2009

Gouache on Rives BFK, 89 ½” x 42”

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Mayde Herberg Just recently, I became aware of a terrible jolt – a startling brightness and loudness that accompanies my waking. Navigating the Stream of Dreams was born out this current uncomfortable leap from deep sleep, where all is fertile and fluid, and the following collision with concrete planet earth.

I am fascinated by the sense of confusion and discomfort of this in-between state - these moments between waking and sleeping.

Through photographing friends and myself either sleeping or keeping eyes shut, I attempt to capture the state of unconsciousness and join it with physical reality thereby closing the gap between sleeping and waking. The palm branch boat that floats above the sleepers suggests a feminine vessel for containing and navigating the rich substance found in the stream of dreams.

Mayde Meiers Herberg’s work is primarily oil pastel drawings informed by her interest in dreams and the complex machinations of the psyche. Early drawings were whimsical watery environments, before shifting to metaphorically depict thorny emotional situations. Her deep interest in psychology, theater, and design inform Herberg’s recent installation work.

Herberg’s resume includes over 40 group shows. Many of her drawings are in private collections and her work has been seen in newspapers and magazines including: Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register, Press-Telegram, Interior Design Magazine, and Alaska Airlines Magazine. She received an Art for Rail grant from L.A. County Transportation Commission and a grant from the Pine Avenue Public Mural Program, City of Long Beach.

After obtaining her B.A. in graphic design/ceramics and her M.F.A. in painting/design, Herberg spent several years as Gallery Director and instructor in the Art Department at Long Beach City College.

In 1975 she joined the faculty at Santa Ana College as Gallery Director and instructor where she curated over 150 exhibitions and taught drawing, two-dimensional design, illustration, gallery practices, and production. In 2007 Mayde retired and is currently an adjunct faculty member in the Santa Ana College Art Department, where she continues to teach drawing.

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Navigating the Stream of Dreams, 2012 Mixed Media, h 38” x w 50” x 72”

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Ilee Kaplan When I was about twelve years old, I wrote a poem celebrating my feelings about my nursery school artwork, which I will quote in its brief entirety: Every picture on the line, Is really not as good as mine.

I’ve painted more all through the year, Then any person who is here You might think I am quite vain.

But to see my picture is better, Is very plain.

Of course, I have grown out of such toddler-esque hubris. However, I have never ceased to celebrate the process of art making. All of the aspects are intriguing—mastering a technique, conceptualizing the content, the physicality of the production process, and channeling my emotions and perceptions through a visual experience.

Woodblock printmaking has been a significant thread for me since graduate school. This printmaking process encompasses all of the art making qualities I enjoy: the opportunity to assemble a multi-layer puzzle of lines, shapes, and colors; the ability to create an image that is strong, dramatic, and graphic; and a production process that is physical and detailed.

The two works in this exhibition are from my Pillow Project. Inspired by a class in Jewish mystical dream interpretation, I created a series of images of people sleeping on pillows printed on pillows. I invited friends to pose, sleeping, as well as to contribute a dream, which became a sound piece accompanying the installation. After I finished the edition of pillows, I framed and painted the woodblocks themselves and included them in the project.

Ilee Kaplan received in B.A. in Medieval Literature (1975) at University of California, Berkeley and her MA in Printmaking (1980) at California State University, Long Beach. Her awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the California Arts Council, and the Distinguished Artist Award from the Public Corporation of the Arts (now Arts Council for Long Beach). She has exhibited her paintings and woodblock prints regionally and internationally. She currently is the Associate Director for the University Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach. She has served on numerous grant and artist panels including for the Public Corporation of the Arts, California Arts Council, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and has been an accreditation consultant for the American Association of Museums.

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Meg and Mike Sleeping, 2011

Acrylic, wood, mixed media, 28” H x 52” W

Not Pictured

Deb and her Two Dogs, 2011

Acrylic, wood, mixed media, 28” H x 52” WW

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Karen McCreary For me, art making is an expression of a personal search, transforming thoughts and emotions into tangible objects, which can be further examined and shared. My work combines plastics, metals, and drawing. I am drawn to these materials by their unique characteristics to produce forms with transparency, depth, and movement of light and color through the surfaces. These dimensional drawings create illusional spaces inhabited by suggestions of human presence. They give form to points of diversion, reflection, and changes in perception, motivated by a desire to find order and balance in an increasingly chaotic environment.

Karen McCreary is an artist with a professional background in jewelry manufacturing. She received her B.F.A. in jewelry and metalsmithing from California State University, Long Beach and has exhibited her sculpture and art-to-wear extensively since.

A southern California native, McCreary is inspired by its light and landscape. Experimentation with various materials and techniques attracted her to plastics because of their transparency, colors, and great versatility. Her current work combines sheet acrylic, resins, and metals and is exhibited in galleries throughout the United States and in Europe. She has also exhibited her work directly to the public through the American Craft Council Shows, the Smithsonian Craft Show, and the Contemporary Crafts Market since 1983.

Interviews and reviews of Karen’s work have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines including, Ornament, Metalsmith, The Press-Telegram, and images of her pieces have been included in a number of Lark Book’s 500 Series publications. She has also been commissioned for one-of-a-kind and limited production pieces for the television and motion picture industries.

{ galleryred.com }

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Inclined View B, 1992

Acrylic, aluminum, graphite, and lacquer, 8.5” x 9” x .5”

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John Montich Cars Series: Fenders, Fins, Pipes, Grills, Lights, Ornaments and best of all CHROME. This is the stuff of which dreams are not just made but engineered, fabricated, finished, polished and then documented, cheese caked, and marketed. It is our heart held in the thrall of car lust. Will this want bring vulgarity or the best that life has to offer? The answer is buried in a fantasy begun at a young age.

John Montich is a nationally recognized fine art photographer. Working with alternative photographic processes, traditional film and high contrast darkroom prints to describe everyday ephemera has defined his recognizable style.

His work is included in many private and corporate collections across the country. Exhibitions at the Armand Hammer Museum, Laguna Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Long Beach Museum of Art have included his photography. A solo exhibition at the University of La Verne’s Irene Carlson Gallery of Photography surveyed his unique transfer images. Cypress College, El Camino College, Emeritus College, Long Beach City College and Porterville College have featured his work. The Best of Photography Annual has published his award winning images in several editions. Art galleries and alternative venues have exhibited his work for over twenty years.

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Eye Sore

Diptych, 2 – 16” x 20” Cibachromes, framed 20.5” x 54”

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PIA PIZZO Since the seventies my research has led me to an exploration of the book as an Art form. The tactile values of materials are found in paper that is torn and worked upon with patient care so as to feel its textures, its porosity, the very tissue of its surface.

The non-readable books extend the perspective of mind and memory, setting out to recount a happening, a state of affairs or a journey through the pages.

The page is the setting for any hypothetical adventure you may embark upon, the virgin void of mental space, opening up the perspective within.

The pages unfold with kinetic rhythm, becoming the arena within which to unwind your mind rather than the stage for grasping codified messages. The tearing or punching of the paper is never the outcome of aggression but stems from studied feeling and touching, from physical contact with both the material and reality, as a step towards thinking once again in tactile terms. Symbols and diagrams explain the relationships that exist within Human Nature and the universe.

The pages without words or images are focused on the light and shadows created in the empty spaces; they are composed with natural light, which causes the pieces to vibrate as the light changes through the day. My work demands the music of silence.

Pia Pizzo is internationally known for her drawings, oil paintings, artist’s books, and installations. Born in Italy, Pizzo lives and works in Long Beach, California, where, since 1970, she has explored the book as an art form. From 1960 to 2012, Pizzo’s work has been seen in 39 solo exhibitions in Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Germany, England, and the United States. Also, between 1957 and 2012, she contributed to 91 group exhibitions in Italy, Taiwan, Spain, France, Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Macedonia, England, Germany, Brazil, and the United States of America. Pizzo’s artworks are included in museums, libraries, archives, and private collections in USA, Europe, Brazil and Taiwan

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Not pictured

Arrows of Fear and Hope, 1998

Computer generated print on Arches paper, 19” x 13”

The Great Way, 1998

Computer generated print on Arches paper

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1

Alchemic Letter #2

Computer generated print on Arches paper, 1/31, 19� x 13�

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Robert Potier I have become known for bold abstract paintings done in acrylic on canvas but occasionally a sudden insight breaks through and I have the compulsion to explore the spark of a new idea in a mini-collection.

These two paintings, JFK - In Memory #2 and I Have Been to the Mountain - In Memory of Martin Luther King, are such an exploration that have resulted in a small collection of paintings dealing with politics in the broadest sense. I find it difficult to use current politicians as subject matter and feel that I must stand back awhile, using my iconoclastic nature to view the subject through the critical lens of time. Although I often use humor to lightly skewer a subject, some of my paintings are quite explosively raw in nature. These two paintings on display fall into the realm of emotions, vividly brought on by the ugliness of assassination. Time has shown these two men to have their various frailties but I show deep respect tinged with awe, partly by the use of somber grays. The bottom panel of each painting symbolizes the passing from life into death and the cosmic riddle.

Robert Potier studied at IIT (Chicago) and received his BFA Degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He earned his teaching credential at Sacramento State College.

Potier’s most recent solo exhibition was at the James Gray Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. Besides extensive exhibiting in galleries and museums, there have been inclusions in juried shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Laguna Beach Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum of Sacramento, and others.

{ robertpotiergallery.com }

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JFK - In Memory #2

Acrylic on canvas, 60” H x 40” W

2

I Have Been to the Mountain - In Memory of Martin Luther King Acrylic on canvas, 60” H x 40” W

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Sue Ann Robinson Many of my artist’s books begin with the daily realities of contemporary life—the media, my environment, and life’s daily requirements at work and at home. I make one-of-a-kind sculptural bookworks, usually in series. This exhibition includes three series: “Words, Out,” “Words, In” and a painted unique book made from found publications. I frequently use existing texts and publications in creating my one-of-a-kind books. “Words, In” represents the barrage of messages that have come across my threshold daily since 2007 recombined in increasing layers of altered new meanings developed in a new context. For this exhibition, I have contributed two new altered books, Mixed Messages from Pearce Universe, part of my “Words, In” series. Several chapters (in clear paint cans) of “Words, Out” are the result of many altered (shredded and crumpled) texts combined with dry pigments. Curried Book is part of my on-going series of painted found brochures that I began in mid-1990s from brochures that stretch back to the 1950s. In addition to paint, this unique bookwork has been painted with curry spice.

Sue Ann Robinson has made limited edition and one-of-a-kind artist’s books since moving to Long Beach in the early 1980s. She was the artist-in-residence at the Long Beach Public Libraries and the Long Beach Museum of Art with consecutive Artist-in-Community grants from the California Arts Council.

She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the City of Long Beach and the City of Los Angeles as well as the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Her artist’s books have been exhibited locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally and are in many public and private collections including the Getty Research Institute and the National Gallery of Art. She has printed her works at residencies at the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY; Centrum, Port Townsend, WA; and the Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY as well as Dorland Mountain Colony, Temecula, CA. She has taught book arts workshops for all ages at public schools, museums, parks, and art centers, and most recently she has shared her expertise in art and book arts with adult caregivers.

Robinson maintains a studio in Long Beach and continues to share her enthusiasm for the arts with the public as Director of Collections at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

1

{ http://www.scwca.org/profile/sue-ann-robinson } { www.artslb.org/registry }

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1

Curried Book, 2008

Unique book, mixed media acrylic pigments on found brochures, 9-3/4 H x 9 D x 4-1/2 W inches, closed dimensions; 9-3/4 H x variable dimensions installed

2

Words, Out, 2011 (Chapters 1, 2, 5, 8, 10, & 11)

Unique bookwork mixed media text, plastic, powdered pigments in clear acrylic cans; dimensions: each can 7 H x 6-1/2 in Diameter, installation dimensions variable Chapter 1: Words, Out—Alphabet Chapter 2: Words, Out—Encyclopedia C Chapter 5: Words, Out—Encyclopedia N Chapter 8: The Biotic Worlds of Man pages Chapter 10: Words, Out—E+E 2011 Chapter 11: Words, Out NOTE: Additional Chapters (cans) in the series can be seen in Experience the Book at the Main Public Library, 102 Pacific Avenue, Long Beach

3

Words, In—I (messages to Pearce Universe), 2012

Mixed media altered book 9/14 H x 12-1/2 W x 5-1/4 D inches hanging & open

4

Words, In—II (messages to Pearce Universe), 2012

Mixed media altered book 8-1/2 H x 11-1/2 W x 5 inches D hanging & open

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Carol Roemer The Shaman’s Toolkit: The material and spiritual realms are in constant interaction among tribal people. In this contemporary version of a shaman’s tool kit, I incorporate the span of time, recalling the Neolithic fertility goddess and contemporary Yoruba diviner. When the modern viewer approaches the open toolkit, they morph into the diviner. Each of us is unique in our experiences in the material realm, and the objects spark memories, relationships, dreams, even fears. They summon your creative imagination.

How It’s Made: It was in art history that I started to read the messages that ancient peoples transmitted through their art. They told stories of their lives, ambitions, and beliefs. I draw great inspiration from their symbolism and imagery, and seek to impart a sense of mystery and wonder in my work. Ancient artwork often contains cryptic clues, and in this piece, I play with the sacred symbolic spiral and the enigmatic Minoan Phaistos disk’s glyphs, some recognizable, others unknown.

The Material Realm: Recently I was overwhelmed by the realization that the objects artists create never existed in the world before. Where does this creativity come from? For me it doesn’t always come in an explosive eruption. Instead it’s a series of small sparks that propel an idea, enlarge it, amplify it, and wrestle it into a physical object. My recent work pays attention to sources that engender creativity: the mental, emotional, and material realms. Each artist translates ideas and feelings into physical matter, and it is the material realm that’s expressed here.

Carol Roemer’s artwork includes drawing, painting, pastel, jewelry, and mixed media, each chosen to express an idea, feeling, or emotion. It is based on her interest in the elements of art and the imagery from past cultures. It reflects her background in drawing and painting, art history, and over 30 years of teaching classes in studio and ancient, tribal, and Pre-Columbian art. She has a B.A. in Drawing and Painting, M.A. in Art History, and PhD. focused on the history of the arts in America. These interests emerge in her paintings, mixed media work, collages, and books. Her recent work has been shown at Hellada Gallery, Long Beach Arts, and in selected exhibitions, and can be found in private collections.

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1

The Shaman’s Toolkit

Polymer clay, acrylic, found objects, 5 ½” l, 3” h, 2 ½” d

2

How it’s Made

Acrylic, pumice, decals, 36” x 36”

3

{ carolroemer.com } { artsmartnow.com }

3

The Material Realm, 2012

Mixed media, 12” l x 12” w x 3” d

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John Hillis Sanders My work in this exhibition is a recent piece, following an investigation that began in 1979. It is based on the idea of developing an overall surface in the application of paint in a controlled but spontaneous feel. Please visit my website at johnhillissanders.com to see a video illustrating this process and a portfolio of my other works.

John Hillis Sanders has been working as an artist for over 40 years. During the nineteen seventies, Sanders worked primarily with clay and his conceptual approach led to site specific and installation work, which has been his major focus for 30 years. The outdoor site-specific pieces use materials and images that Sanders chooses for their connection to the concept of the work. Two examples are Greyhound (1993) made of 30 larger than scale greyhound images coursing over a hillside in Palos Verdes, CA, and Grove (2005) an acre-sized field of long handled shovels laid out in a grid in Southampton, NY. Sanders creates indoor installations using ultraviolet light. The first piece in this genre was the Mt. Sac installation, a static work created in 1988. The last piece, Three, created in 2006, included a light installation, a video of the work in process, and a series of photographs of that process.

{ johnhillissanders.com }

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Kazimir’s Chair

Paint on canvas and found object, 8’ x 8’x 34”

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Joan Skogsberg Sanders The minute I stepped foot in Tangier, Morocco, I was hooked. Aside from the visual impact of an area that looked like a classic painting and was candy for the painter’s eye, I was intrigued by the hidden aspects of this country…..Arab women veiled and robed…..men in hooded jellabas…. homes sequestered behind ornate doors, few windows, frequently located in winding, dark, puzzling casbahs. On subsequent trips to Morocco I learned more of the contrasting and conflicting values and culture of this country. Yes, women were held back, but I was to learn that many of them wanted to keep it that way. And, yes, they prayed to Allah five times a day, but that didn’t stop the thievery and rampant questionable morality. (Read “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles.) Although frowned upon, superstition is alive and well. Morocco is a poor country and its people have to scrape by with any means available to them. Existing side by side are the very poor and, in the minority, the super rich who are drawn to this exotic country.

I was transformed by Morocco…..captivated by its beauty and, mesmerized by its ancient past, I was inspired to paint a poetic mosaic of the Middle East.

Joan Skogsberg Sanders is best known for two series of paintings. The first is her Moroccan Series, in which she searches for the soul of the country. Although consistent visually in colors of sand, ocher, brown, and gold, Morocco itself is a complex country that lends itself to deep study and artistic exploration. Sanders’ series has been shown, along with her interview, on International Cable television, sponsored by Islamic Information Services.

Fresh Paint is her newest series, painted mostly in acrylic and mixed media on wood, inspired mostly by California. In these new images, her focus is on dynamic color and abstract shapes, yet with identifiable reference points. She reaches out to the viewer to create a mood of vital energy and excitement. Sanders’ work has been exhibited in over 60 juried shows in England, Wales, France, and throughout the US. One of her paintings was seen on the Bones television show. Sanders experiments with varied media, and enjoys sketching pastel portraits and plein air paintings, often in Long Beach’s El Dorado Park.

{ artfulhome.com/artist/Joan-Skogsberg-Sanders/1481 }

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Not Pictured

Hadith I, 2004

Mixed media, 18” x 24”

Hadith II, 2004

Mixed media, 18” x 24”

2

2

Rabat, 2004

Mixed media, 12” x 16”

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URAN SNYDER I go to the desert now, sun dried and barren I am sure I used to swim with prehistoric sea creatures painting the rocks and cloudy sky it becomes an underwater scene URAN SNYDER is known for her large black and white figure drawings as well as her site-specific installations and large paintings.

After a childhood spent in Tokyo, Japan, and spending time in Europe before coming to the United States, Snyder’s work shows a unique blend of WesternEastern sensibility.

Snyder’s latest solo exhibition, Yearning, was shown at La Sierra University in Riverside, California, and her newest piece, Theseus, was in a group show at Gallery Neuartig in San Pedro, this past May. Snyder earned her B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees at CSULB. She is an active member of WAM, a group that started in the 80s at CSULB. The group originated from Connie Jenkin’s course, “Women Art Makers”. Starting as an art group supporting women returning to the university, it remains an active organization.

{ http://geniusworkcoaching.com/Home.html }

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Jumbo Rock #5

Acrylic on paper, 52” x 102”

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CRAIG CREE STONE The objects exhibited here are elements that were produced to evaluate the eventual design and construction of the artwork located between Ocean Street and First Street in Long Beach entitled: Image Emergence: Promenade of Clouds. This artwork deals with emergence as a theme, things that disappear and reappear from view. The third element will be used for gallery visitors to generate rubbings/drawings at a workshop during the exhibition.

In the late 1970’s Craig Stone’s artwork explored how the perceived gender, race, and ethnicity of an artist’s name influenced the acceptance, exhibition, and reception of an artist’s work. Exhibiting under a variety of personas (i.e., Cree Stone, Michi no Kogeinin, Hu Shu Chuan, Jerome Lee Washington III, etc.) the project and findings were eventually revealed as the work of one artist (Craig Stone).

In the early 1980’s, Stone combined elements from his various personas and began to exhibit under the name Craig Cree Stone, a combination of his own name and the persona Cree Stone.

From the early 1990’s to the present, Craig Cree Stone has produced many large-scale artworks in the public sphere. An award winning park that reverses the idea of the outdoor sculpture gallery in Signal Hill (gallery walls atop a promontory that reveal views of the ever changing landscape), permanent “street art” of surrealistic shadows extending from parking meters along Second Street in Belmont Shore and recently five large scale stainless steel cloud-like sculptures that cast intricate shadows during a sunny day and create ephemeral images when lit at night on the Promenade in Long Beach.

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1 Promenade of Clouds, 2011 Installation between Ocean Street and First Street, Long Beach

t One-Third Scale Test of Bird Cloud to Generate Rubbings, 2011 Aluminum, 19” x 34” x 1/16” t One-Third Scale Model of Bird Cloud Sculpture, 2011 Wood, stainless steel, 59” x 33” x 18” t Full-Scale Test of Smallest Cloud Element, 2011 Aluminum, 38” x 78” x 1/8”

{ craigcreestonestudio.com }

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Annie Stromquist These two works are from a series of seven called “The Messengers,” which use birds as poetic carriers of warnings. The messages they carry? The viewer might think of many possibilities in our current world. That we are being warned is the important thing.

Since finishing an M.F.A. in printmaking in 1994, Stromquist has focused on creating mixed media works on paper, which include drawing, painting, collage, intaglio, relief, and screenprinting (serigraph) techniques.

Stromquist’s art has been exhibited throughout the United States and in Europe. She has received grants and awards including an international Pollock-Krasner award. She has written a book on screenprinting for beginners, Simple Screenprinting: Basic Techniques and Creative Projects, published by Lark Books, which is currently in its eighth printing, and teaches printmaking at Long Beach City College.

Selected for month long artist residencies, Annie has spent time on two different occasions in Newfoundland and also in an electricity-free cabin in the desert hills above Temecula, California. These residencies allowed her to focus full time on making art while getting to know the surrounding geography and art community.

{ anniestromquist.com }

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The Messengers (1), 2008

Mixed media on paper, 12” x 22”

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The Messengers (3), 2008

Mixed media on paper, 12” x 22”

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Alice Foss Thorne My current series of work uses organic materials, such as branches, seeds, pods, and found wood. This series drives from my long time interest in nature, gardening, and what we all throw away. The seed in its many varieties becomes a symbol for rebirth and transformation. The pieces are contained in frames that barely hold the branches, and shadows are formed on the wall behind, creating double images. The beauty lies in the natural forms and colors.

The series is based on the historical concept of the “Garden Folly” in the 18th Century. The folly could be frightful, humorous, sensual, or senseless. It is at best sublime, can be totally frivolous.

Alice Foss Thorne works in post-consumer materials, such as plastic bottles, toys, debris collected from the beach, assembled into three-dimensional forms in hardware cloth. She also works with paint and collage.

Thorne’s concepts deal with mass consumerism and the current series uses organic materials, such as branches, found wood, and seeds. The seed, in its many varieties, becomes a symbol for rebirth and transformation. This series derives from her interest in nature, gardening, and what we all throw away.

Thorne attended the Art Institute of Chicago, and earned a B.F.A. from CSULB, before teaching art classes at Brooks College, Long Beach, CA. Alice’s work has been seen in seven solo exhibitions and over twenty-six juried group shows, winning several exhibition awards. Her work is in many private collections.

Honors include Individual Artists Grant, Public Corporation of the Arts, Long Beach, CA, and Public Art Installation at the United Cambodian Community Center in Long Beach, CA.

{ anniestromquist.com }

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Not Pictured

Garden Folly Series #9, 2012

Creeping fig, seeds, found object, 21” x 19” x 3.5”

Garden Folly Series #8, 2012

Oak gall sanded branch, seeds, 38.5” x 10.5” x 5.5”

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Garden Folly Series #7, 2012

Creeping fig, peach seeds, found object, 21” x 19” x 3.5”

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Gail Werner My work reflects the landscape and cultural imagery related to my Native American background. My tribal affiliation is with the Cupeño, Luiseño, and Diegeño tribes located in southern California. Many of the elements found in my work such as color, light, and plant and animal life are influenced by the southern California desert and mountain landscape. Native American rock art, pottery and basket designs specific to this area also make their way into my work.

Southern California Native American stories and songs, especially the creation stories and traditional “bird songs”, also influence my work. These stories and songs often incorporate plant and animal life as the characters. They reflect a dreamlike, evolving world telling how the world came to be and how the people came to be where they are. My paintings reflect that world: images appear to float, or their scale is exaggerated.

Landscape, color, light and imagery, abstract designs, stories and songs—all of these elements merge together for me to evoke a sense of place.

Gail Werner earned her M.F.A. in drawing and painting from California State University, Long Beach in 1985. She is a painter working in oil and encaustic.

She is also a printmaker specializing in the monotype (the painterly print). The southern California desert and mountain landscape, plant and animal life, and cultural elements related to her Native American background inspire her work. Her tribal affiliation is with the Cupeño, Luiseño and Diegeño tribes l ocated in southern California.

Werner has exhibited widely throughout the United States. Her most recent solo shows were at the Stone Rose Gallery in Long Beach and at the Merced College Art Gallery in Merced, California. Recent group shows include Art on Paper at the Circle Gallery in Annapolis, Maryland, The Original Show at Flow Art Space in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Labyrinth at Gallery Neuartig in San Pedro, California.

{ gailwernerart.com }

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3

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Sage, 2012

Oil and Pencil on Wood Panel, 36” x 24”

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Nest, 2012

Oil and Pencil on Wood Panel, 24” x 18”

3 Bird Dreams IV, 2012 Oil on Wood Panel, 10” x 8”

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Jaye Whitworth My art is a process through which I investigate questions about the world, the self, and the nature of creativity. I use found objects and materials that ask the viewer to pause and engage in a moment of contemplation—to entice the experience of feelings and thoughts that generally get lost in the crush of everyday go-go-going.

One of my main concerns is how we make order and meaning in our lives, and how we understand ourselves and each other. Since I love teaching almost as much as making art, I must ask what you think: What the heck are these things? Do they look grand & imposing, or are they more ramshackle?

Couldn’t she just have soldered pieces together, or is there another meaning in ’wired’? Does the backside have the same message as the front? Is this Art or Art-Making or Not? Ask the person next to you what they think: they may be wondering, too! Does it make you want to fool around with some ideas or things? Maybe you could start with just going through your kitchen drawer…

And hey, October is Arts Month in Long Beach: what are you going to do about it?

Born and raised in Midwest farm country, Jaye Whitworth grew up loving the open spaces and quiet places in the world. At 19, she moved to California and decided to take an art class at the local college...and graduated from CSULB in 1988 with her B.F.A. in Drawing and Painting.

Whitworth has shown art from California to Denmark, in both group and solo shows, and has enjoyed being an Artist-in-Residence and working with schools, museums, YMCA, Dept. of Parks & Recreation’s Anti-Gang Program, and the El Dorado Nature Center. Whitworth loved working with the downtown Main Library Oct/Arts/2010, as she believes that we contribute to a better world working at the pivot point of Art + Books + Creativity = Cultural Literacy & Community.

Whitworth also believes that none of the above might have happened—without her immersion in the hotbed of artmaking made up of wonderful people in the Long Beach Community of Artists network, where she says, “I stand with Giants.”

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1

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The Blue King, 2012

Mixed media construction with cigar box, wood, metal, wire, lead, beads, tinker toys, etc., 30”h x 24”w x16”d

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The Queen of Dreams, 2010

Mixed media construction with candy tin, paints, beads, fabric, ceramics, wire, wood, etc., 26”h x 12”w x 10”d

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While  we  typically  think  of  “nowâ€?  as  referring  to  the  present  (it  probably  stems  from  the  same  root  as  the  word  “newâ€?),  we  use  the  word  in  many  contexts  that  send  us  slipping  backwards  or  forwards  in  time.   I  could  say,  “she’s  been  reading  that  same  poem  for  twenty  years  nowâ€?  (past).   Or,  I  could  say,  “she  read  a  poem  just  nowâ€?  (immediate  past).   I  could  say,  “he  is  reading  a  poem  right  nowâ€?  (present).   Or,  I  could  say,  “he  is  going  to  read  that  poem  nowâ€?  (immediate  future).   This  is  an  exhibition  of  past,  present  and  future  “nowsâ€?:   ³1RZV´ WKDW KDYH EHHQ IUR]HQ LQ WLPH FDVWV IURP VSHFLÂżF SHUIRUPDQFHV WKH ZUDSSLQJ RI ROG REMHFWV WUHH IRUPV re-­modeled  as  geometric  structures,  and  photos  from  a  country  eerily  frozen  in  time  by  an  oppressive  dictatorship.  “Nowsâ€?  that  are  reactions,  intuition  and  impulse:   current-­event  drawings  that  pay  homage  to  Slavic  feminist  activists,  painted/sculptural  narratives  responding  to  life  as  it  intersects  with  culture  and  the  environment,  and  drawings  that  are  simply  meant  to  “leave  a  mark  on  the  worldâ€?. Âł1RZV´ WKDW KDSSHQHG MXVW SULRU WR RSHQLQJ WKH JDOOHU\ GRRUV ZDOO Ă€RRU DQG SROH LQVWDOODWLRQV DQG IRRG SUHSDUDWLRQ $QG Âł1RZV´ WKDW ZLOO KDSSHQ GXULQJ WKH VKRZ RU DIWHU HYHU\RQH KDV JRQH KRPH D ÂłWKLQJV ZH GR´ SHUIRUPDQFH an  eraser  love  seat  that  will  change  as  it  is  sat  upon,  and  take-­home  how-­to  make-­a-­balaclava  instructions.  NOW  is  an  exhibition  of  Long  Beach-­based  graduate  students  and  alumni  from  CSULB  and  UCI  who  are  stirring  the  con-­ temporary  pot  and  infusing  the  Long  Beach  art  arena  with  exciting  and  challenging  visual  poetry.   Look  at  what  is  emerging  now. +LODU\ 1RUFOL̆

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Carleton Christy I want my two-dimensional work to be, undoubtedly, an illusion. This way the viewer can skip wondering if it is supposed to be real or if my portrayals happened or not and get right into the form and technique—my form and technique. I guess I take the idea of “leaving my mark on the world” seriously.

Carleton Christy is an artist who focuses on two-dimensional artwork; most recently his work has been in metal point drawing and woodcut. Christy’s work has been shown at the Long Beach and Laguna Beach museums of art among other institutions and galleries in the United States. He was born in Provo, Utah in 1976 and earned his masters degree in fine arts at CSULB in 2006. His studio is in Long Beach where he lives with his wife and two children.

{ carletonchristy.com }

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Untitled (woodcut with numbers), 2012 Woodcut, 45” x 60”

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JOCELYN fOYE Raised by a taxonomist, Jocelyn Foye’s work stems from an understanding of this scientific practice of observing and collecting. Currently, she is trying to capture and illustrate how the reoccurrence of every day processes derived from labor produces a fundamental visual pattern.

In this exhibition she is displaying the work from a solo performance/exhibition at Kristi Engle gallery, Rock ‘n Roll, Rock ‘n Roll, Rock ‘n Roll. It was an Air Guitar Competition produced and performed with a team of 15 performers. The two finalists to the performance made work from their final acts on beds of clay.

Foye has produced private performances in her studio as well as public events often heavy with spectacle and excitement. Following the event, the resulting marks left in material are cast and recorded, sometimes wholly, sometimes edited, to create sculptural reliefs which are both abstract and grounded in the origins of their creation. The events are ephemeral and often reveal the disconnect between the expected arena of their performance and the contemplative gallery space. The resulting objects, often referred to as a sculptural relief paintings, carry the aura of the performance, but function as complete artworks to contemplate unto themselves.

Jocelyn Foye (born in 1977 in Hartford, Connecticut), is a contemporary sculptor incorporating performance, photography, printmaking and painting. She lives and works in Long Beach, CA and maintains a faculty position at El Camino College as well as Jocelyn Foye Designs, a web and graphic design consultancy agency. She earned her MFA from CSU, Long Beach, California and BA from Trinity College in Hartford, CT. Her performances, sculptural relief paintings and photographs have exhibited at regional museums, commercial galleries as well as College and University galleries around the United States and Europe.

Foye is a recipient of the 2011 Fellowship for Emerging Visual Artists from the California Community Foundation, in part due to her work with many notfor- profit organizations, dance troops and athletic clubs around the United States. In 2006, Foye was one of twenty featured artist in the LA Weekly’s Annual Biennial, an exhibition highlighting successful graduates of all southern California Colleges and Universities.

{ jocelynart.com }

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Gold image Biff, 2011

Polyurethane resin, gold paint, 28.75� x 27.5�

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Cynthia Herrera In Cuba, 60-year-old American-made and new Chinese refrigerators are where families store globally mass-produced objects re-appropriated to house the everyday basics, and hide “contraband” red meat. Plastic bags, styrofoam containers, and plastic bottles are permanent. The red and silver cans of soda are made in Cuba. All are markers/signifiers of past and present in one space.

To ask someone to open their refrigerator is paramount to asking them to stand naked before the lens. It is discomforting and intimate. In the series “Controlled Humidity,” I expose the “haves” and the “have nots.” The refrigerator is as much a vault as it is an appliance, containing left over rice, medicine, aluminum canisters of gasoline, ice cream. The complex role of food reveals another layer of cultural and class relationships.

The “Now” represented here is in the intersection of private and public, legal and illegal, past and present. I went to Cuba to find, deconstruct, and experience my history, to document the homes, spaces, and people involved in the sequence of events that led to my life in the United States. I photographed the physical structures and textures that would define my identity as an American, a Latina, and a Cuban: crusted orange peels disguised as meat, work camps picking tobacco and cutting sugar cane, body music, death defying acts of crossing oceans, survival by learning a new language, culture and customs. I wanted these family stories and experiences to become visceral for me, and to simultaneously construct my own contemporary relationship with Cuba.

Cynthia Herrera (b. 1977, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist, arts educator and sociologist by training, and her motivation has been in discussing the impact of emigration, exile, and local existing histories on the recreation of “home” and identity.

A first generation Cuban American living in the context of southeast Los Angeles, Herrera’s work deals with identity, intersections of culture and the experience of exile. Her projects document the physical manifestations of cultural transition and change in physical spaces.

Cynthia Herrera is a current M.F.A. candidate in photography at California State University Long Beach, a 2011-2012 GPA Fulbright-Hayes Scholar in Arabic language, arts and culture studies at the University of Mohammad V, Rabat, Morocco, holds double B.A. degrees from the University of California Irvine in Studio Art and Sociology, and studied art history in the University of Burgos, Burgos, Spain. She currently lives in Long Beach, California.

{ cherreraphotography.com }

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Controlled Humidity, La Habana, Cuba, 2010 Digital inkjet print, 40” x 60”

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Nestle, Florida, Cuba, 2010 Digital inkjet print, 20” x 30”

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Nathan Huff My recent drawing and painting installations create freewheeling narratives: personal stories of suspending gravity, traversing emotional vertigo, and sorting reservoirs of memories. I am fascinated by visual conversations that can occur between images and objects that tangentially relate yet lack a linear retelling. Exploring the gaps between visual perception and modes of representation, and possible interpretation of these objects, provides a rich and fertile arena for my art making.

In my studio practice I leave space for interpretive play and experimentation. I collect meaningful images, imagined experiences, or emotional conundrums. My initial responses take the forms of gouache drawings; sculpture made from altered found furniture, creative writing, an enacted dialogue, an Internet search and collage, or colliding personal mythology with actual objects. It is in these chance combinations that objects take on potential beyond what I might have immediately recognized. New visual observations, personal insights, and metaphorical links are discovered in the process of this exploration.

Nathan Huff produces paintings, drawings, and sculpture that create freewheeling narratives: personal stories of suspending gravity, traversing emotional vertigo, and sorting reservoirs of memories. He earned an MFA in Drawing and Painting from CSU Long Beach, a degree in art education from Azusa Pacific University, and has also studied art in Italy, France, the UK, and Spain.

Actively exhibiting in Los Angeles and abroad, his work has been collected throughout the west coast by universities, public institutions, and private individuals.

His installations have been featured in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles at D.E.N. Contemporary (West Hollywood), Gallerie View (Salambo, Tunisa), group exhibitions at jk Gallery (Los Angeles), The Lillian Berkely Collection (Escondido, CA), The Loft (San Pedro, CA), Concrete Walls gallery in (Los Angeles), and at the Istituto San Lodivico (Orvieto, Italy). He was recently invited to participate with Art in Embassies as a guest curator for the US Embassy in New Zealand. The exhibition Encountering Place features Kiwi and Los Angeles Artists whose work represents and negotiates their relationship to representing location.

Nathan enjoys working in his art studio above the beautiful cliffs of San Pedro and is privileged to work with art students at CSU Long Beach, Azusa Pacific University, and Biola University, as an adjunct lecturer.

{ nathanhuff.com }

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Excavation and Ascending, 2008

Mixed media installation: drawing, painting, string, level, chair, 180” x 120” x 48”

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JEFF & GORDON We work with the “things we do,” the social customs and cultural idioms from the public and institutionalized to the idiosyncratic and unconscious that connect each of us to the social sphere. From “real estate walk through videos” to ”focus groups” to the recreational pastime of the so-called “one percent,” we appropriate, intervene in, and re-frame the “things we do” via video and performance pieces, creating situations that foster the public¹s reexamination of their role in the ever-evolving social narrative.

As well as performing these vernacular customs and idioms ourselves, we also portray, between the two of us, the give-and-take, back-and-forth process of social interaction, in heightened and sometimes humorous fashion. We complete this portrayal through the mediation of the cinematic screen. The cinema, in all of its contemporary forms, is our society’s great reifier of social identity and relations, both representing and teaching us who we are and how to act. By appropriating the cinematic aesthetic, we set the perfect stage on which to illuminate the otherwise comfortable social structures of mass culture.

JEFF&GORDON is a collaborative artist duo comprised of Jeff Foye and Gordon Winiemko. The two met when Foye and fellow grads at Cal State Long Beach included Winiemko, then a grad at UC Irvine, in the first Greater Los Angeles M.F.A. (GLAM.F.A.) Exhibition, a survey of southern California M.F.A. student work. After helping each other out on their respective thesis shows, it was a natural progression for Jeff and Gordon to start working together as JEFF&GORDON.

{ jeffandgordon.net }

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Jeff & Gordon, 2011

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Tina Linville I make sculpture out of salvaged objects and materials I have accumulated in my studio. I arrange, wrap and revise these objects to create hybrid forms that reveal and conceal themselves simultaneously. What is ordinary becomes mysterious, and out of explainable parts comes an unexplainable whole.

Tina Linville was born in 1981 in Washington State and earned her BFA in Sculpture at the University of Washington in 2006. She is currently an M.F.A. candidate at California State University Long Beach, expected to graduate in Spring of 2013. She lives and works in Long Beach, California.

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{ tinalinvillestudio.com }

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Studio snapshot, August 2012 Long Beach, California

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What Brought Me Here, 2011

Salvaged objects, nylons, thread, & acrylic mediums, 45”H x 41”W x 28”D

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Becca Shewmake My work is based on narratives and meta‐narratives in which abstract characters come together to perform functions in their environment. Fragments from my own life intertwine with references to the culture at large to create images with compound levels of interpretation. Environmental issues emerge in the form of polluting bio‐machines and acid rain clouds, while societal problems appear through various manifestations of oppressed‐versus‐oppressor themes such as experimenter vs. subject, hunter vs. prey, or consumer vs. consumed.

Becca Shewmake received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Minnesota in 2005. Before college, she worked in factories; industrial images can still be read in her work. Recently, she has been creating paintings that address environmental and social issues through images such as polluting bio-machines, acid rain clouds, and radioactive robo-plants. She is currently working on her Master of Fine Arts degree at California State University, Long Beach.

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{ beccashewmake.com }

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GrinDin, 2012

Mixed media on canvas, 60” x 68”

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They was all Switched Up, 2012 Mixed media on canvas, 70” x 74”

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Noah Thomas I am interested in making sculptural forms that feel unexpected, or surprising, organic, or improvised. I start by creating structures out of linear materials that evoke digitally rendered forms or architecture, but that are completely hand built and designed empirically. I often finish the pieces by adding a surface layer over the structure that allows for me to play with texture qualities, transparency and opacity. I am interested in this duality between the digital precision and the handcrafted aesthetic. My background in music is also present in the work through the use of visual rhythm and repetition, as well as the lyrical quality of the forms.

In my recent work I have been starting with found tree branches and allowing them to direct me in the form that I build, filling in the space between and around the branches, or adding onto the cut off ends. The techniques I use and the materials imply traditional wood-craft/furniture-making while the resulting forms give the impression of something designed using computers.

Noah Thomas lives and works as a multimedia sculptor in Long Beach, CA. He grew up in New Hampshire in his father’s furniture studio, where he was greatly influenced by his family’s interest in traditional craft, folk music, and dance. Thomas’ work exhibits a merging of his traditional roots with a more contemporary aesthetic. After receiving his B.A. in piano performance at Skidmore College, he studied sculpture at California State University Long Beach, earning his M.F.A. in 2003. Thomas has shown his work extensively in the Los Angeles Area with solo shows at Post, Project 210, Raid Projects, and The Office. His diverse studio practice includes sound installation and performance, public art, and sculpture. His work has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, and the OC Weekly.

{ noahthomas.org }

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Night Flight, 2010 Plywood, 10’ x 6’ x 3’

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The Rover

Wood, burlap, plaster, paint, 3’ x 3’ x 18”

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Vav Vavrek vav vavrek is a creator of things as well as an instigator of events. He tends to delve deeply into the refuse piles of the fortunate to aid in the expression of his deep seated agitations and anxieties. his works and his writing evoke some of the helplessness and anger of the new lost generation. his most recent works crawl through the grimy recesses of life through explorations of addiction, mental illness, poverty, gender roles, and politics. vav utilizes any and all materials that he can get to adhere with his greasy fingers, including: oil, acrylic, enamel, marker, spray paint, alternative photographic processes, scrap metal, broken electronics, low quality video, splinters of wood, and anonymous detritus. vav vavrek was born in wilkes barre, pennsylvania and grew up in the shadows of the rusting smokestacks of pittsburgh. a slight brain malfunction caused him to ride screaming into the wind on a faded steel horse until he lost his voice in phoenix, arizona. vav has recently violently dug up his roots and is trying to cultivate a new existence in the smog belt of the increasingly misnamed city of angels. he is currently creating works from nothing, or at least the remnants of nothing.

{ www.spraygraphic.com/vavvavrek }

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1 Eraser love seat, several thousand erasers with TV and altered video, photo by dan hilbert’

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Carrie Yury Women who do things in public that they’re not supposed to do fascinate me. I’m not that brave. My “Everyday Balaclava” series is about feminism, activism, freedoms, and strictures in Russia and the US. Pencil drawings of balaclava-clad women doing everyday things are inspired by the Russian feminist punk activists Pussy Riot, the Ukrainian feminist activist group Femen, and Russian dissident journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova, both of whom were brutally murdered for their anti-Putin regime reportage.

Thanks to feminist activism, femininity has become dangerous again, a trope turned inside out, baring sharp Slavic teeth. Whether cutting carrots (“Cutting”), exercising (“Training”), or on the phone/doing dishes (“Planning”), the women in “Everyday Balaclava” are rendered both comic and sinister by the addition of identity-obscuring headwear. The line drawings are accented in bright colors, invoking Pussy Riot’s startling use of color. I’m paying homage to my Slavic feminist heroines for engaging in feats of public daredevil outrageous activism but I’m also thinking about what comes after and between such stunts, about how women reconcile or integrate their everyday activities, roles, and modes with radical beliefs or politics.

The participatory installation “Everyday Balaclava” is comprised of a pile of instructions detailing how to make your own balaclava. My goal in giving gallery goers these instructions is to link a DIY activist ethos with everyday activities. The installation also encourages dialog about the Pussy Riot trial beyond the moment of action/indignation into what can be done to fight authoritarian regimes, despotism, and misogyny.

Carrie Yury is an artist living and working in southern California. Her work addresses the politics of public privates, ethnography, and feminism. Yury works in various media, including photography, drawing, sculpture, and music. She has had solo shows in Chicago, and in Los Angeles, where she is represented by Sam Lee Gallery. In addition to her solo shows, her work has been shown in Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York in group exhibitions, including Figure and Form in Contemporary Photography at LACMA, Twisted Selves at The California Museum of Photography, Veronica at Pitzer Art Galleries, and The Wight Biennial at UCLA. Yury holds two Masters degrees: an A.M. in English from the University of Chicago (1996), and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of California at Irvine (2006). Her work is in the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Yury’s work has been reviewed in The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Reader, The OC Weekly, and ArtUS. In addition to being an artist, Yury is an arts writer for arts publications including Artillery MAgazine and The Huffington Post Arts Section.

{ carrieyury.com }

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Planning, 2012

graphite and watercolor on paper, 12” x 9”.

From the series “Everyday Balaclava,” courtesy the artist and Sam Lee Gallery.

Not pictured

Everyday Balaclava

graphite and watercolor on paper, 12” x 9”.

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BY JEAN CLAD Four nationally known, Long Beach-­based artists create artworks that explore individual approaches to hand-­made books.

7HUU\ %UDXQVWHLQ DOWHUV ROG YROXPHV WR PDNH IDVFLQDWLQJ QHZ VWRULHV 7LQL 0LXUD FUHDWHV EHDXWLIXO ¿QH ELQGLQJV DQG OLPLWHG HGLWLRQ SUHVV ERRNV 3LD 3L]]R FUHDWHV ULFKO\ HPEHOOLVKHG XQLTXH SDJHV DQG OLPLWHG HGLWLRQV $QG 6XH $QQ 5RELQVRQ PDNHV unique one-­of-­a-­kind works with unusual materials. $UWLVWV FUHDWH ERRNV LQ PDQ\ VW\OHV DQG LW VHHPV QDWXUDO WR GLVSOD\ WKHP LQ WKH VLWH GHGLFDWHG WR DOO NLQGV RI ERRNV²WKH library. I fell in love with artists’ books many years ago and have curated countless shows using these wonderful works.

(DFK RQH R̆HUV VRPHWKLQJ QHZ DQG GL̆HUHQW 3OHDVH HQMR\ -­ Jean Clad Jean Clad was born in Minnesota and moved to California as a child. She grew up in Long Beach, attended Wilson High School and Long Beach City College. After graduating with a B.A. in art and philosophy, she moved to Paris to study painting at the atelier of Andre Lhote. Clad married a writer and they moved to Italy, where she painted full time for the next three years before returning to live in Big Sur and Washington D.C., before settling in New York. During this time, she was represented by the Camino Gallery. Following her husband’s death in a plane crash, Clad and her young child moved back to California to be near family, providing her the opportunity to pursue graduate studies in art at California State University, Long Beach.

After teaching art at Long Beach City College and two years of working at the Long Beach Main Library, Clad combined her twin passions in her ¿UVW FXUDWRULDO H[SHULHQFH Artists’ Books, which was shown at the Main Library. Although Clad has curated many exhibitions since then, her area of special interest has remained artists’ books and those who create them.

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TERRY BRAUNSTEIN The common thread through my work is a kind of visual archaeology: begun by exploring the world through research and challenging the viewer to find meaning by delving into the work, as I do in finding my material.

I am a collector, constantly acquiring images from books and magazines, and various kinds of ephemera. Old magazines, encyclopedias, books, maps, dollhouse furniture and bric-a-brac form my archive materials. My resulting images address issues of daily life and personal memory about the larger forces of the universe and human history.

I have made artists books for more than twenty years, producing over seventy. I am interested in the ways in which the viewer’s response to this medium differed from that of painting and printmaking, which were my previous media.

My works in this exhibition are altered books, to which the viewer brings his or her own memory of old books from childhood, atlases, medieval manuscripts, church hymnals, and pocket books of verse. I see them as three-dimensional worlds within the covers. I glue together their pages so that they are as much “sculpture” as books. I cut out holes through the pages, so that the viewer can look through and enter the work, often using windows and doors to extend that effect, reminding one of doll houses and train sets -- the miniature worlds one experienced as a child, while the material in these works is very much “adult.”

Long Beach multi-media photomontage artist, Terry Braunstein, received her B.F.A. from the University of Michigan and her M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute of Art. She has exhibited in museums and galleries, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Gallery Miyazaki in Japan, L.A. County Museum of Art, Sala Arcs gallery in Barcelona, Spain, as well as one-person exhibitions at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, Long Beach Museum of Art, Fendrick Gallery and Washington Project for the Arts in Washington D.C.; Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery and Franklin Furnace in New York.

Her work is in numerous collections, including the Getty Center, the National Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, L.A. County Museum of Art, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in N.Y. Her photomontage book, Windows, was published in 1982.

Terry Braunstein’s commissions include photo-installations for L.A. County Museum of Art’s Windows on Wilshire series; a memorial to the Navy presence in Long Beach; porcelain panels for L.B. City Hall; a 50th Anniversary sculpture for the City of Cerritos; and the Sun Valley Health Center through the L.A. County Arts Commission.

{ www.terrybraunstein.com }

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What Beetle is This?, 1988

Laser printed editioned artist’s book, 7 3/4” x 5 1/2” x 1/2”

Not Pictured:

Venus & Adonis, 1997

Mixed-media altered artist’s book, 5 1/2” x 4” x 1/2”

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TERRY BRAUNSTEIN (CONTINUED)

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1a & 1b

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Shot on the Spot, 1999

Mixed-media altered artist’s book 11” x 8 1/2” x 2 1/2”

2a

2a & 2b

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Old, 1991

Mixed-media altered artist’s book 10” x 7” x 2”

Not Pictured

Meta+Morphe, 2003

Mixed-media altered artist’s book 11’ x 8 1/2” x 2 1/2”

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Tini Miura Colors and music are essential for me. Colors and music make me feel. When I feel I know that I am alive.

I always loved to read and my life is not long enough to satisfy my thirst for knowledge. This is one reason why I chose my profession, designer-binder.

My work makes bibliophiles, who are passionate about their books, truly happy. They thank me, I am happy. Who gives thanks to the men in garbage trucks whose work keeps us healthy? I know I am fortunate to do what I love and at the same time am able to pass on my knowledge to the next generation. In my work I use my hands to create a book from loose leaves. My brain is involved when reading the book trying to understand the meaning, message or lesson, and my heart or soul to translate the meaning into visuals through colors and forms.

I could not find a better work, a job that incorporates body, mind, and soul, and I am grateful to all and everything that made it possible.

About the design of my work in this exhibition: In this edition of Venus and Adonis, it is the typography that makes it an outstandingly beautiful book. Therefore, the body of Venus waits to be born out of the “V” on the front cover, while Adonis has already stepped out of the “A” on the back cover. Warm colors are used for the female form; cool ones for the male.

Kerstin Tini Miura studied bookbinding techniques and design in Germany, Switzerland and France. Since 1968, Tini has lectured and taught on four continents and is featured in several TV documentaries as well as in numerous magazines and newspaper articles. Her work has been exhibited in more than sixty international venues. Five books about Tini’s work have been published in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, France, England, Italy, Spain, Canada, USA, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, China, and Brunei. In the mid 1990s, Tini decided to leave the competitive art field to the next generation but made an exception to be included in the Mostra competition in Italy.

{ tinimiurabookbinding.com }

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Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare, Arion Press, San Francisco, 1975 Bound 1990, Tokyo

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PIA PIZZO Since the seventies my research has led me to an exploration of the book as an Art form. The tactile values of materials are found in paper that is torn and worked upon with patient care so as to feel its textures, its porosity, the very tissue of its surface.

The non-readable books extend the perspective of mind and memory, setting out to recount a happening, a state of affairs or a journey through the pages.

The page is the setting for any hypothetical adventure you may embark upon, the virgin void of mental space, opening up the perspective within.

The pages unfold with kinetic rhythm, becoming the arena within which to unwind your mind rather than the stage for grasping codified messages. The tearing or punching of the paper is never the outcome of aggression but stems from studied feeling and touching, from physical contact with both the material and reality, as a step towards thinking once again in tactile terms. Symbols and diagrams explain the relationships that exist within Human Nature and the universe.

The pages without words or images are focused on the light and shadows created in the empty spaces; they are composed with natural light, which causes the pieces to vibrate as the light changes through the day. My work demands the music of silence.

Pia Pizzo is internationally known for her drawings, oil paintings, artist’s books, and installations. Born in Italy, Pizzo lives and works in Long Beach, California, where, since 1970, she has explored the book as an art form. From 1960 to 2012, Pizzo’s work has been seen in 39 solo exhibitions in Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Germany, England, and the United States. Also, between 1957 and 2012, she contributed to 91 group exhibitions in Italy, Taiwan, Spain, France, Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Macedonia, England, Germany, Brazil, and the United States of America. Pizzo’s artworks are included in museums, libraries, archives, and private collections in USA, Europe, Brazil and Taiwan

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Such is Life, 1987

Reeves paper, Japanese and Indian rice paper, inks of China, gold leaves, bound by the artist, leather cover, 5”x 35” open, 5” x 3” x 11/2” closed

Not Pictured

Such is life, 1987

One-of-a-kind-sculptural book, black Papier d’Arches, Japanese rice paper, ink of China, gold leaves, black linen canvas for the cover, bound by a professional binder, 23” x 15” closed, 23” x 45” open

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The Seed, 1998

One-of-a-kind-sculptural book, Reeves paper, Japanese and Indian rice paper, canvas, inks of China, gold leaves, bound by the artist, 22 1/2” x 15”closed, 22 1/2” x 30” open

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{ openmuseum.org/member/profile/1109 }

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Resurraection, 2012

Reeves paper, Japanese and Indian rice paper, inks of China, gold leaves, bound by the artist, leather cover, 23” x 24” open, 5” x 3” x 2” closed

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The Book of Time and the Great Transition, 1994

O ld wood box, wood and stone found in the beach, Nepalese rice paper, 8” x 12” x 4”

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Sue Ann Robinson Since childhood, I have found inspiration, comfort, and wisdom in family, friends, travels, and books. These continue to be my sources in my art studio work. I have been making artist’s books since 1980 when I first discovered the genre at the Writer’s Center, Glen Echo Park, Maryland. I continued my pursuit of artist’s books when I moved to California and worked at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, and then next, as artist-in-residence at the Long Beach Public Library system with a three-year grant from the California Arts Council. (There are few people who are as passionate about public service and knowledge than librarians!) I work in series and the exigencies of life are often the source of my studio work, like working with my 97-years-young mother with memory loss. Books, Naturally is the result of our collaboration.

Sue Ann Robinson began her art career in New York City, on completing her M.F.A. degree from Columbia University. She lived and worked as a museum professional and exhibiting sculptor in Washington, D.C. from 1970 to 1981. After moving to California, she continued her sculpture in the form of artist’s books with many residencies, commissions, exhibitions, and awards. She is the recipient of several grants from the Public Corporation for the Art / Arts Council for Long Beach, the City of Los Angeles, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts among many others. Her artist’s books are included in many public and private collections including the Getty Research Institute, the National Gallery of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the University of Seattle, among others. Robinson maintains a studio in Long Beach, teaches book arts workshops throughout the nation, and works at the Long Beach Museum of Art, where she started as the Artist-in-Residence in 1988. In 2012, Robinson led Book Arts for All workshops for parents, teachers, artists, and caregivers with a grant from the Marcella Brenner Trust.

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Words, Out, 2011 (Chapters 3, 4, 7, 9)

Unique bookwork mixed media text, plastic, powdered pigments in clear acrylic cans; dimensions: each can 7 H x 6-1/2 in Diameter, installation dimensions variable Chapter 3: Words, Out—Alphabet Chapter 4: Words, Out—Atlas Chapter 7: Words, Out—Dictionary Chapter 9: “The Brachistochrone Problems & Kinematics of 2-particle collisons” NOTE: Additional Chapters (cans) in the series can be seen in Transformative Visions 2 at the Main Public Library, 102 Pacific Avenue, Long Beach

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{ http://www.scwca.org/profile/sue-ann-robinson } { www.artslb.org/registry }

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Books, Naturally, 2008

Mixed media, unique books, nests, altered books 9” H x 9” D x 23” W

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Angels & Alligators, 1993

Unique mixed media book 9-1/4” H x 6” W closed; x 5”D x 7” W opened

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Sue Ann Robinson (Contined) 4

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Divine Comedy, 1998

Unique mixed media artist’s book 6”H x variable dimensions open

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Quercus Psalter, 1994

Limited edition lithography with pochoir, closed dimensions: 6 “ H x 4” W x 1/2 “ D

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There is no place just like this place anywhere near this place, 2012 Unique mixed media flag book, 8-1/2” H x 5-3/4” D x 12-1/2+“ open

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“...a juxtaposition of two elements contradicting each other...�

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A SENSE OF IRONY T S U ,URQ\ D MX[WDSRVLWLRQ RI WZR HOHPHQWV FRQWUDGLFWLQJ HDFK RWKHU UHVXOWLQJ LQ D QHZ RU GL̆HUHQW SHUFHSWLRQ RI HDFK HOHPHQW The  eye  of  the  photographer  sees  all  details  of  a  scene,  and  when  there  are  contrasting  elements  inherent  in  the  scene,  it  can  be  a  gift,  resulting  in  an  image  that  draws  the  viewer  in  closer,  and  hopefully  elicits  an  ‘aha’  moment  or  at  least  a  smirk.

The  result  of  this  concept  is  a  show  of  four  photographers’  visions  of  irony.  Hopefully  there  will  be  some  ‘ahas’  and  smirks  as  you  view  these  images.

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{ www.kayerickson.com }

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ELLEN BUTLER I was hooked on photography when a friend loaned me his SLR in the early ‘70s. Frustrated that I could not draw either easily or well, but feeling compelled to communicate visually, I took up photography with a zeal that has continued to this day.

While I still love the process of shooting black and white film and making darkroom prints, I am shooting with a DSLR and using Photoshop daily. And frequently now, I am making mixed media pieces using a combination of old school and 21st century processes. The goal always: communicating with people.

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Untitled #1

Gelatin silver print from black/white film, 16” x 20”

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Untitled #2

Ultrachrome inkjet print from digital capture, 20” x 22”

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Untitled #3

Ultrachrome inkjet print from digital capture, 17” x 21”

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Kay ERICKSON A sense of irony in a work, makes the viewer take a second look, and hopefully produces an ‘aha’ moment. In the midst of the digital photographic revolution where everyone has a camera, it’s up to the photographer to make images that contain many layers of perception, if only to stand out from the mass of photographs online, on cell phones, and on social media.

Kay Erickson has been taking photographs all her life. She received a B.F.A. in photography, Summa cum Laude, from the University of Minnesota, and a M.S. from Mankato State University.

Erickson travels around the world, capturing images of people and places so that she can expose more people to the fact that we all have more similarities than differences, with the hope that it will eliminate some of the stereotypes, and contribute to a more peaceful world.

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Beach Umbrellas, 2012

Digital print on archival art paper, 13� x 19�

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Lewis Francis I grew up in the densely populated 2.5 sq. miles that make up the Rock of Gibraltar, therefore the sense of space and the scale of the landscapes and cities in the US always filled me with a sense of wonder and excitement.

Up until my late teenage years my only experience with the vast natural lands that many take for granted was via a very small black and white TV screen.

The very real need to experience this natural world in person led me to travel extensively and to attempt to capture the many, and mixed, feelings it evoked in me through my photography.

However, more recently those same wild, open spaces feel smaller and ever more encroached upon. Nature itself feels surrounded, controlled and managed to me.

The sadness and frustration of this realization now drives a significant part of my photography.

Lewis Francis is an educator and landscape/urban photographer working in black and white.

Francis moved to the US in 1995 from Gibraltar where he was born and has lived in Long Beach for the last four years.

As with many others, Francis’s interest in Photography began during his early teenage years when the ability to capture and freeze a moment in time with a photograph was simply a thrill. The feeling of being able to control these moments of one’s own life in some small way was also a great source of comfort during difficult times.

In later years, photography was forced to take a back seat to other priorities but he was able to return to it in 2006 and has been busy since then photographing the deserts, mountains and cities of California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona.

The resulting work has been shown at galleries in several cities including New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Portland. Recently, Francis was honored to have been selected as a Finalist in Critical Mass, 2012.

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Constrained

Print, 10” x 15”

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Control Amargo Print, 11” x 17”

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Chris Grinnell I view my environment as a canvas of cultural expression to be mined for glimpses of truths about modern life and social interaction. To me, the irony in this work comes from the unexpected and incongruous juxtaposition of found objects or situations and the possible meanings that may be implied.

Through an exploration and observation of my surroundings, these photographs express chance encounters of space, light, and cultural remnants that suggest particular aspects of our contemporary existence. I am drawn to manifestations of social commentary and ways in which people communicate or express themselves in the landscape.

As I make my work while walking in urban areas, a variety of handheld cameras are employed to serve my photographic interests. These photographs were made with my iPhone, as I’m amazed at the image quality that can be wrung out of these ubiquitous communication devices.

Since receiving his M.F.A. in photography from the University of New Mexico, Chris Grinnell’s work has been included in over twenty group exhibitions across the United States, as well as solo shows at galleries in southern California, Albuquerque, NM, and Hampton, VA.

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27” x 23”

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Ron Javorsky As Proust wrote: “Photography achieves singular images even out of something otherwise well-known, images different from those we are used to seeing, singular and authentic.”

Light is my way of showing the strange within the familiar—unusual illumination, bizarre distortion. As one who grew up in a gray industrial city, I’m drawn to colors that project warmth, that create contrast, that show us how every-day images can have a luminescent and singular beauty.

I have been a fine-arts photographer in Long Beach since 1995, shooting the architectural sights of Long Beach and Los Angeles for ten years now.

I am attracted by unusual buildings; I look for strange details that jump out at me. I’m especially taken by reflections on the sides of glass buildings.

I do this to find the strange and different in objects we see every day. I want to point out difference, to show that Long Beach is not such an ordinary place. I’m saying: “Look, this is it! This is the place we live in as I see it. Take another look. The out-of-the-ordinary is all around you.” I plan to continue in this fashion as long as I can.

Ron Javorsky was born and raised in Cleveland, a gray industrial city whose average of 250 cloudy days per year really teaches you to appreciate light.

As a photographer in southern California, he is therefore like a kid in a candy store.

He learned photography professionally in a commercial portrait and product studio in Cleveland. After one year on the job, he moved to San Francisco where he took time out from photography to learn jazz bass. The Safe House show in Long Beach’s Lafayette Building (1998) reintroduced him to fine-art photography.

Working in both color and black and white, Javorsky’s specialties are night photography, floral photos, architectural shoots and catching his fellow jazz musicians in the act of doing what they do best.

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1 Venice Night Parking, 2004 Composite print

2 Nights Lights From My Kitchen Window, 1998 20” x 24”

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JOHN MONTICH Presenting multiple images compressed to a single form has always provided me with the most thought provoking results. Whether through a multi-panel presentation or a multi-image sandwich, the tension, sarcasm or satire is maximized. Utilizing non-traditional film techniques and high quality darkroom prints has always brought the richest results.

John Montich is a nationally recognized fine art photographer. His recognizable style has been defined by working with alternative photographic processes, traditional film, and high contrast darkroom prints to describe everyday ephemera.

His work is included in many private and corporate collections across the country. Exhibitions at the Armand Hammer Museum, Laguna Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Long Beach Museum of Art have included his photography. A solo exhibition at the University of La Verne’s Irene Carlson Gallery of Photography surveyed his unique transfer images. Cypress College, El Camino College, Emeritus College, Long Beach City College and Porterville College have featured his work.

The Best of Photography Annual has published his award winning images in several editions. Art galleries and alternative venues have exhibited his work for over twenty years.

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Night & Day in NJ

Diptych, chromagenic prints 2 – 8” x 10“, framed 17” x 28”

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2 Untitled Cibachrome, 11” x 14”, framed 15.5” x 20.5”

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{ www.jeffrau.com } { www.sixpackprojects.com }

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Jocelyn Foye Raised by a taxonomist, Jocelyn Foye’s work stems from an understanding of this scientific practice of observing and collecting. Currently, she is trying to capture and illustrate how the reoccurrence of every day processes derived from labor produces a fundamental visual pattern.

Foye has produced private performances in her studio as well as public events often heavy with spectacle and excitement. Following the event, the resulting marks left in material are cast and recorded, sometimes wholly, sometimes edited, to create sculptural reliefs which are both abstract and grounded in the origins of their creation. The events are ephemeral and often reveal the disconnect between the expected arena of their performance and the contemplative gallery space. The resulting objects, often referred to as a sculptural relief paintings, carry the aura of the performance, but function as complete artworks to contemplate unto themselves.

Jocelyn Foye (born in 1977 in Hartford, Connecticut), is a contemporary sculptor incorporating performance, photography, printmaking and painting. She lives and works in Long Beach, CA and maintains a faculty position at El Camino College as well as Jocelyn Foye Designs, a web and graphic design consultancy agency. She earned her M.F.A. from CSU, Long Beach, California and BA from Trinity College in Hartford, CT. Her performances, sculptural relief paintings and photographs have exhibited at regional museums, commercial galleries as well as College and University galleries around the United States and Europe.

Foye is a recipient of the 2011 Fellowship for Emerging Visual Artists from the California Community Foundation, in part due to her work with many not-forprofit organizations, dance troops and athletic clubs around the United States. In 2006 Foye was one of twenty featured artist in the LA Weekly’s Annual Biennial, an exhibition highlighting successful graduates of all Southern California Colleges and Universities.

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{ jocelynart.com }

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1 Pole Dance, 2007 Silicone rubber, 34” x 31”

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2 Powwow, 2007 Urethane rubber, 34” x 31”

3 Sumo (detail), 2011 3’ diameter, 3” deep, polyurethane resin, paint

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VIRGINIA KATZ During certain seasons of the year in Southern California, windstorms from the desert blow through to the ocean causing an “off-shore flow.” These wind gusts, known as “The Santa Ana Winds”, can reach 60 miles per hour. Other times, wind from the Pacific Ocean pushes onto the shore for an “on-shore flow.” Capturing this natural action and its elusive form on paper resulted in the Wind Diagrammatic series of drawings.

To record this phenomenon on paper, I applied strings to tree branches and, at the end of the strings, I affixed carefully selected pens to paper. The paper is weighted on the ground and when the wind blew, the pens moved in an action that recorded the movement of the air. Many drawings were completed during 16-18 hour consecutive periods. Entering the “slowness” of time is a vital component in all of my work. It allows me to cooperate with the subtle nuances of natural forces that occur while watching, waiting and taking cues from the process.

My work is a series of investigations into physical space that includes tangible and intangible phenomena. Process and environmental patterns and forms are natural languages that are indicators of our earthly past and future. Other elements of focus have been the ocean tides, the earth’s rotation, the circulation of people and topographical patterning.

Virginia Katz received her M.F.A. from California State University, Long Beach in 2004. Since that time she has exhibited nationally and internationally, including four solo shows in the Los Angeles area with Ruth Bochofner Gallery, Santa Monica; Jancar Gallery, Los Angeles; d.e.n. contemporary, Culver City; and Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine. Her work has been reviewed in The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, LA Weekly, and ArtScene as well as other publications.

She is currently represented by Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica.

{ virginiakatz.com }

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10-4-08 Off-Shore Flow, 10 Hours, Gold and Copper on Black Paper, 2008

Gold and copper archival ink on Arches Paper, 44.5” x 30”

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10-5-08 Off-Shore Flow, 8 Hours, Silver on Black Paper, 2008

Silver archival Ink on Arches Paper, 44.5” x 30”

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JEFF RAU I am fascinated by the ever-shifting cloud that cloaks the city of Los Angeles in an obfuscating haze: one day nearly opaque and the next offering visibility for miles; one day a blue misty fog and the next a distinctly gray-brown cloud of smog and grit. For two years I daily documented the color of this low cloud on the horizon (compared against the more vivid color of the overhead sky). Home Depot paint samples have supplied a consistent external reference to describe the specific color experience while the highly romanticized sample names call attention to our idealized emotional associations with color and at times add their own humorous or ironic commentary. The daily rituals of color matching, photographing, and weather/air-quality data collection highlight the broad range of possible conditions and explore some of the factors that contribute to these varied results.

Jeff Rau graduated from Valparaiso University, Indiana, in 2000 with a B.S. in Civil/Structural Engineering; he worked for three years as an aspiring structural engineer for a Los Angeles area firm before leaving this career path to pursue serious study and professional opportunities in the arts. In 2010, he earned both an M.F.A in Photography and a graduate certificate in Museum Studies from California State University, Fullerton.

Rau presently lives and works in Long Beach, California, he is an adjunct professor of art at Biola University in La Mirada, and is actively exhibiting work in galleries throughout California and the southwest region. This includes solo and/or group exhibitions at California State University, Fullerton; Cypress College; BC Space, Laguna Beach; Orange County Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Ana; The Creative Center for Photography, Hollywood; Sylvia White Gallery, Ventura; and Modified Arts, Phoenix.

In addition to producing artwork, Rau has maintained an independent curatorial practice focused on organizing exhibitions that bring together both emerging and mid-career artists to impel dialog on a variety of contemporary issues. He is one sixth of the curatorial collective Sixpack Projects, and has curated exhibitions at California State University, Fullerton; California State University, Long Beach; Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana; and Phantom Galleries, Long Beach.

{ jeffrau.com }

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LA Haze – September 2011, 2011

Pencil on paper with paint sample cards, 30 daily records, 58” x 82”

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Jennifer Reifsneider Identity arises in language, memory and experience, and dissolves in the gaps between. My artwork combines forms and systems of identification, such as measurement, collection and embodiment, with labor-intensive processes and associative meanings. I am looking for the sense and nonsense binding phenomena, mind and body.

These works are vacancies and accretions appearing where form, thought and action rupture or collide. I use spaces and ciphers in an attempt to hold the contradiction of emptiness that is dependent on substance.

I often employ materials and techniques from fiber traditions, which are ancient manipulations of tension designed to control the threat of chaos. These subtle frictions in my work allow for moments of transition and balance between states that are fragile and stubborn, confident and ambiguous or exact and hidden.

Jennifer Reifsneider has participated in over 40 solo and group exhibitions across the United States, shown works at the Torrance Art Museum and Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles; Cartin Gallery, West Hartford, Connecticut; and Basilico Fine Arts, New York. She has received several commissions, grants and awards, including a percent-for-art public project in Missoula, Montana in 2003. Her work is in private and public collections, including the Yellowstone Art Museum and The Museum of Modern Art / Franklin Furnace Artist Book collections. In 2010 she was the first artist-in-residence at Coastline Community College in Huntington Beach, California.

Born in 1973 in Plainfield, New Jersey, Reifsneider was raised on a working farm in rural southeastern Pennsylvania. She earned her B.F.A. in photography from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1995. In 2008 she relocated from Montana to Long Beach to pursue graduate studies at California State University, Long Beach. She received her M.F.A. in 2011, and continues to live and work in the Los Angeles area.

{ reifsneider.com }

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Not pictured

Meridian Tack, 2010

Slip Grid, 2011

Continuous circumference of a sphere describing the furthest Thread, twine, 93 x 35.5” extension of my body, hand-knit organic cotton I-cord, 28’ x 5-1/8”

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Broken Meridian (Brink) (detail), 2012 Knit thread, rust, dimensions vary

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2 One 274-foot perimeter and 1/256th of one 2,800 square-foot Huntington Beach, CA, “encyclopedia lot” [a plot of land given away in the 1920s with the purchase of a set of encyclopedias]

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Scale Study, 2010

Dictionary pages, twine, thread, invisible tape, 72” x 43.5” x 12”

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Vergence, 2010

Masking tape, the circumference of my head, 9.5” x 9” x 2.5”

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Rebecca Sittler For this project, every known, independently owned donut shop in Long Beach, CA with “donut” in the title was visited. A plain glazed donut was purchased with a specialty donut and both were documented by placing the objects and receipts for the objects on a flatbed scanner in a darkened room. The size of the sample set reflects the number of donut shops with the word “Donut” in the title that could be found by the end of 2008. Shops that advertised their wares with a large artificial donut were also included (because I couldn’t resist). Details in the sample set present multiple threads, mysteries, and some dead ends within seemingly “straightforward”, evidentiary imagery.

Rebecca Sittler is currently an Associate Professor of Art at California State University, Long Beach. She lives in Long Beach with her husband and daughter, somewhere in-between Donut World and Simone’s Donuts.

Sittler received her M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art in 2003. She has recently exhibited her photographs at Sam Lee Gallery in Los Angeles, Daniel Cooney Gallery in New York, in the main exhibition at the Ulsan International Photography Festival in South Korea, in solo shows at major universities, and as part of several group exhibitions with significant jurors and curators.

{ rebeccasittler.com }

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Donuts of Long Beach, 2008 56 light jet prints (7” x 5” each)

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TraCI A. DURFEE I decided at a very early age that God and Jesus just weren’t for me (and by early, I do mean seven). Which is not to say that I don’t believe that there isn’t SOMETHING out there that is infinitely larger than “us,” wielding a rather jaw dropping life force with higher purpose to our existence. I believe this because I have indeed experienced miraculous, inexplicable things.

However, science and nature comfort me and give some definitive answers to a few of life’s wonders. My exploration for AFTERLIFE will be all about cells & the chemical reactions that occur in living organisms once they cease to be alive. I find enlargements of microscopic things to be unbelievably beautiful, seemingly new universes unto themselves. If the only thing that happens to us after we die is to become decomposed matter that reenters the planet in a new way, I am (mostly) at peace with that. If I’m wrong about this, bonus! - let the angels carry me away.

Currently, Traci A. Durfee is a mixed media and printmaking artist, as well as co-owner of Oh Jeepers! Graphics.

Raised with Mid-Western sensibilities in a Mormon household, I fled all of that at 19, heading due East until I arrived in Boston. I spent the next 18 years becoming cultured, open minded, & educated in the arts & graphic design. I then hit a wall with a splat & had a small window of opportunity to relocate to Long Beach seven years ago. I moved here sight unseen with nothing to lose, and fell in love with this town within the first 24 hours of arriving. It was the best decision I ever made. It’s been a floodgate of possibilities in an unrelenting swirl of inspiration and I somehow had the great fortune of discovering my love for printmaking. All that, and the weather isn’t bad either.

{ ohjeepers.com }

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Cell #3, 2011

Collograph with chine-collé on black Rives BFK Paper, 9”x12”

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Kurt Hantzsch Afterlife: where (chalky) desolate weeds are worn down, and albatross moon populates the landscape with beauty: thus. El Diablo Gato: Day of the Dead.

A brief bio of a middle aged orphan. . .(Disjointed? Perhaps) but a bio nonetheless. . .

My familial connection with Long Beach is well-rooted on the corner of 10th and Daisy (551 West 10th).

Education: B.A. Long Beach State. . .M.F.A. Eastern Washington University.

About my art: If it makes someone happy. . . that is compensation (well) enough.

Influence: Henry Miller. . . “Paint as you like and die happy.�

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El Diablo Gato: Day of the Dead, 2010 Watercolor and mixed media, 16” X 20”

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David Hocking I enjoy the juxtaposition of potential meanings present in this piece. Crows have long been mythological symbols of both death and the otherworld ... yet are also a symbol for flight, and human longing for their ability to travel the skies. The bird depicted is grounded, yet not on a discernible surface.

The stamps in the background all depict flying machines, and all have flown, as have the feathers and bird bones. My hope is that the piece would stimulate reflection on our tremendous capabilities as humans to learn and develop, but also on our own limitations, both physically and spiritually.

David Hocking is an artist and Engineer living in Signal Hill with his family. Along with his wife Kimberly, he founded and supports Greenly Art Space. David received a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Biola University, and has shown performance and installation pieces in several venues, including Gallery 57 in Fullerton, the Da Gallery in Pomona, Reconstructive Gallery in Santa Ana, and the Biola University Art Gallery. He also holds a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from CSULB. In recent years, David has focused on smaller paintings and assemblages, most recently with a series titled Underpinnings, exhibited at Greenly Art Space. In addition to his artistic endeavors, David focuses his energy on his family, and directing the Engineering and Technology functions for an aerospace hardware manufacturer.

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The Crow, 2003

Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 16” x 20”

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KIMBERLY Hocking Thoughts about the afterlife have influenced my art process as I have contemplated the life and death of my brother John. I created the photos for this exhibit during a trip to a location where I had photographed him as a child. This piece, “being” (moonlight series 1) was captured during a midnight walk in the full moon. The beauty of the moment inspired me. The process of this piece was both playful and joyful with the image suggesting the presence of spirit. Photographs for this exhibit will explore the ways light and beauty are windows into heaven.

Kimberly Hocking is an artist with an M.A. from Loyola Marymount University. She lives and works in Signal Hill, CA. Her art-making practice is centered in the process of contemplation and includes multiple art forms with a focus in both photography and sculpture. She has created and curated numerous community projects that encourage contemplation through art. In 2007, photos taken with disposable cameras by youth in Seal Beach and in Sierra Leone were paired to create a show titled Broken-Beautiful. Inspired by this experience, she and her husband David founded Greenly Art Space, a non-profit art gallery, with the purpose of encouraging contemplation, creativity, and community through art. In her most recent show Artifacts of Hope, she integrated found objects with natural materials (vines, seeds, etc.) to create sculptural work. She spends much of her time being inspired by her two children who help her to see the world through the eyes of wonder.

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Being (Moonlight series 1)

Unaltered digital photograph, variable size

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Jamie Kivisto My latest work has been inspired by weathered architectural structures. I find something intriguing in the layers of colors peeking through the wall of a building that has not yet had to succumb to the mundane look of suburbia. An object as simple as a piece of wood from an old shed that has been abandoned has an organic texture and quality hard to find anywhere else. These are not only interesting in their aesthetic, but they have a life cycle and create a story. I aim to express the parallels between these objects and life. For Afterlife, I will explore these parallels further, while also examining different theories of life after death. whether that means forming into a new being, proceeding to a place such as heaven or hell, or moving to another dimension. I intend to portray the life cycle as a never ending, constantly changing entity.

Jamie Kivisto is an emerging artist who has called Long Beach home since 2005. After studying life drawing and painting at the University of Cincinnati from 2002-2005, she decided that California would be the best place to fuel her artistic career and inspiration. Kivisto’s work consists mainly of acrylic and mixed media paintings that include collage, tissue paper, gel mediums, and other materials that create depth and texture. She has shown in group and solo exhibitions, designed awards, taught drawing classes, and has had her work placed in film and television.

{ jamiekivisto.com }

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Guadalupe

Acrylic on canvas

Not pictured

Being (Moonlight series 1) Acrylic on canvas, 28” x 41”

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Michael Mercurio Gaia [JHܼԥ], [Greek gaia earth] is inspired by the Gaia theory that proposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth are integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system, maintaining the conditions for life on the planet. If one were to appreciate the complexity of this beautiful design, then one can feel at peace with the human interpretation of the ‘afterlife’ as a magnificent cycle of life & death, serving a divine purpose that transcends human understanding and constructs. Like the Hindu belief of ‘samsara’ (the cycle of action, reaction, birth, death and rebirth as a continuum), there is an inherent grand purpose of all things, as well as the pantheistic belief of our Earth and Sun as parents; a concept owned by countless indigenous peoples from many cultures. The sculpture represents the dualistic interpretation of the classic phrase from the ‘Book of Common Prayer’, ‘dust to dust’, or rather ‘[from] Earth, [to] earth’, as well as the Earth as a whole living entity.

Michael Mercurio currently lives in Los Angeles, CA. He is known for his blend of sculpture and canvas, utilizing surrealistic dark themes to express the ecumenical states of apathy, oppression and discontent that permeates our lives on an unprecedented global scale.

{ themercuriogallery.com }

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GAIA, 2012

Earth sculpture on canvas, 30” x 40”

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LONG BEACH ARTs mONTH OCTOBER 2o12