LUMARTZINE Contemporary Art Magazine • Santa Barbara • Ventura • Central Coast California
No. 3 • Spring 2021 SPRING 2021
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LUM ART MAGAZINE • No. 3 Editor-in-Chief Debra Herrick, PhD Art Director Arturo Heredia Soto Writers Kit Boise-Cossart James Glisson Bay Hallowell Madeleine Eve Ignon Audrey Lopez Tom Pazderka Alexandra Terry Photographers Megan Cerminaro Elliott Johnson Theo Kracke Lou Mora Ed Mumford
Lum Art Magazine is a biannual art & culture magazine based in the Santa Barbara and Ventura area and covering the Central Coast of California. Created collaboratively by local artists and writers, Lum is committed to great writing and meaningful conversations about art. Arts & Culture Benefactor Norton Herrick Education & Culture Sponsors Michael VanStry Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science & Technology Friends of Lum Art Magazine: Lea Boyd, Casey Caldwell, John C. Connelly, Matt Henriksen, Frederick Janka, Habib Kheradyar, Olga Krigman, Teddy Nava, Anaïs Pellegrini, Marc & Laurie Recordon, Mark Ryan, Manjari Sharma, Wendy Smith, Casey & Trent Summar, Stephanie Williams, Nathan Vonk and Hiroko Yoshimoto. Join the Friends! Visit lumartzine.com/shop.
On the Cover: Nathan Hayden, What Was Magic of Numbers, Hypnotic & Wonders, ink on wall, 12 x 44 ft.
Funding support was provided by the City of Santa Barbara’s Community Arts Grant Program.
Advisory Board Laura Macker Johnston Frederick Janka Anaïs Pellegrini Michael VanStry
Sponsors and Advertising For sponsorships, ad inquiries and rates, contact editor@ lumartzine.com or visit lumartzine.com/shop.
Advertising & Development Anysa Olivera sales@lumartzine.com Printed in California Lum Art Magazine • No. 3 Spring 2021 Published by California Culture Press All content in this publication is the property of the publishers and may not be reused in any way without written permission from Lum Art Magazine. Submissions Editorial inquiries, pitches and submissions can be sent to editor@lumartzine.com. Follow Instagram: @lumartzine Facebook: Lum Art Magazine Website: lumartzine.com
Tax-deductible Donations Lum Art Magazine is fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative. To make a tax-deductible donation, contact editor@lumartzine.com. Arts Writing Internship Program Lum Art Magazine partners with the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum and the Journalism and Writing programs to mentor emerging artists and writers. Give Arts writing and publishing is an essential component of a vibrant arts & culture community. If you are in a position to support the vitality of your arts community, please consider giving. Donations can be made at lumartzine.com/shop or via Venmo: @lum-art-zine. Checks can be mailed to 262 E. McFarlane Dr, Ventura CA 93001. To learn more about the impact of your donation, contact Debra Herrick at editor@lumartzine.com or (805) 708-6269.
In memory of Robert Leonard Herrick (1945–2020)
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CONTENTS 6
The Wrong Way to Make Paper Stephanie Dotson by Debra Herrick
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Strings on Me Ethan Gill by Audrey Lopez
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Pranks of Destiny Maysha Mohamedi by Alexandra Terry
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Studio Visit Nathan Hayden by Debra Herrick
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Bright World Jane Gottlieb by Debra Herrick
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Siempre Mรกs/Always More Minga Opazo by Bay Hallowell
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Cynthia/Shana & Post-Feminist Performance Shana Moulton by Madeleine Eve Ignon
Year One The Free Republic of California by Debra Herrick
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From Debris to Sun Dwelling Tom Fruin by Kit Boise-Cossart
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We Live in a Strange Time The Films of Adam Curtis by James Glisson
The Long Wait for Fall Elizabeth Herring by Tom Pazderka
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Gallery Guide
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CONTRIBUTORS KIT BOISE-COSSART Kit Boise-Cossart received his BFA from the College of Creative Studies at UCSB. He is a builder of green residential projects, and when time allows, an artist. He has been a Lum Art Magazine writer since its inception, documenting the work of fellow artists, galleries, nonprofits and museums. kit-boisecossart.com JAMES GLISSON James Glisson is the curator of contemporary art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. His recent publications and exhibitions include True Grit: American Prints 1900-1950 (Stephanie Schrader, co-curator), Nineteen Nineteen (Jennifer A. Watts, co-curator) and Becoming America: The Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk Art. His projects have been covered by the Guardian, Los Angeles Times, El País (Madrid), Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Review of Books. BAY HALLOWELL Bay Hallowell is an artist, curator and gallery committee chairperson at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara. bayhallowell.com ARTURO HEREDIA SOTO Arturo Heredia Soto is co-founder and art director of Lum. He received his BFA from the National School of Fine Art and studied Image Studies in the MFA program at the Faculty of Art and Design, both in Mexico City. A fine artist, exhibitions designer and art handler, he is the current exhibition designer for Santa Barbara County Office of Arts and Culture and the head preparator and exhibition designer of the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. art@lumartzine.com DEBRA HERRICK Lum co-founder Debra Herrick holds a PhD from UCSB in Latin American Literature and is the editor-in-chief of Lum Art Magazine and Ventura Culture Magazine. She is the former senior managing editor of the Journal of Mexican Studies (UC Press) and has contributed to various publications including Artillery Art Magazine, Réplica21, Carpinteria Magazine and Coastal View News, where she is also the managing editor. editor@lumartzine.com
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MADELEINE EVE IGNON Madeleine Eve Ignon is a visual artist and graphic designer who works in a wide range of painting and collage techniques. She has been awarded residencies at Starry Night Program (Truth or Consequences, New Mexico), Vermont Studio Center and Drop Forge & Tool (Hudson, New York), and has exhibited nationally. She earned her MFA from UCSB, where she was the 2019–20 College of Creative Studies Teaching Fellow. She currently teaches art and design at UCSB and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. madeleineignonart@gmail.com • @madeveart AUDREY LOPEZ Audrey Lopez is a curator and researcher working at the intersections of social practice, public art + installation, and racial justice. She is the public art and engagement fellow for the Santa Barbara County Office of Arts & Culture, and a co-curator on Cosmovisión Indígena, a project funded by the Getty Foundation’s PST: LA x Art x Science initiative. Previously, she was curator of community engagement at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. She holds a PhD in Sociocultural Linguistics from UCSB, where she currently teaches courses on language, race and power. TOM PAZDERKA Tom Pazderka is an artist and writer. He holds an MFA from UCSB where he was a regents fellow and artist in residence. His work and writing have been published in 3:AM Magazine, Philosophical Salon, Dandelion Journal, Dark Mountain and LA Weekly, among others. He blogs at tompazderka.substack.com. @tompazderka tompazderka.com ALEXANDRA TERRY Alexandra Terry is the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, where she has organized exhibitions by Genevieve Gaignard, Barry McGee, Beatriz Olabarietta and Brian Rochefort. Until 2015, Terry was curator at MOP Foundation, a London-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting and supporting Iranian contemporary art.
LUM
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Your contributions make Lum Art Magazine possible Give today at lumartzine.com/shop Checks can be sent to Lum Art Magazine at 262 E McFarlane Dr. Ventura CA 93001 • Venmo @lum-art-zine To learn more about the impact of your donation, contact Debra Herrick at editor@lumartzine.com • (805) 708-6269
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The Wrong Way to Make Paper Stephanie Dotson
by Debra Herrick
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orking with handmade paper again started during the pandemic for Santa Barbara-based artist Stephanie Dotson, who took from the homesteader current of the early stay-at-home days the concept of “we’ll do the things.” Dotson’s paper recipe is messy with a dollop of survival sensibility. When making paper, she recommends mixing some old artwork in with your used grocery bags, ripping them up before immersing the scraps in a big bowl of hot water. “Think about how disorienting it is that some things are not special at all and some things are,” she says, “and then reduce it all down to a giant soup.”
opposite page: Stephanie Dotson, Untitled (Strings on Floor on Thursday), 2019, archival inkjet, open edition
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Early in her career, as an art student living in Athens, Georgia, Dotson created several concert posters for REM, Widespread Panic and Green Day. A materials and process-focused artist, Dotson came up at the Kansas City Art Institute, taking part in Adriane Herman’s Slop Art Supermarket, a collaborative exhibition presented as a Penny Savor-style catalogue of work by emerging and established artists. The Slop Art Supermarket was a foundational experience for Dotson in taking away the “pedestal” from art objects and replacing it with an accessible platform.
It wasn’t long before Dotson became a maverick in her own right, developing a brand of disruption rooted in her longstanding interest in textiles (an interest that goes all the way back to her girlhood days quilting with 4-H and her grandma Clementine in Topeka, Kansas). In 2011, she began drawing braided rugs; and in 2013, she took apart the oval braided rugs themselves, reconfigured them and then hung them on the wall as geometric abstractions.
“Formally, I’m exploring the space these materials and textures occupy—flattening three-dimensional items and making them two-dimensional drawings and vice versa,” says Dotson. “But there’s also this idea of appreciating the ‘non-preciousness’—taking these objects that literally we wipe our feet on, and elevating them on the wall as a work of art.” In recent work, Dotson has continued the red thread of rugs, taking her detailed drawings and embedding them in a multi-layered photographic process. The current series is a set of images which begin with a photograph of a drawing,
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wallpaper or otherwise that Dotson prints out and layers with Model Magic twists and Sculpey blobs, handmade paper, buttons, paint, more drawings, paper scraps and so on, taking photos and printing them at each stop—over and over flattening three dimensional objects until “it feels right in both two and three dimensions.” The final piece is a single sheet of poster paper. Referencing photographer Lukas Blaloch—who followed playwright Bertolt Brecht’s line on the importance of exposing the labor involved in art— Dotson says she’s interested in revealing the process behind her images. Some of this labor is revealed in the textural edges captured, and the scratches, shadows, highlights and debris that enters the image and interrupts the veneer of a flat surface. Rather than photographs or photo-documentation, Dotson thinks of the final prints as installation spaces (or twodimensional installations) and might make several simulacra or copies, rarely working in closed editions.
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“Every work is a space. I’m reacting to the edges and exploring how things layer up from back to front,” she says. “I’m not precious about the work and the materials which is in a lot of ways really practical and freeing. Things can fall apart afterwards and that is fine. I reserve the right for twenty possible outcomes for very similar work.” Stephanie Dotson’s work has been shown at the Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara City College; London Taxi Gallery, Athens, Georgia; Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia; Christina Ray Gallery, New York; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles—of which she was a founding member—among other galleries.
top, from left: Stephanie Dotson, Untitled (Charcoal on forms on papers), photo and mixed media, 2020; Untitled (Buttons, voids), photo and mixed media, 2020; Untitled (Mountain, heavy rotation), photo and mixed media, 2020; The Wall and How’s the Work, photo and mixed media, 2020 right: Stephanie Dotson at work in her Santa Barbara studio, photo by Debra Herrick SPRING 2021
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Strings on Me Ethan Gill Installation view, Strings on Me, Left Field Gallery, photo by Elliott Johnson
by Audrey Lopez
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I’ve got no strings / To hold me down / To make me fret / Or make me frown / I had strings / But now I’m free / There are no strings on me.” So sings the character of Pinocchio—a young wooden puppet prone to lying—in his compulsory stage debut ordered by the predatory theater director and puppet master who later imprisons him. Although Pinocchio’s song and dance succeed in entertaining the crowd, who shower him with laughter and the stage with gold coins, their cheers suppress the dark truths of how Pinocchio came to be on stage and the sinister realities he will face when he leaves it. Pinocchio’s agentive dilemmas seem to have taken up some recent brain space for San Francisco- and Chicago-based artist Ethan Gill, palpable in a series of new oil paintings for Strings on Me, his latest solo show at Left Field Gallery in Los Osos. Referenced across the show’s title and several pieces, Pinocchio is described by Gill as a story employed to “teach us to tell the truth so that we can believe in ourselves when faced with challenges.” Ethan Gill, Liar, oil on canvas
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Urging inquiries beyond such simplistic, singular lessons typically gleaned from Disneyfied versions of folk narratives, Gill’s practice itself builds through multiple iterations: the extended drying time of oils allows him to paint, rework, scrape and wash away various images before attaining one that “holds up” the direction of a particular work. In this manner, thirteen paintings organically came together to form Strings on Me, an exploration of what happens when truth feels “too complicated, inconvenient, confusing, scary or unknowable.” While humans might usually be tempted to buy, talk or pleasure themselves out of facing such uncomfortable expeditions, the events of 2020 vaporized habitual escape routes, and the characters on view in Strings on Me were granted no exceptions. Their relationship to any uneasy truths found along the way, however, and what roles they played in shaping them, remain murky. Anxious eyes peer out from vibrant folds of flesh, while twisted fingers are lit by unseen flames. Bulbous, Olmec-like visages and figures bulge, swell and droop toward canvas boundaries. In one painting, “Liar,” a flabby-faced Pinocchio is surprised by a mutant version of his notorious wooden nose which curves around and pokes his own forehead. Things are not okay. Even the bright, potential joy of Gill’s lush color palette belies a tangled complicity among the contorted articulations of fingers and hands that make up the bulk of the exhibition. Hands, with lines formed out of lifetimes, the strings they’ve pulled, and the stories they tell, have long been a source for artists’ creative expression. Hands go up in protest or behind backs in handcuffs, shake with fear and crumple in anguish. Fingers cross when telling lies and become ensnared in their own manipulations. But fingers can also maneuver into mudras intended to heal and protect, and hands can raise fists, throw shakas or sign on channels beyond the range and reach of dominant ears and eyes. Basking in these ambiguities, the tensions and anxieties underlying Strings on Me are less overt than the suffering, despair, rage and resistance found in the paintings of Ecuadorian Kichwa artist Oswaldo Guayasamín that Gill’s work brings to mind. Yet the roots of institutionalized violence, poverty and anti-Indigeneity that Guayasamín faced in 1920s Quito are profoundly familiar to California artists and audiences of the early 2020s, who simultaneously navigate survival and their roles in a global pandemic, attempted political coups, racialized police brutality, a housing crisis and multiple environmental emergencies, all during the altered temporalities of quarantine. Whether it’s the self-harming Pinocchio, the anonymous gnarled fingers and knobby faces, or the voluptuous, halfspasmed, half-wilted, mascara-melted figure of Miss Piggy, Gill’s characters have been through it this year, and are likely to find more empathy than usual among 2020-weathered viewers. Though the unsettling, unsettled questions of agency it raises are not new, Strings on Me sounds a subtle, effective call for intimate investigations of the strings pulled, tied and plucked by ourselves and others, especially now, with so much time—and so much grief—on our hands.
from top: Ethan Gill, Entangled Hand 3, oil on canvas; Hand 6, oil on canvas; Hand 4, oil on canvas; photos by Elliott Johnson
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Maysha Mohamedi, Sex in Zion National Park in 2021, oil on linen, photo by Ed Mumford
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Pranks of Destiny Maysha Mohamedi by Alexandra Terry
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n early July, I visited artist Maysha Mohamedi at her home studio in Thousand Oaks. Maysha showed me some of the work she had recently completed for exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York City, and Loyal Gallery, Stockholm—both of which had shifted to digital presentations—and we discussed process, material, inspiration, and her then upcoming project hosted by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: the BIPOC Abstractionists Directory Initiative. Alexandra Terry: Hello Maysha! It was so lovely to spend some time with you at your studio! It was my first socially distanced studio visit, and being able to visit with you where you have been working during the shelter-in-place orders was invigorating. What has it been like for you to work out of your home during the pandemic? Maysha Mohamedi: At first, it felt like the four of us— myself, my husband and two boys—were living within some wild nexus of colliding and harmonious energies. I’d be working in the studio, tripping over small bicycles and my husband’s weights, with all sorts of incompatible sounds blaring in the background: lawnmowers, the Frozen
II soundtrack, water gun shrieks and dropped cups. After a while, I renovated my home studio to better accommodate my work needs; my dad helped me tear out an old storage structure and finish a big white wall on one end of the space. For now, our routine is wonderfully simplified: we work, eat, swim, play tennis and go to the beach. AT: It seems that family and lineage have always played an important role in the creation of your work. My mother is Iranian and I worked for an Iranian non-profit arts organization for many years, and I immediately was able to recognize the calligraphic exploration of Farsi in your paintings. Language, poetry, calligraphy and storytelling play a fundamentally pivotal role in Iranian culture and art. MM: My marks are geometric metaphors representing the eternal and ongoing conflicts of the self in the world. My mother’s hands and her written text have remained a magical locus where all the curves and texture of her skin and the ink take on a supercharged emotional quality. I remember failing my cursive homework in third grade for mimicking the way she wrote the letter “V,” which contained an extra curly flair on one segment. I have dissected and recombined Farsi Maysha Mohamedi, Ojai Wildnerness 01, photo by Lou Mora
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letters to create new forms in my painting, but I mainly invent forms directly from my imagination. AT: You use alternative materials and methods for mark making in your work. I am particularly interested in your use of black tar from the beaches in Santa Barbara. What sparked this idea and how did you prepare the tar? MM: I can’t remember my thought process at the moment I picked up that first hardened disk of tar at the beach, but I remember wanting to recreate that particular quality of black which only seems to occur in nature: rich, almost blue, shiny and intensely light absorbent. I took it to my studio and melted it to use as paint on my surface. The viscosity allowed me to use a long stick to apply ribbons of tar onto the painting, as if I was forming hard candy. AT: I see in your work a deep connection to the physical body and movement. You’ve also described a sort of physical ritual where there’s an element of movement and meditation that you incorporate to prepare work and in the act of painting itself. MM: When I first began my inquiry into creating a truthful mark, my first lexicon of marks was based
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opposite page: Maysha Mohamedi, Ojai Wildnerness 07 & 05, photos by Lou Mora this page: Maysha Mohamedi, Pranks of Destiny, oil and acrylic on linen, photo by Megan Cerminaro
entirely in youthful gestures: covering the back window of the family car with stickers, smearing a booger somewhere quickly so nobody sees, tracing an imaginary smiley face with my toe onto the wall next to my bed because I’m restless and can’t sleep. I seek to replicate these sensations onto the surfaces of my paintings by pushing, smashing, dragging and being irregular about my composition, just as I would have as a younger person. AT: You recently led a workshop at the ICA LA entitled ‘Who Are the BIPOC Abstractionists?’ as part of the launch of the BIPOC Abstractionists Directory Initiative. How will the directory function and who will it serve? MM: I found myself disturbed and moved by the mainstream revelations of ongoing racial injustice in this country. One day, I asked myself the simple question: Who are the other BIPOC abstract painters? It was not the easiest question to answer, and therein began my inquiry. I proposed the workshop to the ICA LA as the first step in healing this particular void in the resource landscape and began to work with artists Laura Owens and Lisa Diane Wedgeworth on how we might facilitate such a discussion. The directory has attracted a lot of attention, as people are hungry for this information. It’s really exciting! The ICA was incredibly
supportive and I believe that this directory will impact art curricula at the primary, secondary and college level, in addition to becoming a reference point for art institutions as they curate shows and develop their programming. AT: And finally, what is next for you? What is on the horizon, and how do you foresee this turbulent time in our global history affecting your trajectory as an artist, an activist, a mother, a human? MM: I have a new lithograph that’s going to be released soon at Hamilton Press in Venice, California. I will also have several new paintings in a group show at Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton this December. All of my studio activities are being filmed by the filmmaker Lina Larson, who is making a documentary about me over the course of the next year. The film will be released in 2022. One major effect of this turbulent time is that I’ve stopped thinking so much about the future, since it all feels so unknown. I can only be in the present moment now, which means I’m invested in my work and my children in a richer way. It’s strange to experience such clarity in my daily life alongside an overall atmosphere of despair and confusion.
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Cynthia/Shana and Post-Feminist Performance
by Madeleine Eve Ignon
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anta Barbara-based artist Shana Moulton’s multidimensional video, installation and performance pieces awaken and embody a universal inner-world anxiety specific to the Internet Age. Her work explores the need to understand both the harsh physical world and lofty energetic dimensions through movement, relationships with fantastical objects, and inter-landscape travel. Many of her works, including the multi-part Whispering Pines series—named for the mobile home park near Yosemite where she grew up, and an homage to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks—feature the artist’s alter-ego Cynthia, a curious id-character with hypochondria, overdrawn eyebrows and short, ash-blond hair. The hair is obviously a wig, one that is delightfully similar in color and texture to Moulton’s own hair. That detail, along with minimal makeup and constant, lovingly direct gestures towards the world of her upbringing, make for a fascinatingly thin membrane between Shana and Cynthia. When Moulton performed at University of California, Santa Barbara in the fall of 2018, one of the most impactful moments of the evening was seeing her unceremoniously remove the wig to take questions from the audience. Cynthia as we had seen her had left the room, and Shana allowed us to witness that transition with zero pretense. She took questions barefoot in a long white muumuu. In Moulton’s videos, the qualities of Cynthia’s elastic facial expressions and body language move between the exasperation of a housewife in an infomercial and the melodramatic, wonder-filled face of a New Age Edith Piaf. There is a lot of singing in the work, though it’s much more yearning, aspirational quasi-opera—if Enya made music for digestive yogurt commercials?—than Piaf’s plaintive gargle. Cynthia is both careful and adventurous, moving
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away from her safe home-spaces into uncharted forests and celestial realms. With an unabashed embrace of the embarrassing, Moulton creates worlds for herself, for Cynthia—for us—wherein she can safely explore and expose the things we all think about. Cynthia is an intergalactic traveler, the way we are when we surf the internet or type an absurd question into the Google search bar. She has the capacity to hold all our questions, however embarrassing, deluded or self-involved. She wants wellness, connection and the opportunity to express herself. The word ‘kitsch’ comes up a lot with Moulton’s work, and it’s an apt descriptor for the visuals, but the work is also serious in its questions and tone. It is a wonder to see a female character boldly explore her neuroses both within the environments Moulton creates and as an avatar for our own bodies and minds. In the 2014 Art 21 mini-documentary New York Close Up: Shana Moulton & Nick Hallett Stage An Opera, Moulton is interviewed alongside her collaborator, composer Nick Hallett, who references her frequent comparisons to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Moulton’s work registers less though in the tradition of Keaton or Chaplin, both of whom used their bodies for external as opposed to internal exploration. Moulton—or, more specifically, Cynthia—lives more as a post-feminist Vaudevillian mime acting out (and acting out at) the absurdities and insecurities of female desire, hope and failure in the Digital Age. The exhibition, Shana Moulton: The Invisible Seventh is the Mystic Column, opens at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara in March 2021.
Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 10, 2018, video installation, courtesy of Galerie Gregor Staiger and Galerie Crèvecoeur
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right: Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 8, 2006, video still below: Shana Moulton, The Pink Tower, 2019, installation view, The Zabludowicz Collection All images courtesy of Galerie Gregor Staiger and Galerie Crèvecoeur
Cynthia’s elastic facial expressions and body language move between the exasperation
embarrassing, Moulton creates worlds
of a housewife in an infomercial and the
for herself, for Cynthia – for us –
melodramatic, wonder-filled face of a New Age Edith Piaf.
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With an unabashed embrace of the
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wherein she can safely explore and expose the things we all think about.
above: Shana Moulton, Personal Steam Interface, 2019, installation below: Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 10, 2018, video installation
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From Debris to Sun Dwelling Tom Fruin’s “Camouflage House” by Kit Boise-Cossart
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t feels like an upside-down world these days, but if one looks with a little effort, one can find a right side up experience.
Enter Tom Fruin’s “Camouflage House”: a small, personsized mini-cathedral built of bright, translucent, colored panels that can be found at the end of a hike in Elings Park.
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It’s basically in the middle of nowhere and stands unanchored at the top of a broad, barren, dusty coastal knoll, elevated above the surrounding geography about 2/3rds of a mile up from the shoreline. Last fall, on a bright, hazy afternoon, sun poured through the installation. The land was bone dry, beat up, and looked like the washed-out fur of an old lion. A cool breeze rose up
from the sea’s ruffled, near-shore surface. The ocean was in the air, the Channel Island peaks embraced by fog. There was no one around. This is possibly to experience public art at its best. The surprise of an unexpected sculpture found in a natural setting that takes time and effort to reach. The world is right side up here, if only for a few fleeting moments. Art that makes its way to a public setting like Elings Park starts in the artist’s private world—in this case, traceable to childhood. An early discovery for the artist came from the Fruin family’s West Coast Manhattan Beach neighborhood. In the driveway, a telephone technician was splicing and casting off bits of wire. The young Fruin happily collected them—colorful, coated pieces of copper—twisting them into figures and animal shapes. He was delighted. Fast forward to Manhattan Island, New York, in the later part of the 1990s. We see the artist as a freshly minted college grad (UCSB ’96). No driveway here, only a landing outside his low-rent entry door with steps to the sidewalk below. Each morning as the artist made his way to the street to work at a NYC theater company building sets and hanging lights, he navigated through refuse of the previous night’s gritty activities. An archeological dig of a dark, upside down, public life. Fruin saw the daily castoffs as a record of the community—a people’s history as seen by what’s left behind. While comfortable with drawing, he knew early that he wasn’t a painter. He was a sculptor. Somehow digging through the debris of the city, he made connections to his newfound home and the street’s shadowy denizens. He collected trash and wired it into delicate, wall hung, quilt-like frameworks. This was the beginning of a series that led him decades later to small glass architectural structures.
computer files, then assembled by spot welding in the artist’s studio. Hence the unusually clean-cut metal and organic arrangement of colored and transparent shapes held in raised black outlines like a stain glass window. Surprisingly, the metal cut-outs have a loose, hand drawn quality. It’s a house only in name, the shape similar to a first grader’s drawing. It’s not a home or a dwelling. Simple yet complicated. One doesn’t reside there. Not for long, anyway. Is it functional? That depends on what it does. Is it camouflaged? Only if in a kaleidoscope. Does it leak in the rain? Probably. Warm in winter and cool in summer. No. Full of colored light inside with sun by day and moonlight by night. Yes. And a happy bonus—its illuminated after hours by small solar flood lights. In a way, no one really owns this house. It belongs to everyone and no one. It puts color into the world and helps overcome darkness. The children that visit like it—they call it the “Lighthouse”—and it stands right side up. Camouflage House is a temporary public sculpture installation sponsored by the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission in partnership with the County Community Services Department’s Office of Arts and Culture and Parks divisions. Following its Santa Barbara oceanfront debut at Arroyo Burro Beach County Park, the work traveled to Elings Park and later to North County.
Tom Fruin, Camouflage House opposite page: photo by Theo Kracke this page: photo by Arturo Heredia Soto
The walls and roof of “Camouflage House” have an effortless vertical and horizontal symmetry within a ridged framework. They’re constructed of salvaged plexiglass pieces, cut and sandwiched together between flat black metal sheets. These sheets are laser cut from sketches, turned into
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We Live in a Strange Time The Films of Adam Curtis by James Glisson
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ince the 1990s, Adam Curtis’ documentaries have explored the persistent anxiety of contemporary life. His four-part series, Century of the Self, considered how the ideas of Sigmund Freud, who saw humans as beset with dangerous animalistic impulses, transformed not just the clinical practice of psychiatry, but advertising, consumer culture and politics. His more recent film, HyperNormalisation, continues to probe the 21st century psyche but takes a broader perspective. It looks at what he considers the fractious geopolitical situation and how that puts individuals in a permanent state of anxiety. What are they—or more accurately, we—worried about? There is climate change, terrorism, faltering economies, diminishing privacy and ghoulish algorithms shaping our lives bethind the scenes. All of these are excellent reasons to worry. The concept of hyper-normalization is more than that. It is a perceived chasm between what people experience and feel every day and the messages they receive from mass media and governments. Early in the film, Curtis pinpoints the waning years of the Soviet Union under the premiership of Leonid Brezhnev as an early moment of hyper-normalization. With shortages of consumer goods and the failure of centralized planning, it was plain to see that the dream of a
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socialist paradise was over, but the Communist Party insisted otherwise. The science fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky used near future science fiction to chronicle this crumbling society. These brothers are most famous for the short novel, Another Roadside Picnic (1972), which director Andrei Tarkovsky reworked into The Stalker (1979). To depict these parallel worlds—one media-centric, the other lived— Curtis weaves together a breathtaking variety of stories: Donald Trump’s real estate investments, the Occupy Movement, New York City’s financial crisis in the 1970s, Syrian politics, terrorism, and the brief rehabilitation of Colonel Gaddafi by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the years before the Libyan Revolution. There are, he concludes, no big visions for human progress or a better world. There are only those in power managing ineptly from crisis to crisis and no meaningful opposition. What makes the film mesmerizing despite its dreary message is Curtis’ knack for locating extraordinary archival footage. In HyperNormalisation, we are treated to Soviet youngsters in something like a reform school talking about punk rock and video documentation of New York City’s failed 1975 auction for municipal bonds to finance its debt. (When bankers did not buy the debt, city officials appealed to
Washington, but Gerald Ford refused to step in, leading to the infamous New York Daily News headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”) Curtis has also unearthed a 1990s clip of an elementary school girl extolling Prozac for improving her self-worth. She play-acts the role of what she imagines is an anxiety free person. In another clip, a bemused flaneur—Patti Smith—wanders around the decaying infrastructure of Manhattan in the 1970s making disjointed observations about city life. Though filmed forty years ago, her performance feels like a narcissistic monolog delivered to a smart phone for social media. Juxtaposing archival footage in the film’s montages, Curtis achieves a chilly and bleak irony. In one case, a Jane Fonda aerobics video is mixed with footage of the execution-byfiring squad of the brutal Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife on Christmas Day, 1989. Soldiers manhandle the elderly couple who scream and try to push them away, and we jump to Jane Fonda leading her spandexclad class as they stretch their arms high as if in religious praise. The elderly couple are in front of a wall and collapse instantly when bullets hit them; Curtis cuts to Fonda squatting to tighten her glutes; and back to Romania as their coffin is lowered into a snowy grave and cement poured. As captions explain, paraphrasing the Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci, “The old system was dying and a new system was about to be born.” Curtis’ scathing montage says that the dream is over. Curtis uses Fonda’s transformation from activist to fitness instructor as a vivid foil for political movements in the United States that were co-opted by a culture of selfimprovement. People retreated from outward social concerns to the inward world of exercise and selfactualization. If you can’t change the world, then change yourself. The social media echo-chamber has only amplified this trend. But why this inward retreat? As the narrator explains at the beginning of the film, “We live in a strange time. Extraordinary events keep happening. Yet those in control seem unable to deal with them and no one has a vision for a different world.” Instead, they manage from crisis to crisis and try to maintain the equilibrium of the current economic system. Individuals wrap themselves in a cocoon fearful of the dark forces that could do them harm. Politicians manage and deflect these threats of economic collapse, civil unrest, climate change and terrorism without any pretense of resolving them. They act as managers who preserve the existing equilibrium but offer no alternative visions. This state of perpetual—and reasonable—worry is only part of
hyper-normalization. The other is the evaporation of facts into a cloud of misinformation, “fake news” and conspiracy theories. Curtis singles out Vladmir Putin’s longtime advisor, Vladislav Surkov, as the master theorist and practitioner of an amorphous brand of repression. Surkov undermines Russian opposition groups by secretly supporting them, thereby, impugning their credibility. No one can be sure whose side anyone else is on and no effective resistance can coalesce. Surkov studied avantgarde theater; he knew how to turn politics into a stage play full of untrustworthy characters and ambiguity. While the film HyperNormalisation was made in 2016 before the election and well before the Covid-19 outbreak, its diagnosis of the UK and USA was prescient. As Curtis saw four years ago, journalists called out Trump’s lies, hyperbole and incoherence but didn’t realize he was playing a different game. Like Surkov’s machinations, Trump’s messaging sows doubt and waylays critics in a snowdrift of contradictions. It is easier to insinuate doubt than to prove a fact. Covid was a hoax, then not. The election is “rigged,” the “deep state” plots in dark rooms, and witch hunts abound. Journalists turn themselves in circles correcting outrageous and flimsy fabrications. Great theater manipulates emotions
and great actors have us believe they really suffer. It was Aristotle who long ago saw the power of emotional release through catharsis, the cleansing effect that watching a tragic drama has. But what happens when the real world becomes a play watched on screens and anger is quelled by social media outrage? As Curtis reminds us, invisible power continues to operate behind a curtain and in between the cyclical emotional purging. The film ends in a mash-up of Barbara Mandrell’s breakup song, “Standing Room Only,” and snippets of Barack Obama, David Cameron, Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair doing not much at all. They are bland, business-as-usual media appearances by polished professional politicians until Curtis cuts in clipped footage from the final scenes of Brian de Palma’s horror film Carrie (1976) based on the Stephen King thriller. After having pig blood dumped on her at the high school prom, the shy Carrie, who secretly possesses telekinetic powers, kills her tormentors and sets the prom on fire. Mandrell’s I’m-so-over-you song plays against a Hollywood fantasy of murderous revenge while politicians pose in front of cameras and do the day-to-day work of managing appearances oblivious to the strange times we live in.
Studio Visit
Nathan Hayden by Debra Herrick
In Nathan Hayden’s Santa Barbara studio, the precision of the natural world unfolds in haptic geometric abstractions.
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A
t first, moving from Nathan Hayden’s wall drawings to his recent sculptural work feels uneven—the dramatic torque of his large scale black and white geometric abstractions is replaced by a softly lit stasis, singular shapes, subdued hues—but the leap lets you see the development of Hayden’s haptic techniques, his study of positive and negative space, and his affinity for imperfections. You also see the way his geometric forms and often surprising drips, textures and fingerprints, align early modernist abstraction with hippy vibes and aesthetics pulled from nature.
opposite page: Nathan Hayden in his Santa Barbara studio, photo by Debra Herrick this page: You Shift Your Vibage and You Shift Your Vibage Back, detail, ink on wall
Nowadays, you’ll find Hayden working in his Santa Barbara home which he shares with his wife, artist Hannah Vainstein, and their daughter Zadie. But some time ago, in the early 1980s, Hayden was a young boy, growing up in rural West Virginia with his parents, unofficial subscribers to the back-to-theland movement. Hayden’s family had no running water and lived in a log cabin that his dad built with the help of a borrowed donkey to haul chopped down trees.
“That’s where I spent the first eight years of life,” says Hayden. “Our friends were craftspeople and artists, people who were thinking about aesthetics, making things with their hands and integrating art and life; it was a countermovement to the Industrial Revolution.” In 2015, the Walker Museum called it “Hippie Modernism” in their exhibition of the same name. It was “alternative communities and new ways of living and working together,” write the curators, “… a search for a new kind of utopia, whether technological, ecological or political, and with it a critique of the existing society.” This is Hayden’s lineage. In Hayden’s wall drawings, he circles a singular motif, “usually some form I’m looking at, the bark of trees, the landscape, the positive/negative spaces between rocks or branches,” he says. Before starting a new piece, he makes “the cards,” small studies that he’ll use to find a geometry that can unfold in different patterns and directions. There are elements in his work that reference the folk art tradition, Gee’s Bend quilts, Navajo weaving and Japanese wood block prints, and at the same SPRING 2021
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Scultptural work and “the cards” in Hayden’s studio, photos by Debra Herrick
“When Zadie began to talk, she learned the word ‘sculpture’ and it became a loose term for ‘object,’ but always a textural object,” says Hayden. “I’m searching for some kind of continuum between those natural objects that are in our everyday lives and these sculptures.”
Nathan Hayden, Go Innocent into the Forest My Children, detail, ink on wall
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time, op art. Its work made in the space between outsider and insider—the boy in West Virginia’s back country, and the MFA teaching art to college students. Patterns, for Hayden, are access points to spirituality, what his younger sci-fi reading self called other dimensions. He finds many of his patterns in nature while dancing. As he walks or dances outside and in nature, material images appear to him. “For me, ideas are culled from things that are interior and exterior,” he says. “Looking at rock forms and tree forms and flowers and then I’m thinking about them a lot. The dancing has to do with the spacing and how to represent what I see in nature in my own terms—I haven’t totally figured out how to express it with language. Dancing just makes my mind more pliable. The movement unsticks me.” Hayden works in a sundrenched farmhouse studio in the forested area near the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, photo by Debra Herrick
From dancing, Haydan finds patterns and shapes that echo the forms he sees in trees and rocks. He then hand builds his pared down pink clay sculptures. The fingerprints he leaves on each one are registers of his hand, traces of time and work. But they’re also an invitation to touch something
textured and naturally fibrous, something other than a screen, plastic or other mass-produced artifact. “When Zadie began to talk, she learned the word ‘sculpture’ and it became a loose term for ‘object,’ but always a textural object,” says Hayden. “I’m searching for some kind of continuum between those natural objects that are in our everyday lives and these sculptures.” That continuum between the natural world and the haptic artistic practice Hayden has cultivated is made up of his background, studies and practice, and is clearly seen in his admiration of turn-ofthe-century artist Charles Burchfield, who was the first artist to have a solo exhibition at the MoMa in 1930. Burchfield created his watercolors of nature scenes and townscapes immersed in the rural landscape and forests of upstate New York. His belief in “the healthy glamour of everyday life” resonates with Hayden and his work—“something about the subtle glamor of everyday life,” says Hayden, “that’s sort of how I see it now, the world and nature and the wonder of being in that.”
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Bright World Jane Gottlieb by Debra Herrick
J
ane Gottlieb loves color. So much so that just about everything in her life is vivid, bright and intensely colored—from her clothes, cars and furniture to the interior and exterior walls of her Santa Barbara home.
The colors in her wardrobe like the colors in her photography are saturated and eye-catching, but make no mistake, her artistic work is not a trove of psychedelic stoner posters, they’re images steeped in the intersection of painting and photography and markers of the evolution of analog to digital image-making. They also embody an earnestly Californian vision of leisure, landscapes, car culture and monuments. “Emerging in the late 1980s as a significant addition to the development of West Coast photography, Jane Gottlieb’s work sounds a varied yet subtle coda to the concerns of the Los Angeles art scene that prevailed from the late 1960s to the mid1970s,” writes Laguna Art Museum’s late chief curator Michael McManus in an introduction to the exhibition catalogue for Gottlieb’s first big show in 1988. Originally from Los Angeles, Gottlieb studied painting and art history from 1964 to 1968 at UC Berkeley, University of Syracuse in Florence, Italy and UCLA. She then studied graphic design at School of Visual Arts in New York City, launching a career in advertising that culminated with Gottlieb owning her own agency in Los Angeles. At 35, Gottlieb landed the Laguna show, left the ad business and started working fulltime as an artist. Her early series on LA’s car culture led to further photographic collections of swimming pools, gardens and architecture. Gottlieb composed classical vignettes of Southern California living that pushed the viewer’s perspective, often using a fisheye lens to further distort and embellish reality. She traveled the world with her SLR and catalogued thousands of images. Then, Gottlieb discovered a process to alter color on film that over the next four decades she’d develop into her signature and bridge from analog to digital photography.
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Jane Gottlieb, Lawn Bowlers Life
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Jane Gottlieb, Cadillac Fin
In the seventies and eighties, Gottlieb captured images with Kodachrome 35mm color slides that she printed using the Cibachrome process that was archival and could produce saturated colors. Inspired by the retouching process in which she observed a master printer spot her prints with dyes, adding color where there was no color, she began painting multiple layers of dyes into her photographs. By pushing the color into the emulsion, it would dry into the glossy luminescent photographic print with unrealistic, saturated colors. Gottlieb’s palette was sown in her studies of Fauvism, travels to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and the feathers of her beloved parrot Adler; and her collages and transposed colors are rooted in Surrealism as well as the artist’s uncommon optimism and playfulness. “Color shifted the reality of the photography,” says Gottlieb, who notes that she was among the first to experiment with this technique. “It was difficult because it was easy to scratch and it was hard to saturate the color into the
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Jane Gottlieb, Deco Delight
emulsion, you had to repeatedly paint it.” There was also the expense. Thirty years ago, printing a 30 x 40-inch print cost $500, recalls Gottlieb. For the next 15 years, Gottlieb painted on her Cibachrome prints, but by 1991, she was also using Photoshop. While she was ready at the launch of Photoshop 2.0 to transition to digital, the art world was not. The Nancy Hoffman Gallery that represented her in New York in the nineties would only show her handpainted photographs. Today, Gottlieb uses Photoshop to create new work, often pulling from her inventory of original slides dating back to her twenties, or digitally enhancing her handpainted color prints. Her most recent pieces are dye sublimation prints on aluminum that she has printed by master printer Eric States of Photo Printing Pros in Goleta. The works are archival and can be cleaned with Windex. Gottlieb’s artworks are now on view at UCLA across six buildings. At UC Santa Barbara, Gottlieb’s work is exhibited in five buildings, including the permanent collection of the Art, Design and Architecture Museum and a 14 by 15 feet piece in the Library.
above: Jane Gottlieb, Hollywood Pool below: Jane Gottlieb, California Pool
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Siempre Más / Always More Minga Opazo by Bay Hallowell
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We live in an era of excess, we consume and throw away,” says artist and fourth-generation craftsperson from Chile, Minga Opazo. “We don’t see the massive amount of overproduction in our everyday life, it’s invisible to us, tucked away.” Opazo’s exhibition, Siempre Más/Always More, at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara, examines the relationship of textiles to climate change. Opazo’s vibrant large-scale weavings and installations made of found and recycled textiles, bring attention to the global ecological harm of textile production, including the “glut of discarded, chemically infused garments . . . that are now being buried under Chilean soil.”
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Bay Hallowell: One of the most visually arresting objects in the exhibition is “Siempre más,” a multicolored sphere made of tightly wound and glued fabric strips, severed in half. The two halves are displayed with their flat sides up, all the inner rings of fabric exposed like the growth rings on a felled tree. What was your inspiration for this piece? Minga Opazo: For a while, I have been thinking about what future generations will see when they unearth our waste. Traditionally, textiles were made with raw, natural materials woven together to create shelter and protection. During the industrial revolution, natural dyes and looms were replaced by machines and assembly lines. This shift created
opposite page: Minga Opazo, Organización; this page, above: Minga Opazo, Mejor que sobre que falte; below: Minga Opazo, Siempre más; photos by Debra Herrick
unsustainable, chemically infused garments, which can no longer recede back into the natural world. What will future generations see when they unearth our waste? I am always experimenting with new ways to make my work. The main restriction that I have for myself, is that I don’t want to use toxic or wasteful materials to create my sculptures. For this piece, I used Elmer’s glue, the least toxic glue on the market. To create the ball, I used the papier mâché technique—layering pieces of fabric every day for six months until I had the perfect round ball. Then, with a very sharp machete knife, I cut it in half. SPRING 2021
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BH: Just behind “Siempre más,” hanging on the wall, is a colorful weaving, one of three in the exhibition. My first impression is of bright colors and softness. Then, I notice the looseness of the weft. A closer look reveals actual, intact pieces of clothing woven into the weft strings, like thick strands of yarn. These garments are like small bodies gently supported, or perhaps trapped, in a web. What is the story behind these weavings?
wanted to bring that tradition to my own practice, creating weavings that have sculptural volume with contemporary materials such as recycled clothing.
MO: The structure of weaving is enmeshed in our everyday lives—from our bedding to the way we dress. As a fourthgeneration Chilean textile craft person living in the US, my focus is the examination of how Chilean textile history and design, climate change and trash displacement are interconnected with everyday life. In studying the history of textiles in Chile, I learned about the sculptural weavings of the Awakhuni, who created garments with volume. I
MO: In my most recent projects, I question the textile industry by creating a series of cultural works that explore the idea of solastalgia, a term which describes mental or existential distress caused by environmental change and living in an era of excess, constantly consuming and throwing away. According to my research, only 15% percent of the used clothing donated to thrift shops in the US is actually sold. The other 85% is sent to other countries, like
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BH: The large installation “Leaning on Top of Us” consists of a sheet of clear, corrugated plastic preventing a lumpy pile of used clothing from spilling out onto the floor. Tell me about this work.
Chile, where the majority goes into desert landfills, where it is buried or burned. The cycle of our ancient textile industry is broken from beginning to end. I am dedicated to researching and studying this industry further and to creating work that exposes and reflects the current situation of our broken system. One part of my research was to go to thrift shops in Ventura and experience the way that donated clothing is sorted, collected and dispatched to different places, including Chile. I acquired massive bales of clothing that were mostly trash. The store could not resell the clothing, so this is what I used to create my work. BH: On one long wall, six uneven chunks of layered fabrics hang like weird, handmade books from another time and place. They strike me as dystopian, geological artifacts— are you influenced by an awareness of the earth’s strata? MO: Yes, all my work is inspired by my research on waste management. In 2006, when Charles Moore, a sea captain and oceanographer at the Marine Research Institute in Long Beach, surveyed plastic washed up on Kamilo Beach, a remote, polluted stretch of sand on Hawaii, he discovered plastiglomerate. This substance is a fusion of natural and manufactured materials. Melted plastic binds together sand, shells, pebbles, basalt, coral and wood, and can seep into the cavities of larger rocks to form a rock-plastic hybrid. This inspired me to create geological artifacts with recycled clothing, alluding to the future and how our waste will interact with nature. BH: Your response to an invitation to create an artwork outdoors for all to see is joyful and in the words of one admirer, “like a breath of fresh air!” (See “Llego el color/Color Has Arrived,” a weaving Opazo created in the exterior of the Architectural Foundation’s Acheson House, facing Victoria Street.) This tightly woven work has a completely different energy than the weavings indoors. What was your thought process in creating it? MO: When I started experimenting with outdoor installations in 2015, those installations were called Tramar (to weave). I wove natural yarn from Chile outdoors, in different places along the coasts of Ventura and Carpinteria. Tramar was a time-based installation in which the work only lasted a couple of months because the natural wool
eventually eroded and decomposed. Now, I am more interested in using recycled fabrics made of plastic and chemically infused materials. These textiles, unlike the natural wool, will not decompose for thousands of years. For me, this piece was the most interesting, creating a conversation between my old work and my new work.
opposite page: Minga Opazo, Llegó el color, AFSB, photo by Minga Opazo this page: Minga Opazo, Leaning on Top of Us, photo by Debra Herrick
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Year One The Free Republic of California
by Debra Herrick
E
ver wondered what could happen if California was its own country? There’s a new proposal exploring this hypothesis and it’s not from a political action committee but from the Santa Ynez and Los Angeles based artist Cole Sternberg. Presented by the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation’s Ojai Institute—where Sternberg is an artist in residence—the new multifaceted public art project, The Free Republic of California: Year One, departs from the premise that California has seceded from the United States and formed its own nation. With the $472 billion in annual revenue paid to the federal government each year now kept in California, the state is reborn, and those funds are poured into education, health care and other social programs. The nuanced and heavily researched project draws from Sternberg’s background in law (the artist has a law degree from American University) and plays with notions of statehood and freedom by offering a vision for a more enlightened nation that includes a new Constitution. The roughly 9,000-word document, the Constitution of the Free Republic of California, enacted on Oct. 20, Year One, includes ten articles, setting up the government for the newly established democratic nation. Other documentation builds an alternative history and identity through a new flag, photographic documentation and ephemera; a budget, peace agreements and international conventions in support of the environment and human rights; and, a proposed future conjured through sculpture, performance and engagement. Year One has four components: A 24-hour multi-media installation that is visible from CGBF’s exterior windows; Family art experience kits that are free to download; A site specific outdoor installation throughout the Ojai Valley of yard signs and poster interventions; And, thefreerepublicofcalifornia.com—a conceptual and internet project that serves as the locus of the exhibition.
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Cole Sternberg, The Free Republic of California: Year One, photo by Yoni Goldberg
Year One also highlights the Ojai Institute’s initiative as a platform for new ideas. As The Free Republic of California’s official education partner, the institute hopes to stimulate conversations about the possibilities of government through the proposal’s “real life” application, particularly for youth and coming of age voters. “There are elements of surprise and intrigue in the use of text and images because at the essence of the project is imagination—How do we imagine possibilities and a more inclusive government?” says Frederick Janka, CGBF executive director. “That strikes at my belief about art— seeing different possibilities . . . the spark is to look at what exists and ask why things exist as they are.”
Cole Sternberg, For Zoe Leonard (I want a country)
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Installation views, The Free Republic of California: Year One, Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, photos by Debra Herrick
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The Long Wait for Fall Elizabeth Herring
by Tom Pazderka
O
ne Friday, I received terrible news. The Basic Premise had closed. Shocking as it was, it was by no means a unique occurrence. For months, news stories of galleries and museums shuttering, of artists fleeing the cities, and the art world being effectively shut down, dominated. The Basic Premise was just another victim of terrible circumstances and inopportune timing. Yet another gallery that did not make it through the crisis. It was all a ruse—one that was perhaps more than a year in the making, a clever ruse, an evil and delicious ruse that would have happened whether Covid happened or not.
So, what occurred? The Basic Premise sent out Instagram posts vaguely detailing their closure and in the same breath urged its followers to support the store that will soon be taking over its former space on Ojai Avenue. Lots of condolences, disbelief and comments followed. No doubt some gnashing of teeth. Then, The Basic Premise opened its new exhibition, Ojai City Gift, a site-specific installation by the Ojai-native, then Berlin-based, and now Ojai-native-again artist Elizabeth Herring, which mimics/is/functions as an Ojai retail store, with a heavy dose of in-jokes and tongues-in-cheeks. Ojai paraphernalia abounds, some of which is readily available throughout the city in other stores while much is
unique and specific to Ojai City Gift. Items were made by the artist to look like objects, trinkets and random tchotchkes that tourists to Ojai revel in and Ojai residents consume ironically. But make no mistake, the installation is far from a simple joke. First, the ‘store’ occupies only the window level of the gallery space. It remains resolutely foregrounded even though it recedes beyond the window itself. As such, the inside is something like the site of the unspeakable, the potentially dangerous, dimension of the virus and its various forms. The show is thus hysterically prescient and timely, despite the fact that its form was decided on in advance of the pandemic. It simply fits within the reality of Covid
Installation view, Elizabeth Herring, Ojai City Gifts, The Basic Premise, photo by Tom Pazderka
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without the need to comment on it. Second, the same impossibility to enter into the space—its foregrounded, stage-like presence—perfectly illustrates the concept of the ontological incompleteness of reality itself. My friends will surely pardon yet another Zizek reference. But isn’t the fact that when we can shop ‘at’ the store, see it, experience it as such, interact with it visually, but never actually enter it, the same as the idea of an augmented reality that is common to video games in which the background is rendered, say, as a building with doors and windows, but one cannot enter into it because there is no need to do so? This is how Zizek describes the ontological incompleteness of our structured reality. He claims that if there really is a god, this god ‘made’ reality precisely in this way, like a video game in which certain parts are left incomplete. There are elements to reality to which we simply do not have access and about which we can only theorize. Certain aspects of quantum physics are structured in this way, to the point where knowledge itself is a dimension to which we may have only partial access. Third, the concept of this exhibition falls into a type of critique in which obfuscation functions as revelation of its subject. The opening of a retail
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store in place of an art gallery certainly raises eyebrows given the fraught history of gentrification and the role that artists and galleries are said to play within it. From New York to Bucharest, Moscow to Beijing, gentrification seems to follow on the heels of art communities. But whether they actively participate or passively observe, the dynamics of gentrification are not so much an issue as they are the driving force behind the critique of art itself. Without gentrification (the objectified fetish, the fantasy ‘object’) many issues surrounding social issues, wealth disparity, hierarchies, etc., would have to be reevaluated or would simply disappear. Art needs gentrification for its own subjectivity to function. Gentrification normalizes the subject of aesthetics and aestheticizes the subject without actually changing the way that gentrification functions. Gentrification itself is a term that is used positively within the real estate industry. But because historically artists are typically on the receiving end of the stick and not the carrot offered by the industry, gentrification has been systematically used, debated and entrenched within the dominant discourse as a term for a slow, churning evil, responsible for social inequality, community displacement, and unrest. Ojai City Gift is a poke in the eye
of this generalized critique turned conventional wisdom of market economics and social dynamics. Of course, a retail store would open up after an art gallery had made the neighborhood cool and safe. Whether this statement is true or not seems to be a question beyond debate. It is so much part of received wisdom that one of the shirt’s memes—“I grew up in Ojai and all I got was priced out of the housing market”—underscores this tension between joke and truth. Fourth, the interplay between the death of the gallery and the birth of the retail store points to a larger narrative playing on the anxiety and unease within modern Western culture. It is the interplay of forces that shape and mold people from citizens (cultured society) to consumers, and there is a big difference between the two. In 2004, two Czech documentary filmmakers showed precisely what it means when the fantasy space that constitutes consumer society is broken down and when the illusion that separates culture from brutal market logic is shattered. The documentary Czech Dream followed a two-week-long blitz marketing campaign for a brand-new shopping mall, called a ‘hypermarket’ in Czech, aptly named Cesky Sen (Czech Dream). The date was set for its grand opening and hundreds of people turned up in a field where the
faรงade of the building was gleaming in the far distance. As the crowd started approaching, many soon began to get the joke. The faรงade of the building was just that, a faรงade, supported by wooden beams, like a Western movie set, and the Czech Dream was just that, a dream. Ojai City Gift feels a bit like this. Being had and feeling duped is an emotion that many will find objectionable, while others will find it absolutely brilliant. The point is not to focus too much on this aspect of the exhibition. It was after all a clever, attention-grabbing maneuver by The Basic Premise. The point is to examine the world we are living in without resorting to hypernormalizing tendencies that are all too prevalent these days and get over the sting that surely arrives when being punked. I for one am glad that the long wait for fall is over.
Installation views, Ojai City Gifts, The Basic Premise, opposite page: photos by Elizabeth Herring; this page: photo by Tom Pazderka
Elizabeth Herring, City Limits
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Gallery Guide
Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara
Randall David Tipton, Poppies, watercolor
Marcia Burtt Gallery
Richard Schloss, oil on canvas
Santa Barbara Fine Art Santa Barbara Fine Art gallery showcases the rich culture and bright energy of Santa Barbara through landscapes and narrative scenes. Santa Barbara Fine Art’s Artist in Residence and one of the original Oak Group members, Richard Schloss, is an iconic California landscape painter of 45 years, whose paintings can be found in the permanent collections of four museums. Also featured are original Oak Group members Arturo Tello, Michael Drury and John Comer, and newer members Michael Enriquez, John Wullbrandt, Carrie Givens and Linda Mutti. 1321 State St, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, info@ santabarbarafineart.com, santabarbarafineart. com, (805) 845-4270, (415) 786-3765
Located in downtown Santa Barbara, Marcia Burtt Gallery features contemporary landscape paintings, photographs, prints and books.
Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) seeks to enrich lives and inspire critical thinking through meaningful engagement with the art and ideas of our time. MCASB provides Santa Barbara and the Central Coast with exhibitions and programming that encourage discovery, cultivate new perspectives, and challenge the way we see and experience the world, ourselves and each other. 653 Paseo Nuevo, Upper Arts Terrace Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, hello@mcasantabarbara. org, mcasantabarbara.org, (805) 966-5373
517 Laguna St, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, marciaburttstudio@gmail.com, artlacuna.com, (805) 962-5588
Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara Gallery
City Hall Gallery The City of Santa Barbara’s downtown gallery features a hallway with designated panels for artwork on the first floor of the building as well as adjacent space for related exhibition display. 735 Anacapa St, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, art@sbac.ca.gov, sbac.ca.gov, (805) 568-3994
The Gallery/Conference Room of the AFSB is a dynamic space within a historic setting for curated exhibitions of contemporary art, photography and design. Four solo exhibitions and one group exhibition are presented annually. Local artists, architects, photographers and designers are invited to submit work in a wide range of content, mediums and styles. 229 E. Victoria St, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, info@afsb.org, (805) 965-6307
Atkinson Gallery Santa Barbara City College The Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara City College Art Department’s showcase for the visual arts, hosts exhibitions of contemporary art each academic year featuring international, national, regional and student artists working in a wide range of styles and media. Humanities Building, Room 202, 721 Cliff Dr, Santa Barbara, CA, 93109, John Connelly, Gallery Director, jconnelly1@pipeline.sbcc.edu, (805) 965-0581 x 3484
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Channing Peake Gallery
John McGrath
The main lobby of the Santa Barbara County Administration Building in Santa Barbara was designated as the Channing Peake Gallery by the Board of Supervisors of the County of Santa Barbara in 1989 to honor and commend artist Channing Peake.
SlingShot Art Studio & Gallery
105 E. Anapamu St, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, art@sbac.ca.gov, sbac.ca.gov, (805) 568-3994
220 W. Canon Perdido, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, slingshotart.org, (805) 770-3878
SlingShot promotes artistic opportunities for artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities, guiding each artist to develop an independent and meaningful art practice.
Solvang
Deborah Kerner, Motif for a Nighttime Journey
Gerald Patrick, Untitled
Silo118.com Silo118.com started life as a brick-and-mortar gallery in Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone and ultimately morphed into an online gallery. Silo118 also does pop-ups and mega art fairs. Browse the gallery’s array of exceptional artists at Silo118.com and contact Gallerist Bonnie Rubenstein if something strikes your fancy!
The Gallery, Hotel Indigo Santa Barbara Located in the vibrant Funk Zone, Hotel Indigo Santa Barbara features a contemporary art gallery in partnership with the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation. 121 State St, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, indigosantabarbara.com, (805) 966-6586
Silo118.com (no physical address), (209) 2224965, bonnie@silo118.com
Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art
Sullivan Goss Gallery Sullivan Goss Gallery has represented the work of American artists since 1984. The contributions of American artists from the 19th century to the 21st century can be found in Sullivan Goss’ expansive galleries in downtown Santa Barbara, California. 11 E. Anapamu St, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, Nathan Vonk, Owner, sales@sullivangoss.com, sullivangoss.com
Located on the Westmont College campus, the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art offers programming for both students and the community. Founded in 1985, the Museum changed its name in 2010 after a major gift from Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree. Collections range from Rembrandt prints to Barbizon artists to Contemporary masters.
David Paul Bayles, Sell, digital photograph on metal, Wildling Museum Collection
Wildling Museum of Art and Nature The Wildling Museum of Art and Nature offers visitors a unique perspective on the importance of preserving our natural heritage. Through the eyes of artists and education and field experiences, visitors can renew their relationship with the wilderness and understand its fragile nature—hopefully leaving more committed toward ensuring those spaces remain for future generations. Now, the Wildling is committed to furthering this mission online through monthly virtual presentations, expanded online galleries, video content and more. 1511-B Mission Drive, Solvang, CA, 93463, info@wildlingmuseum.org, wildlingmuseum. org, (805) 688-1082
Los Osos
955 La Paz Rd, Santa Barbara, CA, 93108, museum@westmont.edu, Westmont.edu/ museum, (805) 565-6162
Santa Maria
Installation view of works by Austin Eddy and Sylvia Fragoso
Left Field
Betteravia Gallery The Community Arts Workshop The CAW provides workshop, gallery, venue, classroom, meeting space and more—a “blank canvas” for local artists and arts organizations to develop ideas, make connections and build community. 631 Garden St, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, hello@sbcaw.org, sbcaw.org, (805) 324-7443
The Betteravia Gallery is located in the Joseph Centeno Betteravia Government Administration Building in Santa Maria. The County gallery includes a lobby area for artwork adjacent to the Board of Supervisors’ Hearing Room in the Gallery South in addition to several wall panels for exhibition display in the Gallery North. 511 Lakeside Pkwy, Santa Maria, CA, 93455, art@sbac.ca.gov, sbac.ca.gov, (805) 568-3994
Left Field is a contemporary art gallery located in Los Osos, a small town on the Central Coast of California, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The gallery presents exhibitions with the primary goal of bringing to the region contemporary art not otherwise seen here. 1036 Los Osos Valley Rd, Los Osos, CA, 93402, Nick Wilkinson, Gallery Director, (805) 305-9292
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Michael Ferguson, Calypso Orchid, acrylic, 25x33 in., detail.
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SHANA MOULTON The Invisible Seventh is the Mystic Column
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