Juror Statement & Biography

Thank you for the opportunity to jury the Pasadena Society of Artists’ 95th Annual Juried Exhibition. Arts organizations like this are especially important in our current environment because they bring people together through the process of art and creative energies. As individuals in the arts, and for those that cheer us on, creativity provides a layered, interwoven guide through the complexities that surround us. Narrative forms push us to new understandings, and non-objective abstractions steer unspoken responses. Like so many events across the globe, this show (originally scheduled for early 2020) was postponed due to the pandemic. Creativity has been so important to individuals and audiences during this time of Covid. The quarantine that was set in place for our own safety and the health of others – family and strangers alike –generated a uniquely challenging circumstance to reflect upon society and our place in the world. This is also an age to revisit artforms like poetry and visual expression from a vantage point where time is shaken as if the hands of the clock go simultaneously forward and backward. Some of the artists in the exhibit made direct reference to the pandemic, while others made note in their statements about their quarantine. Clearly, each artist reacted to this urgent dilemma through creative production, and some through a new-found lens. Artists are particularly brave when they intuitively express and experiment. The exhibition is comprised of a range of genres, media, and approaches. The variety in the artworks is where I was able to see most clearly how our artmaking becomes a portrait of ourselves – a self-portrait, a collective, a community portrait. Each artwork communicates as much through process as manifestation – the journey as well as the destination. Kim Abeles October 2020

Kim Abeles

Kim Abeles is an artist whose artworks explore biography, geography, feminism, and the environment. Her work speaks to society, science literacy, and civic engagement, creating projects with science and natural history museums, health departments, air pollution control agencies, the National Park Service, and non-profits. In 1987, she innovated a method to create images from the smog in the air, and Smog Collectors brought her work to national and international attention. In 2019, she worked with the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Photo by Tony Pinto Moscow to create smog portraits of world leaders with quotes from climate summits. The National Endowment for the Arts funded two recent projects: a residency at the Institute of Forest Genetics, where she focused on Resilience; and “Valises for Camp Ground: Arts, Corrections, and Fire Management in the Santa Monica Mountains” in collaboration with Camp 13, a group of female prison inmates who fight wildfires. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, California Community Foundation, and Pollack-Krasner Foundation. Her work is in forty public collections including MOCA, LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Her process documents are archived at the Center for Art + Environment.