Souls Made of Stardust

souls

MADE OF _________________

STARDUST

Humanity’s existence can only be described as miraculous. We are born of atoms, molecules, which then multiply and create an advanced being with the ability to communicate and emote. When our body stops, the molecules return to the earth and create life in other forms.

The astronomer and cosmologist Carl Sagan succinctly described our existence: “We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff.”

This universal existence is the essence of the exhibit, Souls Made of Stardust, presented at Sergott Contemporary Art. Nine artists from eight countries take on a global vision of themes concerning the ephemeral, nostalgia, spiritual transcendence, and ancestry. Each artist performs an act of selfunderstanding and healing that leads to a sense of balance and peacefulness within their work.

Artists Luis González Palma, Tarrah Krajnak, and Luján Candría explore their own personal history, understanding their culture, their past, and the nostalgia of their existence and others like them.

Originally from Guatemala, Peru, and Argentina respectively, each one of these artists now resides in a new land where they explore the cultural conglomerations of their two identities. Anna O’Cain joins this group through an installation that, like the other artists, coalesces her past with her present, questioning her very existence. Their work is pensive and humble while also realizing the fractures that come with cultural, situational, and ideological changes.

Hung Viet Nguyen and Madhavan Palanisamy realize their spiritual transcendence from a more scientific or analytic approach. As a biologist, Nguyen’s recognition of nature’s food chain inspires his philosophical perspective on existence. In 2013, Meher McArthur described his work as “a reminder to be humble about one’s own power and to show compassion towards those who are weaker”.

Palanisamy takes a more spatial perspective on existence, often looking at the very foundation of the existence of everything in the universe. The subtleties and interconnectedness of the world abound in his work.

Tania Alcala, Momilani Ramstrum, and Echo Lew explore a more abstract perspective on spirituality and the affectation of color and space in their work. Alcala and Lew, from Mexico and China, meditate prior to creating their work, utilizing this spiritual activity to guide their non-representational artwork. Ramstrum, through the manipulation of sound, performs an amalgamation of senses and colors derived from her multi-medium process that then guides the visitor into a distant land.

Souls Made of Stardust, curated by Associate Director, Andrew Ütt, will run from May 20 until July 1 at Sergott Contemporary Art in Rancho Santa Fe, California.

List of Artists Anna O’Cain (USA) Echo Lew (China & USA) Hung Viet Nguyen (Vietnam & USA) Luis González Palma (Guatemala) Luján Candria (Argentina) Madhavan Palanisamy (India) Momilani Ramstrum (USA) Tania Alcala (Mexico & USA) Tarrah Krajnak (Peru & USA)

Anna O’Cain Anna O’Cain is a studio art instructor in drawing, design and sculpture. She studied visual art at the University of Okalahoma, received a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego where she continued to work with hybrid media, experimental processes, and installation.

She has been a recipient of grants from California Arts Council and Art Matters in New York. Performance actions taken from daily life, i.e. mending clothes, making pies, sewing felt covers for books in a library, and cataloging stories are elements in her installations work. Found objects used in her work often provide historical sources from which to begin the art making process. Sound, interactivity and electronic technologies are combined with more tradiional media in her work. Questions about learning, memory and record keeping (how we know, how we learn, what we remember, and what we forget) are at the center of her research and practice. With one foot in both physical and virtual worlds she is still amazed and excited about the hybridization of traditional and electronic media.

Installation with found objects, photography.

Echo Lew In my Zen Buddhist meditation practice, the lights bend like a reed in the breeze, or soar freely as a bird above a cliff, thousands of lights dancing in my mind. The inner world is clean, clear and full of fresh air.

Thousands of lights move as a wave. The secrets of the universe are revealed.

Music, especially classical symphony, also shapes these visions. I draw the feelings the music brings forth, the expansive sense of flying over mountains, rivers, and oceans.

Pigment prints on Canvas

Hung Viet Nguyen Nguyen’s complex, labor intensive investigations of oil paint reveal a methodical mastery of texture. While portions of Nguyen’s work suggest the influence of many traditional art forms including woodblock prints, Oriental scroll paintings, ceramic art, mosaic, and stained glass, his ultimate expression asserts a contemporary pedigree.

Oil on panel

Luis González Palma Luis González Palma’s work tells stories, some of which based on what one could imagine from the prose of Juan Rulfo and others that speak of the type of literature of Edgar Allan Poe. It is these stories within the image that unite two distinct points within his work: the portraiture of a strictly Latin American culture and a metaphorical and surrealist mise-en-scène.

“My particular interest is in finding feeling. The image that contains a certain sensation of nostalgia is very important, not because of its relation that it has with the past, but because of its relation with the present that in reality is the only time that matters to us,” declared González Palma in an interview given at PhotoEspaña in 1999 upon receiving the “Baume et Mercier” prize.

Kodalith, Gold sheets on Paper

Lujรกn Candria AFAR In the dreamlike image of an uncertain, blurry and unreachable path, our projection on it brings us back to the reminiscence of that future which, even in the distance, is able to move us, invade us with its memories and transcend us; slipping between our desires to whisper a sonorous repetition of infinite spaciousness.

Pigment prints on paper

Madhavan Palanisamy OUR SOULS ARE MADE OF STARDUST “We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff.” - Carl Sagan Pigment prints on paper

Momilani Ramstrum DREAMING THE DANCE As an artist, Momilani uses intuition, inspiration, discipline and madness. In each painting, she strives for exquisite detail as well as movement through the piece as a whole. Her visual art is influenced by musical improvisation, with the interplay of lines creating dissonance and resolving into consonance. She creates many layered-textures, enlivened by contrasting sections, and varied forms. Her use of color is bold with entwined and distinctive, twists and complements. She draws inspiration from her photography of nature, the desert, trees and plants and the vibrant interplay of shape and light. Her visual images are created through a process of internal dialogue with the painting – she watches the play of colors and shapes, sometimes for hours. Layers are begun, and a painting allowed to form itself over weeks or months of reflection. As a composer and inventor, she holds a patent for her MIDI glove which she created to control the computer in real-time. She has a Ph.D. in electronic music and performs unique improvisations using voice interacting with a MIDI glove controlled computer.

Video & Performance

Tania Alcala Alcala approaches each painting in a meditative state. Beginning with a large wood panel—which she uses as her canvas—she spreads various tubes of paint around her until, “the colors intuitively pull me in,” as she says. She applies wide swaths of paint to each panel; one color after another, maintaining the purity of the various hues, then blends the edges of the colors. As she works on each abstract piece, she adds several layers of paint spontaneously, creating many shapes and forms, while working from her memories and emotions and especially from her passion for life.

Acrylic and resin on panel

Tarrah Krajnak 1979, features large-scale, complexly layered photographic works that draw from intense periods of research and collection in Lima, Peru. The focus is on my own intimate relationship to the turbulent history of the city during 1979, a year of seismic changes. With increasing violence and instability in Peru’s provinces, Lima’s population swelled and was transformed by a massive influx of rural migrants from the highlands and eastern jungles; my birth mother was among them, one of many young women uprooted during that tectonic demographic shift. That’s almost all I know about her.

Like her peers, she was vulnerable in a city that was a violent, dangerous place. 1979 was a year that created orphans.

1979 features archival materials – specifically pornographic and political magazines from the year I was born– in an effort to retrace, reclaim and reinvent something like a psychic history of that difficult year, and, locate myself within it. The results are not archival so much as counter-archival, a fractured atlas of collage, high-keyed abstraction, found light and broken glass.

Pigment prints on paper

PO Box #239 Rancho Santa Fe, CA 92067 (858) 756-2377 sergottart.com info@sergottart.com