Chaffey College and the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art proudly present Student Invitational 2019, the 42nd annual juried exhibition featuring Chaffey College student artists. In this rigorous program, the selected artists work closely with faculty, the museum curators, and other art professionals to create a new body of work, culminating in a professional quality group exhibition at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art.
This was printed on the occasion of the exhibition, Student Invitational 2019, April 8 – May 9, 2019 Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, Chaffey College 5885 Haven Avenue Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91737 www.chaffey.edu/wignall
Sonia Breik Bly Cannon Regina Castillo Noah Cortez Kristin Maxine Crofford Lina Garcia Joseph Govè Joel Hutchinson Alaast Kamalabadi
Sonia Breik
Sonia Breik, The Arabian Horse 1, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches.
I am in a new country. I am a new country. Sonia is my given name, and Syria is the country where I was born. These are things I did not choose in life, but they are permanent parts of who I am. Memories of love, family life, beautiful weather, old alleys, the fragrance of jasmine flower in the evening, a sense of place and warmth are what make Syria my home in my mind and heart. For work related reasons, lived in Dubai for a long time. However, I always returned to Syria because it is my home. I now live in the United States with some of my extended family. Each move helps me grow, and each one changed my understanding of my identity, my culture, and my thoughts on how I would live. Before moving here, I did not make art. I studied and obtained a business degree, and that choice was based on grades and tests. This direction in life was made as a sensible choice to make a living. Although I initially studied English, I also began to take art classes and explore many of the thoughts and reflections I had of myself both in my old country and my new country. There are many risks in studying art, as opposed to business, but I feel it allows me to know more about who I am, where I am, and who I want to be. For this exhibition, I have made two large paintings. Each shows an Arabian horse, and each represents me both before and after my move to the United States. The differences between the two horses are, in fact, the differences between the two Sonias. Those two people are separated not only by time, but also by choices. The two paintings represent my previous feeling and my current feelings towards my life. Each painting is constructed to show significant differences in the sensibility of the person they represent. My Arabian upbringing still prevails in my new life here, but my choices continue to expand and I continue to evolve as a person. No future can ever begin without living the past. I carry two countries inside of me, one rooted in the base of the other. I am myself. I am a new country.
Bly Cannon
Bly Cannon, Salvation Gate, 2019, acrylic and collage on canvas, 30 x 40 inches.
In May, 2016, I walked out of a dangerous domestic situation with a small suitcase and my purse. I had gathered things up in a weird fugue-like state, only feeling certain that I shouldn’t take anything that wasn’t really “mine,” even though I had been married for over 30 years. Among my odd packing choices was a button that I’ve had since the 80’s, from an AIDS fundraiser; it sparkles and says: “ART SAVES LIVES”. It had been in a drawer for decades, but it went in the suitcase. After some months of separation, I became clearer in my thinking, and realized I was never going back. That decision also marked the end of a long period of allowing myself to be a prisoner of another person’s thinking. What initially replaced that thinking was elation, and then, grief. At the lowest bottom of the grief I felt untethered, or disconnected, almost soulless. An untrue identity that I had taken on died when I acknowledged it was a false choice. What was left felt foreign and incomplete, and I doubted my worth. A strong part of my core, being an artist, had been shoved in a drawer for decades…I had started to discover it in college, and then had relinquished it. One of the many things that became clearer after leaving was that button was a message to myself: “I can remember myself, I can create, I can still save my life”. Making art, and becoming able to say, “I am an artist,” (actually believing it is true), has taken me from the bottom of grief to transformation. I believe part of that transformation happens while processing acceptance. When we throw off denial, we see without filters. It can be unbearable, but making art is my antidote. Seeing so much, and then choosing a composition, is a clarifying process. Recently, I’ve had an intense interest in edges, borders, fences, barriers, and all that exists on either side. I see a constant tension between natural and unnatural, organic and manmade, and I love the way that pattern exists everywhere. I also now understand that transformation, mutation, and metamorphosis seem like a rarity, but they are actually a constant. They are like a connective tissue between black and white, worm and butterfly, real and imaginary. And very importantly, seeing them as a constant, strikes down false choices. They are really another pattern, and they wipe out preconceptions in a powerful way. My current work is looking at ways to show transformation and change in mediums where nothing moves. The work in this show uses photography, drawing, and painting combined. I’m interested in that intersection of disparate things, and how they may give life to each other. I’m newly drawn to the power of big abstraction and flatness, and I admire the potency of realism and pattern. I’m playing with boldness, and detail. I want to show the integration of struggle and joy. I still want to fool the eye a little, and I want you to not need words to feel what you see.
Regina Castillo
Regina Castillo, Sculpture #1, 2019, ceramic with low-fire underglaze, 23 x 19 x 15 inches.
Clay as I Know it. . . When I first encountered clay, I immediately developed a deep connection to the art of ceramic creation. Creating something out of clay from beginning to end is a very intimate process in which you give life to an idea. Working with clay has provided me with endless learning opportunities that only make me want to delve deeper into what this art form has to offer. I have found that there are an infinite amount of possibilities when dealing with such a versatile medium. Clay can be manipulated into just about anything you can imagine as long as its strengths and weaknesses are respected and understood. Exploring Clay. . . My work has always been inspired by the natural world, its biological environments and everything living within. I am continually motivated to explore clay and develop my sculpting skills while looking for inspiration in the world around me. While natural inspiration is the foundation for my work, I am also influenced by our own human-created environments and social current events. Recently, I learned about immigration policies enacted at the U.S borders. The policies separate migrating families and send the children to prison-like detention centers across the country. Such present social conditions have prompted me to use my platform in the art world and my community to shed some light on the current mistreatment of the children. My Artistic Voice. . . From the moment I found out about the innocent children being torn apart from their families and kept in cages, I knew I had to give them my voice because theirs had been stripped away. I want to draw attention to the experiences and living conditions these children are facing, when their only crime was to hope for a better life with their families in a safe place. Just like the sculptures, the children don’t get to leave their cage to go home or even be with their loved ones in such difficult moments. It is understandable how humans might overlook certain natural forces that present themselves in our environment and feel like we have no control over them, because we don’t. However, we should not ignore social conditions and inhumane practices that we as a people have created and think we don’t have control over them, because we do. As a society of human beings, we can unite against certain government choices and let it be known that we will not tolerate the inhumane policies. With this exhibit, I do my part in the long fight to bring fair border policies that don’t compromise the fabric of our humanity as a people. My message is simple, Free the Children!
Noah Cortez
Noah Cortez, Father, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 68 x 48 inches.
As a painter, I find painting is a way to create emotional narratives that are related to me. Being able to stretch reality and paint what’s not apparent from a photograph or sight gives me a sense of power. I manipulate color, material, form and reality to create accurate representations of something in my head. Painting encompasses not only what I see, but also how or what I feel. My natural curiosity about people draws me to paint them. I attempt to present a more nuanced representation of an individual, one that departs from the objective description of a photograph. Photographs of people serve as a kind of identification of that person. I want everyone: me, the sitter, and the viewer to enter into a more symbolic system of visual communication. A system that is more ambiguous and stimulating for all. I choose my palettes carefully. I see my palette as a description of my emotion overlaid onto my subject. I feel in order to display another person’s psychological make-up I must also confront my own feeling about that person. I must always be attuned to with my feelings when I paint because when I create portraits, I can’t help but feel I paint a little bit of myself into each work. In this series, titled Divorce, I explore the story of my family’s separation by looking at all of the members of my immediate family. By painting portraits of each separate family member, it became clear to me how the divorce has shaped each individual family member’s sense of self. Once I capture my subject on the canvas, I work quickly, but think over the memories tied to that person and our shared history. What finally makes the canvas complete is a portrait that is as much about the person depicted as it is about me, my family, and many of the struggles we have shared as a family.
Kristin Maxine Crofford
Kristin Maxine Crofford, The Business Mother, 2019, face mounted archival pigment print, 54 x 36 inches.
For some, becoming a mother is a planned event. For others, becoming a mother means a complete re-evaluation of your life and your future. When my husband and I found out that we were pregnant with our son, it was life changing. We had been using birth control for years and were planning our futures around playing music in a rock band that we had created when we were younger. With the surprise of our pregnancy and the birth of our son, my goals in life shifted and my priorities began to refocus on providing a stable foundation for my family. Although being in music is no longer a priority of mine, I still look like I belong in a rock band. The way I dress, in relation to being a young mother, has opened my eyes to how people generally have a very specific person in mind when it comes to raising a child. I have had instances where, in public, people have both passively and sometimes aggressively, questioned how suitable I was to be a mother, based on my outer appearance alone. This has led to a lot of reflection about my sense of identity as a mother as well as the scrutiny that other mothers also encounter. As a photographer, I have always aimed to capture something that starts a conversation. I enjoy focusing on social justice, human rights and morality. When I look through my camera lens, I hope to see change on the other side. In a culture that has become very image heavy, one of the challenges for an artist is to create work that can compete with all of the visual noise. Is there a way to change the world and help shape my community without speaking a word? The Pictures Generation is an interesting example of how to construct monumental images that challenge typical art forms. I often find myself with similar interests and techniques, such as the use of appropriation and controversy in my pieces. Artists such as Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger are huge inspirations in my work. I also find myself drawn to Robert Longo’s work and can see a little of his influence within my current series. I believe these artists have created and challenged social ideals and norms in a very postmodern way, and I aim to challenge society in the same manner. Can I create imagery that leads people to question their assumptions about motherhood? This idea of the “perfect mother,” that has been portrayed in media and art since Renaissance paintings, is about to get a reboot. When I began this current series of work, I had set out to portray the typical “ideal” commercial looking mother. The one you see in commercials, smiling and happy with blonde hair and blue eyes. As the work has grown, my interests have become more critical of this kind of representation. I now feel I want to amplify some of the other stereotypical aspects of motherhood, and the issues associated with it, both positive and negative. Throughout the many different experiences that I had as I journeyed through being a first-time mother, I realized how many other women also walk the same path. Many of the issues depicted in my work affect not just mothers, but also the way women are represented in contemporary cultural context. Each portrait is a self-portrait where I put myself in the shoes of each mother I represent, building an elaborate and exaggerated character that performs for the viewer. From the working mother, to the breastfeeding mother, the vaccinating mother, and the commercial mother, each has her own story to tell through the imagery that I create.
Lina Garcia
Lina Garcia, David, 2019, 24 x 20 inches.
My art is a process of circuitousness and an open mind. I would like to paint in different ways, but I sometimes veer off course and attempt to create something less mundane and that sometimes turns disastrous. This is art, and painting for me is a release and an encumbrance. Most of the time I want to paint everything from all styles of art but I have chosen to focus on portraits directly. I want to challenge myself and every canvas is a new opportunity. I see opportunity in every face and only wish to recreate the image of a person through brush and paint. I am the type to believe art speaks for itself, good or bad is within the creator of the work and the viewers eyes, not all artwork must rely on an explanation. When I was a young girl, I would always take the bus around Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding cities. Enjoying every aspect of street life, culture, people and art. As an adolescent, these influences helped mold me into what I now try to create in my own artworks. Many styles would catch my attention, none more than huge murals of faces and the human figure. I admired how artists were able to capture people as they were, in a realistic form through paint. I was able to see so many different styles of painters through my long days of walking or catching trains and buses across cities, using their influences to only dream about how I wanted to do what they did and what I hoped to someday try. Being thirteen and watching older artists take half a day to paint a small section of a large building was better than most things for me or leaving home before the sun came up to find just the right spot to paint with a group of other teenagers. We grow as artists and just like anything else, with practice any craft can get better. Each of my presented works for the Wignall Museum started with a conversation and thought process. The process is as important as the result of each artwork; therefore, everything must be taken into consideration about what goes into the paintings. I choose to work with individuals in different settings and paint a realistic portrait with a small point of surrealism to intertwine the two types of work within one image. I hope only to capture the people I had the pleasure of painting in a way that best suits them personally and make more art in the future.
Joseph Govè
Joseph Govè, from Phobia Masks, Arachnophobia, 2019, ceramic, 20 x 6 inches.
For the majority of my life I have lived here in Rancho Cucamonga with my family. Having grown up here, I feel as if I have lived in a small town with a limited exposure to the culture, politics, and urbanity of central Los Angeles. Rancho is a little bland. Like most kids around here, I grew up loving video games, but not knowing what art was. My love for art started in high school where I took my first three years of ceramics. During this time, I learned basic ceramic techniques like hand building, soft slab, textures, and glaze mixing. I enjoyed these years immensely, and with encouragement from my family, friends, and ceramic teacher Kent Rothman, I went on to pursue Ceramic Studio Art here at Chaffey College. Ceramics is a way for me to realize complex and nuanced ideas that percolate from a variety of thoughts, interests, and dreams that I have. Much of who I am and the way I think can be traced back to health issues during my youth. At the age of eleven, I was diagnosed with a hybrid condition of Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn’s. This disease cause continuous bleeding within my intestines and extreme pain. Over the course of 5 years, I would spend large periods of time, months even, hospitalized and receiving treatments that my body ultimately rejected. In the end, I needed reconstructive surgery for my digestive tract. By this time, I was sixteen and in high school. Many of the psychological issues that underwrite my current work were established during my time in the hospital. Although I also work with different mediums, nothing gives me the immersive hands-on feeling of ceramics. The shear physicality of it is intensely therapeutic and beneficial to my health and well-being. When I work with clay I fall into a trance-like state, I call it the clay zone, where I can work for hours. In high school, one of the first sculptures we had to make was a heritage mask. This is a project where students create a mask based on their ethnicity. In some ways, this early work contributed to my current work. The work I have produced for this show presents different phobias in the metaphoric form of a mask. My interest in phobias came about through those early childhood experiences in hospital. As an adult, I’m now exploring some of those fears and anxieties through ceramic mask-making. I am particularly interested in the use of texture and color to bring out the specific characteristics of each phobia I have chosen to dwell upon. I have generally found that viewers of the work have a visceral reaction to them. The work makes them feel uncomfortable. This isn’t my reaction. I love their creepiness, the goriness, and particularly their Trypophobianess – a fear of clustered holes. Although it may not be clear to all of my viewers, these works dig deep into my childhood fears and help negate those memories.
Joel Hutchinson
Joel Hutchinson, The Pink Wallpaper, 2019, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 24 x 24 inches.
Being gay has had a major impact on many of my life experiences and how I view gender. I have always felt uncomfortable with many of the gender expectations and norms that have been imposed on me. This has caused me to fall in the “gray area� when it comes to gender and living up to the demands of masculinity. Through my art, I want to address the absurdity of personal lived experiences versus gender expectations. Society is often very binary in its views and norms, and the reality is there is more in between than just two sides. The juxtaposition of opposites in my work will demonstrate how when those two worlds are blended it creates something perhaps confusing but more inclusive of the groups that fall in the in-between. I think that the act of gender is a lot like an art form in and of itself. With a drama and flare that is reminiscent of drag, I want to put gender norms into question. Gender is like drag in that everyone uses gender as a type of costume to express something about themselves. My current work pokes fun at our notions of gender and how ridiculous these concepts can become when put in a certain context. I like to take certain gender stereotypes, place them within a seemingly odd context and then see what happens. I often find that amongst the collision of these worlds, that there is humor and beauty. My hope is that this can serve as a device for viewers to question, along with me, how we as a society come to terms with the way we manufacture sexual identity. This body of work is my way of coming to terms with some of society’s norms and how they relate to me personally. The process and tools I use for my work in many ways relate directly to the themes I am exploring. Paint is my primary medium of choice, specifically acrylic paint. Painting has a freedom to it that allows you to edit, transform, and manipulate simple material to create an idealized vision. I think gender identity can be thought of in a similar way. I incorporate mixed media into my paintings to express the element of flash that I see as essential to tell my stories. The concept of costuming also speaks to the use of mixed media, as a final veneer. Sampling is also important, such as the use of Americana imagery, to put my work in a certain cultural context. With sampling of gender stereotypes and references from popular culture, I am in control of my story of gender. By painting in this way, I feel I can create my own expression of identity, which should truly put into question the expectations of society.
Alaast Kamalabadi
Alaast Kamalabadi, still from Gnaw, 2019, HD video.
I come from a sociological background and it is my primary interest in art. My academic focus was on the sociology of gender and sexuality. My inquiry in art is to explore how rituals of beauty, like personal grooming and make-up application, can evolve from something alluring, desirable and sexual into something threatening, disconcerting, and dangerous. I want to alter preconceived notions of femininity and direct them towards less predictable ends. I am a video artist. I work with a time-based medium to reflect and skew how film and television currently portray women. Media in general, but particularly film and television, contribute to some of the absurd standards for femininity and beauty that influence women young and old. My videos use a similar language, but as a tool to revise some of these standards. They prompt viewers to rethink their ingrained senses of what feminine ideals mean. In one sequence, blue lips caress the camera sensually in much the same way that a chocolate advertisement might work in a product which will be consumed by the lips. As the video goes on, the mouth begins to bite, chew and consume not chocolate, but the sensuous blue lipstick on the lips. My hope is that this sequence of events at once appears desirable and sexual, and yet violent, sad, self-harming and ultimately, unsettling. I hope the viewers of my work will question the notion of vitality, particularly as it is portrayed by the beauty industry. Vitality is such a big term to unpack: fertility, beauty, youth; sterile, virgin, yet active and exuding sexuality—a sanitized notion, paradoxically desexed and resexed by the beauty industry in its commodification as something that can be packaged for over-the-counter consumption. It must remain just alluring enough, but not too threatening or charged, else it repulse the consumer. I’m trying to examine how, if we look more inward, this has produced a kind of neuroticism in women. To some extent, the beauty industry is aware of this and has attempted to hijack a certain ethical stance against some of the very standards they helped establish, to again market their products. CVS is now pushing something called “Beauty Marks” in their advertising that purports to inform consumers about whether or not the female image selling the product has undergone digital alteration. My work seeks to push that further and almost confront the viewer’s assumptions when viewing sexualized femininity through mediums like video. I frequently fixate on compulsions that manifest in gendered, repetitive, and self-destructive behaviors such as trichotillomania and lip-biting. It is present in every aspect of the feminine life—certainly mine. Even innocuous everyday beauty regimes seem to involve some manner of self-inflicted pain. And many facets of womanhood are wounding: periods, childbirth, sexual violation. Is womanhood inherently masochistic? Or do you need to be a masochist to be comfortably woman? All this shaving, waxing, plucking, scrubbing, exfoliating, and popping zits suggest a pathological need to chip away at something. All this need finds an outlet in consumption. My work, and the work on many subsequent women, owes a debt to Martha Rosler and her seminal video work Semiotics of the Kitchen. In many ways this piece broke many of the molds for not just art by women but for the discussion of womanhood in general. Things have changed tremendously since that video was made but many of the issues around gender and sexuality remain. My work exists in a more complicated cultural landscape and many of the arguments are much more nuanced and specific to our time. I not only want to add to the conversation on what women are in terms of representation but, I want represent the individuality of my generation’s perspective.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Institutional support for the Wignall Museum of Contemporary art is provided by Chaffey College, the School of Visual & Performing Arts, and the President’s Office. CHAFFEY COLLEGE GOVERNING BOARD Kathleen Brugger, President Gloria Negrete McLeod, Vice President Gary C. Ovitt, Clerk Lee C. McDougal, Member Katherine Roberts, Immediate Past President SUPERTINTENDENT/PRESIDENT Henry D. Shannon, Ph.D. DEAN VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS Jason Chevalier, Ph.D. FACULTY STUDENT INVITATIONAL, VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS Mark Lewis DIRECTOR/CURATOR WIGNALL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART Rebecca Trawick ASSISTANT CURATOR WIGNALL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART Roman Stollenwerk STUDIO TECHNICIAN AND MUSEUM PREPARATOR VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS Andrew Hadle PRINTING Chaffey College Print Shop WIGNALL MUSEUM MISSION STATEMENT The Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art is a teaching museum and interdisciplinary art space that cultivates direct engagement with works of art through exhibitions, education, and other community programming. WIGNALL MUSEUM VISION STATEMENT The Wignall Museum introduces Chaffey College students, faculty, staff, and community members to innovative contemporary art objects and ideas. By fostering critical thinking, visual literacy, discourse, and empathy, the Museum seeks to enhance the intellectual and cultural life of our community.
www.chaffey.edu/wignall Facebook • Instagram @wignallmuseum
VISION
Chaffey College: Improving lives through education.
MISSION STATEMENT
Chaffey College inspires hope and success by improving lives and our community in a dynamic, supportive, and engaging environment of educational excellence where our diverse students learn and benefit from foundation, career, and transfer programs.
5885 Haven Avenue Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91737