California College of the Arts Fine Arts Department
Graduate Program in Fine Arts
Make Art/Work is an exhibition of CCA staff members. In its physical form, this exhibition presents the individual practices that the diverse staff at CCA explores in their personal time outside of work.
San Francisco Bay Area artist Brandon Shimmel is interested in the trappings and seductive science of consumer marketing and retail display. He uses materials associated with window dressing (polished aluminum, colored plexiglass, pearlescent colors and Trompe-L’oeil surfaces) to extend his picture plane beyond the traditional window frame and by implication, to comment on the manner in which the object of desire is leveraged in consumer culture. His ability to successfully meld his painted surfaces with the partial surround of his framing devices extends the aura and reach of his imagery.
From Glen Helfand’s catalog essay, “Sometimes he paints seductive, painstakingly detailed, patterns that could be lifted from designer handbags or Burberry houndstooth. These motifs accessorize the paintings, but also complete them. They also cross the economic spectrum—from Burberry to Blue Blockers, the low rent sunglasses that inspire a 2016 painting of the same name—in which orange plexi suggests a filter through which we perceive aspects of the artist’s vision.”
Shimmel is a 2015 MFA graduate of California College of the Arts. This is his second solo show with the gallery. A 50-page color catalog with an essay by Bay Area critic and curator Glen Helfand accompanies the exhibition. The show will be on view from January 6 — February 2, 2017. An opening reception will be held at the gallery, located at 315 Potrero Avenue, on Saturday, January 7, from 4 — 6 PM.
http://georgelawsongallery.com/exhibitions.html
The CCA Textiles Program is pleased to present its thirteenth annual exhibition, which fills all four rooms of CCA’s College Avenue Galleries.
The exhibition includes the work of CCA graduate students who work in and around textiles, embroideries produced by undergraduate students in Narrative Stitches (taught by Anne Wolf), and weavings created by undergraduate students in Storylines (taught by Tali Weinberg).
We are also delighted to include the work of Ruth Tabancay, the fourth annual Lia Cook Jacquard Artist-in-Residence, who produced work on the TC-1 loom in the CCA Weaving Studios in October 2016.
Exhibition and events offer a bolstering sense of community in the midst of a tumultuous political era.
On the eve of the inauguration, and into the first days of a new regime, Resistance Training, a presentation of recent a new artwork and activism, provides a needed opportunity to gather aesthetic and artist community forces and brace for what comes next. Organized by curator Glen Helfand, the exhibition focuses on aesthetic gestures that offer models of resistance to negative shifts and ideas for action, be they poetic, ideological, or forceful protest. The location on the Mills College campus offers the opportunity to create a space for gathering that draws upon intellectual resources and dialogs.
In the realm of fitness, the term resistance training refers to exercising muscles using an opposing force. The official transition of power to a game changing new U.S. president, which occurs on January 20, is a large, heavyweight force to oppose with the purpose of becoming stronger. Various communities, artists and activists, are banding together in dialogue and creative action to engage strategies for survival in what promises to be a challenging period.
The exhibition will include artworks, actions, and demos of strategies for survival. Artists include Luke Butler, Ana Teresa Fernandez, Sarah Hotchkiss, Omar Mismar, Melissa Wyman, Rachel Weidinger, Andrea Bowers, Alex Molinari, and others. Resistance Training also will include Post Fax, a faxing campaign targeting office workers, interns, and others with pertinent messages sent through a form more tactile, and perhaps urgent, than social media; and be an affiliated venue for 100 Days, an artist-organized calendar featuring one daily artistic response to Trump’s first 100 days in office.
The symbol of the empty vessel has often signified both the capacity for plenitude and a waiting to be filled–a quintessential yin and yang fraught with tension yet predicated upon balance. Posing such tropes for dissection and contemplation is at the core of Tyler Eash’s latest body of multimedia works, a microcosm in and of itself which seeks to grapple with the human condition at large. Rife with a certain lightness of being, the works are as earnest as they are pressing–an exercise in art making for a higher power, and a meditation upon the soul.
Random Parts is pleased to host the exhibition, snail, snail, schnell – start down the hubble pinggg a group show with works by the German, Hamburg based artists Carl Gross, Timo Roter and Christian Rothmaler.
The exhibition includes paintings, sculptural objects and live Gastropods mined from their infamous St. Pauli neighborhood.
Read My Pins presents a remarkable range of more than 200 pins and brooches from the personal collection of Madeleine Albright. The majority of these pieces were collected and worn during Albright’s service as US Ambassador to the United Nations (1993–1997) and as the first female Secretary of State (1997–2001), under President Bill Clinton. The assortment is eclectic, international, and representative of nearly a century of jewelry design. Yet the jewelry’s true interest lies not in their materials or monetary value but in the roles they played during her political service: Albright used her pins as silent yet visually outspoken codes to foreign officials and the press. Pins could be adopted for various reasons—a shining sun or a patriotic flag would reinforce a positive alliance with the United States, for example, while more difficult negotiations might bring out wasps or snakes.
Albright served the US government during a remarkable period in history, and many of the notable landmarks of her tenure can be decoded through the visual iconography of her pins. These pieces document and symbolize moments of political upheaval and also convey the patriotism of this Czechoslovakian-born diplomat. Whereas George H. W. Bush famously said “Read my lips” to convey a campaign promise, Albright encouraged, “Read my pins,” demonstrating that jewelry had become part of her personal diplomatic arsenal. These objects became delicate instruments with which she applied pressure during intense negotiations, and into which she invested humor as she represented the United States on the international stage.
There are many forms of memory: memories of events we have experienced, memories we have heard as family stories and from popular culture, even memories of an imagined future. The twenty-four artists in From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art work with memories that are not their own. They remember and recall stories that were never theirs and assemble them in a variety of media to be seen, heard, and experienced by others. At once intimate and shared, the memories they work with are second-hand experiences, culled from a photograph they saw, or a story they heard, or even a once subconscious memory. The artists are secondary witnesses to the past events they use in their works, and it is precisely this distance in time and space that allows them to offer powerful narratives open to a wide range of interpretation and expression.
In the decades following World War II, Japanese artists were responding to Americanization, uneven economic growth, and an expanded sense of photography’s applications. Though photography had a presence in pre-war Japan, it was during the 1970s and 1980s that Japanese artists increasingly turned to photography as a method of expression. As the medium diversified, it developed to encompass a wide range of perspectives and methodologies ranging from straight photography, to conceptual and constructed image-making.
Featuring predominantly vintage black-and-white photography, many of the pictures comprising Black Sun/Red Moon are serene in their general impression, yet taken as a whole, the images hint at the quiet tension surrounding a country’s ongoing modernization. Several artists in the exhibition look outward at their homeland and abroad, depicting complicated, changing environments that are both confrontational and wistful; a tightly packed subway provides the counterpoint to a depopulating countryside. Other photographers look inward, staging performances for the camera and revealing charged intimate moments.
Rather than showcasing Japan through a consistent documentation of its people and places, Black Sun/Red Moon builds a portrait of the photographic legacy of a range of Japanese artists, each with a distinct perspective on landscape, portraiture, abstraction, and candid street photography. By situating photographs from this pivotal era of Japanese photography alongside the works of representative pre-war photographers and promising contemporary artists, Black Sun/Red Moon traces the arc of an adapting nation and offers a glimpse at its creative influence.
This exhibition features works by Daido Moriyama, Eikoh Hosoe, Erika Yoshino, Hitoshi Tsukiji, Ikko Narahara, Kansuke Yamamoto, Kiyoshi Suzuki, Masahiro Kodaira, Michio Yamauchi, Nakaji Yasui, Naoya Hatakeyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, Risaku Suzuki, Shomei Tomatsu, and Yutaka Takanashi.
November 4 – December 3, 2016
Facundo Argañaraz
Peter Bonde
Ry David Bradley
Chris Hood
Alex Ito
Adrianne Rubenstein
