Brianna Rigg
If the Ocean Was Whiskey
October 29 to December 3, 2011
San Diego artist Brianna Rigg transforms the Space 4 Art galleries into an installation that examines the emotional content of historical artifacts.
About the show: Brianna Rigg’s installation, “If the Ocean was Whiskey,” is an immersive environment composed of artifacts that are reminiscent of the Old West, maritime culture, elementary school classrooms, and Southern Californian architecture. These artifacts, both collected and made by the artist, are arranged to create a mashup of vernaculars used to express Rigg’s imagined understandings of the historical narratives to which these artifacts refer. Driven by a desire to unveil the emotional aura surrounding the object, Rigg seeks to close the gap between the object and that which it represents by creating a contemporary mythology in the form of a blasted narrative that allows the viewer to dwell in the realm of fantasy. Objects are not on display in “If the Ocean was Whiskey.” Instead, objects inhabit the space. The environment mimics the objects within it, so that echoes of each form reverberate throughout the space to create a harmonious order that allows for the merging of the installation’s various themes.
About Rigg: Rigg was grew up in Ashland, Oregon. She attended The Evergreen State College where she received her Bachelors Degree in 2002. Brianna is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California San Diego. Recent exhibitions include; Grey Market, Fe Gallery, Pittsburg PA, 2011, Possessive/Obsessive, Art Produce Gallery, San Diego CA, 2011, Cross Disciplinary Productions, Deans Office, UCSD, La Jolla CA, 2011, Somatic Sensor, Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica CA, 2011, Mourning California, Periscope Projects, San Diego, 2010, Never Took the Drugs I Meant to Take, solo exhibition, VAF Gallery, UCSD, La Jolla, 2009, and The Dark Tower, Compactspace Gallery, Los Angeles CA 2009.
Marie Thibeault
Emanations: Paintings and Works on Paper
September 3 to October 15, 2011
Los Angeles artist Marie Thibeault will make her San Diego debut Sept. 3 2011 at Space 4 Art with “Emanations, Paintings and Works on Paper.” Thibeault’s work shows complex and multi-layered abstractions of dramatic urban dissolution, such as the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Her approach is rich and painterly; the images become jumping-off points for improvisation. The large oil canvases shimmer with color and simultaneously jar with staccato gestural strokes. The meaning of the physical destruction is never out of sight, and with it a metaphysical angst and destabilization. Within the paintings’ layers, patterns of continuity emerge and retreat: the viewer is ultimately surprised to find balance and a new kind of beauty.
In 2008, Constance Mallinson wrote in Art in America: “The sumptuous interplay between abstraction, representation and text in the works implies that no single language is adequate to fully convey the complex experience of natural or even human? made disasters. Engaging a spectacular artistic tradition, however, Thibeault asks that all the possibilities be kept open.”
Thibeault is a professor of art at California State University at Long Beach. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work can be viewed at http://mariethibeault.com/.
Her most recent exhibitions have been at the George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco, The Torrance Art Museum and the Jancar Gallery in Los Angeles. She has a bachelor’s degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and masters of fine art from University of California, Berkeley.
Drawing Expanse
June 11 to July 17, 2011
Space 4 Art’s first open call for submissions was a survey of drawing. The show was an
overview of the expansive potential of drawing in the contemporary art practice. Drawing
continues to evolve as a medium, encompassing flat work, sculpture, performance,
photography and video. From the most traditional, to the most experimental, all forms of
drawing share the common language of mark making, gesture, notation, and line. Drawing
Expanse illuminated the myriad ways in which drawing continues to influence and affect us.
ADRIFT, A RAFT
April 1 to 30, 2011
It’s transparent. It’s opaque. It’s a veneer. It’s all veneer. It’s a curtain pulled back. It’s a window. It’s refuse. It’s a refusal. It’s making the simple complicated; it’s making the complicated simple. It’s continuity. It’s dissent. It’s heart smart. It’s book art. It’s static. It’s visceral. It’s revealing. It’s concealing. It’s a language. It’s us. It’s the anti-community. It’s forced community. It’s communal. It’s play. It’s a joke. It’s us.
Adrift, a Raft, a group show curated for Space 4 Art by UCSD Art History PhD student Rujeko Hockley, brings together the work of eight MFA candidates in UCSD’s Visual Arts Department. Conceived as a complement to MFA Open Studios at UCSD (April 2, 2011), this exhibition has emerged out of an urgent need to speak across the divide, whether that be MFA vs. PhD, UCSD vs. San Diego, or the Visual Arts Department vs. the greater San Diego arts community. It is too convenient to believe that these divisions are real, and absolute; it is inaccurate to conclude that we have no shared goals, that there are no places where we blur and overlap. However, it takes effort to forge community out of disparity and difference, to meld your concerns with those of your neighbor. This applies as equally to the connections made among students thrown randomly together by a single common interest, i.e. the pursuit of a degree in a particular program, as it does to the connections that do or do not, may or may yet, exist between us and the larger world. There is nothing to link these eight artists; there is everything to link these eight artists. They have nothing in common; they have everything in common. Adrift, a Raft finds them together, each developing an idiosyncratic vision of their relationship to one another and to their community. They form a society unseen, hidden in plain sight. Though here, standing next to one another, speaking a silent, shared language, perhaps they are revealed.
ARTISTS:
JAMLAH ABDUL-SABUR
SADIE BARNETTE
MIKE CALWAY-FAGEN
ROB DUARTE
ADRIENNE GARBINI
CHRISTOPHER KARDAMBKIS
HYEYEON KIM
STEPHANIE LIE
PERFORMANCES BY:
ASSEMBLY OF MAZES
ASH ELIZA SMITH
ISLAND BOY
THE FIFTH SEASON
February 24 to March 26, 2011
Gallery director for La Jolla’s Quint Contemporary Art, Ben Strauss-Malcolm, curated a show of five Space 4 Art artists. As we celebrated our first year, he honored this achievement and looks to the future of our organization.
The ARTISTS
Mike Calway-Fagen www.MikeCalway-Fagen.com
May-ling Martinez www.martinezart.blogspot.com/
Joshua Jon Miller http://www.sdspace4art.org/2011/01/joshua-jon-miller/
Morgan Manduley www.morganmanduley.com
Claire Zitzow, www.clairezitzow.com
JUDIT HERSKO and LEA DENNIS
December 4, 2010 to February 12, 2011
Judit Hersko: “Pages from the Book of the Unknown Explorer” examines the history of Antarctic exploration and science based on the artist’s research and experiences in the region. In the piece, which includes suspended, translucent objects, projections, and cast silicone book pages, Hersko inserts a fictitious woman explorer into real historical events. The unknown explorer’s obsession with a microscopic planktonic snail that resides in Antarctic waters connects this work to the artist’s collaboration with scientists studying ocean acidification and climate change. Hersko has an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an Associate Professor at California State University, San Marcos and lives in San Diego.
Lea Dennis: ”Tremendous Effort” is a body of sculpture and photography that results from Dennis’s own range of idealism and doubt in the face of both personal and political realities she would like to change, and the application of passionate energy to futile outcomes. In this work, handmade boxing gloves symbolizing strength and aggression are undermined by the delicate nature of the material used to make them: paper. A series of photographs capture the frailty and beauty of the carefully made objects. Finally, a hand-fabricated, full-size fighting ring will be suspended from the ceiling. Lea received a BA from San Diego State University in Fine Arts. She currently works and resides in San Diego, California.
SOAP & FEATHERS
September 2010
Our fall gallery show featured the grotesque, pretty paintings of Walter Wojtyla, a towering sculpture of whittled tree branches, and stretched intimate attire by John Dillemuth, and the elegant, primordial work of emerging Tijuana artist, Griselda Rosas.
Thanks to each of these artists for sharing their work with Space 4 Art and the San Diego community.
