Opening Reception with Space 4 Art Open Studios: 7-10 pm, Saturday, April 27, 2013.

In an international group exhibition, Space 4 Art presented contemporary artwork that addressed themes concerning the unknown, the occult, and the metaphysical. The artists selected were representative of visual art’s ability to speak about and create experiences of the extraordinary for the viewer, of realms of unknowing, the ritualistic, and conjuration.

By reimagining the unknown, the artists in this exhibition strive to make the invisible concrete in their various modes of production: through video, sculpture, collage, and texts. But the materials and imagery used surpass their everyday lives and are forced to behave in unexpected ways. A forest becomes a site of unresolved terror, collages become maps for rituals, plaster figurines harbor “haunted dirt,” hidden light creates shifts in perception, video montage and cloud computing become a vessel for paranormal disruption, and finally, “erratic events” are “fixed” in place in the form of translucent sculptural waves.

Exhibiting Artists:

• Carl Diehl (Portland, OR)
• Kristen Gallerneaux (Detroit, MI / San Diego, CA)
• Adam Nelson (Baltimore, MD)
• Christopher Richmond (Los Angeles, CA)
• Vabianna Santos (San Diego, CA)
• Kandis Williams (Berlin, Germany)

The exhibition is curated by Vabianna Santos and Kristen Gallerneaux.

OPEN HOUSE

Show to run: February 2 – March 9, 2013

Opening Reception w/ Space 4 Art Open Studios: 6 – 10 pm Saturday, February 2^nd, 2013

Exhibiting artists: Jamilah Abdul-Sabur, Ingrid Hernandez, and Melissa Inez Walker.

 In this exhibition, Space 4 Art brought together several artists that explore space through active and imagined action in photography and large scale installation.  Open House was an exhibition that allows viewers a chance to delve further into their relationship with the spaces presented and the environments the artworks help construct.  The artists featured use constructed places, as other artists might use a particular pigment, to explore the nuance of existence.  Space and those within are deeply intertwined; one’s physical body is an integral component of one’s surroundings.  Even in dreams, when a person is immersed in a place between creation and memory, one can feel a brick wall solidly, regardless of how similar the brick’s ephemerality is to any other whim or remembrance.  Because, between dream and reality there’s no difference in the way that information is processed.  The space of experience afforded us by our memories and fantasies are real places worth exploring.  The artists, Jamilah Abdul-Sabur, Ingrid Hernandez, and Melissa Inez Walker, utilize the idea of space to convey diverging theories on how people exist within their environment and how space itself negotiates its own representation.

About the Artists:

Jamilah Abdul-Sabur constructs spaces that are not quite rooms; though it may have a wall and a roof it is more a dream of a place, that’s both familiar and foreign to many.  While describing her work Jamilah has said “The house, the fish, and the salt are the three things that have remained with me since my first visit out to the Mojave Desert/Salton Sea region. I was walking, and walking on dead fish. So you walk on this substance, this thing that has intact anatomy. It becomes the floor, the ground in the space.”  A local emerging artist and recent graduate of UCSD, her work explores the transmutable nature of how space exists.  Abdul-Sabur will construct a large scale installation specific to Space 4 Art’s gallery for the Open House exhibition.

Ingrid Hernandez explores the use of space, construction materials, and the definition of living space through direct photography.  Her work aims to subvert the stereotypical piteous exoticism of current documentary photography concerning poverty by focusing on the domestic space of her subjects.  In this more intimate space the psychological geography of the inhabitants takes precedent over any fetishization.

Melissa Inez Walker investigates the role and representation of women–the women in her photographs inhabit a persona found in the domestic interior.  Utilizing the concept of constructed identities her work explores the tools of such labor ironically through typical construction garb as well as more delicately through the expressions she coaches from herself and her models.  One can see the space for their identities under construction and mirrored back for the viewer to take part in.

Some parental discretion is advised.

TENANT SERIES: Part I

Show to run: January 2 – 19, 2013

Receptions: Jan. 5, Jan. 12, & Jan. 19

Space 4 Arts’ gallery has shown works from all over the world, the country, and southern California.  But to kick-off the new year, we were proud to take the opportunity to showcase some of the artists that reside at Space 4 Art.  Through a series of one week group shows we  explored the relationships between artists working in concurrence over various lengths of time and through a wide array of materials.  We call this the Tenant Series.   The first Tenant Series was a group of three shows that featured 10 different artists.

Exhibiting artists: Josh Miller, Chris Warr, Asha Sheshadri, Van Tran, Mindy Donner, Jenna Ann, Max Daily, Jessica Rose, Linda Litteral, and Ben DeHart.

 

Beast Mode

Reception: January 5, 2013, 6 pm – 10 pm

Show Run: Jan. 2 – Jan. 5, 2013

Two-man show featuring brutal sculptures and formal paintings.

Josh Miller

Chris Warr

 

One thing led to another…

Reception: January 12, 2013, 6 pm – 10 pm, 5 performances, $5 suggested donation

Show Run: Jan. 9 – Jan. 12, 2013

The San Diego Guild of Puppetry and Space 4 Art presented 6 tenants who create time-based works through objects, puppetry, performance, video, and music.

Asha Sheshadri

Van Tran

Mindy Donner

Jenna Ann

Max Daily

Chris Warr

Reflections

Reception: January 19, 2013, 6 pm – 10 pm

Show Run: Jan. 16 – Jan. 19, 2013

This show featured three painters from Space 4 Art. In Reflections each artist reveals their perspective of and reflection upon society through their preferred medium.

Jessica Rose

Linda Litteral

Ben DeHart 

JAMAIS VU

On Saturday, November 10, Space 4 Art hosted the opening reception for Jamais Vu an imaginative and skillfully crafted exhibition featuring the work of accomplished Los Angeles artists, Michelle Carla Handel and Michael Arata, and locally renowned artist, Ernest Silva. For this exhibit, the Space 4 Art curatorial committee selected sculpture, photos, and paintings that foster consideration of the darker side of our collective identities. Standing before these works, viewers are transfixed by a moment of paramnesia or Jamais Vu – a disorder of memory characterized by the illusion that the familiar is being encountered for the first time.

The opening reception of this exhibit also included open artist studios, refreshments, and a wild evening of onstage multimedia performances and experimental music curated by local visual/video artist Mnstrpsy. Performances included Dancing Strangers, a post-punk, art-rock influenced duo from Tijuana and Innerds, a math-lounge duo who claim influence from Zandar.

Show to run: November 10 to December 15, 2012
Opening Reception: 6 – 10 PM Saturday, November 10, 2012

ABOUT THE EXHIBIT:

These artists operate between two worlds. The first is that of sensual beauty–the voluptuous curved forms that exist within Michael Arata’s and Michele Carla Handel’s works we recognize as playful and pleasant. Ernest Silva’s work has its own romantic charm: the perceived innocence of the past. However, immediately after seeing the works, if not simultaneously, we are confronted with something inward, uncomfortable, and perhaps disturbing. Familiar forms are skewed just enough to become perverse. In Arata’s sculptures, cartoonish forms call attention to invisible spaces and belie sinister distortions. Carla Handel’s works are uncomfortable states of mind made real, with our insecurities anthropomorphized in abstract, primal sculptures. Ernest Silva’s paintings emphasize the use of images to trigger speculation based on personal experience. The common denominators are the handmade, the emotive, and the sense that they may have been imagined, based on observation, drawn from art history, or recalled from memory.

The moment of indecision in describing or identifying the forms in Jamais Vu is a moment of searching among myriad subconscious associations, then sorting and naming them. We are all too familiar with the bittersweet, but it never ceases to awe the senses. We know how dichotomy works, but we are never prepared to deal with it.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Michael Arata, Artist/Chair at West LA College department of Arts & Humanities. Recently had his first museum-scale retrospective Arataland! Hosted by the Beacon Arts Building. He’s been making painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and installation in Los Angeles for the last three decades. In the words of critic Ryan Stabile, “His work is a complex and idiosyncratic vision – darkly humorous, playfully erotic, conceptually quirky, and often confrontational.”

Michelle Carla Handel recently received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University. She received her BFA from Parsons, The New School for Design, New York. Since graduating, she has shown steadily in Los Angeles at notable locations such as Weekend Gallery and Garboushian Gallery.

Ernest Silva is a long time painting professor at the University of California, San Diego. His paintings, sculptures, and public installations have shown nationally since the 70′s. In his words, his work “is a personal view, assembled to invite a consideration of human nature. Not the sum of objective descriptions but the combining of subjective experience and perceptions of the objective world.”

THE NEW LISTENERS

On September 8, 2012, Space 4 Art will host the opening reception for an unprecedented exhibit for its gallery to coincide with Art San Diego Contemporary Art Fair. This daring and intellectually stimulating show titled The New Listeners will feature the work of notable interdisciplinary artists, Jesse Sugarmann and Jack Ryan. Sugarmann’s bold works focus on mechanical interpretations of the human body whereas Ryan’s innovative projects deal with mechanized representations of the human brain. Combined, these two systems of work create an abstract and absurd (yet somewhat thorough) physical reinterpretation of human form and function, and offer a vital reading of a mechanically quantified humanity. The opening reception will feature 37 open artist studios, refreshments, and an onstage performance by Author & Punisher, an industrial doom and drone metal, one man band utilizing primarily custom fabricated machines/controllers and speakers.

Show to run: September 8 to October 13, 2012
Opening Reception: 6 – 10 PM Saturday, September 8, 2012

ABOUT THE EXHIBIT:
Jesse Sugarmann engages the automobile as a totem of humanity, employing the landscapes of automotive design and car culture as conduits to social understanding. According to him, “Automobiles exemplify a fantastical and idealized sense of humanity, one prone to whimsy yet tethered to practicality. They embody the best and worst of human ingenuity and desire, offering a timeline display of both human absurdity and sincerity.” For The New Listeners, Sugarmann will be showing two videos from his 2011 series titled Silver Anniversary – a series of active monuments commemorating the Space Shuttle Challenger and re-enacting its disaster. In addition to these videos, the artist will be exhibiting a sculptural installation titled Wake Up Sleeping Giant in which he elevates automobiles into the reflective ridge of the desert horizon using an illusion of mirrors.

Working with drawing, sculpture, multi-media design and electronics, Jack Ryan’s work triangulates between personal history, the immersive qualities of sound, and cultural conditions of perception and understanding. While the visual world dominates experience, sound provides him with opportunities to explore a deeply physical awareness of space and environment. His most recent projects explore sound and visual form’s interrelationship and the possibility of the visual and acoustic as one singular aesthetic form. The works Ryan will exhibit for the New Listeners use strategies of bi-lateral stimulation and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) a therapeutic process used on trauma victims, often soldiers, to create an environment linking brain hemispheres for purposes of addressing trauma. Ryan uses principles of EMDR to shape installations that can influence neurological states from sound and light patterns.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Jesse Sugarmann is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, performance, sculpture, and fibers. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in venues such as the Getty Institute, el Museo Tamayo, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Banff Center, Filmbase Dublin, Human Resources LA, Drift Station, and the 2010 Portland Biennial. His artwork has been written about in publications including ArtForum, Art Papers, ART LTD, Art Cards, Art Fag City, Art Car Nation, ArtSlant, and the New York Times.  Jesse is represented by Portland’s Fourteen30 Contemporary and is the recipient of a 2012 Creative Capital film/video grant.  Jesse lives and works in Bakersfield, California.

Jack Ryan is an artist and independent curator living in the Pacific Northwest. He is a co-founder of Fugitive Projects based out of Nashville and a member of Ditch Projects in Springfield OR. Solo show exhibition history includes Maison Laurentine (Paris France), Archer Gallery (Vancouver WA) and Cascade Gallery (Portland OR). Group shows include The American University Museum (Washington DC) Powerhouse (Memphis), Brooks Museum (Memphis), Crawlspace (Seattle), Hunter Museum (Chattanooga), The Frist Center (Nashville), and Consolidated Works (Seattle). Recent screenings include The Hirshhorn Museum (Washington D.C), MICA (Baltimore), The IMAFY (Cairo Egypt), Dublin Electronics Arts Festival (Ireland), Ausstellungsraum Klingental (Basel, Switzerland), 21 Grand (San Francisco), and The Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.). Research awards recently brought him to residencies in Iceland and to the New Media Institute’s Interactive Screen in Banff, Canada. Ryan received his MFA from the University of Georgia and previous to that he studied as an undergraduate at The University of Oregon and Hunter College in NYC.

Author & Punisher is an industrial doom and drone metal, one man band utilizing primarily custom fabricated machines/controllers and speakers.  Tristan Shone has performed and exhibited these machines in festivals and exhibitions in the United States and abroad extensively. He released his third album, a sculpture/art based album entitled “Drone Machines” in 2010 on Heart & Crossbone Records out of Tel-Aviv.  Author & Punisher’s newest record Ursus Americanus was released April 2012 and focuses primarily on Dub Machines. Drone/Dub Machines are custom made and fabricated from raw materials and utilize open source circuitry. The devices draw heavily on aspects of industrial automation, robotics and mechanical tools and devices, focusing on the eroticism of interaction with machine.  The machines require significant force from the performer, aligning he or she with the plodding drone and doom influenced sounds that are created. Alongside fabricating machines and composing sound for performance, Tristan Shone works at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (http://ncmir.ucsd.edu) as a mechanical engineer and the Center for Research and Computing in the Arts (http://crca.ucsd.edu) and at the University of California, San Diego as a researcher in sound interface design.

DO ANYTHING
OPENING RECEPTION
JULY 13 to August 12, 2012

The centerpiece to a multitude of events taking place at Space 4 Art from July 12 through 15, 2012 is the exhibit Do Anything. The show features work by individual artists and collectives who focus on do-it-yourself publishing and print projects. Employing alternative methods of production and distribution to create books, zines, and video work, the exhibiting artists work with a variety of themes to actively engage a wide audience. Opening during Comic-Con, this exhibition focuses on artistic practices that push the boundaries of contemporary publishing. The opening reception will feature a screening of Strange Attractors:  Investigations in Non-Humanoid Extraterrestrial Sexualities on Space 4 Art’s outdoor stage.

Artists and collectives exhibiting at Space 4 Art (located at 325 15^th Street in San Diego’s East Village) include: Bettie Breitweiser, The Institute of Extraterrestrial Sexuality and Encyclopedia Destructica, Juliacks, Justseeds, Darin Klein, Ed Luce, Ed Piskor, Louis M. Schmidt, Tom Scioli, Mary Tremonte, and Unicorn Mountain. As a satellite to the exhibition, Double Break Gallery (located at 1821 5th Avenue in Bankers Hill) will be showing new zines by: Josh Atlas, Jessica Greenfield, Ben Hernstrom, Jennifer Murray, and Jessica Vaughn.

A panel discussion on July 15 from 7 to 9 PM at Space 4 Art will feature comic-artists Ed Piskor (creator of the graphic novel, Wizzywig and the web-comic Brain Rot), Ed Luce (creator of the comic books Wuvable Oaf and Henry & Glenn Forever & Ever). Also at Space 4 Art, a zine discussion on August 4 from 2 to 4 PM will feature artists Darin Klein and Louis M. Schmidt in a discussion of creating and collecting zines.

About the Curator:
Christopher Kardambikis is an artist exploring an absurd mythology for the future through drawings, paintings, and hand-made books.  He has co-founded two artist book projects: the Pittsburgh-based Encyclopedia Destructica and the San Diego-based Gravity and Trajectory. He has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, and the Pittsburgh Center of the Arts. Kardambikis received his MFA at the University of California, San Diego and his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University.

*THIS EXHIBIT CONTAINS ADULT CONTENT

MY PLACE LIKE HOME
June 16 – 30, 2012

Featuring artists culled from an open call to all Southern California MFA programs, My Place Like Home investigates explorations of interpersonal relationships, particularly of the family – blood relations and the families we create – as well as the relationship to and perception of one’s own body. It is through these explorations that the artists reveal the process of finding one’s sense of place, both in the family as well as in the broader social and perceptual world. The opening reception will feature an outdoor “living room” with vintage home movies from the exhibiting artists and Space 4 Art tenants playing on the big screen.
Opening Reception June 16
6 – 10 pm Saturday

Featuring artists culled from an open call to all Southern California MFA programs, My Place Like Home investigates explorations of interpersonal relationships, particularly of the family – blood relations and the families we create – as well as the relationship to and perception of one’s own body. It is through these explorations that the artists reveal the process of finding one’s sense of place, both in the family as well as in the broader social and perceptual world. The opening reception will feature an outdoor “living room” with vintage home movies from the exhibiting artists and Space 4 Art tenants playing on the big screen.

About the Curator:

Sascha Crasnow is a San Diego-based curator, art historian and writer. She received her MA with a concentration in contemporary art from Hunter College in 2009 and is currently pursuing her PhD with a focus on contemporary Middle Eastern art and politics at the University of California,San Diego.

About the Artists:

Veronique d’Entremont is completing her MFA at UCLA this year. Her photograms and sculpture both reveal investigations of the artist’s body. In different ways, the artist leaves her impression on the works, projecting, or leaving a trace of herself behind. In her in-progress comic book, some pages of which are included in the exhibition, she visualizes a conversation with her grandmother, which primarily focuses on her practice, but exposes elements of her relationship with her grandmother, and her late mother.

Janna Ireland is finishing her first year at UCLA. Her Altars to Southern California depict the artist in her husband’s family’s backyard in the San Fernando Valley. Filled with imagery of pools and palms – clear symbols of Southern California – Ireland’s work investigates her place within this new city and the family of which she is now a member.

Jae Hee Lee is completing her MFA at UCSB this year. Her video, To Remember My Grandma, depicts the artist brushing her teeth while subtitles recall stories of both her and her mother’s relationship with Lee’s grandmother, who passed away three years ago in South Korea, a country they had left nine years previous. The performance explores the memories of these relationships and the changing perceptions, particularly after they are gone, of the people who make up our families.

Tiffany Ma is concluding her third year at CSUF. Her small “animal” sculptures, with their Dali-esque long spindly legs and absence of head, remove what the artist deems to be the root of judgment in our society – the face. In doing so, Ma imagines a world where living things would exist without this capacity for negative critique. In her Home series, Ma manipulates black and white copies of home images from a 1970s House Beautiful magazine, and couples them with terse text expressing doleful notions of home, self and family.

Vabianna Santos is completing her MFA at UCSD this year. In her work Agree to Be With Yourself, two hot pink amps, poised on an altar, are linked together, the treble knob oscillating back and forth resulting in a rhythmic “breath.” The sculpture emphasizes the absence of a body, and perhaps specifically that of a youthful teen music fan who no longer exists having grown out of her novelty amplifiers.

Jessica Sledge is completing her MFA at UCSD this year. Her current project centers on her relationship with her neighbor, Judy McCloud. In her three-channel 16mm film, Sledge searches through the contents of McCloud’s garage, emptying it of its contents: a huge collection of materials for making lamps, a former craft of McCloud’s. The two women perform ritualistic tasks, and create new objects out of these materials – McCloud passing along both her knowledge and personal artifacts to Sledge. These new constructions are neither purely Sledge nor McCloud but a true union of the two – a representation of their relationship.

IMMATERIAL ERGONOMICS
April 14, to May 26, 2012

Opening reception - April 14
6 to 10 PM

Immaterial Ergonomics brings together four artists from both coasts who share an affinity for material transcendence. Their innovative, contemporary work represents a range of hybrid practices: sculpted canvases, painted videos, printed sculptures and digital processes, which turn traditional mediums on their head. The four artists share a goal: to head toward representational objects, only to sidestep the familiar at the last moment. And drift past.

The work of Brice Bischoff, Ryan Perez, Matt Sheridan, and Maria Walker will be celebrated with an incredible reception that includes high-caliber music performance art by UC San Diego art teacher Michael Trigilio, and a one-night-only installation by San Diego artist Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli.

Inside:
Brice Bischoff is a Los Angeles-based artist who transforms photographs of natural settings into the surreal with experimental techniques. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007. His work has appeared in exhibitions in New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., St. Louis, Tokyo, and Warsaw. In 2007, he was a member of the art collective, Self Made, who ventured on a 22-city art tour across the United States and Canada. His work is in the collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art and has been featured in the textbook Pinhole Photography, Fourth Edition.

Ryan Perez, who was born in Oceanside but now lives in Los Angeles, received his BFA from Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design in 2008 and is currently an MFA candidate for the spring of 2012 at University of California, Riverside. He uses materials and techniques common to both commercial and art production. His sculptures and photographs attempts to speak towards how seduction and desire is located in both the mass produced and the art object. Acknowledging an affinity with the commercial, while slightly diverging from it, his work flirts with ideas dealing with the surface of high modernism and suggests hints of how the individual deals with mass industry/culture.

Matt Sheridan of Los Angeles works in animation, video installation, short film, painting and collage. His work focuses on the power relations between bodies and information. He received his MFA from Art Center College of Design. While working for MTV, Nickelodeon and the NBA, he also taught animation at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, the School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute.  He has shown in the USA, UK, Brazil, Iran and India, the Netherlands and France. Matt Sheridan’s portion of Immaterial Ergonomics was made possible in part by an ARC grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation.

Maria Walker lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She builds complex stretchers that involve irregular pieces of wood poking out against the canvas. The canvas forms topography of peaks and valleys that the artist responds to with acrylic paint. The stretcher dictates the flow of water and acrylic paint across the surface to create the image; She received an MFA in 2006 from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in Elkins Park, Pa.

Onstage:
Michael Trigilio (starvelab) is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and co-founder of the long-running experimental Neighborhood Public Radio project. The starvelab music he will perform at Space 4 Art has been described as a rocket ship celebration across a thousand hallucinatory emotional landscapes. He recently showed work from his Speculative Religious Electronics project at Disclosed unLocation in South Park, San Diego, and was part of the Wireless exhibition at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in November, 2011. He teaches courses in Media and Sound at University of California, San Diego. Some sounds and information are available at starvelab.com.

Outside (in the cubes):
Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli’s “My Pink Room” is an installation that will be up for one night only. Lavatelli works in installation, performance, and video to examine femininity and expectations in cinema— how moving image has fragmented realities and female identity. The Pink Room is a stage for the construction of an identity, just as girls fill their room with objects to dictate who they are with these accouterments of gender.

 

 

 

 

HYDRODYNAMICA:

REMEMBER THE FUTURE

January 28 to March 9, 2012

Space 4 Art and Loft 9 Gallery present a Pacific Standard Time exhibition exploring early surfboard design and how the use of surfboard materials influenced mid-century sculptors and designers.

The show was conceived and curated by Richard Kenvin, of Loft 9 Gallery. Kenvin is the director of the Hydrodynamica Project and has surfed in San Diego for over forty years. The exhibition focuses primarily on the work of two Southern California surfboard pioneers: Bob Simmons and Carl Ekstrom.

Simmons’ board design and early use of composite construction processes in board building from 1949 to 1954 parallels California’s post-war modern design movement and profoundly influenced modern surfing and skateboarding. Andy Warhol considered Ekstrom’s surfboards works of art and purchased two in 1968 for props in the campy surfsploitation flick “San Diego Surf.” The boards helped inspire an explosion of revolutionary surfboard design in San Diego that culminated with the designs of Steve Lis in the late 1960’s.

The exhibition will feature original Simmons planing hulls and other objects he made, including the boomerangs he used for experimentation. Boards from Ekstrom, Lis, and Nicholas Mirandon will also be exhibited, along with photographs and short film clips. Viewers will be invited to ponder the relationship of these designs to California art and design from 1945 to 1980.  Once overlooked, surfboard design is currently experiencing a worldwide renaissance that is changing surfers’ perspectives on the past and changing the way people ride waves today.

Pacific Standard Time is an unprecedented series of concurrent exhibitions throughout Southern California museums and galleries that highlight the significance of art in Los Angeles region in the post World War II decades. Exhibitions and related programs began in the fall of 2011 and conclude in spring 2012.

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

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.

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.