Art+Tech Artist-in-Residence

Established in 2014, the Cerritos College ART+TECH Artist-in-Residency is a unique annual program, which pairs a local professional visual artist with the amazing technology resources available on the Cerritos College campus. Each Fall, a different department within the Cerritos College Technology division is selected and the artist is given limited access to the faculty and equipment within that program. During the semester, the artist and campus collaborators work to produce a proposed project that is then featured in a solo exhibition at the Cerritos College Art Gallery during the following Spring semester.

Please note that, due to the current coronavirus pandemic, the artist residency has been temporarily put on hiatus until such time as it is deemed safe to again work freely on campus.

 

Young Joon Kwak: Dilectio
Plastics and Composites (2019)

Dilectio is an exhibition of work produced by LA-based artist Young Joon Kwak during their time as the 2019 Cerritos College Art+Tech Artist-in-Residence. Created using the specific equipment and processes available at the Cerritos College Plastics and Composites facilities, combined with their own unique artistic practice, Kwak’s work in Dilectio explores the parallel contemporary paranoias of plastic as a dangerous industrial material and plasticity as a mode of being.

Kimberly Morris: Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler
Cosmetology (2018)

Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler, a French phrase translated into English as “Let the Good Times Roll,” is primarily associated with the celebratory Cajun/Creole festivals surrounding Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Kimberly Morris, the 2018 Cerritos College Art+Tech Artist-in-Residence, pulling from her own connections to that region, creates work that directly references the various masking traditions frequently worn by participants in the Mardi Gras parades and performances.

Sonja Schenk: The Box
Welding (2017)

As Schenk explained in her residency proposal, the exhibition consists of “a complex set of parts, carefully packed in custom paper-pulp molding, along with disposable tools, hardware, and a large image-based instruction diagram,” all located inside a non-descript metal box. When unpacked by visitors to the exhibition, the contents of this box expand to produce an assemblage (and/or multiple assemblages) large enough to fill the entire exhibition space, which visitors can rearrange at will.

Stephanie Deumer: Features of the Same Face
Woodworking (2016)

Features of the Same Face is a sculptural installation inspired by a dollhouse meticulously handmade by the artist’s mother. Incorporating furniture, wallpaper, and prints, the show imitates a domestic interior dining room. Elements in the space exist in a simulated state, embodying the memory of their original. For instance, the wooden chairs were fabricated via 3D scanning of the initial dollhouse chairs and then built to human scale with a CNC machine. Through various digital processes and translations, the pieces paradoxically become nostalgic: harkening back to childhood toys, recollections, and a time when handmade wood crafting was more valued.

Beatriz Cortez: Your Life Work
Autobody Collision Repair (2015)

Your Life Work invites the viewer to imagine different possibilities for the present, and the future, through a series of speculative interventions into the past. The large-scale installation explores the way vocational education was conceived as part of a plan for population control that put into practice ideas about the predetermination of people’s lives that were inherited from colonial times and then recycled into modern national discourse. By coopting the productive possibilities of the standard tools and materials used within the vocationally-oriented Automotive Collision Repair program at Cerritos, the exhibition explores the creative potential of metal shaping as a practice that can exist both within industrial labor and outside of it, as part of a creative practice.

Jeff Cain: Natural History
Engineering Design Technology (2014)

Natural History features a life-sized sculpture and manipulated photographs inspired by 3D scans of taxidermied animal specimens from local museum collections and private holdings. These animals, native to the American West, and therefore loaded with semiotic significance in our collective imagination (coyotes, eagles, rabbits, bears, etc.), were scanned, manipulated, and printed using the 3D software and printers available in Cerritos College’s Engineering Design lab