Window Dressing
Badly Licked Bear, CASSANDRA, Spring 2020
WINDOW DRESSING is an annual cycle of short-term installations presented in the exterior
vitrine of the Cerritos College Art Gallery
Catalogs for Previous Cycles:
SPRING 2018 | SPRING 2019 | SPRING 2020 & FALL 2021 | FALL 2022
- SPRING 2024 -
Gina M.
SELLING THE NEW NORMAL
Jan 7 – Jan 20, 2024
Laid out like a storefront display, Gina M.’s Window Dressing installation, Selling
the New Normal, features pieces resembling familiar elements from a classic American
classroom, with bright primary colors, blinking lights, chalkboards on the wall, and
a patriotic desk supporting a tower of colorful blocks. The sculptures playfully introduce
children to a horrific new normal. Look closer. The poem on the American Alphabet
reads, “A, begins Assault Rifle, a weapon of war. B, is for Bullet, that shoots through
a door.” The soft sound of children's songs plays in the background. Meanwhile, fragments
of police radio chatter and breaking news bites drift in intermittently, overpowering
the songs, only to fade back afterward. With America's safety protocols in place,
the media's modulating repetition of horrific facts, and the ever-increasing frequency
of domestic terrorism, gun violence in America is normalized. Selling the New Normal
renders the invisible visible, revealing the apathy and indifference toward the emotional
well-being and security of the next generation. Each piece in the series reflects
a sardonic commentary on the subconscious conditioning of America's children, which
normalizes domestic terrorism, while demanding that they simply “deal with it!”
Describing her practice as “whimsy with a dark side,” Gina M. is a sculptor, painter,
and found-object assemblage artist using seemingly innocent childhood imagery (like
teddy bears, toys, puppets and games) to create reactionary expressions of her inner
emotional life. As the child of puppet theater operators, nurtured by puppets and
their puppeteers, she developed an affinity for the anthropomorphic, which ultimately
helped her cope with and accept the divorce and divide of her family. In college,
she studied interior design and color theory at the Fashion Institute of Design, and
studio arts at Pasadena City College. She worked on Kent Twitchell’s Colorado One
Mural Project, and received private training in painted trompe l'oeil, faux finish,
and decorative wall treatments. Her work has been exhibited at Gallery 825, Blue Roof
Studios, the Irvine Fine Arts Center, El Camino College Art Gallery, MOAH at the Lancaster
Museum of Art, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Municipal Art
Gallery, and the Boone Family Gallery at Pasadena City College. Her solo exhibition,
Through the Toyshop and Behind the Curtain, was featured at the Huntley Gallery at
Cal State Pomona College.
Holly Perez
IGNORANT THREADS
Jan 21 – Feb 3, 2024
A number of obvious distinctions exist between the typical storefront window display
and the humble backyard clothesline: dream vs reality, new vs used, universal vs individual.
Holly Perez’s Window Dressing installation, Ignorant Threads, explores the paradoxical
ambiguities that hover between these distinct polarities. A string of flannel shirts
spans the entire length of the window display, each clipped to a rope clothesline
stretched between makeshift poles held up by simple cement bricks. Each flannel shirt
contains a boldly-painted phrase, written in white house paint, exemplifying past
stereotypes, judgements, and ignorant comments hurled at, and projected onto, the
artist, and many other women as well. For Perez, as a brown-skinned Chicana woman
working to escape the molds of what it is to be feminine, these flannels act as a
kind of skin; skin that has taken on the role of the protector, absorbing those painful
verbal blows.
Holly Perez is a multimedia artist using her own real-life experiences of trauma as
a semiotic framework to explore issues of cultural toxicity, in particular within
her own community, including alcoholism, abuse, and excessive consumption. Arguments
and conversations become fodder for confrontational reflections on issues that plague
society, while objects, textures, and colors operate as stand-ins for familiar situations
in need of unpacking. Her artwork seeks to create a physical and mental safe space
not just for herself, but for any that can relate to her experiences. Perez holds
a degree from Mt. San Antonio College, a BFA from Cal State Fullerton in Drawing and
Painting, and a MFA from Claremont Graduate University. She currently serves as faculty
at Santa Monica College and Long Beach College, and as an Art Leader at the dA Center
for the Arts in Pomona.
Randi Hokett
TEMPEST PROGNOSTICATOR
Feb 4 – Feb 17, 2024
Randi Hokett thinks a lot about isolation/connection, lust/love, birth/rebirth, volcanoes
and plate tectonics, the body, and the junctures between light and dark. Geology and
chemistry both currently play a huge role in her artwork. For her Window Dressing
installation, Tempest Prognosticator, Hokett will produce a large mineral painting
on site covering the entirety of the window gallery space (both walls and the floor)
using a variety of humidity-sensitive minerals whose chemistries respond to one another
and whose colors fluctuate in response to subtle changes in the humidity, not unlike
a kind of giant mood ring. Various elements within the overall composition will slowly
change from blue to pink and back again, depending on how the exterior and interior
humidity are impacted by variable changes in temperature throughout the day, including
the very real possibility of rainy conditions outside. Viewers can repeatedly return
to the window to witness (and document) the shifting colors of the giant painting.
Randi Hokett is an artist and Southern California native. She received her BA in Art
History from UCLA and her MA in Art History and Museum Studies from USC. Her work
has been exhibited at LA Artcore, Irvine Fine Arts Center, Torrance Art Museum, Cerritos
College Art Gallery, Sam Francis Gallery, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Lancaster
Museum of Art and History, Finishing Concepts, and Claremont Graduate University Art
Gallery.
Loren LeBlanc
IMPOSSIBLE BINARIES
Feb 18 – Mar 2, 2024
Loren LeBlanc’s Window Dressing installation, Impossible Binaries, consists of a surreal
arrangement of four life-sized figurative sculptures constructed entirely by hand
using a 3D printing pen and accentuated with hand-picked dried floral ornamentation.
Seeming to defy gravity, these dynamic forms are presented in various evocative gestural
poses as a means of exploring personal truths built around a future-focused curiosity
and nuanced historical interrogation of the artist’s own lived experience as a young
black creative living in contemporary America.
Loren LeBlanc is an emerging figurative multimedia sculptor currently based in Inglewood,
CA. He holds a BA in Studio Art and Economics from Cal Poly Humboldt in Northern California
and a MA in Illustration from Arts University of Bournemouth in the south of England.
Employing a unique self-taught approach, he fuses handheld 3D printing pen technology
with traditional clay sculpting techniques seamlessly, creating intricate, evocative,
life-sized figures.
Nube Cruz
CON EL NOPAL EN LA FRENTE
Mar 3 – Mar 16, 2024
Nube Cruz’s Window Dressing installation, Con El Nopal En La Frente (With the Nopal
on the Forehead), is a physical manifestation of their ongoing exploration of Nopal
Futurity, an art practice that (re)mixes older indigenous technologies and the idea
of Indigenous Futurity with a cuir/queer indigena perspective. Recognizing that Amerindigenous
peoples have already been living in a post-apocalyptic world since 1492, Cruz’s work
seeks to activate the potential for contemporary liberation through the historical
reconstruction, and innovative development, of (new) Indigena cosmologies. By excavating
the historical invisibility of native people’s advancement of, and contribution to,
the technologies of modern society, Cruz hopes to disrupt the standard Western modernist
narrative in order to rematriate, retrieve, and reconstruct images and obliterate
the borders, legalities, histories, objects, resources, and bodies that have otherwise
been co-opted by the colonial gaze. Through sculpture, photography, and performative
video documentation, invoking what they call ‘indigie-archivist research,’ their installation
will begin the necessary conversation on how the possibilities and potentialities
of indigenous futures might be engaged and activated.
Nube Cruz is and artist and activist currently completing their BFA degree at UCLA.
They have exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including We Are Made of the Earth,
Our Skin Says So at A+R+T Gallery in Los Angeles, The Aesthetics of Undocumentedness
at Dalton Gallery in Atlanta, and The Latinx Project at NYU in New York. The have
been a Native American Arts Grantee through the San Francisco Queer Arts Foundation
and Galereria de la Raza and have served as an assistant researcher on the UCLA Indigenous
Mapping Project. They also work transnationally with indigenous activists in Mexico.
Teresa Flores
AN INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION
Mar 17 – Mar 30, 2024
Teresa Flores is a multidisciplinary artist who explores connections between her Chicana
identity and the notion of the California Dream. Through drawing, painting, video,
and social practice Flores explores the ways generations of colonialism and assimilation
in California have affected families like her own, who can trace their ancestor’s
migration along the Pacific coast for generations. In exploring food and movement,
collective art making and nurturing, Flores seeks innovative avenues of expression
and pathways to healing. Her Window Dressing installation, An Intergenerational Transmission,
consists of both window signage and a video presentation. The window signage is constructed
from readymade LED neon wiring, wood, nails and hot glue. The sign, which spells out
the words We Can Make Our Own, references the idea of collective autonomy and the
economics of the Los Angeles artist tradition of the neon sign. The piece is based
on a smaller 2017 LED neon sign and fully embraces the makeshift Chicanx practice
of rasquachismo by not trying to hide imperfections in the construction process of
the sign. Tortilla Burning is a durational video from 2007 that focuses on a single
tortilla burning on a stove over a twenty minute period. The burning tortilla is a
reflection on colonialism and assimilation in California. The video was created in
remembrance of the time the artist’s grandmother spent in the child foster care system
in Southern California in the early 1930s, where she was forced to cook and clean
for her Mexican-American foster families while being abused and isolated for her indigeneity.
Together, the two artworks celebrate humanity’s will to survive in the face of ferocious
and shifting capitalist and imperialist world hegemony. They investigate our capacities
to create when in survival mode and make visible the marks and burns of struggle and
imperfection.
East-LA based multimedia artist Teresa Flores is an inaugural Artist-in-Residence
for the Dolores Huerta Foundation. Her drawings, paintings, videos, and social practice
projects have been featured in Alta Journal, The New Yorker, and NPR and have been
presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Spike Art Quarterly in Berlin,
and Galería de la Raza in San Francisco. Flores has also exhibited with Dominique
Gallery, Espacio 1839, and has been a featured artist in the annual Venice Family
Clinic Art Walk and Auction. Flores studied drawing and painting at Fresno State,
original home of the feminist art movement, before receiving her Public Practice MFA
from Otis College of Art and Design, where she earned the recognition of Outstanding
Alumni.
Nancy Buchanan
WHAT DOES HE OWE US?
Mar 31 – Apr 13, 2024
During the 2020 presidential race, Nancy Buchanan collected mailers that were sent
to her friends solicitating donations for the then-president’s re-election campaign.
For her Window Dressing installation, What Does He Owe Us?, she stitched together
these printed forms and envelopes and then painted over them to create large-scale
murals depicting iconic symbols associated with the greed and boorishness of the Trump
presidency: a gilded coronation carriage and an oozing hamburger.
Nancy Buchanan is a conceptual artist working in many forms; her performance works
began in 1972, when she was a member of the infamous F Space Gallery in Santa Ana,
CA; her earliest videotapes were recorded on open-reel Portapacks; and she also produces
installations, drawings, and mixed-media work. She assisted activist Michael Zinzun
with his cable access program Message to the Grassroots from 1988-1998 and traveled
to Namibia to document that country’s independence from South Africa. Buchanan’s work
has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum of Contemporary
Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Centre Pompidou, and the Getty
Research Institute (where her papers and video works are archived). Buchanan is the
recipient of four National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist grants, a COLA
grant, and a Rockefeller Fellowship in New Media. Her work was included in the 58th
Carnegie International.
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