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
Previous Cycles:
SPRING 2018 | SPRING 2019 | SPRING 2020 | FALL 2021 | FALL 2022 | SPRING 2024 | SPRING 2025 | SPRING 2026
Catalogs for Previous Cycles:
SPRING 2018 | SPRING 2019 | SPRING 2020 & FALL 2021 | FALL 2022 | SPRING 2024 | SPRING 2025
- SUMMER 2026 -
CHIASMIC WILDNESS
Curated by Jaden Chavarria and Miguel Zavala-Lopez
July 1 - August 7, 2026
Humans have long developed the ability to create worlds within worlds. As we transform our natural environment and get lost into, and through, these new realities, our relationship with surrounding ecosystems forces them to adapt to our needs, often resulting in a distinctive separation, a space in between. The title of this exhibition, Chiasmic Wildness, references philosopher Sean Williams’ eponymous concept, itself derived from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the chiasme (chiasm), which describes the intertwined connection between humans and the natural world as it “exists in the embodied relationships with [the Other including] people, animals, plants, and spaces” (Chiasmic Wildness, 6). Contemporary humans adapt our movements and actions based on convenience and consumption, as well as through restricted access to drinkable water and the growing instances of human-generated devastation within our spaces of embodiment. Chiasmic Wildness probes the assumed duality of human and nature in order to highlight the existential and ontological intertwining of our inherent bond. The artworks within this exhibition, all selected from the permanent collection of the Cerritos College Art Gallery, depict various observed and/or concealed repercussions of human industrialization. Wildness, here, is synonymous with an untamable energy, a space not limited to the typically recognized wilderness areas, but rather where the Self and Other meet; an intertwined relationship, built on the premise of visible looks and invisible thoughts, often ignored by the anthropogenic reality we have conjured, and yet inseparable as such.
For example, the late Inna Jane Ray explored the complex relationship between human intervention and nature’s capacity to reclaim and redefine altered landscapes as spaces of being. José Guadalupe Sánchez III, an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, investigates the multilayered experiences of diverse Brown social realities within modern urban-industrial landscapes, spanning the complexities of time. The late photographer, Laura Aguilar, whose work became representations of her own complex identity, created bodies of work that reintroduced the human form back into the natural environment. Carlos Beltrán Arechiga focuses on the juxtaposition of manufactured environments and natural landscapes through the illusion that humanity operates as a separate entity, rather than in reciprocal participatory relationship. Ashton Phillips, an interdisciplinary artist, demonstrates the endurance of nature as the “Other”, absorbing and transforming the environments that humans create. Ceramicist and former Cerritos College professor, Steven Portigal, approaches his sculptural work as an alchemist, blurring the line between manufactured and organic material. Christina McPhee, through a layered abstraction, representative of destruction and rebirth, illustrates the intertwining relationship between human industrialization and ecological resilience, challenging the presumed separation between the Wild and Self. And Cog•nate Collective, a trans-national artist collective, centers its work on the experience of the US/Mexico border, through various research projects, public interventions, and collaborative programs with communities, challenging our understanding of the land and its relationship to other invisible, human-generated borders.