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
Catalogs for Previous Cycles:
SPRING 2018 | SPRING 2019 | SPRING 2020 & FALL 2021 | FALL 2022 | SPRING 2024
- SPRING 2025 -
Sarah Rafael Garcia
SANTANA’S FAIRY TALES
Jan 12 – Jan 25, 2025
Sarah Rafael Garcia’s Window Dressing installation, SanTana’s Fairy Tales, is a reconfigured presentation of her ongoing community-based, oral history, multimedia
storytelling project of the same name. Originally debuting in 2017 at Cal State Fullerton’s
Grand Central Art Center in her hometown of Santa Ana, SanTana’s Fairy Tales transforms personal and collective stories into contemporary variations of familiar
fairy tales and fables as means of poetically expressing the histories of the Mexican
and Mexican-American residents of that local community. Inspired by Grimms’ Fairy Tales and in collaboration with graphic artist Carla Zarate, Garcia designed twelve narrative
panels, which will all be displayed in the window alongside three original carousel
horses from the historic amusement ride dismantled in downtown Santa Ana in 2011.
QR codes posted throughout the installation also give visitors access to the extensive
digital archives Garcia has developed as part of the project’s research, including
photographs, document scans, oral recordings, and musical accompaniment. A bilingual
publication based on this particular research has been adopted as an Ethnic Studies
required textbook by the Santa Ana Unified School District.
View the Project Trailer and Browse the Project's Digital Archives.
Support LibroMobile by Purchasing the Book: SanTana's Fairy Tales.
Santa Ana-based artist, curator, author, and community educator Sarah Rafael Garcia holds a BS in Applied Sociology and a MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University, San Marcos. She is currently serving as a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Cal State Fullerton’s Latinx Lab in the Chicana/o Studies Department and has previously served as lecturer and visiting artist at Chapman University. Garcia is the founder of both Barrio Writers and the independent BIPoC-focused community bookstore, LibroMobile, and the co-founder of Crear Studios, an interdisciplinary art studio and exhibition space in Santa Ana. Garcia’s writing has been published extensively, including in recent anthologies such as Immigrant Sci-Fi Short Stories and Speculative Fiction for Dreamers, and in journals like KCET Artbound, La Tolteca Zine, As/Us Journal, and LATINO Magazine.
Alberto Lule
A CORRECTIONAL COMPLEX
Jan 26 – Feb 8, 2025
Alberto Lule’s practice confronts the historic and contemporary co-dependencies of
capitalism and the prison-industrial system. Ostensibly, free markets flourish - all
to commonly, in fact - on the backs of marginalized, and often even incarcerated,
laborers. Retail and prison frequently go hand-in-hand, perhaps even more so in our
age of privatized detention centers. The California prison system, for example, regularly
employs prisoners for free labor, while retailers often take advantage of lax regulations
to purchase cheap products from sweatshops in the pursuit of higher profits. For his
new Window Dressing installation, A Correctional Complex, Lule fully embraces the ambiguous ethics of this exploitative mutual alliance, presenting
a fantastical boutique that purposefully surfaces the labor of prisoners, highlighting
the capitalist natures of the prison complex, the retail store, the surveillant state,
and even institutions of higher learning, which have historically all had a twisted
interconnection with one another. Various objects from Lule’s Prison Readymades series are displayed, some of which were designed to function for the benefit of
the incarcerated person, while others invoke the power of the institution itself,
including instructional videos, mannequins in fashionable prison attire, makeshift
tattoo machines, surveillance bubbles, and a grid of customized ‘shivs.’
Alberto Lule's current artwork focuses on mass incarceration and the prison industrial
complex in the United States, particularly the California prison system. Using his
own experiences of incarceration, he aims to tie the prison industrial complex to
other American political issues such as immigration, homelessness, drug addiction,
and mental health, all of which, along with many other issues, are connected to the
millions of people being incarcerated and used in a new form of slavery. Lule holds
a BA in Art from UCLA and a MFA from UC Irvine. He has taught at San Diego State’s
Centinela Prison Vista Program and as a teaching artist Orange County Juvenile Hall.
He was a co-chair of a student organization at UCLA called The Underground Scholars
Initiative, composed of formerly incarcerated students as well as students that have
been impacted directly by the California prison system. Their aim is to support and
advocate for formerly incarcerated students and students who are currently incarcerated
by partnering with other groups, such as UCLA ́s Prison Education Program, to dismantle
the prison industrial complex and the school-to-prison pipeline. He was the first
inaugural artist-in-residence at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles, curated the show
Affective Resistance at UC Irvine’s University Art Gallery, and has had work recently
exhibited at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum at Portland State University, Long Beach
City College Art Gallery, Crear Studios, and Craft Contemporary.
Jesse Colin Jackson
MARCHING CUBES
Feb 10 – Feb 22, 2025
In 1987, researchers at General Electric pioneered a method for generating computer
graphics from medical scan data that featured an underlying language of faceted cubes.
Widely adopted thereafter, “Marching Cubes: A High Resolution 3D Surface Construction
Algorithm” has become a seminal visual language for constructing virtual environments.
Jesse Colin Jackson’s ongoing project, Marching Cubes, makes this computational procedure tangible, translating the digital algorithm into
3D-printed construction units that can physically act out its structural logic. Using
specialized software, Jackson is able to scan and input a digital model of any three-dimensional
object and a custom script will output assembly instructions; the units can effectively
make anything. To date, this process has created assemblies that explore architectural,
anthropomorphic, ecological, and art historical themes. By enacting a ubiquitous algorithm
in the real world, this project generates dialogue about how information technologies
create the building blocks of contemporary culture. For his Window Dressing installation,
also called Marching Cubes, Jackson will develop an evolutionary series of assemblies that suit the L-shaped
space of the display window, with a special emphasis on human figuration. Starting
Monday, February 10th, he will assemble an initial sequence of cubic forms, returning
several times over the course of the following two weeks to deconstruct and rebuild
them, ultimately executing an extended stop-motion assembly experiment.
Jesse Colin Jackson is a Canadian artist and designer based in Southern California. He explores the architectures we construct—from buildings to landscapes to virtual worlds—through objects and images made with digital visualization and fabrication technologies. His interactive Marching Cubes performances and installations (2016—present) have been featured in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Mexico City, Stockholm, and Tehran. His exhibitions focused on the places we live have been reviewed in The Globe and Mail (2014, 2019) and the LA Review of Books (2021). Jackson holds a M.Arch from the University of Toronto. He was a 2014-2015 Hellman Fellow at the University of California, Irvine and a 2008-2010 Howarth-Wright Fellow at the University of Toronto. Jackson is currently an Associate Professor of Electronic Art & Design at the University of California, Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts, where he also serves as the Associate Dean of Research and Innovation and Executive Director of the Beall Center for Art + Technology.
Curt LeMieux and Marley van Peebles
YOU ARE ALL ANIMALS
Feb 23 – Mar 8, 2025
You Are All Animals presents itself as a sequel, of sorts, to That Which Animates, a recent two-person exhibition at LAUNCH LA by the artists Curt LeMieux and Marley
van Peebles. As with that previous collaboration, which brought together the artists’
playfully figurative drawings and paintings depicting anthropomorphized creatures
and celestial beings, their new Window Dressing installation seeks to prod the depths
of corporeal experience, featuring expressive representations of bodies that push
and pull in unexpected directions. The display as a whole seeks to advance an alternative
to traditional visual merchandising techniques, confronting viewers instead with a
witty and evocative reinterpretation of standardized advertising practices. At the
center of the installation are three large anthropomorphic sculpted mannequins, whose
limbs distort and extend throughout the interior of the long vitrine. These human-animal
hybrid forms are themselves adorned with custom apparel utilizing appliqué patterns
combined with hand-drawn and painted figures. Whether in two or three dimensions,
as both figure and as fashion, eyes bulge, digits bloat, and arms and legs dance.
Bodies are shown to perform, otherwise.
Curt LeMieux’s approach to art making is rooted in experimentation with process and
materials. His practice involves a range of visual disciplines and he is best known
for creating works that suggest a tension between fragility and strength; they are
at once ephemeral yet anchored with a sense of permanence. The complex relationship
between human industry and nature is a reoccurring theme for LeMieux and his artwork
sometimes contains humorous political and pop culture references. LeMieux has been
living and working in Los Angeles for twenty-five years. He received a MFA in 2001
from Claremont Graduate University. His work has been exhibited at The Santa Monica
Museum of Art, Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Monte Vista
Projects, The Armory Center for the Arts, and The SOO Visual Art Center in Minneapolis,
Minnesota. Marley Van Peebles uses found objects such as cardboard, wood and fabric
to create what the artist calls “flat objects.” Using common domestic items, such
as discarded food packaging and clothing, Van Peebles’s art is directly linked to
his everyday actions. “When I create, I do it from an instinctive place. I don’t think
too much. I just flow. Part of my goal as an artist is not only to challenge the way
I think about my art, but also to challenge the institution of art and the idea of
what it means to 'know' your own art. I create from a spiritual or instinctual place
without theoretical grounding. The notion of improvisation is an important aspect
to my process. Creating in the moment.” Van Peebles graduated from Parsons School
of Design, The New School in 2020. His work has been exhibited at HVW8 Art + Design
Gallery in Los Angeles and Berlin, Highway Performance Space, and Mama Earth at Bergamot
Station. In September of 2024, LeMieux and van Peebles held a joint exhibition, That
Which Animates, at LAUNCH LA, a precursor to their new Window Dressing installation.
Fafnir Adamites
CHAOS WEAVING
Mar 9 – Mar 22, 2025
Using tradition craft techniques like feltmaking, weaving, and papermaking, Fafnir
Adamites assembles sculptural meditations on disruption and order, trauma and healing,
and the encoded memories within the legacies of generational trauma. In particular,
they are fascinated by the notion that experiences of anxiety, painful events, and
damaged environments can all become epigenetically embedded in a person’s DNA (itself
a kind of woven thread) to be passed down to, and inherited by, the next generation.
The repetitious nature of their particular practice (mimicking the path of ancestors,
repeating personal patterns, directly tracing the words from a written text) provide
for a physical engagement with, and material exploration of, these irresolvable theoretical
concepts. For their Window Dressing installation, Chaos Weaving, Adamites will create a monumental woven basket form specifically designed to fill-up
the entire space of the L-shaped window vitrine. Designed in three separate sections
in order to wrap completely around the corner of the L-shaped gallery, this large
textile form pressing against the boundaries will be both surreal and challenge the
notion of traditional basketry techniques can accomplish. Like much of their earlier
work, this form will be built from black, indigo, and natural color reeds, combining
traditional twining with a free-form pattern that Adamites calls “chaos weaving.”
Unlike a woven textile which is grounded in an orderly grid, chaos structures are
open-ended and are based on a disorderly foundation. For this installation, the pattern
itself will evolve as it moves across the length of the gallery, transitioning from
predicable twining to an asymmetric and erratically woven form. Added paper pulp will
further this sense of disruption from the orderly to the chaotic. As the artist points
out, a powerful transformation takes place in a process like papermaking, when the
millions of chaotic fibers bind together to make a strong, cohesive, singular piece.
The conceptual depth rooted in this kind of process manifests the artist’s desire
to reclaiming personal intuition and agency against the chaotic landscapes of environmental
distress and social disorder.
Fafnir Adamites holds an MFA degree from the Fiber and Material Studies Department
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Photography and Women’s
Studies from UMass Amherst. Adamites is currently Assistant Professor in the Fiber
Area at California State University, Long Beach, having previously served as a Visiting
Assistant Professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, and taught workshops and
intensives at Arrowmont School of Art and Craft, Snow Farm: The New England Craft
Program, and Women’s Studio Workshop. Their work has been exhibited in solo shows
at Earlham College Leeds Gallery (Richmond, IN), Brattleboro Museum and Art Center
(Brattleboro, VT), Boston Sculptors Gallery, Western New England Art Gallery (Springfield,
MA), Hampden Gallery at UMass Amherst, and Greenfield Community College South Gallery.
Adamites has held residencies at MASS MoCA, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Vermont Studio
Center. They are a Board Member of the Surface Design Association and a member of
North American Hand Papermakers.
Stephanie Sherwood
SITE LINES (CONFINE IN SITU)
Mar 23 – Apr 5, 2025
Over the last few years, Stephanie Sherwood has developed a unique guerilla-style
art practice painting directly on discarded furniture and other raw materials she
finds laying out and about on the streets and alleyways of Los Angeles. At a time
when so many people are displaced and unhoused, Sherwood’s artistic impulse is quite
understandable, to decorate and beautify the kinds of worn-out domestic objects that
frequently serve as a symbol of urban blight to some, while at the same time providing
a modicum of comfort and shelter to others. For the most part, after painting these
objects, Sherwood leaves them on site (i.e. in situ), where they ultimately decay or are destroyed, ending just as ephemeral as they
started. Lately, however, the artist has been moving these painted assemblages indoors,
where they take on a new life. For her Window Dressing installation, Site Lines (Confine in Situ), Sherwood will assemble a collection of discarded objects found in the local neighborhoods
surrounding Cerritos College, composing her distinctive illusionistic and anamorphic
paintings over their three-dimensional surfaces. Typical of her imagery are colorful
fleshy organic blobs that appear to press against and bulge their way out from restrictive
cage-like grids, resembling nothing more than the familiar wire baskets and grocery
carts that perpetually dot the urban landscape. Painted on site, within the gallery’s
window display, visitors will be able to observe as the artist performatively transforms
these objects during set days and times over the course of the installation’s two
week run. The particular L-shaped layout of the window display adds an exciting new
element to Sherwood’s repertoire, providing an opportunity to create overlapping illusions
that visually coalesce and/or dissolve, depending on the forced perspective created
by the audience’s particular viewing angle (i.e. the site lines produced by the viewer’s
temporary line of sight).
Stephanie Sherwood is an artist and curator living and working in Los Angeles. She
holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Cal State Long Beach and studied abroad at
the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in China. In addition to being an active member
of Durden and Ray, she has had solo and two-person exhibitions at the Gatov Gallery
at CSULB, LA ArtCore, Highways Performance Space, Flatline Gallery, Pierce College
Art Gallery, and Red Post Gallery. Group exhibitions include Irvine Fine Arts Center,
Brand Library and Art Center, LA Municipal Art Gallery, Keystone Art Space, Avenue
50 Studio, and Groundspace Project. She has curated shows at Torrance Art Museum,
Durden and Ray, Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, Galleria Rankka, Artbug Gallery, and
Boston Court.
Monica Rickler Marks
MINDFUL CURRENTS
Apr 6 – Apr 19, 2025
Monica Rickler Marks’ Window Dressing installation, Mindful Currents, is designed to invoke a sense of calm and wonder in an otherwise chaotic world.
Expanded from a previous and much smaller installation of the same name, originally
installed in The Closet at Shoebox Projects, Mindful Currents uses abstracted jellyfish sculptures hanging from automated pully mechanisms to transform
the entire gallery window into a giant replica of a jellyfish aquarium. Created by
combining 3D-printed forms with iridescent umbrellas, the jellyfish-like sculptures
will slowly move up and down as if floating in water. Hidden fans within the space
will gently sway the creatures’ tendrils, further adding to the sense that they are
drifting in liquid currents. Electroluminescent wire, LED light strips, fiber optics,
as well as UV-reflective elements that glow in the black lights carefully installed
throughout the space complete the surreal and otherworldly effect. With the world
in so much turmoil, not to mention the stress of classes, the responsibilities of
familial obligations, and the strain of personal anxieties, Mindful Currents provides a brief moment of respite for Cerritos College’s weary students and visitors
alike; so sit back, relax, and get lost in its peaceful undulations.
Monica Rickler Marks is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles.
She earned her BA in Art from California State University, Northridge, and her MA
in Marital and Family Therapy at Loyola Marymount University with a specialization
in Clinical Art Therapy. Monica’s training and experience in the mental health field
influences her work, using her visual art practice to promote emotional growth and
healing. Her first solo exhibition, What We Hide: An Exploration of Hidden Disabilities
and Identity, was presented at Shoebox Projects in 2021. Monica’s work has been exhibited
in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History,
the Torrance Art Museum, and the Bristol Art Museum in Rhode Island.
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