Rio Hondo College Art Gallery SUR:biennial 2013
SUR:Biennial > 2013 > Rio Hondo
Ruby Osorio, Untitled, Mixed Media, 120" x 60" x 6", 2013.
Ruby Osorio
Ruby Osorio lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds a BA in Sociology and Chicano Studies from UCLA and a MFA in Drawing and Painting from UC Santa Barbara. Her work has been exhibited locally and internationally in cities such as London, Tokyo, Mexico City, and Athens, Greece. Solo exhibitions include Story of A Girl (Who Awakes Far and Away) at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Laguna Art Museum, as well as three solo exhibitions at Cherry and Martin Gallery in Los Angeles. Her work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, among other publications, and resides in notable collections, including the Eileen Norton Foundation and the Hammer Museum.
My drawings, paintings, and ceramic sculptures, presented in the SUR:biennial as a continuous wall-length installation, explore notions of memory in the representation of femininity and myth.
Antonia Wright, Still from Love on an Escalator, with Ruben Millares, Single Channel
Video, 4:46 Minutes, 2012.
Antonia Wright
Born in Miami, Antonia Wright graduated from the New School University in New York with an MFA in Poetry, as well as at the International Center of Photography. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles and Spinello Projects in Miami, Trading Places 2 at The Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Perfect Lovers (a Frieze New York special project) at the White Box Gallery in New York and Areoplastics in Brussels, Belgium. Other venues in South Florida include The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, The Tampa Museum of Art with the Hadley Martin Fisher Collection, the Marty & Cricket Taplin Collection at the Sagamore Hotel, Art@Work at the Mosquera Collection, The Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, The Frost Museum at Florida International University and The Cisneros-Fontanals Foundation (CIFO), Primary Projects, David Castillo Gallery, and Dorsch Gallery. In April 2012, Wright became the first artist-in-residence at the Lotus House Shelter for women and children in Overtown, Miami. Her work has been presented in numerous publications, including Art In America, New York Magazine, Daily News, The Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, The Art Newspaper, The Sun-Sentinel, ArtSlant, and the Miami Art Guide. She has been featured in New York Magazine’s article, “The New Talent Show: Pot-Luck Culture,” on the burgeoning salon scene in New York City, which she helped create.
Statement
The sad, strange and beautiful vulnerabilities existing within the human condition are all deep considerations in my work. I explore the various politics and comic facets of human experience through a multifarious, process-oriented practice combining video, performance, photography, poetry, sound, sculpture and perception. My work brings everything back to the body, creating powerful visual metaphors and symbols that at times might appear ambivalent, but are never obscure. I acknowledge the societal taboos and barriers between my artistic choices and pointedly try to push them into the public realm for the viewer to examine and assimilate. There is an element of chance in my performances, as one never knows what the reaction of the public will be. In Love on an Escalator, Ruben Millares and I, kiss in public, documented in a single-channel video. In the work, one sees the audience encountering us; they comment, laugh, look, don't look, look away uncomfortably, and look again. The simple repeated gesture of the kiss tests the rules of social conduct. Why do kids stare? Adult women sneer? Men high-five? And in some situations, no one looks at all. We stand; staking our place in the world, ignoring judgment, and declaring love. In a society flooded with sexuality and sexual imagery, why does an innocent kiss cause such confusion? Why is this act challenging? This intimacy is too intimate live. Our bodies, entwined, become a sculptural intervention, playfully disrupting the shopper’s course, with an act of love.
Carmen Argote, Polyscape III, Inkjet Print, 45" x 30", 2013. Courtesy of the Artist.
Carmen Argote
Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Carmen Argote is a Los Angeles-based artist who has lived in and around the downtown area most of her life. She received both her BFA and MFA from UCLA, with a specialization in ceramics under the mentorship of Adrian Saxe. In 2009, she was an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2010, she created a dual-site-specific exhibition that took place at her childhood home in Pico Union and at Gallery G727, later recreated at the Vincent Price Art Museum. Argote is a 2013 recipient of the California Community Foundation emerging artist fellowship grant and, also this year, she received a MTA commission to create the artwork for the future Metro Expo Line station at 17th and Colorado in Santa Monica. The station is set to open in early 2016.
Statement
An exploration on the influence of site and place has been a central theme in my work. I have often looked at the shape of spaces as a source of inspiration to investigate memory, movement, systems, and manipulation by design. My artwork stems from the personal but attempts to transcend into a larger conversation that explores the culture of the landscape that is Los Angeles. In my work, I use historical fragments, stories, personal experience and imagination to create a layered picture of the past, the present, and the imagined stories in-between. From apartment layouts to amusement parks, my interest in the construction of memory as it relates to site incorporates the idea of the footprint, the mental imprint, the ghost story, and the lingering presence or haunting of a place. The lingering of sites and spaces that were once there, but are now gone, has become of great interest to me as I explore the ways in which the past manifests itself presently and layers itself upon the identity of a place. Imagination and play together with explorations of haunting, histories, muscle memory, and story telling have inspired me to create objects that function as layered gestures of these ideas. Los Angeles in many ways acts as my northern light, I use the fantasies, the nostalgia, the myths, and the trends as cultural inventory for my practice. I work on a human scale, where architecture, and objects become my materials for art making. I move through disparate materials and bodies of work in search of what I call the poetic; a gesture between materials that attempts to reveal a truth; that creates a layering between cultural and contextual references, landing in sculptural form. Working through fragments of historical photos and narratives about a movie studio and theme park, called Selig’s Zoo, that once stood adjacent to the hills across from my Lincoln Heights studio in the 1910s, I felt compelled to return to the hills to explore the absence of development and the stillness of the landscape. The Ascot hills, as they are now known, are the only hills without any development on them in the area, and, as such, they represent for me the natural landscape of Los Angeles and hold an optimistic spirit that I associate with inspiring farfetched ideas and big dreams.
In the photographs titled Polyscapes, I used an oversize papier-mâché eye, ear and nose prop, itself part of Selig Zoo series, collectively called Senses at Auction, and carried them up the hiking trails, placing them into the landscape. The placement and composition become particularly important in this work. I wanted to give each hill a sense, and by doing so bring the landscape into the realm of being human-like. The landscape as a fragment of face, and a face as a fragment of a whole. Each photograph aims to abstract the landscape and shift it through the proportions of the sky and land and by the play of scale with the props. The props were then displaced again to the main quad at Rio Hondo College, nestled in hills adjacent to a mortuary and memorial park.
Tanya Aguiniga, CRAFTA Weave, Deconstructed Blankets, 444" x 120" x 6", 2013. Couresty
of the Artist.
Tanya Aguiniga
My work is informed by border experiences: the interconnectedness of societies, the beauty in struggle, and the celebration of culture. I try to use furniture as a way to translate emotions into three-dimensional objects and tell stories through color and touch. My work encourages users to reconsider the objects they use on a daily basis by creating work that explores an object’s unseen aspect, such as half chairs that rely on the wall to function and whose image is only complete as its shadow is cast upon the wall. I have also dedicated much of my time to using art as a vehicle for community empowerment.
Raised in Tijuana, Mexico, Tanya Aguiñiga is now a Los Angeles-based furniture designer and artist. She holds a BA in Applied Design, with an Emphasis in Furniture, from San Diego State University and a MFA in furniture design from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited from Mexico City to Milan. She is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts, has been the subject of a cover article for American Craft Magazine, and included in PBS's Craft in America Series. In addition to creating various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists' group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art, Aguiñiga also founded the group, Artists Helping Artisans, through which she helps spread knowledge of craft by collaborating with traditional artisans.
Doris Rodriguez, Transient #1 & #2, Mixed Media, both 24" x 23", 2013.
Doris Rodriguez
My work explores the possibilities of the surface, the medium, and the emotive forces of painting. Texture, color, brush stroke, gesture, layers, light, and shadow are an ongoing obsession.
Born in the Dominican Republic, Doris Rodriguez began her career as a painter in New York City before relocating to Miami. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the US and her native Dominican Republic. Rodriguez holds a BFA in Illustration from Parsons New School for Design and a MS in Art Education from Florida International University. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Art Center / South Florida.
Emily Silver, Untitled Upheaval, Mixed Media, 72" x 96" x 36", 2013.
Emily Silver
Emily Silver was born in New York, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her MFA from Penn State University. Having spent many years doing floral design for major events, including spending time recently designing flowers at a mortuary for funerals. Her work has been features in solo shows at Co-Op28 Gallery and the Zoller Gallery, as well as in group exhibitions at 5790 Projects, Gallery Godo, Rupert Ravens Contemporary, and the Saratoga Arts Center. She is currently on the faculty at Santa Monica College.
Statement
My current body of work seeks to examine the space between the celebratory, and the tragedy that simultaneously exist in the life of an event. As subject matter, I look to funerals, parties, parades, and carnivals, in their finite nature, for the work to be actively a part of these sensual celebratory spaces. The materials hold a metaphor of the ephemeral and the cherished creating objects and videos that play with what is monumental or decorative, comic or tragic, and beg the viewer to reconsider their relationship to these ideas. Many of the sculptures in this series become part of short animations that begin to shift our perception of what is real, what is desired, and what is anticipated. This work mashes the individual and group, the celebratory and discarded, the monumental and diminutive. Though these pieces seem overtly playful, there is an under current of the tragic and unexpected invading these spaces.
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