Cerritos College Art Gallery SUR:Biennial 2017

SUR:Biennial > 2017 > Cerritos 

Tarrah Krajnak 

Tarrah Krajnak’s SISMOS79, derived from the Spanish word for “earthquake", is a multi-layered project using a combination of fieldwork, archival research/collection, re-photographic strategies, staged portraiture, and sound recordings. The project, consisting of a number of interwoven series, three of which are included in this exhibition (1979, Marble Studies, and Time twins), examines the intersection between the artist’s own life and the turbulent period in the history of Lima, Peru circa 1979. 1979 was a time of seismic changes in Peru’s capital, a transitional period between the military dictatorship of the 70s and the onset of the Shining Path’s guerilla war in 1980. The city’s population swelled and was transformed by a massive influx of rural migrants from the highlands and eastern jungles; and the artist’s birth mother was among them, one of many young women uprooted during that tectonic demographic shift. 1979 was a year that created orphans. Through the various series of this project, the artist set out to reclaim a psychic history of that year, and locate herself within it. 

1979 (2014) features complexly layered photographic works that draw from intense periods of research and collection in Lima, Peru. Krajnak constructs and then photographed temporary still life sculptures out of found pieces of glass, mirrors, and vintage archival material - specifically pornographic and political magazines from the year she was born. The resulting photographs are not archival, so much as counter-archival, a fractured atlas of collage, high-keyed abstraction, found light, and broken glass. For Marble Studies (2014), Krajnak returned to Peru and rented a studio in a crumbling mansion. Once a symbol of wealth and modernity, this building too had changed along with the city. In the 80's it was abandoned and then in the 90's it was the center of numerous unofficial rave parties with cracked marble pieces left under old chunks of broken wooden flooring. While haunting this remnant of the past over a three month period, the artist used the materials she found at hand - the marble became a surface to conduct her re-photographic experiments and the wood and glass were a way to call attention to the historical layering of time and place. Each day, she roamed the markets and the streets of Lima collecting vernacular photographs and printed materials – using these materials, she photographed ensembles of layered objects, texts and images, creating new images and new meanings. Time Twins (2014-Present) is a series of photographic portraits, audio recordings, and experimental poems. For this project, the artist posted ads in Lima, Peru to locate and photograph other women born in the city the same year as her. The photographs are all staged, often at night, in typical Lima street locations chosen by the subject. Through the portraits, and associated audio recordings that will one-day accompany them, Krajnak explores her own quantum self; but for a twist of fate that led to an adoption by a mid-western couple from the United States, any of these women’s personal narratives could very well have been her own.

Tarrah Krajnak was born in Lima, Peru in 1979. She received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Pitzer College, having previously taught at Cornell University and the University of Vermont. Krajnak has exhibited nationally and internationally at: Art13 London, Art Basel Miami, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Center for Photography Woodstock, San Francisco Camerawork, Newspace Center for Photography, Columbus Museum of Art, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Printed Matter’s LA/NYC Art Book Fair, and metropcs gallery in LA, among others. She is represented by Ampersand Gallery in Portland, OR, which also published her first book, South Sound in 2013, named by TIME as one of the best photography books of that year. She has received grants from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Vermont Council for the Arts, The Vermont Community Foundation, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her work has appeared in both print and online magazines, including Nueva Luz, Camerawork, F-Stop Magazine, and Killing the Buddha. 


Sheila Garrett Rodriguez 

Sheila Garrett Rodriguez’s artistic practice begins and ends at home. As a child of a mixed-ethnic family, her outward expression of cultural identity was significantly suppressed. She was encouraged to avoid speaking Spanish outside the home and to publically limit her personal attachment to popular Chicana symbols. This tension between domestic experience and public persona was, thankfully, up-ended as Garrett Rodriguez matured as an individual and as an artist. Her current work purposefully focuses on her own domestic space and its attendant cultural modalities: textile embellishments, home altar maintenance, and vernacular healing traditions. Such customs are often tied to the refinement of domestic and craft-related skills that are all too frequently overlooked within a fine art environment; embroidery, crochet, flower arrangements, and hand painting. Garrett Rodriguez, however, consciously incorporates these skillsets into her own artistic practice, along with various traditional imagery and other cultural artifacts. At the same time, her work examines the broader theoretical concept of home and its relationship to the domicile, specifically at a time of growing cultural and economic precarity. Home and dislocation are increasingly contingent experiences for many people these days, connected, of course, to physical territory, but also more fluidly, to spaces of cultural familiarity. Garrett Rodriguez layers these references onto, and through, alterations of found objects, including, in some cases, architectural fragments replaced during various home repairs. Her large-scale installation for this exhibition, Screened In (2017), consists of her signature embroidered imagery woven into the warp and weft of used door and window screens. Though disorienting in its surreal displacement of recognizable architectural elements, the interconnected meander of colorful flowers and butterflies suggest the promise of personal rejuvenation and communal continuity in the wake of collective and personal dislocation. In a related series of altered photographs, originally titled Embroidered Home, Garrett Rodriguez uses images of houses for sale in her Whittier neighborhood, adding needlepoint and collaged embellishments to update the homes for potential new residents. Newer extensions of this project have focused more on the personalization of public spaces, bridges and roads that link disparate communities across the greater region of Southern California, a home-away-from-home for an ever-more-mobile society.

Born in Southern California, Sheila Garrett Rodriguez grew up in the Los Angeles area, where she currently works and resides. Garrett Rodriguez received her MFA from the Fiber program at CSULB and her BA from the same institution with an emphasis in Drawing and Painting. She has previously shown her work at the Museum of Latin American Art, the Western Colorado Center for the Arts, Rio Hondo College Art Gallery, Good Eye Gallery, Collective Arts Incubator, and, with Mujeres de Maiz, at Self Help Graphics.

Jasmine Delgado 

Jasmine Delgado's work extends from her love and mastery of printmaking processes. She is enamored by the possibilities of working with multiples and the inherent flexibility of the printmaking medium. It is this flexibility that led Delgado to experiment with combining printmaking strategies with multiple materialities, including fabric, photography, collage, and ink. The content of her work stems from her obsessive love of Southern California communities, and her native San Fernando Valley, in particular, with its hodge-podge of signage, from colloquial hand painted remnants of the past to the neon and digital billboards of today. Delgado’s non-so-uncommon experience of navigating the intersections of Mexican and American popular culture led to the completion of her latest body of work, San Fernando Valley Fabrication (2012-2017), in which she screen printed her layered landscapes on colorfully quilted fabrics, compressing the artist's memories of a bustling San Fernando Valley into a mesmerizing celebration of the (sub)urban life of strip malls, family-run restaurants, and related multicultural bric-à-brac.

Jasmine Delgado was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, a suburban sprawl in northern Los Angeles County that also features heavily in her work. She received a BFA in Printmaking from Cal State Long Beach and a MFA in Studio Art from UC Santa Barbara. In the past, she served as the longtime adjunct instructor (and program director) of printmaking at Cerritos College and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at California State University, Channel Islands. Her work has been featured in Renegade Fiber (Marin County Museum of Art), Mapping Los Angeles (Antelope Valley College Art Gallery), Layered (Project Space 643, Ventura), Made in California (Brea Municipal Art Gallery), and Boundless: New Works in Contemporary Printmaking (Creative Arts Workshop, New Haven, CT).

Consuelo G. Flores 

Consuelo G. Flores' newly created Dia de los Muertos-inspired altar in the gallery's Display Window, Ecos de Huesos, Ramas de Familia (or Echoes of Bones, Branches of Family) uses vintage photographs of the artist’s own ancestors to compose a metaphorical spine along the length of the exhibition space. Emerging from these images are coyote vertebrae connected to strands of red veins and undulating ribbons forming the recognizable shape of the double-helix of DNA. Covered in multi-colored butterflies, these DNA forms seem to pass their encoded genetic information onto the next generation of the artist’s family, represented by the trees on the gallery floor that are exploding with newly-budding flowers and the intimate snapshots of the artist’s siblings and cousins, nieces and nephews, and husband and sons. As with the traditional Day of the Dead altars and ofrendas that inspired it, this installation combines a reverence for the dead with a celebration of the life that perpetually springs forth from that inevitable demise, providing fertile ground where roots can go deep, branches can grow strong, and flowers can bloom … before starting the process all over again; each new cycle another temporary echo of the bones of the past.

Consuelo G. Flores is writer, performer, and mixed-media artist renowned for her Mexican Day of the Dead work. She has been involved in Los Angeles theater, visual, and literary arts communities since the 1980s, first participating in Day of the Dead celebrations in 1981 along with colleagues from the famous Chicano/a conceptual art collective, ASCO, which she later joined as an official member herself, collaborating to create numerous performance art pieces throughout Southern California. In 1982, Flores participated in ASCO’s Day of the Dead Paper Fashion show at Self Help Graphics, the world renowned community arts center and studio. Since then, she has created and modeled numerous Day of the Dead fashions and altars at various Day of the Dead events at Self-Help Graphics, Tropico de Nopal Studio Gallery, and at Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights. She has dedicated altars to the Mexico City victims of 1985, the great Chicano painter Carlos Almarez, the Women of Juarez, the disappeared students of Ayotzinapa, and the murdered night club victims of Orlando. Flores has served on the board of directors of Self-Help Graphics, lectured on Day of the Dead cultural production at Cornell, UCLA, Otis, USC, and Cal State Northridge. This September, Self Help Graphics will be honoring Flores with a Legacy Award for her work in promoting the Day of the Dead as a celebration of cultural significance. In addition to her Day of the Dead-related activities, Flores has also been a member of the Chicana art collective L.A. Coyotas and she works as the Director of Policy, Strategy, and Analysis in the EEO and Diversity department of SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents performers in front of the camera and behind the mic. She has also served as the Cultural Consultant for two major motion pictures, the cult phenomenon Blood In Blood Out (a.k.a. Bound By Honor), directed by Taylor Hackford and starring Benjamin Bratt; and Mi Familia (My Family), directed by Gregory Nava and starring Jimmy Smits. Hackford even chose to open and close Blood In Blood Out with colorful Day of the Dead iconography created by Flores herself. The mother of two artist sons, Flores lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Stephen Blackburn.

Julia Orquera Bianco 

As an Argentine-born artist living in Los Angeles, Julia Orquera Bianco is in an unique position to explore the ways that collective and personal memory intersect to construct identity that is constantly being redefined and problematized. Perhaps because of Argentina’s physical remoteness from the United States, its history and politics can sometimes seem less connected to the cycles of US interventionism in Latin America that has defined much of the last half-century. Of course, this is far from true, and the same anti-communist meddling that led to insurgencies and right-wing paramilitary violence in 1970s and 1908s in places like Central America and Columbia, also triggered violent political fallout in Argentina too, just as globalization and the economic interventionism of the World Bank triggered a debt crisis and monetary collapse in Argentina in the early 2000s. The familiar refrain of the eternal return, that those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, is precisely why Bianco, in her artistic practice, utilizes memory as a creative resource, revisiting her family legacy to project the past into the present in a new context. Her latest work utilizes the phenomenology of video immersion with the materiality of both traditional and non-traditional forms. 

Her installation for the current exhibition, Vuelos (2016-2017), Spanish for Flights, was initially a general response to the outrageous ‘death flights’ that took place during the last Argentinian dictatorship (1976-1983). Invoking the sensation of floating amidst rock suspended under water, the installation is meant to recall the thousands of disappeared (most likely tied to weights and dumped from small aircraft, to be drowned in the Rio de la Plata). However, as a population who understandably refuse to forget the atrocity of past regimes. transgenerational trauma weighs heavily on the Argentinian imaginary. 

Wall text inscribed by hand directly onto the gallery walls reproduce famous lyrics from musicians that were censored during military junta. The more timely question “¿Dónde está Santiago Maldonaldo?” (“Where is Santiago Maldonado?”) can also be found amongst these other censored texts of the past, referencing the political protestor that went missing just last month, sparking urgent national reflection on the possibility that the past might be, once again, repeating itself in the present.

Julia Orquera Bianco was born in Argentina and currently lives in Los Angeles. She attended to Escuela de Arte Fotográfico de Avellaneda, specializing in Photography and later earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Drawing and Painting from Universidad del Museo Social Argentino (Buenos Aires, Argentina). She is currently second-year candidate in the Master of Fine Arts program at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California. She previously worked as a collaborator at Oficina de Proyectos Culturales (the Office of Cultural Projects) in Puerto Vallarta, México, participating in projects with international artists, such as Deborah Aschheim, Fallen Fruit (David Burns and Austin Young), and Iván Puig. She has also served as faculty of the Graduate Program for Fine Arts at Centro Universitario de la Costa at Universidad de Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico.

Gabriel Sosa 

Gabriel Sosa’s artistic practice plays with the relationship between language and memory. Rooted in his personal experience of working as a court interpreter, many of his projects - such as Notebooks (2015-2017), pieces of which are included in this exhibition - confront the disorienting use of language in the justice system and the fallibility of memory, in particular in translation. The violent application of markings alludes to the confusing and often overwhelming nature of the courtroom environment, as a physical extension of state-controlled bio-political power, especially for immigrants that have the added complication of being linguistically distanced, not only from the technocratic legal jargon, but, in fact, from the very language of official communication itself. Inspired by notes taken during witness testimony, ostensibly to ensure the accuracy and precision of the oral translation, the quick, palimpsestic mark-making implies the ephemerality of memory in multiple contexts. It evokes the tension between the parallel processes of the witness recalling memories and the interpreter who disposes of memories as soon as they are formed, ideally to create space for the next words to be interpreted. 

More recent series have explored Sosa’s cultural experience as the child of Cuban exiles and his own acquired memories of an ancestral home that will be forever extraneous to his lived experience, but is still intimately familiar because of epigenetic transference. His video project, 5,382 Days in Exile (2016), for example, places a layered audio track above the found footage of an episode of ¿Qué Pasa, USA?,, a sitcom produced by PBS in the late 1970s about a Cuban-American family living in Miami. The audio, a pre-recorded reading of a letter Sosa’s grandfather sent from Miami to his sister (Sosa’s great-aunt) in Havana, dated June 11th, 1979, dramatically contrasts in tone with the light-hearted nature of the situation comedy that was meant to naturalize the Cuban-American communities place in the quilt of American diversity, but also sanitized the feelings of loss experienced by forced exiles like Sosa’s grandfather. The title of the video is taken directly from the content of the letter, (re)counting the ongoing status of his grandfather’s physical and psychological displacement. This psychological sense of dislocation becomes, as another recent project, Take Me to Guanabacoa (2016), suggests, a part of the legacy of exile, extended to second and third generation Cuban-Americans like Gabriel Sosa himself. The fragmentary and incomplete drawings, rubbings, and photo-collages, are representations of Sosa’s mediated experience of the colonial township in Havana from which his family originated. Acquired memories, these jumbled representations are flights of fancy that bear little resemblance to the current (and perhaps even past) reality of the community, which Sosa visited himself for the first time as an adult, only to have his cherished ‘memories’ challenged by direct experience.

Gabriel Sosa is an artist, linguist, and curator based in Boston, Massachusetts. Born into a Cuban family in Miami, Florida, he is a graduate of the New World School of the Arts, Boston University, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. He has exhibited work at AREA Gallery (Cambridge), LATLab and LA Municipal Art Gallery (Los Angeles), the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), the Museum of Fine Arts and Northeastern University (Boston), and La Fábrica de Arte Cubano (Havana, Cuba). Sosa has curated exhibitions at Haley House (Roxbury, MA), the Distillery, and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston). He has been Artist-in-Residence at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History and Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA). He was the Walter Feldman Fellow in 2017 and will be Artist-in-Residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute in Santa Fe, NM in 2018.

Michael Alvarez 

Michael Alvarez is first, and foremost, a figurative painter. Each of his large-scale paintings pulls directly from the visual artifacts of his lived world, sprinkled liberally with an obvious fascination for the character revealing interactions between people, be they strangers, friends, or intimate relations. As Alvarez clearly knows, real observation never comes from just simply passively looking. Rather, it’s all about seeing; about practicing perception as a form of active participation. And truly seeing (i.e. understanding) is only ever possible when one is able to successfully juggle the apparently diametrically opposed tasks of notating minute, which is not to say insignificant, details while, at the same time, recognizing the deeper hidden truths and overarching themes present within those facts. In this regards, Michael Alvarez is clearly a keen student and inheritor of the art historical tradition of careful, conscious, and conscientious observation. Though couched in the aesthetic and spirit of street art, Alvarez is, above all else, a connoisseur of the people that populate his own contemporary urban environment in, and around, Los Angeles. His is an artistic practice founded, first and foremost, on character analysis; people-watching with an eye for the absurd. Though working in a different medium than Diane Arbus, Alvarez’s paintings have the same uncanny ability to make the “normal” appear outlandish, the “abnormal” to seem wonderfully endearing, and, in both cases, the everyday becomes mythical. 

Michael Alvarez was born and raised in Los Angeles. He holds a BFA from Art Center College of Design and currently  works with students at the Hollywood Media Arts Academy and as a workshop coordinator for artworxLA. He has exhibited his work in a solo exhibition, Sorealism, at Museum as Retail Space (Los Angeles) and in numerous group shows at Joshua Liner Gallery (New York), Giant Robot (Santa Monica), Cal State Northridge, Market Gallery (Los Angeles), 5790 Projects (Los Angeles), Needles and Pens (San Francisco), Pasadena Museum of California Art, and, previously, at Cerritos College Art Gallery. His paintings have also been featured in the Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River, Thrasher Magazine, and Studio Visit. He is also a practicing freelance illustrator and muralist, whose clients include Beautiful Decay/Colt 45, Amoeba Music, and Nine Inch Nails.