El Camino College Art Gallery to Present “Personal Matters” Artist Talk
16007 Crenshaw Blvd
Torrance, CA 90506
USA
El Camino College Art Gallery to Present “Personal Matters”
The El Camino College Art Gallery will present the work of 13 Southern California artists in “Personal Matters,” an exhibition of personal narrative work. The exhibition runs Feb. 13 through March 9, with a reception set for 7-9 p.m. Feb. 23 and an artist’s talk scheduled for 1 p.m. Feb. 28.
Emerging from a historical tradition of artwork representing private experience – Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh and Max Beckmann, to name a few – the artists in this exhibit depict their own experiences. In a time when merchandising and mass media are a main focus, it seems particularly important to recognize individual lives, struggles, love, courage, humor and cultural differences as lived and portrayed on the personal level. The exhibition explores this realm in a broad variety of media, creating an opportunity for the viewer to glimpse the individual artist’s circumstance and psyche.
- Said Abdelsayed presents modernistic brilliantly colored acrylic on canvas portraits of his life with his wife in the early days of their romance in their native country, Egypt, and of their subsequent immigration to the United States.
- Garrett M. Brown artist, actor and director, exhibits watercolors on paper of his mother and father, as he re-imagines their life, vacationing “on the Cape in 1956.”
- Carol Es, artist and musician, presents an installation piece, “The Exodus Project,” featuring drawings and paintings created while on a meditative artist retreat in Joshua Tree.
- Satoe Fukushima exhibits a book of intimate photographs of her un-romanticized experience of giving birth to a baby girl. The photographs and her description of the birth capture the fear and intensity of emotion she encountered along the way.
- Zeal Harris presents “Home Remedies for Driving While Black,” a series of poignant textile works with drawings, often autobiographical, “concerning the impact of police violence on interpersonal relationships.”
- Brenda Henriques, designer and artist, explores memories of childhood in Southern California using life-sized human figures clothed in complex costumes made of an array of media from tea bags to latex gloves to represent elements of her past.
- Sandra Low exhibits a book and drawings from her series, “Ma Stories,” in which she portrays humorous vignettes in comic book/graphic novel style about her mother, highlighting cultural and generational differences between members of immigrant families.
- Gina M., who was born into a family of professional puppeteers, presents whimsical figures made of primarily of clay and embellished with recycled materials and paint. These figures contain elements of the artist’s memory.
- Gloria Plascencia exhibits black and white photographs of herself re-imagined as a street person. These images, from a series titled “Have Compassion,” are a tribute to her younger brother who died while living on the street.
- Gretchen Potts presents an installation dealing with personal memory. Potts connects over 4,000 paper shipping tags, many inscribed with collected memories, into 3-D swirling forms that reference the structure of the brain. Viewers are invited to write down a memory from childhood on available tags, which become a part of the piece.
- Christine Saldana presents a group of exquisite funereal marionettes that represent specific members in her family and the Japanese traditions that they carried with them into their lives as American citizens.
- Cory Sewelson, artist and theme park designer, exhibits paintings on panel that utilize architectural elements to represent both personal memories and broader collective assumptions about “the world and how we choose to live in it.”
- Susan Sironi presents altered books in which she contrasts her own size to the size of images in the illustrated editions of “Gulliver’s Travels” and “Alice in Wonderland.” Within the books, she creates dimensional collages that depict outlines of parts of her own body.
The El Camino College Art Gallery is located on campus, 16007 Crenshaw Boulevard, Torrance and is open 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays and from 1 to 7:30 p.m.Wednesdays and Thursdays.
For more information, contact Director/Curator Susanna Meiers at 310-660-3010. Admission to the El Camino College Art Gallery and gallery events is free. On-campus parking is $3.