The Earth is the ground upon which we all stand, together in our differences. It is an ever-shifting, politicized landscape of borders, exclusions and omissions, as well as shared terrain under pressing physical assault. This multigenerational and multicultural group of artists explore the reality of a shared planet that is humanity’s most divided territory and damaged common ground.
Curated by Suvan Geer and Sandra Mueller
October 3 - November 14, 2020
Kim Abeles
Mariona Barkus
Sharon Barnes
Pilar Castillo
Danielle Eubank
Samantha Fields
Eloisa Guanlao
Ann Isolde
Sant Khalsa
Meg Madison
Kaoru Mansour
Maryrose C. Mendoza
Sandra Mueller
Naida Osline
Pamela J. Peters
Sheila Pinkel
Sinan Leong Revell
She Votes/ Bonnie J. Smith
Stitch in Time/ Suvan Geer
Linda Vallejo
Gail Werner
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Kim Abeles
The hundred+ sky photographs for Shared Skies were collected through my journeys, from artists who participated while traveling, and international acquaintances through social media. Each sky is identified with the location and the name of the person who took the photograph and represent all seven continents plus the Arctic. For participating, each photographer was given an archival print that included their sky with twelve others.
As people look toward the sky each morning, through the day or each night, the “shared skies” speak to our connections. In a global sense, we can imagine an interrelatedness through a seamless sky and observe the effects of our environmental choices. From the Salt Flats of Bolivia to Grand Forks in the United States, and Maasai Mara, Kenya to Pine Ridge, Oglala Sioux Tribe, our skies portray the connected parts of our place on this earth.
Kim Abeles is an artist whose artworks explore biography, geography, feminism, and the environment. Her work speaks to society, science literacy, and civic engagement, creating projects with science and natural history museums, health departments, air pollution control agencies, National Park Service, and non-profits. In 1987, she innovated a method to create images from the smog in the air, and Smog Collectors brought her work to national and international attention. In 2019, she worked with Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow to create smog portraits of world leaders with quotes from climate summits. The National Endowment for the Arts funded two recent projects: a residency at the Institute of Forest Genetics where she focused on Resilience; and, Valises for Camp Ground: Arts, Corrections, and Fire Management in the Santa Monica Mountains in collaboration with Camp 13, a group of female prison inmates who fight wildfires. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, California Community Foundation and Pollack-Krasner Foundation. Her work is in forty public collections including MOCA, LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Her process documents are archived at the Center for Art + Environment.
Legend of Shared Skies, 2012-2014
Archival ultrachrome prints of international skies
Identified by location and photographer
56" x 16”
$1200
Legend of Shared Skies, 2012-2014
Archival ultrachrome prints of international skies
Identified by location and photographer
56" x 16”
$1200
Mariona Barkus
Earth is currently littered with more than a quarter million metric ton of highly radioactive waste. Over 90,000 metric tons are in the United States, stored at 121 sites in 35 states. “Monument For A Nuclear Dump” was inspired by Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository’s search for a system of surface markers to warn of its planned lethal underground cache for hundreds of thousands of years. A “toilet paper roll” encapsulating 32 years of newspaper clippings mimics the folly of this entombment while documenting ubiquitous nuclear waste proliferation. When I created this print in 1995, only the United States was planning an underground nuclear waste repository. Today, countries around the world subscribe to the “best practice” of isolating nuclear waste in deep geological repositories, which will be permanently sealed. But this “best practice” assumes a rather static geology instead of the living, breathing, shifting common ground that is our earth.
Mariona Barkus has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States as well as internationally. Barkus’ work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Getty Research Institute, UCLA, Franklin Furnace Collection at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Museum, Long Beach Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Carnegie-Mellon University, UC Berkeley, Houston Contemporary Art Museum, and Eastern Washington University among others. Her work has been reviewed in numerous catalogues and periodicals including The Los Angeles Times and Artweek. Some of the books featuring her work are Crossing Over: Feminism and Art of Social Concern by Arlene Raven; Other Visions, Other Voices by Paul Von Blum with a foreword by Lucy Lippard; Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook by The Visual Studies Workshop; From Site to Vision: the Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture, edited by Sondra Hale and Terry Wolverton, and most recently, American Artists Against War 1935—2010 by David McCarthy, University of California Press.
Monument for A Nuclear Dump Installation
Archival digital print & nuclear waste newspaper clippings
20” x 14" print; 9.25” x 662' roll
$500 print only
Sharon Barnes
My suspended work Milkman’s Flight was inspired by Toni Morrison’s book, Song of Solomon. Morrison wove a story in which the conflicted Milkman would finally know his forefather’s names and the inherited magic to free one’s mind and fly. The slave trade severed the memories of countless lineages and displaced African peoples from an entire continent. My work explores connections to earth and memory that are vital to the restoration of peace within each individual and among all people, as we seek to connect with one another on common ground.
Sharon Barnes is an inter-disciplinary Los Angeles-based artist born in Sacramento, CA, and raised in Los Angeles. She studied at Otis College of Art & Design where she recently returned to complete her MFA in Fine Arts, and previously earned a BA in Television & Film from CSULA. Barnes has exhibited nationally and internationally, including group shows at the California African American Museum, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Aqua Art Miami, the Los Angeles Tom Bradley Airport and a site installation at the Arco Chato in the Republic of Panama. She has completed residencies at the Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency in Saugatuck, MI and the Spelman College Art Colony at Taller Portobelo in Panama. Barnes’ work is in the permanent collection of the UCLA Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies, as well as private and business collections.
Milkman's Flight
Suspended sculpture
72" x 72" x 3"
$7000
Pilar Castillo
Designed as a ‘hyper-real’ counterfeit, the PASSPORT booklet mimics the structure and subverts the content of the official document. This counterfeit travel document aims to confront the institutional narrative, question its authenticity, and serve as a record of protest and indignation. This work is centered within the context of ‘decolonizing design,’ as a practice in redefining how we interpret government narratives, and to consider the formats in which land is claimed and people discarded.
PASSPORT revisits the political systems imposed by the U.S. government to exploit immigrants based on denying them citizenship and basic human rights. This counter narrative recollects a history of exploitation against Black, Indigenous, and people of color, from cotton plantations to boarding schools and internment camps, to the current humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border
Pilar Castillo is a Belizean-born artist based in Los Angeles, and proudly represents the Caribbean diaspora. She has dedicated twenty-years as an art practitioner and professional in the L.A. art community with a focus on public art. As a painter and illustrator, she applies handmade processes to design work ranging from publication to product design. In 2018 she ventured into entrepreneurship opening CastlePillar Design studio. Most notably designing artwork for the 2018 launch of LAX Terminal 1 for Los Angeles World Airports. Since 2017 she’s been a featured designer with the city’s LA Original brand. Pilar holds an M.F.A. from Otis College of Art and Design, a B.A. in World Arts and Cultures from UCLA’s School of Art & Architecture, and has completed field studies in Amsterdam, Belgium and Cuba.
Passport
Digital hand-made passport with sound by "Jar of Files"
6:32 minutes
NFS
Danielle Eubank
Common ground is the answer. In order to help mitigate climate change, which is what Antarctica Glacier II is about, we need to change the way we think about air, water, and earth to more fully embrace the understanding that we all share these elements, amongst all living things. Air, water, and earth are figuratively and literally our common ground.
Antarctica Ice I reflects how I feel at times. It is floating in the benign yet destructive sea. There is only one sea, one common ocean amongst all continents, all people, all life. The sea is our common ground yet, when viewed from our individual angles, it is easy to lose sight of the larger perspective. That piece of ice, no matter how big or small, is unaware that it is part of a greater whole
Danielle Eubank is a painter exploring the relationship between abstraction and realism. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Eubank conceived One Artist Five Oceans, a 20-year project as an expedition artist sailing and painting the waters of every ocean on earth. Culminating with an expedition to Antarctica in 2019, the Southern Ocean was Eubank's fifth and final ocean. It capped her decades-long quest to paint every ocean to raise awareness about the state of the oceans and climate change. Eubank was the expedition artist for the Phoenicia Ship Expedition, a replica 600 BCE ship that sailed from Syria and circumnavigated Africa. As the expedition artist for the UNESCO approved Borobudur Ship Expedition, she traveled 10,000 miles aboard the replica 8th century Indonesian boat from Indonesia to Ghana. Eubank also sailed aboard the barquentine tall ship “The Antigua” to the High Arctic that sailed to the northernmost settlement on earth. She painted the Henley Royal Regatta in 2011-2014. A film documentary about her work, Mozambique VI, premiered at the Newport Beach Film Festival. She was a 2018 Creative Climate Award nominee and received the WCA/United Nations Program Honor Roll Award
Antartica Glacier III
Photograph printed on metal
30" x 20"
$1,600
Antartica Ice I
Photograph printed on metal
20" x 30"
$1,600
Samantha Fields
In my current paintings, I use multiple sources to construct scenes that examine our current political situation and the death of the American Dream . . . itself a carefully constructed fiction. While half of our nation celebrates, the other half is mired in despair, this dissonance is present in all of my current work.
The paintings in Common Ground depict man-man disasters: car bombs, acts of terrorism/war, & industrial explosions. In these paintings, I remove identifying information, only the explosions and smoke remain. These are painted against a background of confetti, which reads as both celebratory and destructive . . . the little bits of paper “flip”, becoming shards of debris and shrapnel. While most of my work deals with climate change as seen in the landscape itself, these works offer a corollary conversation surrounding the procurement of fossil fuels. Historically, landscape painting has been markedly political. In this sense, my work falls well within that tradition.
Samantha Fields was born in Cleveland Ohio in 1972. She holds an MFA from The Cranbrook Academy of Art and is currently a Professor of Art at California State University, Northridge. She has received numerous awards and recognition, including a City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Grant. Her work has been collected by and exhibited at public institutions including the California Museum of Photography, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Crocker Art Museum, the University Art Museum, and the Armory Center for the Arts. She is represented by Traywick Contemporary in Berkeley, California. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Harpers Magazine, ZYZZYVA, Artweek, Art in America, Art ltd., Artillery, The Detroit News, The Detroit Free Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. A profile about Fields is included in Danielle Krysas book, A Big Important Book About Art: Now With Women!
As Above, So Below
Acrylic on Paper
30" x 22"
$1800 unframed, $2300 framed
Elevations
Acrylic on Paper
30" x 22"
$1800 unframed, $2300 framed
Eloisa Guanlao
Haiyan 2.0 revisits the frustratingly pernicious issue of habitat and species loss in the age of the anthropocene. Its manifestation as a canoe underscores our own undoing, from the loss of a way of life and home for island dwellers due to the rise of sea waters, from the building of dams that wreak havoc on the wild salmon population, to the extraction of minerals for personal computers and phones, the colonization and exploitation of our home continues unabated. The life-sized canoe is cast in edible rice paper. Lightly block-printed on each canoe are images of trilobites, an extinct species that once dominated the planet. Dancing alongside the trilobites is the Covid-19 virus. The canoe serves as a double-edged reminder of the tenuous benefits and pitfalls of technological dependence and ecological alterations. Canoes once served as the lifeblood of island dwellers for expanded colonization to other islands and gathering of sustenance, but like fragile island homes, the rice paper canoe will disappear when inundated by water.
Eloisa Guanlao is a multi-disciplinary artist and scholar. She attended Carleton College in Minnesota, California State University in Long Beach, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and LA County High School for the Arts for her art and art history training. She currently makes her home in California with her husband and two daughters. Three threads converge in her artwork: migration, technological dependence, and colonialism. She finds that one thread inevitably runs into the other two, forming a muddled jumble that can only be sifted through and examined via art — a means of corporeal and spiritual survival.
Haiyan 2.0
Rice paper, ink
18" x 96" x 18"
NFS
Ann Isolde
My paintings address the ongoing threat of Climate Change. I’ll never forget the famous “blue marble” photo taken during the Apollo 17 trip to the moon in 1972. It changed how I view our planet. It looked so beautiful and alive. That was two years after the first Earth Day celebration, which was the birth of the modern environmental movement. This is when it first became clear to me that we are just one of many interrelated species that share this common ground called earth. Unfortunately, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, humans have become more and more addicted to fossil fuels, which are heating up the atmosphere and polluting the air and water. Now we must focus on “Climate Justice” and address environmental racism as we struggle to maintain a balance so all species on this planet can survive. This is the great challenge of our time.
Ann Isolde is a visual artist and activist who has been involved in the feminist art movement since 1973. She earned a BA from Knox College and an MFA from the University of Colorado. She subsequently joined Front Range Women in the Visual Arts in Boulder, Colorado. In 1975 she drove to Los Angeles to participate in the Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman’s Building. Within a year, she began working with Judy Chicago on The Dinner Party Project as facilitator of the team that researched the achievements of 3,000 women in Western civilization. She was one of eight women who painted the 999 names in gold china paint on the “Heritage Floor” of this monumental sculpture now permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. A member of SCWCA since 1981, she also worked as an administrator in Publications and Exhibitions at both LACMA and the Getty Research Institute before retiring in 2007. She is the editor of Personal Voices / Cultural Visions: Conversations in the Visual Arts Community, Los Angeles 1994-1996 published by the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art.
The Greenhouse Effect
Acrylic on canvas board
13" x 16"
NFS
Planet in Peril
Acrylic and paper on canvas board
11" x 14"
NFS
Sant Khalsa
My artwork derives from mindful inquiry into environmental and societal issues impacting the shared natural resources essential to sustain all live. Growing Air focuses on hundreds of ponderosa pine trees I planted during Spring 1992 as part of the reforestation of Holcomb Valley in the San Bernardino National Forest to improve air and water quality and restore a fragile and vital ecosystem. The valley located north of Big Bear Lake was decimated by mining, clearcutting and cattle grazing during the 1860s gold rush. I returned to the site of the seedling plantings in 2017, twenty-five years later, to find an extraordinarily beautiful and thriving forest. I am fascinated with both what is visible and the hidden mysteries we seek to understand about trees and their communal lives. I am spending time in the forest, developing a meaningful connection and producing works that respond to this unique and complex environment.
Sant Khalsa is an artist, educator and activist whose photography, mixed media and installation works are widely exhibited, published, and acquired by museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Nevada Museum of Art, Center for Creative Photography in Tucson and UCR California Museum of Photography in Riverside. Khalsa is a recipient of prestigious fellowships, grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, California Council for the Humanities, Center for Photographic Art in Carmel and others. She was honored as the inaugural recipient of the Society for Photographic Education Insight Award for her significant contributions to the field of photography (2012). Books have included Sant Khalsa: Prana - Life with Trees (Griffith Moon/MOAH Lancaster, 2019), In the Sunshine of Neglect (Inlandia Institute, 2018), Seismic Shift (UCR California Museum of Photography, 2011), Backyard Oasis (DelMonico Books, 2012), Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment (Skira/Rizzoli, 2011) and Art in Action: Nature, Creativity and Our Collective Future (Earth Aware Editions, 2007). Khalsa is a Professor of Art, Emerita at California State University, San Bernardino and the founding director of the Joshua Tree Center for Photographic Arts.
Holcomb Valley (Gold rush remains & Ponderosa Pines planted 1992) from “Growing Air”
Archival pigment print
18.5" x 24”
$1,500
Holcomb Valley (Ponderosa pines planted 1992)
from “Growing Air”
Archival pigment print
18.5" x 24” $1,500
Meg Madison
After my mother died, I bought a small house in the California High Desert; I am the third owner from the original 1957 recipient of the Homesteader Act. I began making cyanotype photograms of all the native plants on the five acres. I cataloged each print with the date, time, plant’s name, location, and day’s weather condition. Holding the piece of coated paper next to daggers of yucca, and spines of cactus as the sun exposed the paper brought me in direct contact with the plant, the earth and this land. “No 179 Yucca Schidigera” was made August 7, 2017, 9:19 am, a sunny hot day in 4 minutes and 45 seconds. The left and bottom of the composition are flanked by bayonet-like plant stems, while the middle is an expanse of deep blue space; much like the expanse of the desert, and also a personal searching for grounding.
Meg Madison is an artist who uses photography to conceptually examine contemporary life. She was born and raised in New York City, studied film at San Francisco State and came to art late with her first solo exhibit at the Kristi Engle Gallery in 2005. Madison embraced art making with community projects, collaborations, and exhibitions in galleries, non-profit spaces, and museums in Los Angeles and beyond. Madison’s early work explored memory, ritual, and the ecological transition from being wanted to being discarded; this was followed by projects on land use, measuring, mapping and the human connection to the land. Jemez Homestead: Stolen Land is a long-term project using the sun to create cyanotype photograms that map a five-acre homestead parcel in the high desert. The paper is snuggled into shrubs and braced against desert plants- the elements of the sun, the wind, the iron salts, the physical presence of land ( the plants shadow) and finally the local well water to develop — all collide creating a print that has touched the land —leaving marks, holes, and scratches on the paper, a metaphor for the contact of land stewardship..
No 179 Mojave Yucca from “Jemez Homestead
“Stolen Land” Project
Cyanotype photogram of Yucca plant, Rives BFK paper 30” x 22”
$600
Kaoru Monsour
My landscape series started while I was traveling to South America, Asia, Europe and the U.S. I observed elements of different landscapes. For my art making process, all these landscapes are the communal ground for the inspiration of my work.
Kaoru Mansour is a native of Japan working as a painter and musician in Los Angeles. She moved to California in 1986 and studied at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles 1987-1989. Recent Selected solo shows include Heather James Fine Art in Palm Desert, Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia, En Gallery in Pasadena, ARK in Altadena and Plan D gallery in Los Angeles. Recent selected group shows include USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, El Camino College Gallery in Torrance and Vallo della in Lucania Municipality, Italy.
Portland #102
Inkjet print and acrylic on canvas
10" x 20"
$450
Foothill #103
Inkjet print and acrylic on canvas
10" x 20"
$450
Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza
Global is a consequence of a longing for identity and place through the stereotypical colonial fantasy of "island life." Although the piece looks very inviting, for me it addresses the loss, extraction, and subjugation of island cultural life that is hidden in the popularization of the exotic and perpetuated by the colonized mind.
Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza, an interdisciplinary artist and arts educator, has crafted her own visual language of transformation, exalting the everyday in drawings, sculpture, and installation for nearly 30 years. Using memory, material significance, and personal narrative, her work investigates colonized and decolonized perspectives reflecting circumstances of cultural amnesia and assimilation through processes of the handmade. Mendoza is an Associate Professor in Drawing in the Visual Arts and Media Studies Division at Pasadena City College and earned an MFA from the Claremont Graduate University. Her work has been exhibited at the Pacific Asia Museum, Los Angeles’ Municipal Art Gallery, Commonwealth and Council, Baik Art, Solway Jones, Hudson Jones Gallery, PlugIn Gallery, YYZ Artist’s Outlet, and many others. Her most comprehensive solo exhibition, Navigating Technics, is currently on display at the Orange County Museum of Art. Mendoza was honored as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2019), and with C.O.L.A. Individual Artist, L. A. Artists’, and Art Matters Fellowships, as well as honorariums from the YYZ Artist’s Outlet, the PlugIn Gallery, and the Pacific Asia Museum. She has enjoyed internships and artist residencies at Art Space Yosuga in Kyoto, Japan, Joshua Tree Highlands Residency, Yaddo Artist Retreat and the Socrates Sculpture Foundation.
Global
32 Aloha shirts, filler
42" x 42' x 42"
NFS
Sandra Mueller
In Morning Chores two birds — who might be permanent residents or winter visitors to this once royal Indian forest — share the pictorial frame and colorful palette with a temple sweeper. Their stance is one of calm repose that brings our attention to earth’s most precious resource, water. They are quietly at work to sustain their/our physical and spiritual presence on this planet.
Sandra Mueller is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and facilitator. She spent much of the 1990s working on the cutting edge of interactive media before returning to visual art. Mueller has curated and directed environmental exhibitions for conferences, galleries and community art spaces. She has edited and produced more than 50 interactive media and print titles including multiple art catalogues. Mueller serves on the national board for the Women’s Caucus for Art and as a Regional Coordinator for The Feminist Art Project. Her colorful abstract paintings, archival eco-prints and installations have been shown broadly in the Pacific Rim region. In 2014, she co-created a twelve-foot wide “Dome of Many Connections” as a gathering place for an international art exchange in Shenyang China. She received her BA from UC Berkeley in intellectual history and found her way to visual art two decades later. Now she presents her concepts visually and keeps a studio practice in Santa Monica, CA.
Morning Chores
Archival acrylic print
16" x 39"
NFS
Naida Osline
We humans often create geographic, cultural, economic, racial, age and gender borders that prevent us from seeing our common ground. GRINGOTOPIA began in the summer of 2015, when I rented an apartment off the malecón in Chapala, Mexico, a magnet for expatriates. I interviewed 25 citizens from Mexico, the U.S. and Canada—retirees, businesspeople, drifters, veterans, artists, and workers who left the U.S. for Mexico in search of a better quality of life. The results were twelve, ten-minute video chapters, featuring interwoven interviews, paced like a social conversation.
I have a heightened awareness of the cultural divisions that are tearing this country and friendships apart. Political rhetoric does not represent the subtlety of human experience. Rather, relationships follow a more organic path in real life. GRINGOTOPIA offers a look at individuals who voice intimate and often humorous observations about their life-changing move across more than just a geographic border.
Naida Osline is a photo and video artist who combines images sourced from analog and digital processes, blending conceptual and documentary practices. Based in Southern California, she works throughout the Americas, exploring themes of community, identity, gender, aging and transformation, along with the mystical and natural worlds in tension with the human-built environment. Osline’s work has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Southern California and internationally. She has done extended residencies in Colombia, SA and Mexico as well as in U.S. national parks. Her work has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, Artillery Magazine, Huffington Post, the OC Weekly, Culture Magazine, Coast Magazine, Artweek and ArtScene. The gallery features a screening of a series of twelve, ten-minute video shorts that comprise Gringotopia (2018), which explores an area south of Guadalajara in Mexico that is a magnet for expatriates from the U.S. and Canada, who moved there for a better quality of life. The video series, seen by over 8,000 viewers worldwide, includes English and Spanish subtitles. Osline’s most recent project is a feature length film (with Tyler Stallings) called Hometown Proud (2020) that explores attitudes related to growing up LGBTQ.
Gringotopia
Digital video
12, 10 minute chapters
Free to the Public
Pamela J. Peters
The Legacy of Exiled NDNZ © 2014 series discusses the historical U.S. policy of the relocation of Indians to urban establishment in the 1950s through the 1960s, and the legacy it has created through today. It provides a narrative of seven native adults currently living in Los Angeles, shot in a neorealist visual aesthetic reminiscent of Kent Mackenzie’s 1961 film, The Exiles. This photo was taken at Los Angeles Union Station.
Pamela J. Peters is a Diné multimedia documentarian and artist from the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. Pamela is from the Táchii'nii (Red Running Into the Water People clan). She is a multimedia artist, producing works she regards as "Indigenous Realism" exploring the lives and diversities of real American Indians. As an artist and curator, she pushes viewers to critically analyze the psychological and historical structures of Native Americans in mass media through a Native lens while expressing creative sovereignty. She lives in Los Angeles.
Welcome to Los Angeles
Black and white photograph
22" x 18"
$1,800
Walking in Indian Alley
Black and white photograph
22" x 18"
$1,800
Sheila Pinkel
The work “Transformative Justice” reflects a way of understanding every person as a whole person and a process of solving problems between people instead of calling the police. In this approach to problem solving, people having problems are called to a meeting with a facilitator and members of their families and the community. The facilitator helps them discuss their conflict with the goal of creating understanding of the positions of both people. Ultimately, the person who has been wronged communicates what he/she feels will be adequate restitution. If the person who has committed the problem cannot afford the restitution, then a member of his/her family steps up to help. The community then discusses what it can do to help people having these kinds of problems in the future so that a person does not have to commit a crime. This is the indigenous way of adjudicating problems in their community.
Sheila Pinkel is an artist whose work makes visible the invisible in nature and culture. Currently she is working on carceral issues both in her artwork and in her proactive cultural work in an attempt to create consciousness about the pernicious carceral state locally and in the United States. She is also an emerita professor of art from Pomona College where she taught photography and computer graphics for over 25 years.
Transformative Justice
Digital print
24" x 24"
$500
Sinan Leong Revell
The global pandemic shows how people need to unite to save the planet and to repair the earth. Rival tribes and nations clash over land, resources and beliefs, driven by greed, privation. These “DoppelgANGER “self portraits illustrate how we can be victim or aggressor, creator or destroyer. If my family had not fled China for Australia, I could easily have been one of the nameless millions caught in Chinaʼs struggle. After moving to LA in 1991, I saw the tumult from the Rodney King /LA riots and the Iraq War. “Border Patrol” depicts an immigrant held at gunpoint by a vigilante and “World News” shows a reporter in a war torn landscape with a disfigured native victim — anywhere, any war, any time. I put myself in the picture as every person to show our possibility for good and bad. Our common ground both physically and metaphorically is up for grabs-to be polluted or preserved.
Sinan Leong Revell is a multi-disciplinary artist who works in painting, photography, ceramics, encaustic and performance. Her work has revolved around the experiences of cultural displacement, politics and identity, referencing both global and personal perspectives on migration and cultural diaspora. Born in China, Sinan migrated to Australia as a child. Her Buddhist-Taoist and Catholic school attitudes blend disparate cultures. After graduating from Sydney University, she went on to study art, drama and butoh before joining “SPK”, an industrial band in England, After relocating to the US and spurred by the events of 9/11, she began her “Doppelg-ANGER” series. Inspired by Cindy Sherman’s portraits, Revell channeled an outsider’s outrage at the apathy towards such scenes as gun violence, mass shootings, racism and war. In these staged photographs, she assumes the character of each of the principal players — victim and oppressor. In portraying the self as capable of both roles - good and bad, Revell shows how we are all connected.
Doppleganger—World News
Digital print on metal
29" x 18" x 2"
$1,500
Doppleganger—Border Patrol
Digital print on metal
29" x 19" x 2"
$1,500
She Votes
Bonnie J. Smith
“She Votes” is a community art project created in celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment. Sponsored by the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art, this collaborative volume features more than 110 artworks created by 69 WCA members from across the country. Each 4” x 6” image underscores the continued import of voting rights to women. Works were made in varied media from painting, photography, drawing or collage. The resultant small works that are placed inside this book (of the same name) make visible our varied, yet common ground. The works themselves are even more poignant given their creation during this period of Covid and intense uncertainty around the upcoming 2020 election.
She Votes Participating Artists:
Patti Akesson, Ulla Barr, Jennifer Bentson, Deanna Beye, Carol Bivins, Anna F. Bowers, Mary Sherwood Brock, Andree B. Carter, Vivian Wenhuey Chen, Cheryl Christopher, Christine Cianci, Debra Dobkin, Merrilyn Duzy, Paula Dwyer, Joan Elliott, Cathy Engel-Marder, Melody Epperson, Ellen Erenea, Bruria Finkel, Dellis Frank, Dwora Fried, Anna Friesen, Rosalie Friis-Ross, Shelley A. Gazin, Suvan Geer, Carole Goldman, Maria Grazia, Laurie Talbot Hall, Susan Hannon, Shelley Heffler, Brenda Hurst, Ann Isolde, Beanie Kaman, Susan Karhroody, Susan Kurland, Noreen Larinde, Nancy Goodman Lawrence, Susan Lentz, Ava Letterman, Lynn Letterman, Lynda Levy, Hannah Mandel, Aline Mare, Karena Massengill, Lisa Michot, Freyda Miller, Sandra Mueller, Barbara Nathanson, Mary Ornish, Priscilla Otani, Laura Paul, Stacey Rasfeld, Melissa Reischman, Jane Reiter, Sinan Revell, Marleene Rubenstein, Karen Schifman, Durba Sen, Heather A. Sepanih, Bonnie J. Smith, Kerrie Smith, Andra Stanton, Martha Stevermer, Ann Storc, Holly Stucznski, Olivia Patricia Terrell-O’Neal, Kathleen Thoma, Rachel Tirosh, Nancy Kay Turner.
Bonnie J. Smith is a self-taught artist, published author and curator with a strong emphasis on textiles. Her work is about what she sees and knows. She created the award-winning textile installation “Swimming Upstream” after suffering a life changing injury that confined her to a wheel chair. Once secure in the knowledge that she would recover, Smith created the 12 piece “Swimming Upstream” textile series that became not just her story but of others also trying to swim upstream through life. The series has traveled to the United Kingdom and across the United States. Her work has been exhibited in the United Nations Headquarters as well as embassies around the globe. Smith received the prestigious Leigh Weimer’s Award in San Jose, California in 2017. Her work is in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textile where in 2014 she curated the “Forming Our Lives” exhibition. In 2020, her Drought installation based on the Alviso Sea Marshes was featured during the Festival of Quilts by the Dynamic Gallery in Birmingham, England.
She Votes — 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment
Artist book with 113 original artworks by 69 artists
7" x 14" x 7"
NFS
Stitch in Time
Suvan Geer
This collaborative quilt project was planned in celebration of the 100th anniversary year of women’s suffrage and the 50th anniversary of earth day. We’d planned to meet in galleries and homes. Then Covid-19 hit. To date, our monthly sewing bees have been via Zoom. This quilt is the tangible residue of time spent working alone and together during quarantine. Each piece records a fragment of thought or emotion in response to the events of 2020 – this year that is the common ground we share. As of mid-August, there are 30 panels by 24 women contributors. The project continues. The quilt is still under construction.
Participants: Ruth Ann Anderson, Margaret Adachi Janet I. Adams, Dawn Arrowsmith, Polly Chu, Allison Cosmos, Jill D’Agnenica, Kathy Draper, Karen Feuer-Schwager, Cameron Flanders, Anne Gauldin, Jan Johnson, Sandy Johnson, Stefanie Holzman, Vicki Lopez, Meg Madison, Darlene Martin, Yoshi Makino, Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza, Jessica Ruvalcaba, Christina Sansone, Nancy Spiller.
Suvan Geer is an artist whose artworks explore time and things on the verge of disappearing from notice. With her works she probes the transitory in lived experience. Geer’s installations, objects, photographs and drawings have been exhibited nationally and internationally. They are part of the permanent collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii, the Long Beach Museum’s Artist’s Book Collection and the Centre for Political Graphics. Geer’s art is included in Lucy Lippard’s book Lure of the Local: Place in a MultiCentered Society and Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald, edited by Lise Patt of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry.
Linda Vallejo
The Brown Dot Project (2015-2020) are data-pictographs where hand-painted brown dots on gridded paper depict facts about US Latino health, education, and occupations, as well as their contribution to the US history and economy. The Brown Dot Adobes (2019) are data-based works that use images of historic California adobes.
Today these structures represent the Mexican American/Chicano and “The Dreamers” ancestral home in California. The images in this exhibition represent data surrounding US Latino and DACA home ownership, country of origin, and home-community to illuminate the ever-shifting politicized landscape of borders, migrations, exclusions, and omissions in today’s political climate. These images beg the questions; Does ancestry predicate home or place? Does history of place predict inclusion or exclusion?
Linda Vallejo consolidates multiple, international influences gained from a life of study and travel throughout Europe, the US and Mexico to create works that investigate contemporary cultural and socio-political issues. Recent solo exhibitions include LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes (2019-2020); Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA (2018); bG Gallery, Santa Monica (2017); Texas A&M University Reynolds Gallery (2016); and UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles CA (2015). “Brown Belongings” was featured in the New York Times “Visualizing Latino Populations Through Art” by Jill Cowan (11- 26- 9) and in the Los Angeles Times “Linda Vallejo and a decade of art that unapologetically embraces brownness” by Matt Stromberg (7-20-19). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Sonoma County, Santa Rosa, CA, Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, East Los Angeles College Vincent Price Museum, Los Angeles CA, National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago Ill, and UC Santa Barbara, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA).
94% of Current DACA Recipients Were Born in Mexico, Central or South America (2017)
Pencil, archival marker, repurposed photograph print
8.5" x 11”
$1800
16% of California DACA Recipients Own Their Homes
Colored pencil, archival marker, pigment print of repurposed photograph, paper
8.5" x 11”
$1800
15.7% of Los Angeles’ Westside Community is Latino
Colored pencil, archival marker, pigment print of repurposed photograph, paper
8.5" x 11”
$1800
38% of Latinos in LA County Own Their Own Home
Colored pencil, archival marker, pigment print of repurposed photograph, paper
8.5" x 11”
$1800
Gail Werner
I am part Cupeño, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay (three Native American tribes located in San Diego County.) I think about my connection to the land through my ancestors who have called this area home for thousands of years. I think about how we are connected to the land through our stories and songs.
My work is a reflection on the Southern California desert and mountain landscapes, as well as the creation stories and traditional songs called “bird songs” that are sung throughout this area. In these stories and songs, plants and animals are the characters and are considered to be people. The stories and songs tell about how the world came to be and how the people came to be where they are. Some of the “bird songs” tell about what the people see on their journey, a journey which is said to parallel the migration of the birds.
Gail Werner earned her M.F.A. in drawing and painting from California State University, Long Beach in 1985. She is a painter working in oil and encaustic. She also specializes in the monotype printmaking process. The Southern California desert and mountain landscapes, plant and animal life, and cultural elements related to her Native American background inspire her work. She is part Cupeño, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay, three tribes located in Southern California. Recent shows include The Skies Above, sponsored by the Autrey Museum at the Historic Southwest Museum Mt. Washington Campus in Los Angeles; Protecting Mother Earth at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton; Meditations, a four-person inaugural exhibit of the new Long Beach arts registry at the Collaborative Gallery and The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Indigenous Arts of the Neshkinukat Artists at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden Library. She was also included in the juried exhibits, 4th National Monotype/Monoprint Juried Exhibit, Attleboro Arts Museum, Attleboro, Massachusetts; 2015 California Open Exhibition, Tag Gallery, Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica, and Ink and Clay 41, Kellogg University Art Gallery at Cal Poly Pomona. In addition, she painted a mural for the 2016 POW! WOW! Mural Festival in downtown Long Beach.
Rock Wren III
Monotype
14" x 11"
$1000
Bird Dreams XXX
Monotype with Chine-collé
16" x 12"
$1,200
Smoke Thorn
Oil and pencil on wood panel
36" x 24”
$2,500
At the beginning of the Fall 2020 semester, students of exhibiting artist and Professor Samantha Field’s Art 429 course were presented with the virtual exhibit of Common Ground. 10 Students created artwork as a response to the artist/work of their choice.
Ann Avanessian
Tessa Cervantes-Roth
Kristine Daily
Eric DeLoretta
Emma Farley
Ann Kim
Vanuhi Nadimyan
Cyrena Nouzille
Paty Torres
Rocio Zuniga
Course Description:
Art 429: Advanced Study in Studio Art
Fall 2020 August 25-December 8, 2020
Professor Samantha Fields
This is the capstone course with an emphasis on professional development and skills. Students work in all media, and develop a final portfolio that is the basis for their post-baccalaureate career. The course focuses on the creation of a cohesive, conceptually sound body of work. Students research contemporary artists who deal with material and/or conceptual concerns related to their own practice, learn to speak about their work and the works of others, and develop a sense of community in the cohort that continues after graduation. At the end of the term, students will have a portfolio, a pitch deck, a website, an artist statement, a CV and a bio.
Pandemic Course Modification
The class is held on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 11-2pm. Due to the Covid19 Pandemic, class will be held fully online. Last semester, when education shifted to 100% distance learning, professor and exhibiting Common Ground artist Samantha Fields created an online artist residency called: SIPARP: Self-Isolation Pandemic Artist’s Residency Program. All of her students for Fall 2020 will be enrolled in the class as current artist-in-residents of SIPARP.
You can learn more here: www.siparp.com and on Instagram at @_SIPARP
response
Use the navigation menu on the right to explore the original Common Ground exhibit.
Ann Avanessian
Common Ground is about the earth we all share, and how we relate to each other even from far away. I made this piece about grocery shopping during the pandemic because that’s very universal. We all have to eat and go grocery shopping even if hesitant. We all share the anxiety of being out during a global pandemic no matter where we live because we’re all combating the same virus. It unites us as much as it separates us.
Out
Digital media
Dimensions variable
2020
Tessa Cervantes-Roth
This piece is a reflection of the pollution released every day into the ocean. I transform plastic particles into a work that presents a potential disastrous scene set amid the ocean. This painting relates to the theme of the show, Common Ground, with the focus on how we continue to pollute and destroy this planet at alarming rates. Plastic is everywhere and used every day. The term “single-use” plastic is one that is all too familiar. Around 300 million tons of plastic are released into the ocean with half of it becoming a “single-use” piece of plastic. On average, single-use plastic has a lifespan of 12 mins. Humans are beginning to realize the long term effects “single-use” plastic has on the planet as it has been taking an undeniable toll on both the land and sea. High amounts of plastics are accumulating each year. Some plastics are reaching parts of the ocean that are thought to have not been touched by humans before. Various types of plastics enter these oceans as unidentified large or as microplastics objects that may resemble food to marine animals that unknowingly consume the small pieces. These critically pose a threat to wildlife.
I want to stress the fact that the plastics released into the ocean later become one with ocean life. As they never disappear and don’t decompose for approximately 500-1000 years for each piece of plastic depending on its type and even if the time comes, they will only become infinitely smaller. Leaving a lasting problem humans face.
I incorporate pieces of plastics that humans toss and rearrange to create the foam of the waves. The high consumption and waste of single-use plastic are mostly non- recyclable and not biodegradable. It stays in and slowly destroys multiple ecosystems and can get into our sources of water lines. I hope that my work can make people rethink plastic and its use in our day to day lives.
The Rising Waves
Oil and plastic on canvas
9 X 12 inches
2020
Kristine Daily
These are two drawing of a homeless encampments I stumbled upon while walking in a park in my neighborhood. Not everyone’s place of comfort, protection, refuge, or shelter functions or looks the same. Some people find their own homes to be nurturing, providing security and a sense of belonging, accumulating pleasant memories. However, my thoughts always settle on those without these comforts.
Home extends beyond a physical manifestation; it is a symbol of community, compassion, and place. My work embodies these themes and helps better define what home means to others as well as to myself. “Common Ground is an exhibition focusing on the planet earth as an ever-shifting politicized landscape ...” Some themes in this show include exclusion, omission, home, and displacement. Homelessness encapsulates many of these themes and adds to the conversations that Common Ground is exploring.
Bedroom with Grandeur View
Ink on paper
18 X 20 inches
2020
Serene Home on Remote Estate
Ink on paper
18 X 20 inches
2020
Eric DeLoretta
I created a tableau of lush, artificial greenery and florals for my central figure to emerge from; a glowing evocation of the natural world, morphed into an entirely unnatural playground that has its own merits of beauty. In times of duress, I turn to my gay icons for inspiration. This 1976 Mego Cher doll acts as a conduit of hope, reaching out a hand to pull us out of the darkness. If we collectively turn to the creation and celebration of artifice, perhaps the earth can catch its breath and begin to heal from our endless exhaustion of its life and supplies.
Save Us, Cher
Mixed media tableau
33.5 X 22 X 55 inches (HxWxD)
Emma Farley
My work was inspired by what Saint Khalsa discussed in her work, about the co-dependent relationship between humans and trees. Together we keep each other alive, but most often we take advantage of the tree's resources. Whether it be the land the tree is rooted in, eating the fruit it bears, or even the paper from its pulp. My work is completely made out of recycled materials; all were paintings I made when I was thirteen squirreled away. The figure in the middle represents the fantastical and the mundane; my interpretation of a witch.
Stars Are Out
Mixed media
8 X 10 inches
2020
Ann Kim
In my mixed media paintings, I captured the effects of the Bobcat Fire, which is obviously alarming evidence of climate change. I was stunned by the Bobcat fire, as I go to the areas impacted often and know the area well. As an artist, I portrayed the wound left by the fire and thought about the healing process from a global perspective. The collage painting “Bobcat Fire 2020” is shaped with organic forms and colors representing the wildfire and pollution over the beautiful landscape plain. The natural law is disconnected somewhere, and I glued the rope with knots to the canvas to represent the connection between the community for bonding and communication.
Bobcat Fire
Collage with thread, oil paint, and crayon on canvas
24 X 36 in.
2020
Climate Change
Oil paint and crayon on canvas
18 X 24 in.
2020
Vanuhi Nadimyan
My work is a depiction of one's psyche in response to circumstances of adversity and discomposure. I focus on issues that are relatable to my generation as we have grown up in the age of the internet, global disasters, and social instability. In addition, I focus on representations of my Armenian community. The recent COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, has allowed me to express the turmoil I and millions of other people around the world have been facing through my art.
Descent responds to Sinan Leong Revell’s work which deals with “experiences of cultural displacement, politics and identity, referencing both global and personal perspectives on migration and cultural diaspora.” My painting presents a facet of humanity that deals with intergenerational trauma backed by an image of a man in his prime succumbing to a force of power beyond his will. Inspired by the six-week war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the painting expresses the existential fear of Armenians for the possible diminishing of our ethnicity. It reveals that we not only carry our own emotional baggage, but also the baggage of the generations who came before us, leaving us to inherit an emotional weight that we may not have asked for.
Within my body of work, there exists a collision of technology with nature, such as in Human Error, where we view nature through an implied display device containing glitches. Inspired by the wildfires set off by a gender reveal, I symbolized human involvement in nature through a glitch because as a glitch is a mistake in technology, our involvement is a mistake in nature. In setting off the wildfire, man has intervened with nature by harming it through neglect for our benefit. However, through the fire retardant, man is trying to save nature.
Descent
Oil on canvas
18 X 36 inches
2020
Human Error
Oil on canvas
14 X 17 inches
2020
Cyrena Nouzille
I abhor plastic.While I try to achieve a zero waste existence in my household, it is impossible to recycle all of it. It gripes me that every time I reach to buy fish for dinner, it is entirely encased in a shroud of shrink- wrap. Bread loaves suffocating in bags are sealed with a plastic twist tie. My husband’s shirts return from the cleaners cloaked in film trailing like transparent dresses in the breeze.When I was a child in San Francisco, the butcher shops wrapped your purchases in white paper and tied them with cotton string. Italian pastries came home in a pink cardboard box tied with cotton ribbon. My father’s shirts from the Chinese laundry were neatly folded in pink paper and tied with that familiar string. Each form of packaging was something that would biodegrade back into the earth and leave no trace. How things have changed.
Plastic is carved from the earth, created from fossil fuels, and its pollution has become a global threat with millions of metric tons entering aquatic ecosystems annually1, and is predicted to increase in the coming years.2 As land dwellers, humans see waterways as a device to remove waste from our day, not realizing all the ways that it comes back to haunt us. Now particles are inside our fish, mixed into our air, and packaged into bottled water. Humans have developed the ability to compartmentalize pelagic trash as an abstract concept and have disconnected the reality of our daily actions. In her paintings of ocean water ripples, Danielle Eubank explores a schism between abstraction and realism.Through her works, she illustrates how the ocean connects us all, one big colorful body of water acting as a bridge between all lands. Eloisa Guanlao constructs a similar concept with her paper canoe, adding a symbolic fragility to human existence through dependency on the ocean that connects us no matter how remote the tiny island. Both artists have found that our common ground is bound by water. I applaud these artists for their commitment to using biodegradable and environmentally responsible materials in their creations, a conscientious decision which informs my work as well.
In response to the exhibit Common Ground, Non-bio Luminescence is an arrangement of seven PET jellyfish medusæ. To illustrate how deeply plastic has penetrated our daily lives as well as the ocean depths, transparent fruit containers were employed as a material to represent mankind’s effluent from land to sea. Repurposing plastic draws attention to the properties of the material—non-degradable, rigid but light, and moldable into any form humans can invent. Reforming transparent polymers into glowing jellyfish is an ironic replication; as invertebrates, scyphozoa depend on sea water to support its physical form, drifting and pulsing along to procure its food. This parallels our own dependency on the ocean to sustain human life— from CO2 absorption and oxygen generation to the food and medicine we harvest from it—as well as tourists traveling upon it.
Non-bio Luminescence
Per/polyester plastic with LED string lights
21 X 8 X 16 inches (LxWxH, arrangement)
2020
Paty Torres
I create both sculptures and paintings that are a combination of organic shapes, patterns, repetition, and color. My sculptures have become a compilation of objects that I find around my house due to lack of material, which I then use to create something new. With my paintings, I’ve created work because I’ve become obsessed with repetition and pattern and this method has become a relief for anxiety. I layer patterns and combine them to create one piece. My paintings are abstract, and I use repetitive patterns to try and hypnotize my audience and have them focus on details by taking them into a maze.
My most recent painting is called “Catrina 2020” which is a painting that represents my culture and death with the current situation our world is living in. I use a Catrina in my painting because she represents death in a Chicano/a Household, and she wears a mask because this is the reality that not only the Latino household is facing but every household right now. She is surrounded by repetitive patterns and marigold orange that represents the Day of the Dead flowers that we use to show mourning, prayer and remembrance. The patterns and colors distract a viewer from the reality we’re living in.
Catrina 2020
Acrylic on canvas
40 X 30 inches
2020
Rocio Zuniga
My paintings focus on expressing my emotional experiences onto a textured and damaged surface. I cover this topography with color and shapes which then go through a repetitious process of scrapping and exposing further altering the piece. Through the physical creation of my pieces I create a feedback loop that allows me access to internal processes. By the medium of paint, my paintings attempt to give voice and control to emotions that are otherwise impotent and censored.
At this moment my paintings are focused on the city,deserts, and pollution of Bakersfield and their effects on my internal thoughts and emotions. The land we live on affects all aspects of what makes us the people we are. I have lived in Downtown LA, a short time in Germany and now reside in Bakersfield; the differences in each landscape have left deep imprints on me.
I see Gail Werner’s work as a way of showing the effect the land has on our personhood and its formation at all times of our lives. The land has a hand in our emotions and for better or worse it becomes a part of us. The way the land comes to be directly influence how we come to be.
These paintings attempt to show how I view Bakersfield. The city to me is an ugly and monotonous city. Its constant soup like yellow haze of smog, its bleaching sun which strips color and detail reforming everything outside into a uniform khaki color, these are the things I experience and which I distillate onto these paintings.
Rocio Zuniga
Carcossa
Acrylic on canvas
11 X 14 inches
2020
Rocio Zuniga
Oil Drip
Acrylic on canvas
11 X 14 inches
2020
CSUN Art 429: Advanced Study in Studio Art
RESPONSE
Sponsors
This exhibition and related programming are sponsored in part by the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art, a national organization whose mission is to build community through art, education and social activism.
And sponsored in part by a grant from the Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles.
Embed Gallery is located at Toolbox LA in Chatsworth CA.
Toolbox LA is tech-incubator, innovation hub, co-working space and center for the creative community. With shared desk space to dedicated offices, artist studios, event space, a wood shop, metal shop and makerspace, Toolbox LA's member perk are endless!