Above & Below: Views from AltaSea's Blue Hour

ABOUT THE ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION

Several artists have created long-term projects that speak to the importance of commitment. Barbara Thomason’s Coastal Disturbance is the result of ten years of travel (2012-2022), painting views along a coastline from San Diego, California to San Juan Island, Washington. For the exhibition, selections from the total 118 paintings are organized geographically along a coastal mapping of California, Oregon, and Washington. Thomason’s paintings and her written accounts of the locations succinctly describe the powerful beauty and the tragic errors of our interaction with nature. How often we forget that we are intertwined with “the natural world”, not passing through as outsiders.

Danielle Eubank has been documenting the seas throughout the world for the past twenty years. Her journeys to the locations follow the route of ancient transport ships or take place on research vessels to the Arctic and Antarctic. Scale is in dialogue from multiple directions: the expansiveness of the seas, the travel to reach them, and the paintings themselves that offer refined details of the waters’ grand surfaces. Her project titled, One Artist Five Oceans, is represented as a floor installation in the gallery with an example of her images from each of the five oceans. We can experience through the paintings of Thomason and Eubank, the unique result that only a long-term project provides, and the incomparable discipline required to continue toward these artistic, investigative undertakings.

The splendor of the ocean and its relevance for our future is a meaningful direction for an exhibition. We must also address rather than evade the critical decisions we continue to face. The Abyss is an overarching project by Isabel Beavers that involves mixed media artworks to focus on the dangers of mineral extraction in the deep sea. The artworks in the exhibition represent three visual approaches –sculpture, video, and installation– to address this vitally important subject. Deep sea extraction exemplifies a problem with the way humans have approached the stripping of resources globally: if the public can’t see it, don’t worry about it. Beavers’ artwork tackles the horror of the undersea machinery that chokes the creatures below in the same way that particulate matter in the air harms life above.

Cynthia Minet’s colorfully lit Roseate Spoonbills combine the delight of the imagery with a somber message. The sculptures are created from plastic trash found at the Rio Grande, a prominent crossing point at the US/Mexico border for migrants from many regions of the globe. Minet’s statement about the installation emphasizes the intersecting crises that we face. In her words, an intentional purpose of the work is “to provoke difficult conversations about climate change and human needs.” Linking issues requires more complex thinking on our part, and suggests solutions overlooked by siloed thinking or politicized reflexes.

This same interconnectedness can be found in the imagery of Patsy Cox. Urban Rebutia in its entirety contains 50,000 elements, each individually created from clay. The artwork began in 2006 with 600 hand-made pieces, and combinations of red, yellow, and blue are site-specific to installation spaces. In each case, the concept depicts urban sprawl. At the Kellogg Gallery, 17,000 red forms emerge from the darkness of the gallery space. When creating one the configurations, Cox carefully places each element one by one. The installation of the components becomes a reverent activity, reflecting on all the emotions, details, and actions that compose a life.

Katherine Gray’s blown glass and assembled sculptures connect the physical principles of air, water, and matter. Turvy is a large, glass sphere half-filled with water and creates an optical reverse. Like a camera obscura or the retina of the eye, the scene viewed through it presents the magic of physics. The skill and dexterity required to create her blown glass spheres is a marvel. Her installation, Shipwrecked, adds an ethereal humor through blown glass bubbles, enlarging in size with a steady gradation, emerging upward from a tiny ship-in-a-bottle resting on the floor. Gray’s newest sculpture, Untitled, is a tall glass cylinder filled to the brim with water and interlocking clear glassware. She is interested in the property of glass as being both “present and absent”. The sculpture’s potency is in its physical characteristics or interpreted as a core sample through the waters of the sea toward a sunken civilization.

The rigorous skills required to create Gray’s work is also apparent in the art throughout the exhibition. Process as a performative element can be seen directly in the work of Minoosh Zomorodinia and Amabelle Aguiluz. Both artists involve their bodies to inform the outcome. Zomorodinia’s 3-channel video, Resist: Air, Water, Earth, places herself amid the windy shore of the ocean, maintaining a solid strength in contrast to the wild movement of her garment. The two flanking videos present the glacially slow melting of cylindrical ice forms composted of water from the bay. The artist’s movement is in fact a steady walk backwards toward the sea. She is at once pushing against and interconnected with the coastal scene.

The sculptures of Amabelle Aguiluz are created with a performative gesture: connected at the waist to a knitting machine carriage, she moves back and forth with an informed, intentioned awareness. The two versions of Sea (Center) are created from repurposed fiber and express the accumulation of this technique. Aguiluz’s holistic approach prompts the viewer’s thoughtful observation for art and the ocean, a time element based on a distant heartbeat and our connection to each other.

Ann Phong’s paintings bring together selections from her two primary series, Immigrant –A New Wave of Life and Environment and The Beauty in Bleakness. Her personal encounter with the sea involved an intense journey alone to join her older sister who fled from Vietnam to the United States in 1975. In 1981, one of Phong’s students helped her escape to Malaysia in a small fishing boat “overloaded with 59 humans in it”. Phong’s stories about struggles in Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines speak to her resilience and her empathic sense for refuges worldwide, past and present. Her painting, Looking Up from the Broken Boat, reimagines the turmoil of one of those journeys, escaping in a small boat through the South China Sea. Her artwork shares experiences –as an individual in a chaotic world and polluted environment– through the physicality of the paint and the objects that seem to fly through the thick swirls.

Phong’s paintings juxtapose dramatically with Barbara Benish’s enormous jellyfish created with repurposed, watercolor-tinted silk parachutes. The two artists share an interest in abstraction as a potent tool by communicating through a fearlessness of form and color. Benish’s The Marginal World: Jellies portray Aurelia Aurita (Moon Jelly) and Cyaneidae family (BlueFire) are presented at such a mammoth scale that our size as viewers is reduced. This contrasts with our typical experience viewing jellyfish, framed in blue behind a tempered glass aquarium in a museum.

Discovery through physical endurance and passionate dedication is a philosophical connection between the artworks in this exhibition. In a variety of ways, the artists tackle their relationship with the ocean from personal, global, and political viewpoints. In connection with each of the artists exhibited, the urgency of this moment is balanced by a simultaneous surge of creative expression. The crisis we undergo propagates a human need in us to convey, create, and hopefully correct. The processes of artmaking open our understanding by prompting and clarifying. As an artist, one goes through a metamorphosis. The viewer is the recipient of the result, and in turn, empowered to be an active agent of that focused energy. 

Kim Abeles, Guest Curator
Kellogg University Art Gallery
Cal Poly Pomona
2024

Photo Credit: Calista Lyon

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES 

Amabelle Aguiluz

Amabelle Aguiluz is a Filipina American multidisciplinary artist, weaver, and teacher. Her work is deeply rooted and connected to the body, nature, and the healing power of plant medicines. She uses both traditional and unconventional textile techniques to transform organic, recycled, or found materials into sculptures, weavings, and site-specific installations. Amabelle received her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York for Fashion Design with a specialization in Knitwear Design. She spent a year of her program studying knitwear design at Politecnico di Milano in Italy. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in Hawaii, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oregon, Mexico, Canada, Argentina, and South Korea. She was an artist-in-residence at MorYork Gallery in Highland Park, CA in 2016, Helms Design Center in Culver City, CA in 2017, and at California Creative Learning Academy in Eagle Rock, CA in 2022. Her work has been written about and featured in the LA Times, Signal Tribune, and Fiber Art Now. She was selected for the Fiber Art Now Public Installation grant for a sculpture presented at the Tucson Botanical Gardens in 2020.

Isabel Beavers is a transdisciplinary artist and creative producer based in Los Angeles. Her work explores ecologies, examines environmental histories and postulates about climate futures through multimedia installation + new media. Beavers’ work has been presented, exhibited, and screened nationally and internationally at Helsinki Design Week, Last Frontier NYC, Real Artilleria de Sevilla, Spain, Museum of Design Atlanta, New York Hall of Science, MIT Museum, and Humbolt-Universität zu Berlin Thaer-Institut, among others. They have held workshops at the Hammer Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. She holds an MFA from the SMFA at Tufts University and a BS from the University of Vermont. She was the 2021 AICAD/NOAA Fisheries Art + Science Fellow, 2022 Creative Impact Lab Amman Lead Artist with ZERO1, and is the Artistic Director of SUPERCOLLIDER LA.

Barbara Benish is a California-born artist and writer. In 1992 she moved from Los Angeles to Prague as a Fulbright scholar after co-curating the first cross-cultural exchange between the U.S. and Czechoslovakia in decades. She founded ArtMill (established 2004) in rural Bohemia, an international eco-art center as an extension of her belief in environmental education grounded in local and rural practices. From 2010-2015 Benish served as Advisor for U.N.E.P. in Arts & Outreach, and since 2015 is a Fellow at the Social Practice Arts Research Center, (University of California, Santa Cruz). She has co-authored two books on art and the environment (Routledge), as well as dozens of essays on art. Her mixed media visual work critiques historical tropes that have kept unsustainable systems operating and reflecting post-human living systems. Benish’s art has been shown in hundreds of international exhibitions including museums such as P.S.1 (M.o.M.A.) in New York, the Getty in Los Angeles, Stadtgeschichtliche Museen in Nürnburg, Germany, and the National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic.

Patsy Cox was born in 1973 in Ubon Ratchatani, Thailand. She grew up in Dracut, Massachusetts, finished high school in Kearney, Missouri and has lived in Juneau, Alaska, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Newark, Delaware before settling in Los Angeles, California. She received her BFA from Missouri State University and her MFA from the University of Delaware. She is Professor of Visual Art and Head of Ceramics at California State University, Northridge. She has been a Getty Scholar for the Linking Service Learning and the Visual Arts program, and has served as President for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA, 2010-2016). Her recent exhibitions include Post Painted Pottery Culture in Lanzhou, Gansu Province, China; Mouthpiece at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, California; Melting Point: Movements in Contemporary Clay at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles, and From Funk to Punk: Left Coast Ceramics curated by Peter Held at the Everson Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in VoyageLA, Los Angeles Times, and ArtCritical. Patsy Cox is recipient of grants from the Durfee Foundation, and the California Center for Cultural Innovation.

Danielle Eubank

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Danielle Eubank explores the relationship between abstraction and realism through painting water. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Eubank conceived One Artist Five Oceans, a 20-year project where she sailed and painted the waters of every ocean on Earth to raise climate awareness. Eubank is currently painting some of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States, including the Gowanus Canal (superfund site), NY, and the San Francisco Bay (multiple superfund sites), in order to heighten awareness of the urgency for redress and protection of these waters in our neighborhoods. Eubank is the Expedition Artist for the Phoenicia Ship Expedition, a replica 600BCE ship that circumnavigated Africa. As Expedition Artist in the UNESCO approved Borobudur Ship Expedition she traveled with the replica 8th century Indonesian boat from Indonesia to Ghana. Eubank has sailed to Antarctica and aboard a barquentine tall ship to the northernmost settlement on Earth. She was a 2018 Creative Climate Award nominee and the awardee of the WCA/United Nations Program Honor Roll Award for 2019. Eubank has spoken at conferences and universities in Japan, Korea, Germany, The United Kingdom, France, Mexico, The United States, Spain, Syria and Italy, as well as painting the Henley Royal Regatta. A film documentary about her work, Mozambique VI, premiered at the Newport Beach Film Festival. Danielle Eubank holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of Arts from UCLA. She exhibits her work in The United States, The United Kingdom, as well as in Europe and Asia.

Kathrine Gray

Katherine Gray received her undergraduate degree from Ontario College of Art in Toronto, and her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI. Her work has been exhibited at Heller Gallery in New York City, Urban Glass in New York, and most recently in solo shows at the Craft Contemporary (formerly the Craft and Folk Art Museum) in Los Angeles and the Toledo Museum of Art. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Observer.com, Artforum.com and in the LA Times. Images of her glasswork have also appeared in the New York Times Design Magazine. In 2017, she was the recipient of the Libenský/ Brychtová Award from the Pilchuck Glass School for her artistic and educational contributions to the field; she has also been inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Craft Council and is a Fellow of the Corning Museum of Glass. Gray can be seen in the ongoing Netflix series Blown Away as the Resident Evaluator. Her work can be found in the collections of the Corning Museum of Glass, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Asheville Museum of Art and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA, among others. Gray has written about glass, curated and juried multiple exhibitions, and has taught workshops around the world. Currently, she lives in Los Angeles, CA, and is a Professor of Art at California State University, San Bernardino.

Cynthia Minet

Cynthia Minet’s sculptures, drawings and installations stem from her interests in scientific and ecological issues. Made from translucent post-consumer plastics and LEDS, her work often prompts viewers to ponder the complicated roles that plastics, consumer culture, and electricity play in our lives. She constructs anatomically accurate life-scale domesticated animals, and intends them as surrogates for humans, presenting human nature via the animal. Cynthia Minet was born in New Jersey, raised in Rome, Italy, and is based in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from San Francisco State University, and a BA from UC Santa Barbara. Currently a professor at Moorpark College in Southern California, she has also taught in Rome, Italy and in Guadalajara, Mexico. Minet’s artwork has been presented in solo shows in Southern California at USC, UC Riverside, and CSUN, as well as in the Los Angeles International Airport. In addition to group shows nationally, Minet has presented her work internationally in Italy, Israel, Denmark, and Belarus. Her work is in private and public collections, including the Projectiv Artist’s Museum, Tel Aviv, the Bell Gallery Collection at Brown University, and Special Collections, Otis College of Art and Design. Features and reviews have appeared on The Discovery Channel(Canada), Wired Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, KCET ArtBound, Artillery Magazine, FORM Magazine, the Anchorage Daily News, RAI Television, (Italy), The Huffington Post and on numerous websites.

Ann Phong

Ann Phong is “a gifted painter with a penchant for subtle but nonetheless critical narrative. Phong juxtaposes heavily impasto layers with finer, more transparent ones, as well as vaguely delineated images to convey the complexity of her feelings” (from Daniella Walsh, Visual Artsource, February 1998). Ann Phong received her MFA at CSU Fullerton (1995). She has exhibited nationally and internationally, solo and group in more than 200 exhibitions at galleries and museums including the Watts Towers Art Center, Los Angeles; Laguna Art Museum and Palm Spring Art Museum in California; Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Kitakyushu, Japan; Center Art Gallery; Vancouver, Canada; Gandong Art Center, Seoul, Korea; Red Roof Museum, Chengdu China; and, Andaman Museum, Bangkok, Thailand. Ann’s exhibitions have been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times (Zan Dubin, March 1995), Voice of OC (Richard Chang, November 2018), OC Register (Jeannie Denholm, December 2019), and KCET (Sarah Rafael García, March 2022). She served as Board President of the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association between 2009 and 2018. Ann is faculty in the Department of Art at Cal Poly Pomona, where she teaches Drawing and Painting.

Barbara Thomason

Born in San Diego, Barbara A. Thomason received her Master’s Degree in printmaking at California State University, Long Beach. After graduation she worked as a master printer in lithography at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles for artists Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Claus Oldenberg, Elsworth Kelly, Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Joe Goode and Robert Rauschenberg. Barbara Thomason has had numerous exhibitions. Some selected galleries, museums and university facilities include the Pacific Asia Museum, Space Gallery, representingThomason (70’s- 80’s); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, University of Redlands, Laguna Art Museum, Cal Poly Pomona, Oceanside Museum of Art and the Armory Center for the Arts and LA Artcore and Los Angeles City Hall. Thomason has completed site-specific public art pieces such as the “Gates of Los Angeles,” four etched stainless steel elevator doors”, for the Junipero Serra State Office Building in Downtown Los Angles, the “Noho Mask Mural” in North Hollywood, an interior mural for the Los Angles Children’s Museum, banners for the Oceanside Museum and four banners for CSU Summer Arts at Cal State Fresno. Barbara has taught Painting, Drawing and printmaking extensively and has participated in several academic projects. She has been on the faculty of Otis College of Art and Design, University of California Santa Cruz, University of Redlands, Ryman Arts at USC, University of Alaska and Cal Poly Pomona. She has coordinated courses for the CSU Summer Arts in both sculpture and printmaking and was the gallery director at the University of Redlands Peppers Art Gallery for five years.

Minoosh Zomorodinia

Minoosh Zomorodinia is an Iranian-born Bay Area interdisciplinary artist/ educator/ curator whose work explores the relationship between humans, nature, and technology. She uses walking as a way to negotiate the boundaries of land, challenge the power of technology as a colonial structure, and reimagine our relationship with nature. Her work addresses the natural forces as a resistance and makes visible the emotional and psychological reflections of her environment by photo and video. Zomorodinia has received numerous awards and grants, including the YBCA 100, Kala Art Media Fellowship, the Alternative Exposure Award, and completed residencies including Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi Residency, Recology Artist Residency, and many more. Zomorodinia is a Co-Chair of Women Eco Artists Dialog, and a member of the Program Committee at Berkeley Art Center, SF Camerawork, and former Southern Exposures’s Curatorial Council Member. She has exhibited locally and internationally including the Asian Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Pori Art Museum, and the Nevada Museum of Art, among others.

RELATED EVENTS

Artists’ Reception: Sat., February 3, 2024 | 2-5pm 
with Curators’ Introductions and Artists’ “Round Robin” Talks & Tours: 
Admission Free. Refreshments Served. 
Please RSVP: Click Here or scan the QR code.

Campus Reception: Tue., March 5, 2024 | 4-6pm  
with Curators’ Introductions and Artists’ Walks & Talks:  
in honor of Women’s Month and International Women’s Day March 8 
Please RSVP: Click Here or scan the QR code.