n 2015 Arden Surdam graduated with her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and later received the Focus Photo L.A. award at Photo Basel. Arden was also a finalist for the Young California Photographer Award at Paris Photo. Her current focus as a photographer lies in creating a new and exciting medium by blending painting and sculpture with photography.
To me, it looks like Gay Ribisi delights in producing unusual photographs for public consumption. What I see in her puckish tableaux vivants is reality literally being submerge into an Arbus-like kaleidoscope of humanity. Ribisi’s works feature bizarre compositions, unorthodox subjects and are hard to pin down to one unifying label or easy interpretation. Trying to appropriate a post-identity filter, looking beyond race, gender, and sexuality, to interpret her work is challenging.
Andréanne Michon discovers the layers of ecosystems and unfolds them for the viewer. She accepts that evolution is inevitable and documents each moment as independent works of art. Her telluric narratives in photography allow the viewer to appreciate individual moments across evergreen plains. Her visual installations encourage a deeper study as the observer becomes a part of her terrestrial beauty.
In a glimpse Sandra Klein’s work evokes a curiosity either about her view of the world or her magical mindset. There is a map to her personal history in her art that shows a personal struggle and vulnerability that an audience can empathize with. Her works draw the observer into a creative narrative; real or imagined, a journey down the rabbit hole to search introspectively begins.
Sant Khalsa juxtaposes the vastness of landscape against our own complicated dense lives. She addresses outside space and if we fit enough of it into our lives. Khalsa illustrates that water equals life, growth, and humanity; yet her images often show the lack of actual people in the environment. Humanity is replaced by elementals. Boulders, shrubs and brooks become the centerfolds in her works.
Jo Ann Callis is a pioneer in photography. She began to use a camera in 1973 and was encouraged to continue during her studies at UCLA where in 1977 she completed her MFA in Photography. Not only talented, she is a refreshingly humble artist who is grateful for her long career. Labels such as fabricated, constructed, sexual and surrealist have been used to describe the result of her thoughtfully designed layouts and memorable photographs.
June 15, 2017 to August 5, 2017
The California Museum of Art Thousand Oaks (CMATO) proudly announces the winners from our Inaugural International Juried Art Exhibition – 32 Degrees Latitude. Out of hundreds of applications received from around the globe, only three artists were selected to exhibit at CMATO this summer.
The simplicity of the common contrast between light and dark within the artwork of Thomas Wheeler is conceptually and aesthetically alluring. At first glance Wheeler’s images are clearly photographs, perfectly precise images taken from nature at night with additional elements lit to create a haunting attractive glow beckoning the viewer closer as they move within the scene until transfixed. Wheeler directly manipulates each scene he captures using additional highlighted items, some which are recognizable like trees or rocks, while the others are reduced to mere shapes as a square or linear line. The artist’s hand is palpable within each composition decision of what remains lit.
Gremzde’s practice explores human and nature relationship regarding nature as a focus for the formation of individual and community’s identity. Growing alienation from nature, habitation in cities and dominating consumer lifestyle results in more time spent in constructed, artificial spaces monitored by surveillance cameras like shopping malls and waiting halls defined as non-places, which being real measure of our time have no identity, relations and history. The scene of nature paid close look at as opposite can open itself to reveal a secret life, a narrativity and history outside the given field of perception.
CMATO is honored to showcase Rebecca Rutstein, a Philadelphia-based artist whose works are based in her interest in technology, geology, maps and the undercurrents that continually shape and reshape the world. Her largescale landscape sculptures and paintings are inspired by from her prestigious residency aboard two scientific naval exploration vessels that traveled the world. From these missions, Rutstein has mined the satellite and sonar data to present the wild, unbounded grandeur of the natural world with a technological sublimity that grasps at the infinite possibilities suggested by computers. Jennifer Li, Art in America contributor, writes in the exhibition catalogue,
