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.
Among the most recognizable forms of art for many, landscape paintings in their simplest form are efforts to capture and represent the natural world around us on canvas or other mediums. The beauty of our natural surroundings offers both a comfort based on our own experiences and yet provides a wide range of subject possibilities including mountains, valleys, hills, rivers, forests, and the coastline and other familiar natural settings.
Today, landscapes seem to be everywhere, whether in the form of screens, idealized photographs, commemorative calendars, motivational posters, or pinging Twitter and Instagram feeds. The default desktop wallpaper on nearly every operating system has become a landscape, as if to showcase the superiority of technology in its ability to faithfully render nature in millions of pixels per inch.
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,
January 27, 2017 – April 3, 2017
One of America’s icons, Sister Mary Corita became known as the rebel nun in the tumultuous 1960s. Like Pop giant Andy Warhol, she borrowed from advertising, bill posters and pop culture to make her works, and quoted everything from the Bible to Thoreau, Jefferson Airplane, Philip Roth and Gertrude Stein.
Corita Kent’s teaching methods were unique as she was often seen with her students holding up small viewfinders on field trips while observing local street signs, supermarket shelves, and shop window advertisements. This allowed her students to focus on particular elements of a sign or advertisement rather than the entirety of everything that was around them.
Pop Art was the dominant movement in early 1960s American art. Short for “popular art,” it featured common household objects and consumer products like Coca-Cola and Campbell’s Soup cans, as well as forms of media—such as comics, newspapers, and magazines—recognizable to the masses. Artists often created Pop works using mechanical or commercial techniques, such as silk-screening.
