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Camilo Ontiveros, brought “Exchange/Alteration” to SD from Tijuana, a project in collaboration with Mélanie Badalato, where the two altered participants’ clothes on the spot. Both these artist are part of a process of change they want to bring about by being part of the dialogue about their community. In fact community is so strongly a part of their lives that they actually remove themselves to a certain extent from the individual “star” system that has been established for high-end art market. This is the gentler side of art activism where art is used to bring awareness to social issues many times through humor and irony. |
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Andy Howell takes iconic street language of graffiti and twists and turns it into forced and raised perspectives reminiscent more of Degas' circus imagery and less of 'street' language. His canvases combine the calligraphic language of the rhythm of words as well as high and absurd color contrast through the use of a whiplash electric organic line. The work is based on representation but evolves into shape and color and line, which leads us out of the canvas and into an energized world of action. Andy's work is read, like Gauguin's, from one direction to another, like a text. This artist is a champion of the streets but reads like immortal French School artist of the turn of the last Century. |
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Nina Waisman considers what is at stake as technology advances and exposes the time and space between and around events. Will our need to navigate this evermore minutely mapped world lead to increased expressivity, increased constraint, both, or something in between? As a visitor walks along a path, her footsteps are amplified and played back with increasing temporal delay. In counterpoint to these steady temporal shifts, her sound shifts back and forth in space through speakers running along the path – at times her footsteps play through speakers ahead of her, at times through speakers behind. The miss-alignment of the body’s natural “sound envelope’ evokes playful, meditative and at times wary responses - some visitors felt stalked by their own technologically displaced footsteps. |
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Matt Devine is a self-declared Minimalist influenced by the mid-century design icon Isamu Noguchi as well as Alexander Calder, Barbara Hepworth and Richard Serra. Matt uses steel, copper and bronze to make sculptures with a strong but quiet presence and an elegance that is very powerful. |
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Lael Corbin is part of the adjunct faculty of Point Loma Nazarene University where he oversees the Art Department's shops and facilities. You can tell he loves found objects and the way they can be altered and assembled as his installations and sculpture use mixed media to reflect his current passion. He currently teaches 3-D Design and is in his final year as a M.F.A. Candidate at SDSU. |
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Tristan Shone uses layering of differently guitars, keyboard, and electronic percussion to create the sound that is the justification for the shapes of his sculptures. Just as the music has melody and discordance, the structures he forms have flow and angle. This contrast of mechanical and emotional is confident, intense, and impressive. |
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Tania Candiani's inspiration can come from real sources like old magazines of the 1950s and 60s and although much of her work is sewn with detachable parts and geometric precision, she is an accomplished photographer as well. The work is conceptually based and many layered. This is a self-taught artist but an avid reader who has a broad base of references in her work. |
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Ben Lavender creates works of art varying from steel and concrete sculpture, paintings and mixed media relief’s, to custom furniture and woodworking. Often found working with several mediums simultaneously, it is his sensitivity to materials and attention to detail which sets these works apart. His inspiration comes from the similarity among the natural forces of growth and erosion, He utilizes raw industrial materials to mimic nature with astonishing results. |
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Alida Cervantes is examining the hierarchies of her own society through a series of images of housekeepers who have worked for her families. She creates exceptional portraits, which tie together these workers while separating them from us. They are affectionate although they show the affects of age and hard work and are revealed as matriarchs, caregivers but mostly as individuals. |
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Brian Dick has survived his name and is now a teacher and artist who really likes comic books and movies. He thinks David Collier is a genius. His favorite color is red. He loves thrift store finds especially super-8 movies and old records children's, Hawaiian, old-time radio, homemade records, really any kind of oddball record. He owns an old house. He works a lot and has a very cool girlfriend. His animated videos are way cool and make you laugh. |
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Brad Streeper uses a painting process that is intuitive, and involves unconventional manipulation of paint, glue, gesso and ink. Incompatible materials are mixed, layered and distressed using tools like T-shirts and hammers. Despite the intuitive nature of his process, the end product often references personal interests beyond visual arts. From molecular biology to barren lunar landscapes, he finds himself drawn to the similarities between the micro and macro worlds. |
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Shannon Spanhake and Camilo Ontiveros joined with Sergio de la Torre (all graduate students at the UCSD) to create an artists' space, Lui Velazquez. They invite artists to Tijuana for residencies and are working to set up a film and video archive and a registry of local artists. Shannon is a New Yorker who not only has transplanted herself but also has planted tiny gardens in Tijuana's multiple potholes. Her work takes the form of public interventions and media installations. Using and also examining new technologies, she addresses issues of politics and popular and elitist culture. She has recently completed a book titled, Tijuana: A Fantasy of Absolute Place and is the principal investigator of a project to monitor air pollution using mobile phones. |
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Pamela Jaeger is described by Robert Pincus as making works that are “.... enchanted and a touch unnerving.” We see a combination storybook illustration, surrealism and folk painting. "My own work can turn into a little world that doesn't exist," she says. "Storytelling is a big part of what I do." she explains. "I think of my art as a way of looking through windows – seeing things you might not want to see." But the colors and forms are so sweet and attractive that they candy coat our experience of her work. |
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Allison Wiese is an interdisciplinary artist who makes sculptures, installations, sound works and architectural interventions.. Wiese learned to walk and talk in Brooklyn, drive in southern California and everything else important in Texas. Her work makes poetry with the ready-to-hand, altering spaces through christening and commemoration. Wiese's projects often employ the diversion of commodities or language through space and time. She recently negotiated a large awning off an empty office tower in downtown Houston, for instance, and installed it, capsized, on the floor of a tiny residentially-scaled gallery. She has also developed a site-specific solar audio work for the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. |
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Nina Karavasiles, is a public artist and sculptor, photographer/documenter of her site specific installation and performance work. She created the cast metal elements and the general concrete form for “A San Diego African American Legacy” at Lillian Place. Nina uses history in her other art pieces like the 70th St. Trolley Station to reveal the geological substrata, and Recipe for Friendship in Amici Park which has bronze cafe table setting with recipes from the Little Italy heritage. But Nina is also a subversive art activist who challenges the ideas of willful acquisition and has been known to place her works in public places and in private collection with no desire for compensation. |
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Christopher N. Ferreria’s creative practice is not formal but instead examines relationships between objects, spaces, the audience and himself as the artist. There are chance encounters and interactions, which are site specific and southeast San Diego remains the backdrop for much of his work. His Filipino heritage embodies the cultural schizophrenia between the drive of self-determination and the comfort of colonial mentality. Ferreria’s practice draws upon these difficult, and many times conflicted, intersections of geography, history, culture, and politics expressed through the subjects of cockfights and the car and gang cultures of his hometown ghetto and the military experiences of his father. |
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Jason Sherry is concerned with the real and the unreal. "I am concerned with presenting the absurdity of human history and culture by assembling disparate objects and images into new objects...” There is humor but also an underlying meaning in these collaged works whether paper, photographic, mechanical or mixed media. These are totally obsession works, which flow from the artists in a steam of conscious and unconscious narrative. |
