First Friday, May 6
Artist Reception: 6-8 p.m.
“Wheels of Life” includes the work of two artists: June Glenn and Brescia Rose. They will be showcasing contemporary street photography centered on the current cultures of skateboarding and vintage cars in Santa Cruz County.
Monica Calsbeek and Summer Stiegman both grew up in San Diego, California without acquaintance. Serendipitously, they both attended the university in Santa Cruz in the fall of 2012. Since then, they developed an artistic, feminine, and personal relationship in which they influence one another both materially and ideally. Enmesh is a photographic series where the human form and inanimate materials create a dialogue. The subject matter of the photographs are female bodies interacting with textiles. Ranging from natural landscapes to studio lighting, Enmesh explores photographic techniques by means of experimental digital alterations. The layering process suggests that relationships with the self and objects are bound to be multifaceted and tangled.
Emerson Murray: Shadows on the Wall
Artist Statement: Painting is an emotional endeavor for me. Each piece is a distillation of a story, a theme, or a myth, boiled down to an emotional experience. Whether or not the viewer understands my meaning is irrelevant, as long as the viewer feels something, anything. I paint figures, abstracted into form and color set in abstract landscapes. The figures do not occupy the space volumetrically and light and shadow are generally not part of my tool set. I work in both acrylic and oil paint, the oil paint I mix from raw pigment in order to create my own colors. I generally work with a palette knife and my hands. I oftentimes throw and drip paint onto the canvas. The colors are selected on demand, I do not work from a predetermined palette of colors, but mix the colors as I paint, sometimes mixing colors right on the canvas. I am a disciplined painter and show up for work every day. I may stare at a work in progress for nights on end, but I am in the studio working.
Artist Reception: Friday, June 5 - 6-8 p.m.
Bio: Maddie Amelia Lewis is a 2D artist with a fondness for acrylic paint and ink. She is a recent graduate from UC Santa Cruz. She is fascinated by fantasy, the arts, and textures.
Paintings will be on sale from $20-$85, and lithographic prints will be selling from $5-$15. See artist website for preliminary prices: www.noxkitarts.com
Artist Statement:
I like making huge gestural brush strokes, circular voids reminiscent of black holes, drips, and fine lines. I paint abstracted landscapes and attempt to embody concepts like death, anxiety, love, daydreams, and imaginary places. I will go through great lengths to actualize an idea. I try to draw from the beauty and emotion in my life for my art so I can’t forget it. Each of my pieces is a space I create to reflect, and after I take my time with each one, I let it go.As an acrylic painter, I am a texture junkie. I love acrylic mediums—glass beads, resin sand, modeling paste, black lava—I’ve tried them all and I make full use of them. My paintings ensure dynamic and varied surfaces. I tend to work very quickly and use a lot of aggressive mark-making techniques. The larger the canvas, the more energetic I become while I paint it. For small works, I can be more delicate, but the restlessness remains. They say that drawing from live models gives the drawing itself more life, so I try to instill the energy, emotion, and intensity into my paintings by embodying those feelings as I paint.In the end, it all comes down to an obsession. I paint because I can never get paintings out of my head. A painting will tell me what it needs to be real, and I oblige it the best I can. It’s a piece of the world inside of me—it has always been, and will never cease to be.
Janina A. Larenas: Graphic Works on Paper A collection of design projects ranging from posters to hand printed sticker images to original book illustrations.
Artist Bio: Janina A. Larenas studied printmaking and book arts at the University of California Santa Cruz. Besides design her skills include relief, intaglio and letterpress printing, as well as painting, embroidery, bookmaking and food preserving. Her designs are most recognizable as hand printed printed stickers and as t-shirts for The Devil Makes Three.
The show is available to view during normal studio hours. Check schedule here. If a band is booked, then the studio is open.
Every year the Santa Cruz Arts Council Associates puts on the Gail Rich Awards at the Rio Theatre. You've probably never been, but I think yo u should go. Here are my top 10 reasons to go to your first Gail Rich Awards next Wednesday, Jan. 28.
I really hope I see you there.
19th Annual Gail Rich Awards January 28th, 2015 at 7:30pm Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave. in Santa Cruz FREE and open to the public
2015 honorees:
First Friday - June 6 Krusch Rhoades
Available to view for the month of June anytime the studio is open. pillars of my existence,” said Rhoades.
Krusch Rhoades, 33, spent the formative years of his youth in the “armpit of New York, the shoulders of New England and on the polluted teat of New Jersey.”
Since then, Rhoades has travelled all over the country, and currently calls Santa Cruz his home. He has painted, drawn, molded, and scrawled for as long as he can remember.
“Identifying myself as an “artist” at an early age somehow allowed me to view life with a golden preciousness. Being enraptured with the architecture of simplicity, the constant dance of light. I’m so thankful for this perspective,” said Rhoades.
Rhoades enjoys large scale work, especially when working with spray paint, which he calls the “closest synthesis of dance and paint.”
“The large sweeping strokes is so pleasurable when compared to the restricted movements of smaller pieces,” said Rhoades.
That being said, the artist produces work of all scales regularly, and even paints bicycle frames.
“Paint and bicycles have been the most consistent relationships in my life and have therefore becomes the pillars of my existence,” said Rhoades.
Photographs by Melanya Hamasyan
Available to view for the month of April anytime the studio is open.
Transitory Frames - Dehistoricized Spaces
These set of captured video frames are taken from a discourse among people of the Armenian descent, whose ancestors have immigrated to the United States as a direct result of the Armenian Genocide. They speak of the forgotten cities, villages, and churches of their ancestors. They speak of fear and loss of identity along with the loss of ancient cultural and historical spaces. Although the tragedy of the physical genocide has ceased, cultural genocide is still being carried out. In current eastern Turkey (historic Armenia), places are recontextualized to exclude Armenian historical presence. Ancient Armenian monuments and churches are being destroyed or appropriated as barns and geographical spaces are renamed. As a result, ancestral spaces are dehistoricized and people uprooted.
Artist Summary
My work often involves cultural and social issues which I explore in photography, video, performance, and multimedia sculpture. These often take the form of installation or socially engaging art. Whether social, historical or literary, research is an integral part of my process as it provides a framework for the final product. In the past I’ve studied Armenian folklore in photography. I’ve created dialogue in visual poetry using voice, movement, and space within the medium of digital video. Recently I’ve begun to explore dehistoricized spaces and cultural genocide in multimedia. In all my projects, the chosen theme is one that I am personally attached to but also one that is often a question due for research. Hence, my work isn’t purely documental, as it also enters a very personal realm. Within this realm, there is a strong presence of an intimate act of the hand, whether in the form of calligraphy on bread, puppetry or photographic composition. This in turn creates an intimation of my presence, suggesting a very personal relationship to the question at hand.
Artist Statement: From a young age, I have always been fascinated by the concept of dreams within the human brain. Within these paintings, I strive to explore the tangibility of dream scapes using color, texture, and symbolism to illustrate the vagueness that our conscience is capable of making, expressing our deepest thoughts that our rational mind isolates during waking.
Don’t bleed so loud, I can’t hear the TV
Artist Reception: 6-9 PM
artist statement:
Shadows are revealed in my paintings through humorous abstract narratives, featuring pop culture symbolisms of femininity. In “Dear Jimmy America”, a darkly intimate poem is paired with a comically painterly bra, while “The Great Mother Tit of America” depicts a red-and-white-striped breast lactating ice cream.
In “fun fair i-iii” I explore subtle emotive energies through gestural expressions of vibrant color. Triangular and pentagonal pieces of wood are painted with quick, intuitive movements of wrist and finger. Impressions of vegetal and organic forms emerge, but, like clouds, patterns continue to shift, leaving definition open to viewers’ imaginations.
Lois is a painter, print-maker, radio personality, and self-proclaimed historian. Friday, May 3 Artist Reception: 6-9 PM Santa Cruz Rehearsal Studios 118 Coral Street (Harvey West) http://loisrossonart.com/ Exhibit will be available for the entire month of May and can be viewed during normal rehearsal studio hours.
First Friday September 7
Artist Reception 6-9 p.m.
Santa Cruz Rehearsal Studios
118 Coral Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Chelsea Briggen – a love story
Artist Statement I paint because the color makes me want to crawl out of my mind and join it in its simple vibrancy. I paint to feel the texture of the substance spread. I paint to say something that has no words just a feeling. And sometimes I'm painting to escape or heal or do something external when in fact painting simply brings me to the highest place in myself... consistently. Sitting in front of an empty canvas feels like waking up each morning. I have options. I have a trunk full of colors and my heart pours ideas through me... This is my joy. To paint.
We are thrilled to welcome the Parachute Collective to Santa Cruz Rehearsal Studios this month. Parachute Art Collective is locally owned and operated in Santa Cruz, CA. Parachute's services include promoting, marketing, and distributing for artists including screen printed merchandise and apparel online. We help individuals establishing themselves as artists through facilitating them contributing to and in their communities local and worldwide.
Featured artists include:
[slideshow] First Friday, April 6 Santa Cruz Rehearsal Studios 118 Coral Street
Artist Reception 6-9 p.m.
Joaquin Spengemann is a Santa Cruz native returned to his roots after an extended residency in the east bay. His collages are testimonies to excess and injustice, hubris and tyranny, salvation and redemption as they pay homage to and celebrate the fine craft of the illustrators and photographers whose work he dismembers and reorders. His work exalts the power of nature and scrutinizes the nature of power with recurring themes of greed, romanticism, nostalgia, propaganda and bloodlust. His most recent works betray a burgeoning penchant for the wisdom of alchemical hermeticism, and attempt through the glorious cartography born of the age of discovery to reveal the folly of statism, nationalism, and the currencies that bear their standards. The artist is currently examining the concepts of “value” and “worth” from an antediluvian perspective.
