MDFerrera: Just Breath at The Studio Door

 

By Patricia Frischer

In conjunction with Just Breathe art installation at The Studio Door, MDFerrera shared stories about the series, including a behind the scenes look at the journal entries and music that inspired its creation. The artist spoke to the importance of art to our individual and communal mental health.

MDFerrera admits to having a “hurricane of emotions.”, Anxiety and depression are part of her life. But art centers her. Journaling is an important stabilizing element for her work usually but in this pandemic time, music saved her. She has too many jumbled words to sort out in her brain and music and its lyric and visual arts helped work through the emotions. The lyrics are now part of her journal and appear on wall labels with the art.  

Her painting are mostly done on wood that she buys but she has used scape wood which has more challenges. The grain of the wood is an integral part of the image. Her father was an artist and used wood and so even the smell of wood is nostalgic for her. Sanding and perfecting the wood surface keeps her hands busy which is also calming for her.

Music supplies the rhythm when she takes dance breaks with her daughter.  Movement frees her energy up. She embraces that flow. She does not know when she sits down to work what will come out, but the work is all autobiographical.  The idea is not to force the work, but to encourage it to remain organic. 

When asked about this latest work, MDFerrera said, “I think the intensity and necessity of creating it, is what makes this series different from past work. Not all the pieces in this series are pretty to look at, but they are necessary to healing. It's like if you were to rip out those difficult to read journal entries. True you may not want to relive them, but in order to get over any hurdle, you must face it and go through it. If you think about it in terms of healing, you can't look at your polished self without reflecting on the journey, the process of getting there. It's the full circle effect.” 

The Studio Door is presenting works by MDFerrera on view from January 8th until February 27th, 2021.

The Studio Door also prepared this short video for the SDVAN Mission Federal Art Walk Scholarship. MDFerrera was the recipients of this scholarship for 2020 and we hope to see her work at the Mission Federal Art Walk in 2021, pandemic permitting. 

 

 

 

 

Beatriz Cortez: UCSD Longenecker-Roth Artist In Residence Guest Lecture

 By Patricia Frischer

Beatriz Cortez

Beatriz Cortez gave a fascinating talk which is so important to understand the art work she is creating in the past and now during the pandemic. She is articulate and erudite about philosophy and history and many of her struggles to search for meaning were not only unusual but convincing. My notes on her talk are more like sound bites and to communicate them, I have to take some liberties to reorder them. I think this will not be a problem for her as she is not a great believer in linear time.

She spoke of ancient and contemporary indigenous people and their belief in the power of objects.  In fact, objects have a will, they can punish, reward, travel and protect. The are imbued with this power because of our respect for them. Inanimate objects are intelligent and self-organizing and like us are in the process of forever becoming. She mentions a Museum of Memory where fortunes are delivered and objects can cross time.

 

Time traveling objects

Fortune telling dispensing

I will start with the example which resulted in the sculpture we can view (from Jan 30, 2021) at the Lux Art Institute. Her observation was made of the great stones that populate many of the parks in New York including Central Park. These Glaciers Erratic formed the landscape over thousands of years and are still in constant transformation too minute for us to notice. They are made of minerals just as steel is made of minerals. Her sculpture is steel going back into stone. The steel which we think of as man made is really organic.

Steel armature

Installation at Lux Art Institute, Jan 22, 2021. Sculpture previously on display at Rockefeller Center, New York

 

Cortez made a very difficult immigration from El Salvador on her own and it was a traumatic experience. For her migration can be a death or a re-creation. The idea of Nomadism, something always moving, always in progress of being made needs to be considered. Now more than ever, she sees that we are all breathing each other all the time as we transform. The pandemic is demonstrating that as it spread through the atmosphere. She delivers political messages written in the air, in the breath. We will not be afraid. No more cages. She writes on the concrete: Defund ICE. She questions destiny and the future: who gets the vaccines?

 

Our identities are always shifting but we need to identify ourselves and not have an identity thrust upon us. In her series of cairns, there are collaborations with the mountains when earth is brought from many times and different distant places.  But this is not a linear process, or even a circular one. One needs an "untimely" machine to travel in every direction and simultaneously. "Future perfect" is a future that has happened and is already in the past. It becomes future past. Cortez is constantly trying to open up thoughts. And as they disappear, like those mountains, “In the future, we shall have walked through walls.”

Time machines

Here is the official statement that came with the lecture notes about Beatriz Cortez. Her artist's residency at UCSD is delayed, but that at Lux Art Institute in the studio starts Jan 30 and runs to Feb 27^th, 2021 and is a collaboration exhibition with rafa esparza, Kang Seung Lee, Candice Lin, Pavithra Prasad, and Christian Tedeschi will run until March 30th. 

Watch the full lecture on UTube

Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities and versions of modernity, memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration, and in relation to imagining possible futures. She has had solo exhibitions at the Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles; Clockshop, Los Angeles; Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles; Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles; Centro Cultural de España de El Salvador; Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California; and Museo Municipal Tecleño, El Salvador. Her recent group exhibitions include In Plain Sight at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; Candelilla, Coatlicue, and the Breathing Machine at Ballroom Marfa, in Texas; Unfolding Universes at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia; Utopian Imagination at the Ford Foundation Gallery, New York; Paroxysm of Sublime at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles; Ingestion at TEORé/Tica in San José, Costa Rica; Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas at the Queens Museum, New York; and Chronos, Cosmos: Deep Time, Open Space at the Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. Cortez has received the Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020), Frieze LIFEWTR Inaugural Sculpture Prize (2019), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016), among others. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a doctorate in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She teaches at California State University, Northridge. Beatriz Cortez is represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. 

The Longenecker-Roth Artist in Residence Endowment was established in 2016 to extend Martha Longenecker's legacy as an artist and educator. In the spirit of her historic impact on the visual arts in both local and global communities, this endowment brings to the Visual Arts Department of UC San Diego artists of national and international stature who will inspire our students to broaden the scope, appeal, and range of art as well as incite exchange with the faculty, the campus community and local artists and audiences.

Qing Dynasty Ceramics SDSU Chinese Cultural Center and SD Chinese Historical Museum

by Patricia Frischer 

If you have any interest in color or Chinese Porcelain, I highly recommend the Chinese American Experience and Beyond lecture series on the topic of "Qing Dynasty Ceramics: An unprecedented era of colorful glaze innovations", by Allie Arnell, with comments and works from his own collection by Andy Lu.

In the Qing Dynasty, the vogue for porcelain in Europe would reach its height during the first half of the 18th century. This presentation showed the gorgeous colors such as café au lait, pale yellow, brilliant turquoise, apple green, purple or eggplant, etc. There were over 40 colors in the porcelain during the Qing Dynasty.

This program is presented to you by the SDSU Chinese Cultural Center and San Diego Chinese Historical Museum.

Here is just a short selection of the fabulous works that were discussed. The Song Period preceded the Qing Period with each previous period influencing the next but adding something new.

Allie Arnell

Andy Lu

Waves of Feminism mural by Katie Ruiz at Women's Museum of California

by Patricia Frischer

I joined the Women's Museum of California’s virtual Waves of Feminism mural unveiling and was treated to a behind the screnes creation talk about the inspiration behind the project and how the mural came to be. We got to see the mural created by Katie Ruiz and to hear from Sue Gonda how the women in the three waves of the mural were selected. We learned about separate issues that were prevalent in each era: 100 years ago, the 1960’s and the present. But the director of WMC, Felica Shaw, has also invited the public to contribute their own messages of what the future might mean to us, what the world would be like with gender equity, inclusion and diversity for all.

You can see the mural at Liberty Station right outside the Museum on the exterior walls of Barracks 16 and there will be short labels on the wall, QR codes give you more info including more in-depth exhibitions. Of course, you can go online where they will share all the public messages and more info and tools, workshops, panels and resources to come.  Future projects include: music, films and fashion so you can explore the sound track, celluloid influences and, icons that led the feminist movement. 

Felicia Shaw

Sue Gonda

Katie Ruiz

detail

detail

Waves of Feminism mural