Irma
Sofia Poetercelebrates 25 years of her artistic trajectory
with this retrospective show presented in CEART Tecate, (Federico Benitez s/n,
Downey) Baja Norte. Una y lo otro: Conexion Tecate extended until
the end of June..With a selection of more than 50 pieces this exhibition
shows the different technics, formats and themes that this Mexican-American
artist has explored. More info: 011 52 (665) 65 ispoeter@yahoo.com
I was very sad to miss the 25-year retrospective of Irma Sofia Poeter at Central
Estatal de las Arts in Tecate this last month. She very kindly sent me a video
walk through of some of the exhibition which you can see below.
Poeter was a San Diego
Art Prize recipient in 2016 where she showed a part of the migration series
of cloth works that are like highly embellished mandalas. At this retrospective
she is showed one of these pieces that is her own story of migration from south
to north and back south which has jeans as a central medium. She now lives in
Tecate and considers herself a border artist.
The wide range of materials used in this show is very
exciting. In her early paintings, the subject is always women and how they are
viewed in society. The use of fabric does seem to be a hallmark of her art as
seen with the sleeves of man’s shirts hanging down from the ceiling, actually
close enough to touch you as you walk beneath them.
Her chakra dresses are made from materials from all over
the world. Each of the 7 outfits represent one the chakras. I can relate the
dresses to architecture as they are obviously constructed with layers to be
decorative and still utilitarian. Poeter was trained as an architect and she is
building her own home and studio as we could see from the maquettes on view.
The variety of
mediums is not confusing as Irma Sofia Poeter herself is the subject
which makes the show coherent.
By Lonnie Burstein Hewitt. Photos by Maurice Hewitt.
Art professors Wendell Kling and Alessandra Moctezuma carefully reveal the student prints at the press preview of Heavy Duty.
Steamroller printmaking? I’d never heard of it until I received an email about an upcoming event at Mesa College. Fine arts professor/gallery director Alessandra Moctezuma had come up with another bright idea for Covid-time art: an outdoor community event called Heavy Duty.
Last November, she organized a drive-through exhibition that invited local art-lovers, safely ensconced in their cars, to view a series of current-events-related banners created by local artists. Now, on May 7, displayed on the same campus parking-lot fence, there will be another drive-through exhibit, this time of large-scale woodblock prints made with the aid of a rented steamroller.
Moctezuma, an artist and printmaker herself, said she didn’t exactly come up with the idea herself; she’d learned about steamroller printmaking online. “They’ve been doing it for years on campuses in Florida and elsewhere,” she said. “But I think we’re the first to do it in San Diego.”
Three months ago, she invited 16 professional printmakers to participate, giving them time to create 3’ x 5’ designs. Professor Wendell Kling offered interested students the possibility of making smaller 12-inch square versions; master printer Chris Lahti gave instructions in online zoom workshops, and 24 students completed their pieces during spring break.
My husband and I had a chance to watch the printmaking process at a press preview April 21. First, plywood boards were laid on the ground, while the artists carefully inked their carved wood plates. Once they’re ready to roll, each plate is placed in a holding form and covered with fabric and a protective layer of padding. Effectively, the steamroller acts as a giant-size mobile printing press as it’s slowly driven over the artworks—at least twice, to ensure a good transfer. The inking—like everything else—was painstaking. And the reveals were exciting! All the final results were impressive, as you’ll be able to see for yourself at the May 7th event.
The inking: Artist/gallery coordinator Jenny Armer—she’s also the steamroller driver.
Artist/sculpture-lab technician Trevor Amery with his just-inked wood plate.
The placing of the fabric
Jenny on a roll
The full student prints reveal, with Alessandra Moctezuma & Wendell Kling
The final reveal: Master printer Chris Lahti and Jenny Armer display her finished print.
Heavy Duty: A Drive-Through Steamroller Printmaking Exhibition
May 7, 3-5 p. m. Free admission. San Diego Mesa College, Parking Lot 1 7250 Mesa College Drive, San Diego, CA 92111 For more information, contact Alessandra Moctezuma amoctezu@sdccd.edu/
Participating artists: Trevor Amery Jenny Armer Jennifer Anne Bennett Ty Creighton & his daughter, Samantha Creighton Brian Gibson Wendell Kling Chris Lahti Mary Manusos Jim Melli Morgan Miller III Yvette Roman Sibyl Rubottom Katie Ruiz Jose Hugo Sanchez Katy Yeaw
Lonnie Burstein Hewitt is an award-winning author/lyricist/playwright who has written about arts and lifestyle for the La Jolla Light and other local media for over a dozen years. You can reach her at hew2@sbcglobal.net/
New Quint Gallery exterior (Courtesy Quint Gallery)
Forty
years ago, Mark Quint opened a small gallery in La Jolla, where he’d been
living since 1957, when his family first moved there. He’d graduated from the
San Francisco Art Institute, taught art for several years, and had a good eye,
eclectic taste, and a gift for finding and befriending cutting-edge
contemporary artists.
Quint
would own and design 14 larger galleries over the years, most of them in La
Jolla, until he decided to move his base to an industrial park in Bay Ho in
2016, which gave him more space for his collections and exhibitions but was a
less inviting district.
Mark Quint in 2016, posing with a stack of 200 afghans in a show of objects from his personal collections at La Jolla Athenaeum.(Maurice Hewitt)
Now, in celebration of his 40th
anniversary as a gallerist, he’s back in his hometown with two new venues,
Quint Gallery on the east side of Girard Avenue, and Quint ONE on the west.
QUINT
GALLERY
The
main gallery is an impressive place, including a welcoming lobby filled with
pieces by some of Quint’s favorite local artists, a large exhibition space and another
small one called The Museum Of __ , designated for themed
exhibits. There’s also an
intriguing gift shop, and a bookstore featuring artists’ books published by
Quint Editions.
The Rose Window above the gallery door is the work of Kelsey Brookes, who will be the next artist on exhibit here, starting May 22. The small black-and-white painting is by Kim MacConnel. (Ingrid Westlake)
Currently on view
through May 15 is Walking On Water, a must-see
installation by Chilean-born, New York-based artist/architect/activist Alfredo
Jaar. Originally created in 1992, the piece features a series of light boxes
containing large-scale photographs of a hopeful asylum-seeker crossing the Rio
Grande. Each light box is backed by a mirror, revealing smaller lightboxes that
show different views of the dangerous journey. The piece, on view through the
generosity of its owners who have a special room for it in their home but
wanted others to be able to see it, is as timely as ever today.
To learn more about
the artist, watch the hour-long video interview with Hugh Davies, former
director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), a longtime friend
who gave Jaar his first U.S. exhibition in 1990.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI6J12IInYI or watch below:
Alfredo Jaar: Walking on Water (Nick Nacca)
A closer look at two of the light boxes in Alfredo JaarWalking on Water (Maurice Hewitt)
In
The
Museum Of __ , Richard Ross’s Museology exhibit
of photographs taken in museums’ back rooms just closed April 24. Next up on
April 27 will be Gen Z: The Conventional Rebel, curated by Sarah Cook
and Mabel Deshommes, a pair of 20-year-old student artists who promise an
inside look into the hearts and minds of their generation.
Before leaving the
gallery, ask for a free membership card to The Museum Of __. It’s a wallet-size
souvenir designed by Kelsey Brookes that will give you 10% off any gift-shop purchase.
Quint ONE
After Walking on Water, cross the street to ONE, a
satellite space devoted to offering each visitor a personal experience with a
single, monumental work of art. On view through May 15 is a fascinating display
of the dynamic nature of light and color—a wall-size artwork by French artist
Adrien Couvrat titled Partition. It’s a grid of 21 striated paintings that seem to change as you walk
past them. Each painting is layered; the first layer of acrylic provides
thickness, then the artist rakes tiny ridges through the paint, finally spray-painting
different colors at various angles on top.
Two views ofAdrien Couvrat’s Partition (Maurice Hewitt)
And it’s not just
that the piece changes as you walk by it. Get up close, standing on the left
side of the grid, and you’ll see flat blocks of strong color to your right—no
striations. Standing on the right side, looking left, you’ll see narrow,
paler-colored stripes.
The true magic of Partition
can’t be captured in a photo; you have to see it in person. It’s really
revealing to look at the piece from different viewpoints and see how things
change as you change your perspective.
The artist, who
lives and works in Paris, was introduced here by ONE’s curator/director Ingrid
Westlake, who is also from France and discovered him there. “What we have here
is slow art,” she said. “Things are never what they seem. Move a little, change
your perspective, adopt a different point of view and you’ll see true colors
revealed. It’s optical, philosophical and essential, all activated in these
stunning acrylic paintings.”
There’s also a back
room at ONE, where you can see other artworks, including one more by Couvrat.
Don’t miss the cardboard forest by Eva Jospin, another French artist, best
known for her elaborate and often large-scale cardboard sculptures, as well as
for being the daughter of Lionel Jospin, prime minister of France from
1997-2002.
Eva Jospin’s cardboard forest (Maurice Hewitt)
Walking On Water, on view through May 15 Quint Gallery 7655 Girard Avenue, La Jolla
Partition, on view through
May 15 Quint ONE 7722 Girard Avenue, La Jolla
Both galleries open
by appointment only, Tues-Sat, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Face coverings required. For appointments, go toglad@quintgallery.comor text the gallery at 858.454.3409.
Lonnie Burstein Hewittis an award-winning
author/lyricist/playwright who has written about arts and lifestyle for the La
Jolla Light and other local media for over a dozen years. You can reach her athew2@sbcglobal.net/
Chitra
Gopalakrishnanthinks of herself foremost as a graphic
designer. But she has directed all her design sense into creating meaningful
images. Although this show is all about self portraits, she is channeling all the
women in her life. And that means strong women who have suffered trauma and
loss. Mothers who juggle children with jobs. Women who are goddesses and the
center of their lives.
She takes on some of the feelings of her relatives, her
friends and her colleagues that become a sort of united Chitra. She has
recorded how women shield and protect themselves. There are chards that stick
out of the canvas rather like weaponized jewelry. She uses color, patterns and
repeats that seems to saturate every aspect of her figures, draping them, swaddling
them or hiding them. It seems appropriate and admirable that she and her mother
started a social enterprise collective Kara
Weaves to create fair-trade
handwoven textiles in south-west India.
So these are not 2 dimensional works or even just 3 or 4
dimensions. Gopalakrishnan has mad tech skills and has introduced augmented
reality in the form of 3-d modeling computer animations that are initiated with
smart phones and QR codes. Cast shadows
are projected from tumbling tears and flying spots. They are matched to individual
images, but this is so interactive that you can move them anywhere in the space
you want. She wants there to be an element of each of the works that is
unsettling, or even downright weird.
The idea of a cactus with its protective spikes morphing
into a female delivers a whole series of compositions. Comfortable and uncomfortable
lives side by side. In some of the works, there is no eye contact, but in one
work having to be a hypervigilant mother, she not only has a 3rd eye
but also a third arm. The very latest work is a falling figure, no
color in the background which represents a void, some dangerous pointed objects
and a feeling that she is now willing to jump into the future no matter what it
brings.
Augmented reality with tear drops, plus a mirror face
Augmented reality on the right with the ring of spikes
On April 21, although we were sorry to miss the usual feast
provided to the Trustees and Board members (past and present) of the Balboa
Park institutions, we did learn a bit about the current and future plans of the
Balboa Park Cultural Partnership (BPCP).
Todd Gloria gave opening remarks and mentioned many of the
new developments within the park. There is lots of construction on the way and
when the park is fully opened again, it will be an adventure to discovered new
parts of favorite spaces. We were asked to welcome the Women Museum which will now
now be hosted by the SD Historical Society and the Lux Institute soon to join
the San Diego Art Institute in becoming the newly merged Institute of
Contemporary Art.
Mayor Todd Gloria
Felicia Shaw, Women's History Museum of California
Andrew Utt, director Institute of Contemporary Arts
To stabilize this resource the Parks and Recreation Department
of the City of San Diego is in dialogue with BPCP and are making a current push
to conduct surveys of all sorts of aspects of the this cultural park within a
park. Then they want to create a
framework to identify those needed projects, plan time lines and funding. A big
aspect of that is mobility, access and parking in the area. All this has to be tied
to benchmarking and best practices from other similar parks in the world on
governance and funding.
Original one vision for the California Exposition Experience
Steve Snyder, President & CEO for the Fleet Science Center, introduced a new vision called the One Voice Experience. They want
to elevate and add to the visitors time in the park although there were no
details developed as of yet. Guidelines for this experience include
sustainability, strength of the experience and of course, be coming as inclusive
as possible of the diversity of our communities. They are working with the IDEA
group which stands for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility as well
as BIPOC = Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. We gathered that this means
more collaborations between institution and putting the visitors experience first.
Perhaps they are starting to think about being a cultural theme park for the
city and what that might look like instead of individual institutions just
inhabiting the same space.
