Nervous Structure: Cuppetelli/Mendoza

Nervous Structure is an interactive installation created by emerging artists Annica Cuppetelli (USA) and Cristobal Mendoza (Venezuela). The work is composed of hundreds of vertical elastic lines illuminated with interactive computer graphics that react to the presence and motion of viewers. The piece consists of three planes that intersect: the physical plane (the structure), the virtual plane (the projection) and the perceptual plane (the viewer and his/her interaction). The artists note that “it is in these various points of intersection that the piece works, and our interest lies in the perceptual problems that arise within these intersections.”

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A significant aspect of the installation is the moiré pattern, which is created when the projected lines move over the structure. A moiré pattern is the optical result of two overlapping grids that are not in perfect alignment.  The term is used widely in physics and computer graphics; however the word is hundreds of years old and originates from a type of textile that has a “watery” look, which is produced by layering fabric. The fact that so much of modern technology terminology has its origins in historical techniques (particularly in textiles) is of great interest to the artists, as it connects their individual practices and it ties their work to history.

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Cuppetelli and Mendoza began their artistic collaboration in autumn 2010. They have exhibited in the Biennial of Video and Media Arts (Chile, 2012) and festivals such as Scopitone 2012 (France), ISEA 2012, FILE 2011 (Brazil), FAD 2011 (Brazil), video_dumbo 2011 (New York, NY) among others. Cuppetelli received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (Fibers, 2008) and Mendoza at the Rhode Island School of Design (Digital Media, 2007). Mendoza is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI, where they are based.

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Nike Schröder: 34˚N 118˚W 

34˚N 118˚W  is a site-specific installation made especially for the MOAH entrance lobby by Los Angeles-based artist Nike Schröder.  The installation represents an abstraction of the moment when the sun pierces the desert horizon at dawn. Schröder captured the color scheme from this moment in time by integrating it into the textile art piece, which brings a reflection of the ephemeral horizon into the museum.  As the artist painstakingly hand stitched thousands of colored threads onto the canvases, she allowed them to hang in the manner that paint drips from the canvas, forming a symphony of color that is sensitive to the movement of people as they walk through the entrance doors and to the subtle and shifting air currents in the museum. The two canvases are placed at a prescribed distance apart, creating a locus of conversation between each panel.  The top threads slightly touch the lower canvas while leaving drips of cut-off thread on the floor as part of the discussion between materials and location. 

 

Nike Schröder earned her Art Therapy degree in Germany in 2008 and moved to Los Angeles in 2012.  Working as a professional studio artist, Schröder has shifted her practice from figurative motives to exploring the world of abstraction through precise systems of color.  Her color calculations are based on a specific place and/or time and generously provide the viewer with keen color gradations that she configures into sensitive linear and formal compositions.  Coming from a painting background, the artist explores the exceptional materiality of fibers and textiles as they overlap and extend beyond the traditional frame of a painting into the environment.  Additionally, by utilizing materials that respond to movement, her work invites public interaction while activating the museum space.  Schröder exhibits internationally in galleries, at art fairs and in commercial spaces such as Urban Outfitters and Stefanel. MOAH is thrilled to showcase Nike Schröder’s site-specific piece 34˚N 118˚W,  a work that celebrates the Antelope Valley through her distinctive artistic sensibility.

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Gisela Colón: PODS

PODS—the new work of Los Angeles-based abstract artist Gisela Colón —features a painting-sculpture hybrid of blow-molded plastic forms that are meticulously saturated with automotive lacquers in iridescent, reflective, radiating pigments.  Colón’s use of anthropomorphic, amorphous, organic and asymmetrical lines appear to cause the object to dissolve into the surrounding environment, thereby inviting the viewer to experience pure color and form in space.

 

Colón was born in Canada to a German mother and raised in her father's native Puerto Rico. Having spent the last two decades living and working in Southern California, Colón’s latest body of work reflects the influences of her surroundings and embraces the quintessential SoCal artistic practice of perceptualism—also known as "light & space" and "finish fetish" that developed here in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

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Megan Geckler: Rewritten by Machine on New Technology

“I cannot overemphasize the need for play, for in play you don’t extract yourself from your activity. In order to invent I felt it necessary to make art a practice of affirmative play or conceptual experimentation” – Richard Serra.

Megan Geckler’s installations are fun – let’s just get that out in the open. Her work is an absolute pleasure to look at, and the impending sense of vertigo one may self-induce by circumnavigating her installations and craning one’s neck at precipitous angles is part of the visceral delight. And it is a pleasure that Geckler wants to induce. Her practice of building large scale, site-specific installations out of commonly produced, industrial, rather than art-specific, materials is, at its core, oriented toward the human figure. Geckler creates a kind of grand spectacle full of pulsating color to trigger the eye, while the scale of her work, the investigation of architecture, and the manner in which the pieces unfold dimensionally elicits an awareness of space as traversed by the figure. This hybrid endeavor that blurs the distinctions between disciplines draws on the history of geometric abstract painting, late twentieth century sculpture, and contemporary practices in installation. Geckler focuses on the phenomenological experience of the singular viewer, offering an encompassing environment that notes the vocabulary of minimalism and its use of industrial materials and literalness.

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Rewritten by Machine on New Technology is the first of Geckler’s installations to be re-imagined for a new architectural setting, re-engineered, and re-deployed. Fill It Up and Pour It Down the Inside, her 2006 installation at the Torrance Art Museum was the first iteration and featured a vortex-shaped twist between two rectangles. Machine is about twice the size, and it involves a rhombus and a new color scheme designed specifically for the Lancaster Museum of Art and History.  Her new work invites consideration: What does it mean to have created a site-specific, temporally limited work that gets resurrected and transformed? What are the implications now that the work has passed into the realm of an idea, to be retrieved from Plato’s cave, as it were, and precipitated, realized as a new specificity?       

           

Geckler’s work, in its re-imagination, takes on a self-reflexive quality, but one that is light-hearted and whimsical, rather than ironic. It is a return to the idea, a playful reiteration, and an enchantment with time, place, and perception.

Christopher Michno—Los Angeles, 2013

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Megan Geckler earned her Bachelors degree from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1998 and her Masters degree from the Claremont Graduate University in 2001. She has mounted solo shows at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Los Angeles World Airport, and the Creative Artists Agency among others, as well as in partnership with corporations such as Nike, Target and Urban Outfitters. For more images and information about Geckler, please visit her website - megangeckler.com

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Chris Trueman: Slipstream

noun \slip-strēm\

1. aeronautics: a current or stream of fluid (as air or water) driven aft by a revolving propeller or jet engine.

2. an assisting force regarded as drawing something along behind something else such as to ride in the slipstream of a fast-moving vehicle.  

 

How might a stationary painting behave like a slipstream?  Southern California based painter, Chris Trueman answers this question deftly and deliberately by combining forces between hard edge lines and the organic fields of color that occupy his expansive, immersive canvases. While his command of the painted surface is apparent in the formal qualities of his work, he simultaneously questions and reconstructs the ideological precepts of Abstract Expressionism, OP Art, Hard-Edge and Minimalism, which takes his work beyond the formal and into rich—and often opposing—philosophical terrain. The assisting force of Trueman’s slipstream is generated by the intersection of these formal and philosophical experiments. 

 

Trueman’s slipstream gains additional strength and efficiency as he traverses a range of painterly applications including his generous use of color, tonality, form, texture, and the visible record of his exploration of materials, each providing a tangible contrast to one another. Trueman seduces the viewer by calculating the pressure between hard and soft edges; through directing color combinations that vibrate in the moiré to trick the eye; and by leading the conversation that occurs between the painted surface and the areas where he reveals the raw, untreated canvas.  His attention to materiality—the softness of the raw canvas against the strictly defined edges and textural depth—exposes the truth of the material. Trueman’s painted slipstream is equally structural: his canvases are composed with architectonic forms that reference the tenets of geometric abstraction as defined by Picasso’s lineage of producing an illusionistic space that one feels compelled to step into.

 

Formal elements and historical styles may be easily identified in this exhibition, however the process of analyzing the work is complicated by the very act of viewing and thus, experiencing the painting. The effect of various moiré and optical patterns shift constantly according to the distance and angle from which they are viewed, and often interfere with the ability to see and envision the entirety of the painting at once.  At times the underlying forms are completely dependent upon the leading or foreground layers; much like a cycling team is reliant upon the leading cyclist who is creating a slipstream.

 

Within Trueman’s new work exists yet another type of slipstream, one that is energized by a collision of philosophical references. Moving beyond the formal principles of design, Trueman’s slipstream builds considerable momentum as he shifts through several periods that define the history of modern art: the iconic, self-absorbed and experimental nature of Abstract Expressionism; the mathematical and perceptual trickery of OP Art; the rigorous precision of Hard-Edge painting; and the quiet, contemplative principles of Minimalism. Trueman states that for him, the most compelling collision occurs between the philosophical arrogance of abstract expressionistic gesture painting and the humble “blue collar” act of hard-edge painting. This ideological conflict precipitates a kind of vigorous tension that pulls the viewer into the painting as strongly as the formal properties of his works.  

 

While Trueman’s new body of work is richly painted and contains complex formal and ideological principles, it simply draws the viewer in and is pleasurable to engage.  Trueman gives you the autonomy to move between the layers and create your own slipstream in real time as you move toward and away the painting.

 

Chris Trueman graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003, earning dual BFA degrees in Painting and Digital Media.  He relocated to southern California to attend Claremont Graduate University, earning a MFA with a concentration in Painting in 2010.  Trueman currently teaches painting at Fullerton College and Santa Ana College and has previously taught at Chapman University. Trueman has exhibited his work nationally in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and internationally in Milan, Italy.

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28th Annual Antelope Valley Uniton High School District Art Exhibition 

For 28 years the Lancaster Museum of Art & History, formerly the Lancaster Museum/Art Gallery, has been proud to present the artwork of the Valley’s burgeoning young artists. This year marks the first time the show will be located at the brand new MOAH facility. Featuring the work of over 100 students from across the Antelope Valley, this all-media show will fill three of MOAH’s galleries. Over $1,000 in awards, donated by the Lakes and Valleys Art Guild, Lancaster Photography Association, Lancaster Museum and Public Art Foundation, Beryl Amspoker Memorial, as well as awards from Lancaster’s Mayor R. Rex Parris, City Manager Mark Bozigian, Director of Parks, Recreation and Arts Ronda Perez and MOAH’s Interim Curator Andi Campognone will be presented to students encouraging their passion for art.