The Antelope Valley Art group has teamed up with We Are Cedar to open a gallery in Palmdale and to open new opportunities for local artists.
There are several opportunities and calls for submissions that are open right now.
Take a look at their website or follow them on Instagram to find out more and to keep up with all the activity these folks are getting up to.
“The Dhu Varren Barn” is a collection of photographs of a single barn in Michigan.
As Rheagan Martin has it in his description of his new photography show at Sagebrush Cafe, “The barn on Dhu Varren Road will not last long. When I moved into a house on the farmland, I had no idea that the barn was on the last undeveloped parcel of land in the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan. But as long as the reluctant city council denies plans for its development, the barn still stands.”
The photos in this show capture the Dhu Varren Barn under different conditions of weather and light, inviting thoughts of the tension between continuation and change.
In an age of rapid change, we tend to think that we are the non-permanent part of our landscape.
The world we were born into has been swept away by Twitter, by Apple and by Amazon. We’re half a hashtag away from a brave new world and we gleam in the cast off glow of our personal devices. We’re the blue-lit faces of the future, but in the whiz-bang of tweets and updates we hardly have a breath to wonder what’s next.
We are undergoing a sometimes torturous and sometimes joyous metamorphosis into a new society, which is difficult to acknowledge because we have never known what it’s like to be whatever it is we are becoming. We know, like the caterpillar knows, only where we’ve been.
The iconic Midwestern barn naturally symbolizes this sense of change. It is a literal picture of where we’ve been. But the barn – static, totemic, stoic – here is also suggestive of an idea that re-frames our sense that we are changing against an unchanging background.
The barn in spring offers another context. The barn in sunset too. It complicates the simple sense that we are changing against a permanent backdrop. Because our legacy includes the land – what we’ve done to protect it, to cultivate it, to store its fruits, to love it, in our way.
We have a legacy, but there is an open question as to what that legacy means today and what it will mean tomorrow.
Which light, striking an old barn on Dhu Varren Road, is the real light – the one that tells us the truth about where we’ve been and where we’re going?
This barn won’t last long, Martin says. The world is changing around it.
In an interesting turn of metaphor, the barn in these photographs becomes a double-edged symbol. It represents a changing world, standing here as the emblem of a past that has already been left behind. The distance between this Barn and Us – with our sense of being rushed toward an unknowable future – is wide, and getting wider.
These photos speak into that distance.
“Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” – William Blake
But the Dhu Varren Barn is also the vessel of a certain beauty – the kind we experience when we encounter an object outside of its time, an object that has endured. It is the past – still miraculously present. The past still intact and wholly itself.
When we hold an object like this in our hands now, or in our gaze, we feel that we are reaching back through time, and for many of us it becomes a moment of dumbfounded wonder. We don’t have words to put to this feeling of being stretched across time to touch the past, here, with our cell phones buzzing in our pocket and the news cycle chasing us like a shadow. But without words, we still feel the wonder. That’s why we keep going back to stand in the field and look at the barn. (At least, that must be why Rheagan Martin did it.)
So, the barn is a symbol of a part of the past that is still with us. It may feel fleeting and it may actually be fleeting, but for now it is still here. It’s part of our landscape, however anachronistic it may seem.
You wonder – How can this solitary barn be so active in its symbolism, so two-edged? How can it represent a changing world running full speed from any thoughts of an agrarian past while simultaneously representing the constance of that past, its ability to endure?
What should we say this barn means?
Is it a chance to reflect on a fleeting, pastoral American life, a message about how quickly and how far we’ve come toward changing into something new? Or is it a sign that even amidst all this change, something remains intact? Is it a link to a romance with the land that may flicker but never entirely fade?
Rheagan Martin’s photographs meditate on these questions, which spring to mind in the more poetic rooms of our brains, even if we don’t put these words to them.
“The Dhu Varren Barn” does the work of bringing us to a strange piece of land where the past and the present are hewn – together and apart.
The Dhu Varren Barn
Photography by Rheagan Martin
Showing at Sagebrush Cafe in Quartz Hill, CA
Local artists and art supporters are getting together to do some work that should create lasting opportunities for showing and viewing creative work in the Antelope Valley.
On January 31st, WAC Arts (formerly We Are Cedar) will begin a monthly, rotating, community arts showcase at The AV Art Gallery.
Separately, both WAC and The AV Arts Gallery have made names for themselves locally; as presenters and advocates for the arts. Now combined as one unstoppable creative force, we bring you our first communal exhibition.
This is a free form showcase to merely give you a sample of what both our fabulous local artists, and the gallery, can provide.
As the opening reception approaches, we will share some of the names of which artists will be showcasing.
But wait!! there’s more…
In addition to our wonderful exhibition, there will be a “Sound, Light, and Frequency” audio/visual experience.
Numerous projectors will be brought in and set up, to create an artistic visual presence like no other. While you vibe out to the presentation, there will be musical accompaniment provided by both “Mystery Whacker” and “Jiminy Picasso”.
Live art by: Magz Marz
Welcome to a new era of community art.
SUBMISSIONS
https://forms.gle/oe6hrKZUTRavhcm46
or
wearecommunityart@gmail.com
Take a look if you’re interested in pursuing the opportunity on offer and, as usual, look for chances to support the kind of creative work that you would like to see grow in our community.
Mari Hall is at it again with new paintings. Check them out at her website, Art in the Key of Life.
The new work is textured and bright. There is a sense of specific place in these pieces, but that place in some of the work is clearly an internal, meditative place.
Suggestive geometries evoke certain energies that almost have a flavor about them. They are paintings you want to touch. Somehow, there are feelings in these paintings that refuse to be limited to the experience of the eye.
Here are some excerpts from her artist statement to give you a sense of where she is coming from and where she is going with her art:
I think of art as one of the Universal Languages. It speaks of things that are difficult or simply inexpressible in words. It touches the hearts of everyone in one way or another, regardless of race, creed, gender or cultural background. Art is a reflection of our shared humanity. It is from this viewpoint that I create my art work.
The new millenium created dramatic changes on a global scale. Exhibiting on the internet is part of this transformation. We are dreaming developing drifting with a new tide of widespread change. These changes have become part of my artistic expression.
Take a look at more from Mari Hall at Art in the Key of Life.
Does it sound paranoid to say that we’re seeing circles everywhere? No matter where we look – circles, and circles within circles. 
They are in our eyes, double circles of pupil and lens. They are in the sky, one blazing sphere burning down at us by day as another struggles through the night, grasping always to be complete. There are circles made by man down here. There are children swiveling the hoola hoop until they let it fall at their feet. And it all repeats. Cycles. Circles within circles.
It’s all connected. It’s all about connection.
As Stevie Chun writes in her artist statement for the show:
The circles in “Full Circle” signify events in life. These life events are monumental in shaping who we are as individuals while connecting us to one another, all of them, big and small.
For this series, Chun is painting with ink and watercolor and attaching the paintings to wood. Each piece features a multitude of circles, which Chun describes as a “modest shape” but one that also “has many symbolic meanings across cultures. Circles represent the complexity and completeness of life. In this circular form we can all be connected – able to find common ground.”
An ancient symbol of unity, the circle also evokes notions of the cycle of life, tying it to the most fundamental mythologies of origins – life emerging, cresting, blazing a fullness of being, and returning from whence it came.
The images here recall the feeling of first seeing deep space telescope images from the Hubble – bright galaxies wheeling reaching back toward beginnings too dim to recall.
But the brightness is what we see in those telescopic images. The fecundity of the cosmos…shining like a party in the distant corners of the sky. Each image, like each piece in Chun’s “Full Circle,” is a celebration of this well-spring, this energy.
Showing Now:
Full Circle
Paintings by Stevie Chun
42104 50th Street West
Quartz Hill, CA 93536
Since opening in 2016, the Quartz Hill Public Library has been host to many events. Quite a few of these have been related to literature and the arts.
A local poet, Lida Abramian, is taking advantage of the space offered in this stylish and still very new library.
The event is open to the public and seems like a nice way to workshop some of your work if you’re a poet seeking practice and next steps. Or if you are just looking to engage with the written word as a writer or as a lover of letters.
The Antelope Valley is home to many, many creative artists. There are people here working on everything from painting and mixed media to film and sculpture. Home to a fine art museum, the Antelope Valley is also a place where visiting artists are showcased and celebrated.
Where can you see the work all these artists are doing?
So glad you asked.
Here is a short list of places always showing art in the Antelope Valley.
Downtown Lancaster has partnered a public arts affiliate to implement a nice mural arts program, so the whole BLVD is also a good place to see some art – especially if you like large scale outdoor work.
If you’re looking for more arts and artist information regarding the Antelope Valley region, be sure to check out AV Art.org – our friends with a very similar name doing good work to spotlight and advance the arts in our area.
There is a school of thought that says we can only know the world through the senses. What we see and hear and feel is not just an impression of a more objective world – what we see and hear and feel is the world.
But what happens when the senses are confronted by contradiction? What happens when we aren’t sure what we’re seeing or hearing or feeling? How do we reconcile the facts that seem to say that the world is not one thing, but several things at once?
June Marie Milham’s current gallery show at Sagebrush Café wades into questions like these, using vibrant colors, mixed media, and complex geometries to approach the concept at the heart of her show – “Reconciling the Horizon.”
The work in “Reconciling the Horizon” brings to life a line from Allen Ginsberg:
Detach yrself from Matter, & look about
At the bright snowy show of Iowa
Earth & Heaven mirroring
eachother’s light
This isn’t Iowa, but Milham’s art evokes Ginsberg’s very intentionally as a means of exploring the ways that the horizon is a location of collapsed concepts, a place where earth and heaven are no longer distinct but instead become blended into one sensory experience.
There is an emphasis here on elements of composition. There are tricks of colors, weighted one against another. There are layers of paint (and language too) that play like memories within the moment of each piece, just like memories inhabit each moment of our own waking lives.
In her statement for the show, Milham talks about how the horizon is a site where things that we usually see as opposites actually meet, pushing us to reconsider the relationship between present and past and between emotion and intellect.
At the horizon, we see that these notions really do mirror one another. Opposites, yet somehow complicit in the very essence of that which exists on the other side of the line.
But there is a high and a low. There is a sky and an earth. These opposites cannot stand together. They must stand apart. Our senses tell us this is our reality. But the theory that our world is only what our senses tell us won’t suffice as a full explanation of what happens along the line of the horizon, that site where opposites collapse into one another.
Milham’s new work takes up this idea as a focus and offers a fluid set of responses – some joyous, some calm, some challenging and wild – and she invites us to reflect with her on this strange place of division that, by some magic, is also a place of reconciliation.
Showing at Sagebrush Cafe
42104 50th Street West
Quartz Hill, CA 93536
Bravery Brewing and Sagebrush Cafe have teamed up to craft a beer together. To celebrate the event, Bravery is throwing a beer release party with an emphasis on collaboration and the arts.
Two local small businesses, bringing their strengths together.
And you can be a part of it.
Artists interested in displaying art at the event should send in their work (following the guidelines listed on the flyer) before May 5th.
The show will be held on May 11th at Bravery Brewing.
It’s going to be a blast. If you don’t get a chance to submit and participate as an artist in the event, you can participate by coming out to celebrate the artists of our community as well as a couple small businesses that are known for showcasing local talent in the Antelope Valley.
Cheers!
Sagebrush Cafe will host its biggest ever Arts & Crafts Fair on Saturday, April 6th from 10-4.
This year will be bigger than ever: 30 Vendors – All Local Artists & Artisans
10 am to 4 pm
April 6, 2019
the First Saturday of AprilCome on out to support local culture in the Antelope Valley!
Find Locally Made:
– Fine Art
– Pottery
– Gifts
– Handbags
– Jewelry
– Literature
– Soap & Candles
– Who-Knows-What-Else!?!We’ll have activities for kids – crafts and face painting – as well as activities for adults. It’s going to be a big day. Sagebrush Cafe is turning ten years old, after all, so we wanted to do it up this time.
Bring your friends, fam!
Food – Drinks – Arts – Crafts – Good Times
Sagebrush Cafe
42014 50th Street West
Lancaster, CA 93536
Antelope Valley Arts 