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.
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
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
The Lakes and Valleys Art Guild is putting on a Masquerade Art Auction and Fundraiser on September 8 at the Graphic Experience Gallery in downtown Lancaster.
The Lakes & Valleys Art Guild is one of the most active arts groups in the Antelope Valley and this event promises to be one to get up and get out for.
“What Air Ordered” is a show of photographs by Gabriel Malikian that may put you in mind of journeying. But that is not because it is a set of exotic landscapes with pictures of far-flung places. It’s something else.
To put it one way, Malikian is giving us an invitation in “What Air Ordered.” The show is a collection of photographs inviting us to rethink the things we see every day.
If you have ever walked a street that you usually drive, then you know that the adjustment changes things, transforming a semi-conscious commute into a new experience. It’s not just the speed that changes. Somehow, it’s a different street.
The photographs in this show are not “domestic” images that have been reinvented through a camera lens. This is not a show about commuting – and that is not the point here. What the photographs are doing is capturing street-side, roadside and nature scenes in ways that emphasize geometry and color and manage to intimate meanings pitched just above the co-valence of the parts and their whole.
In a related way, there is an idea in this show that brings home the point that what we see is determined by how we look at the world around us. When we embark on a journey, we begin to look actively at the landscape in ways that we often don’t look at our own neighborhood. In drawing attention to this notion, you might say that “What Air Ordered” becomes a journey of ten images, images that consider both what we see and how we look at things.
As a photographer and writer, Malikian is probably more invested in this what/how relationship than most people. And this interest is certainly part of what you will see when you look at the show on display now at Sagebrush Café in Quartz Hill.
But there is more to it than that. To get at some of the other ideas that animate both the show and the artist, we sat down and asked Malikian a few questions:
-Tell us about your experience taking pictures in Montana. Did the specifics of the region invite a different approach to compared to the places you have spent more time with a camera (like Los Angeles)?
Very much so. I was in Billings for work on a film shoot and I suffered a back injury a week into filming. I had to be replaced at short notice, which is no easy feat so far from LA. The agitation my injury caused around me informed my need to creatively get something out of me, so I made a point of walking around Billings with my camera and focusing on taking photographs. This also served to prove to myself that I wasn’t irreversibly injured (my work demanded a functioning body).
In doing so, I found places in the small city that were novel to me. Uniquely American and discarded. Uniquely hidden or protected. I felt the pioneer mentality play out in the places I visited and felt it move through me. I turned down offers from friendly strangers for a ride to wherever I was going – in favor of seeing what else was hidden from the roadside. I had read about the Terrain Vague movement around that time, so I wanted to find what about the city had been left for nature to reclaim and break down.
In Los Angeles, there is a knowledge I have of its various neighborhoods. They each have an aesthetic and feeling that I know well. I know that a photograph in Echo Park will emote one thing, while in Boyle Heights other feelings can be distilled. Nothing about my time in Billings was predictable.
-Are there any photos in your show that have a surprising story behind them? Any photos that you were able to get that made you feel really lucky?
I can’t say that any if the photographs have any special stories behind them, except perhaps those in Montana. I can’t really say I feel like those captured in LA or in the desert are less special to me either.
As far as luck, I think timing played out in interesting ways in almost all these photographs. I found myself in the right places at the right times. But, that happens when a person puts themselves fully into their work. Many other photographers have captured incredible images, and timing played a huge role. As a photographer, you have to explore and be curious or your lens won’t find those moments.
-In spending some time with the photos in “What Air Ordered” we were struck by the idea that the show seems to pose some questions about how we collectively try to move forward into new territory, mentally anyway, but we do so inside a physical landscape that is littered with yesterday’s artifacts. There is a sense that objects and scenes from mid-century America (and from last year) show us how flawed our ability to move forward may be – or, alternatively, these scenes comprise an ironic commentary on our tendency to get tired of things, set them aside, and let them just sit there rusting while we play with our shinier, newer ideas. Does this observation fit with your own sense of this collection? Is this sort of idea represented in your work more generally?
There is a generally pervasive attitude that abandons the troublesome older thing for whatever is convenient, flashy, and works. People have abandoned Detroit. Because of the ease of access to the next best thing, last year’s model is set aside. Sold back. Put out in the trash. It could be fixed, but why bother? Why even learn how to fix anything?
Psychologically, many people do the same thing. Maybe this will fix my aching heart. Maybe if I just travel the world I will understand. If I just had that, I’d finally be happy. Conversely, to celebrate and repair the broken and forgotten brings a genuine sensation of achievement. I once watched my friend puzzle over a broken camera from the 1920s. She fixed it. The film we found inside was incredible and we marveled for a month over it, wondering what the story must have been. If we just threw the thing away (it was only worth $10) our imaginations and her accomplishments would have been cheapened.
I see yesterday’s artifacts as both beautiful reminders of hardiness, as well as living history. From a material point of view, we don’t make things as long-lasting or as physically heavy as we once did. This makes these items and scenes feel foreign, but one could say the same of our forward progression. Plastics replacing steel sheeting. Engineered obsolescence. The next firmware upgrade.
The weight of these old things informs, emotionally, the tone of my photographs. I feel it stops me in my movement and forces me to reflect on what was, both internally and in a larger sense.
There is indeed an irony in our charging forward to fix yesterday’s problems. I think there is ample opportunity to stop moving and study the past, of what has been. Perhaps in a literal, visual sense, my photographs utilize sparse scenes and older items to provoke a movement inside, and back in time. It may be that the happiness or fulfillment we want is not in a new house or car, it might just be in understanding that which has already happened. To meditate on a certain nothingness (a seemingly barren landscape, actually a space of huge mental potential energy) or the nothingness of the carcass of an old building, can have more impact on our lives and mental wellbeing than keeping abreast of the eternally shifting contemporary.
Every photograph is a piece of history, so it’s fine to get stuck in the past.
Take a look at a few more thoughts on “What Air Ordered” over at Sagebrush Cafe’s blog page.
Antelope Valley painter and writer, Mari Hall, exclaims a “world view, personal, eclectic and electric, is an art lens uniquely shaped by growing through a spiritual,
cultural and technological revolution.”
Her paintings offer a perspective that seems to play on the tenets of both folk art/folk tales and science fiction, fusing a striking and particular modernism with a sense of the universal.
And this makes sense when you find out that Mari Hall is also a science fiction writer. Her 2017 novel, The JuneNoon Effect, “is a thrilling ride through modern America. Set in the not-so-distant future it is a tale of modern life in an age of extravagance.”
Reviewing the novel, Chazz Clarence Ross write that The JuneNoon Effect “espouses Mari’s intricate command of scientific unknowns in the sphere of political subversion and spiritual antagonism. Like a backwards, Halloween ride on Colossus, you will relish Mari’s sudden twists and turns in this potent, sultry journey that smirks the secrecy of Area 51, 911 and other supernatural enigmas.”
Find out more about Mari Hall at her aptly named website, electricmoonbaby.
Antelope Valley Arts 