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.
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
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.
“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.
If you grow up in a family of artists, it’s not always easy to be an artist yourself. Instead of being “the creative one” and standing out, your creativity is given automatic comparison. Any artistic freedom and open-ended exploration of ideas can be dampened by a sense of a pressure to compete or to perform at a certain level. It can drive you away from art entirely.
With an artist for a mother and two artistically talented older sisters, Maggie SanFilippo was not always sure that she wanted to enter the fray. She followed her own path. But – and here’s the thing – that path seems to have always pointed back to art.
Doing costume design in the film industry and working for years as an entrepreneur in the area of vintage and hand-made furniture, SanFilippo never strayed far from art, even if she didn’t think of herself as an artist. She works in fields where design and aesthetics are central. Her furniture work in particular had her hustling to rescue and refurbish furniture, applying some imagination to give life back to thrift store finds and in that way bring new ideas to life.
She found herself naturally drawn to musicians and photographers. Maybe she tricked herself in a very quiet way into becoming an artist despite the fact that she wouldn’t have given herself that title. Or maybe she was just waiting for the right encouragement.
When her boyfriend and business partner, musician Ainsley Hubbard encouraged SanFilippo to take her occasional sketches and run with them, the moment seemed right and she did.
In Conjuring Marz, SanFilippo’s show at Sagebrush Café and her first solo show – you can see the process of “running with it” at work in a collection of pieces combining sketching and water color that become a sort of jazz-couture style: firm lines and inventive improvisations of color, gesture and attitude that bring to mind both Ella Fitzgerald and Coco Channel.
And there is a very deliberate harkening back to the past in Conjuring Marz. SanFilippo was inspired to create some pieces for the show while she was watching Feud, the television series about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, figures of glamour and great emotion – and a scrappy determination to insist on themselves and on their own success.
The style that is at work in Conjuring Marz calls on a certain understatement that hides in plain sight. Many of the pieces contrast vivid splashes of color with images of composure and self-possession. There is something in the drawn figures that the color points to, but the faces aren’t giving anything away.
So the joy that seems to shout itself from the bright and quite direct works in the show becomes at least a little bit complicated. There is something else here too.
Many of the figures in the drawings are wearing sunglasses, holding something back, maintaining a cool secret. That, in a way, is what elegance is – flair that is at the same time somehow restraint.
In Conjuring Marz, SanFilippo gives us a set of pieces that seem like the result of a meditation on this dance between the said and the unsaid. There is a sense that the stage sees what the actress wants to show but those inevitable off-stage incidents, those episodes in the wings are what stand behind the knowing smile when the actress takes her bow.
Conjuring Marz
Showing @ Sagebrush Cafe
42104 50th Street West
Lancaster, CA 93536
“Drawing is a universal language, connecting generations, cultures, and communities. Join us at the AVC Art Gallery on Saturday, October 29, 2016 from 11 am to 1 pm for a relaxed and fun collaborative drawing event in collaboration with the Big Draw LA!
“THE BIG DRAW LA is a regional celebration of the act of drawing. The Big Draw creates participatory opportunities for people of all ages to discover that drawing can help us: look more closely, inspire creative thinking, communicate with others, and have fun in the process.
“Ryman Arts launched the inaugural Big Draw LA in October 2010. Organizations of all sizes and kinds, from established institutions to small groups, are invited to sponsor, organize, or host an event during the month of October. Led by the Campaign for Drawing in London, the aim is to raise awareness of drawing’s power as tool for learning, observation, creativity, and social and cultural engagement.
“Let’s draw AV!”
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The Art Gallery is located in Fine Arts Quad inside Building FA1, on the West side of the Antelope Valley College Campus, adjacent to the Performing Arts Theater.Admission to the gallery is free. For additional information, please contact 661-722-6300 extension 6215, visit www.avc.edu/artgallery, email artgallery@avc.edu or follow us at facebook.com/avcartgallery.
Sagebrush Café: Coffee & Art House42104 50th Street W., Quartz Hill , CA 93536sagebrush-café.comOpen 7 Days
From the Antelope Valley College emailed press release:
Please join us at the Antelope Valley College Art Gallery for a special public reception for David Babb: Between Place and Memory including a conversation with artist on Wednesday, March 4, 2015 from 7:00 pm-8:30 pm. Visitors to the exhibition can write their questions between now and March 4th, 2015 inside a notebook in the gallery which will become the basis for our conversation with David Babb.
David Babb: Between Place and Memory
February 16-March 20, 2015
Antelope Valley College Art Gallery presents David Babb: Between Place and Memory a solo exhibition of mixed media artwork from Antelope Valley College faculty member David Babb whose recent bodies of work use the changing landscape of nature and place as a metaphor to express how we perceive and project our individual identities, histories, and memories. The works invoke the wavering stripes between the earth and the sky, questioning the roaming nature of our perspectives as we move from childhood into our adult lives to envision the residue between the lines of these horizons as dependent on our experiences, location, history, recollection, and momentary personal identities.
An avid and successful gardener, David Babb: Between Place and Memory highlights the recently completed series of digital transfer works titled “Secrets,” which feature Babb’s nocturnal photographs of flowers from his elaborate backyard garden. The photographs are compiled into illustrations which reference color, beauty, and transience to investigate the mental constructs and psychological landscapes of childhood as a vehicle for representing experiences of magic, fear, discovery, innocence, imagination and the ambiguity of our personal buried secrets. Together with his “Horizon Line” oil painting series of luminous background skies marred by the visual scars of rendered grey experiences, the vibrant lines in the foreground shadow the fleeting nature of our visual memories, the transience of life, and the perception of each of our individual landscapes.
The exhibition includes a new graphite paper tracing and acrylic drawing installation titled, “Trace Memory/Trace Evidence,” which visually captures the fragile process of remembering the past through the random compilation, orientation, and layering of images in a technique inspired by the transitional learning experience of AVC students.
Visitors are also invited to participate in the community engagement activity “Kid Fears” by writing or drawing a response to the prompt, “What were you most afraid of growing up?” adding to a growing timeline of past and present memories currently on display in the exhibition, transforming the gallery space into a limitless horizon between place and memory–a collective secret garden.
This event is free and open to the public.
Antelope Valley College Art Gallery
3041 West Avenue K
Lancaster, CA 93536
The Art Gallery is located in building FA1, the Fine Arts Building, located in the Fine Arts Quad on the West side of the Antelope Valley College Campus, adjacent to the Performing Arts Theater.
http://www.avc.edu/academics/kavapa/artgallery/
Follow us: facebook.com/avcartgallery
Antelope Valley Arts 