The Chan Gallery is a 1,500-square-foot gallery located in Studio Art Hall within the Art Department of Â鶹´«Ã½. The Chan Gallery became a reality because of the generosity of Bernard Charnwut Chan, a Â鶹´«Ã½ trustee, former art major and ’88 Â鶹´«Ã½ alumnus. The gallery has hosted exhibitions that have included works by current and former students, faculty, staff, and artists from the Greater Los Angeles area and beyond. During the 2018-2019 year, there were eleven exhibitions that featured works by LA-based artists, local artists with physical or developmental disabilities from the First Street Gallery, and current students, faculty, and staff of The Claremont Colleges. The themes embraced by artists, curators, and organizers celebrated identity and ingenuity, reveled in the magical, endorsed collaboration, but also addressed issues of institutional racism, sexism, marginalization, global warming, and disparaged the state of contemporary politics.
The academic year began with an introduction to the work of our two visiting lecturers Loren Holland and Kim Ye. Holland showed a set of oil paintings that delved into the 19th century imagination engaging with the history of colonialism and institutional racism, attempting to negotiate a truce, if not altogether, turn things upside down through allegory and the magic of the Tarot card. There were layers of symbols that appeared in each painting that the artist was re-codifying through a new lens, one that was subtly and wryly critical, and always addressing the re-presentation of blackness. Ye’s collaborative installation addresses the assertion of a new femininity that is inclusive and empowering to all who identify as womxn. The works are rooted in a contemporary representation of womxn embracing their sexuality and power, pronouncing its multiple representations through various media, and emphasizing identity through the pronoun She, Her, Hers.
The Felt Project was an exhibition organized by Lisa Anne Auerbach and Alec Long who worked with First Street Gallery artists during the Summer of 2018. They created all sorts of artworks using the material of felt. Some works were sculptural and others were two-dimensional, some embraced environmental, social, or political issues, and some dealt with elements of art such as line, shape, pattern and repetition, but all were solid color bold displays of a medium not used by these artists before this experience. It was a fun challenge for them and they came up with really imaginative and interesting works. The next two exhibitions split the gallery in two sections with the group show Anomop in the south gallery and Sophie Morada’s junior thesis show Multiplicity in the north gallery space. Anomop, Pomona spelled backwards, included works by junior and senior art majors and a collaborative sculpture made by students in the wood sculpture class. The majors showed video, paintings, chairs, photographs, and sculptural objects around the gallery’s perimeter either hung on the wall, shown on a monitor, or placed on pedestals or a table. Their works were snippits of larger bodies of work still in progress and they addressed functionality, humor, identity, irony, and sincerity. The collaborative sculpture made by wood sculpture students was a composite piece that consisted of smaller sculptural parts made by individual students that was then assembled together to form a single work. It was surrealist in nature and very humorous as enlarged teeth met with what looked like an arm of cheese that connected to a tower of body parts mixed with geometric and organic forms. Morada’s work in the next gallery consisted of a series of oval shaped floating heads, all self-portraits, juxtaposed with rectangular paintings of herself on a black backgrounds or in environments, or just the patterned environment itself. She presented the multiplicity of her identity throughout these works.
The first exhibition of the Spring 2019 semester was Campus Mail Art that included works from faculty and staff who work specifically in the visual arts across The Claremont Colleges. Since the works had to be delivered via our campus mail system, most of the works were small in scale, although some came in hand delivered and these often were larger than expected, but nonetheless were pleasant surprises. While many works were a variety of media on paper, some were of or on metal, wood or fabric and some were a series while others were singular pieces. It was an opportunity to bring the various persons involved in the arts across our seven colleges together in a group show and to see the variety of works that these artists made. Ian Byers-Gamber’s solo exhibition followed in the south gallery space and Scores, a group exhibition, was in the north gallery space. Byers-Gamber showed a series of color photographs that were re-photographed works from a black and white photographic documentation of the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in Los Angeles. He re-photographed them so that they would be different from the photographs that went into the Los Angeles Public Library’s photography archive. Separate from these photographs were vibrant color portraits of puppets on the west wall and two large black and white double-portraits of the puppets with their puppeteers on the south wall. The puppets in his work took on human characteristics and seemed to be the masters of their arena instead of the actual humans. The group show Scores in the north gallery space was based upon an assignment given to the advanced design students by Mark Allen and Kareem Collie to write a score of their own and execute it in vinyl installed in the gallery. The walls, floors, and windows were taken over by a series of text and images that made pronouncements, dribbled poetry down the wall, reached up to the ceiling, or just stood directly at eye-level. The scores ranged from being abstract or formal arrangements to directive or playful citations.
The junior thesis art exhibition this spring took over many spaces throughout the building, not just the Chan Gallery. Some students chose to show a single work or body of works in a contained space such as one wall, while others did entire room installations or had installations in many different spaces inside and outside of Studio Art Hall. They were mapping out where their work would take them in the next year looking ahead at what they might be capable of for their senior show, hence the title of the show 2020_Rough, a rough draft of what was to come. Their work was funny, playful, tongue-in-cheek, exploratory, embraced participation, scrutinized medium and materiality, and reveled in the physicality of art and its relationship to consciousness. For the senior exhibition this year as there were just two majors and they showed their works mostly in the gallery. Cleo Berliner showed a series of silkscreened self-portraits shown in three different ways: images of her torso touching arm to arm arranged to form the outlined shape of a square, images of a small fly tattoo on her buttocks connected just above the hips in a vertical strand cascading down the wall, and a grid of self-portraits that confronted the viewer directly hung at eye-level. In addition, Berliner made multiple sets of handmade ceramic dinnerware and silkscreened tablecloths that depicted images of her body in parts and invited friends to attend a private dinner and partake of her flesh. The title of her show was The Parts in Between and one might say that her guests ably ingested those parts, Berliner’s redux of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, albeit a Gen Z, post-millennial one. Similarly, Marcus Polk embraced the self, but in a figurative way mostly, as one is only witness to a few baby and adolescent photos of himself. His family and friends form the basis of his venerating and emotional installation titled Family Tree. Working with ephemera collected from his family history, various homes he has lived in, friends, and his personal life, Polk walks us through the joys and traumas of life, his life, his families’ lives. The installation was an attempt at reconciling his life thus far, making sense out of the past to move forward psychologically and physically.
The final exhibition of the year occurred during the summer with Gary Murphy’s solo exhibition E-clipsed. The installation of mirrored speakers grouped with the minimalist eclipse was the namesake of the show. It was an immersive experience that penetrated the body through sight, sound, and physical vibration, a synesthetic experience. Another work, Embers, operated in the same way as E-clipsed, but gave us more meat to take in, in the sense that he confronted us with a desecrated American flag whose stars were made of used cigarette butts and the stripes of discarded beer cans. Across from the screaming flag hung an upside down star titled Level of Honor, a tongue-in-cheek jab at the medal of honor. In the corridor separating the two gallery spaces was hung an upside down cross titled Not Worthy and referenced the crucifixion of Saint Peter who deemed himself not worthy to be hung right side up as Jesus had been. Below this sat the double-headed hammer gun in a wooden case titled Murphy’s Law. As family lore had it, all the Murphy males suffered from the saying that if anything might possibly go wrong, then it will go wrong for them. Despite the slyly humorous irony, the works presented a dark outlook on the contemporary state of America.
There was a psychological eeriness that crept through some of the exhibitions this year and there were a lot of works that encouraged participation or engagement, sometimes with multiple senses. Many works also embraced the self, discovering it and its limits and potential, but also poking fun at it, or asserting an agenda specifically important to the artists. Collaborations and a focus on inclusivity and intersectionality were prevalent in many exhibitions throughout the year. The positive tempered the negative and vice versa, it was as if there were an invisible fulcrum balancing the days of our lives, shifting to and fro, back and forth, looking at the past to understand the present and project the future; and understanding how closely our psyches govern ourselves.