Transdisciplinary Artist Researcher, Aliona Pankina, has held exhibitions at Ex Teresa Arte Actual museum, Museo de Sitio de Chapultepec, Vértice Experimentación y Vanguardia, Teatro Lúcido, Bucareli 69, Galería Sonora 316 Centro, Vértice UNAM and Festival Movimiento en Movement, Mexico; 704 Contemporary Art, Buenos Aires; and AXW Festival, New York. She studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. She resides in Mexico City. This video captures her installation/performance of 2 April, 2023, at Museo Universitario del Chopo, Ciudad de México.
ANN WEBER
COME TOGETHER
Come Together, 2022, found cardboard, staples, polyurethane, 66 x 70 x 7″
My artistic journey began with ceramics. After 15 years making functional pottery, I left New York City for California to study with Viola Frey at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. It was Viola’s totemic clay figures that inspired the scale of my work.
I started working in cardboard in 1991. Cardboard allows me to make monumental, yet lightweight forms, and eliminate the cumbersome process of clay. Frank Gehry’s cardboard furniture was my initial inspiration. My abstract sculptures read as metaphors for life experiences, such as the balancing acts that define our lives. “How far can I build this before it collapses?” is a question on my mind as I work. Ultimately my interest is in expanding the possibilities of making beauty from a common and mundane material.
By casting ordinary cardboard into bronze or fiberglass for public art projects, I am illustrating that things are not always what they appear to be. Even in other materials it is easy to see the details of the former lives of cardboard boxes and individual staples. This humble origin is part of the innovation, charm and humor of the artwork.
One of the unique qualities of my art is the psychological component. Neither entirely representational nor abstract, but something in between, I want the viewers to bring their own associations to the artwork. Working with a palette of simple forms (cylinders and circles), the sculptures are symbolic of male and female forms and the natural world. I use architecture and art historical references to evoke memory, relationships and morality in my sculpture.
– Ann Weber
DEVON TSUNO / GREG ROSE
us and those around us
Devon Tsuno and Greg Rose both work with visual themes of nature and landscape yet behind what might be considered a traditional oeuvre, they explore social constructs, family connections, geopolitics, human relationships and human-made destruction. The obvious brilliance of Tsuno’s carefully layered foliage and Rose’s pristine tree portraiture belie the deep need for tenuous ties we have with our natural surroundings. Alongside beauty is anxiety. Specific to Los Angeles yet easily extrapolated to universal proportions, we find ourselves in trouble. What our community is today, down to individual neighborhoods, individual trees, even may be fleeting, soon to be reconfigured, washed over, burned to oblivion, decimated. Honor the roots from which our lives spring. Celebrate. And be Warned.
Link to Devon and Greg’s Talk: https://youtu.be/zZ1Opnayzf4
(Left) Devon Tsuno (Detail) sixteen cents each and a landscape of plunder #2 (red camellias), 2022, Spray paint, and acrylic on canvas, 56 x 48 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Residency Art Gallery
(Right) Greg Rose Dead Tree (34˚16.911’N 117˚37.013’W)
ANN DIENER
Linear Dissections: The Power of Place
Evolving Terrain, 2019, 49 5/8 x 70 in., graphite, colored pencil, gouache and cut paper on paper
Pierce College Art Gallery is excited to introduce large scale drawings by Ann Diener in our first exhibition back on campus. Ann will give a talk about her work in Art 3300 on Wednesday, February 16th at 2PM with a reception in the Gallery immediately following.
Ann Diener’s drawings and installations are multi-layered narratives, which investigate the social and political ramifications of the built environment. Referring to land, culture, time and memory, the works move beyond geography to engage with issues of science, social class, migration and the anthropological layers of place.
Diener earned her BA from UCLA and her MFA from the University of California Santa Barbara and has exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the US, including at the Weatherspoon Museum in North Carolina, the Art, Design and Architecture Museum at UCSB, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Torrance Museum, Otis College of Art and Design, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Riverside Museum, the Atkinson Gallery at Santa Barbara City College, Edward Cella Art and Architecture, Bank Gallery, Los Angeles and Hosfelt Gallery and Electric Works, San Francisco, as well as numerous art fairs in the US and Europe. She is slated for a one-person exhibition in 2024 at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA, 2024, The Getty Foundation, Los Angeles, California.
Her work has been reviewed in The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Art on Paper, Artweek, among others. She has been awarded residencies at The Bogliasco Foundation, Genoa, Italy, Kaus Australis, Rotterdam and the American Academy, Rome. She has taught at UCSB, been a visiting artist at numerous schools and her practice includes bringing art to public schools.
Link to Ann Diener’s Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EylKQKCO11A
Making Meaning
Presented by Laura Mays
