



All Photos taken by Julia Schlosser
On view now through April 4 in the Art Gallery is Passion for the Possible: The





PRESS RELEASE: December 24, 2008
ecoLOGIC
A survey of Southern California artists, architects, and designers who pose aesthetic inquiries that express a unique logic, ecological reasoning or discourse.
Cypress College Art Gallery
9200 Valley View, Cypress, CA 90630
714.484.7133
January 28–February 29, 2009
Opening reception: January 28, 6–8 p.m.
Artists include: Calvin Abe, Kim Abeles, Samantha Fields, Sant Khalsa, Manfred Menz, Kathryn Miller, Lothar Schmitz, Glen Small, and Joel Tauber.
Curated by Patricia Watts, ecoartspace
Environmentalists often find it hard not to be sarcastic, or even angry, when working with individuals, organizations, and institutions that are ignorant of opportunities to protect the environment. The use of humor and metaphors is often employed by activists to point out playfully what is obvious to some, a way to open minds to new ideas. Artists have long pointed out the not-so-obvious through visual imagery, offering up symbols that can lead cultures to a new awareness. The following artists share this practice. Their work displays a type of logic that questions its viewers to think deeper and harder, and to make sense of what they present. An ecolOGIC, if you will.
Calvin Abe: ah'bé www.ahbe.com
ah'bé landscape architects, an award-winning, Culver City–based firm renowned for creating artful and ecologically sustainable urban infrastructure spaces, began a series of indoor art installations entitled Shreddings in 2003. Questioning our assumptions about what we do, this fourth iteration of recycled paper towers, or an abstract forest, furthers the dialogue on our current methods of waste disposal.
Kim Abeles www.kimabeles.com
Abeles creates poignant or apt signifiers of environmental conditions. In her Signs of Life series, which she started in 2004, she uses satellite photographs to pinpoint or map plant life as sculptural objects. Using model trees, she creates a magnified landscape of what little nature exists in urban areas.
Samantha Fields
Fields’s paintings depict nature’s extreme, environmental drama, unrestrained atmospheric landscapes, the sublime. She documents devastation from wildfires that questions our understanding of natural cycles and human impacts on the land. These dreamy, apocalyptic works remind us of our ability to forget that we live in a precarious, temporal world.
Sant Khalsa www.santkhalsa.com
Khalsa creates typologies of nature, as in her Western Waters series artworks, which describe the proliferation of water stores in the Southwest. Consisting of over two hundred stores to date, these black-and-white photographs of store facades and signage signal a trend: clean water is either a limited resource, or it is an economically driven commercial product.
Manfred Menz www.manfredmenz.com
Since 2004, Menz has created an ongoing body of work entitled Invisible Project. Documenting famous sites around the world, where snapshots are usually taken by tourists, his digitally enhanced large-scale photographs reveal only the locations’ plant life. By removing the built environment, the artist shows us the evidence of nature’s role in today’s world.
Kathryn Miller
Miller’s work is deeply rooted in environmental issues, concepts, questions, and concerns. As a keen observer of the natural world, she combines knowledge of art and biology to illuminate human impacts on ecological systems and native habitat. With her dry sense of humor and sense of the absurd, she invents advertisements of green denial.
Glen Small www.glenhowardsmallarchitect.com
Small, a visionary “outsider” architect and founding member of SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, developed a socially and environmentally responsible sensibility with his early projects in the 1970s, when he conceived of the Biomorphic Biosphere and Green Machine. His designs were inspired by his goal to transform the Los Angeles basin into a futuristic eco logical region.
Lothar Schmitz
Through sci-fi like laboratory dioramas and sculptural systems, Schmitz shows how we shape nature with our desire to bring order or progress to our lives. With coiffed domestic settings, interiorized gardens, we have sealed off the natural world and have become psychologically immune to its unrestrained aesthetic.
Joel Tauber www.joeltauber.com
In his video work entitled Sick-Amour, Tauber falls in love with a sycamore tree, an emblem of our fragmented relationship with nature. Struggling to assist the sycamore to survive in the middle of a parking lot, the artist becomes an eco-warrior, a guerilla gardener, a fake civic worker—all to save the tree.
Closing Reception: Saturday, February 29, 2009, 7–9 p.m.
Gallery Hours: Monday–Thursday, 10 a.m.–2 p.m.; Tuesday–Wednesday, 6–8 p.m. The gallery is closed Friday, except by appointment
For more information, please contact gallery director Paul Paiement at 714.484.7134


To All Art Students, Faculty & Staff
As mentioned at the last department meeting, the department is organizing a fun Halloween Bash in an effort to familiarize the art students with our student organizations. This will held be Friday, October 31st outdoors in the West Courtyard by the kiln shed, 2:00-6:00pm .
There are a variety of things in the works to make a fun event for our students – but the Art Community is welcome!
Come in your self-designed costume!
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| Thursday, 23 October 2008 | |
| Do you have something you want to say to the next president of the United States of America? Do you have a personal story or concern you want to share about this historic election? Faculty, staff, students and community members have until Thursday, Nov. 6, to visit Cal State Northridge's own version of the MTV-styled "confessional" booth. The confessional booth is part of cinema and television arts lecturer Geri Ulrey's project: Dear Mr. President. The project involves the use of a mobile video booth located in a miniature house that travels around campus. Faculty, staff, students and visitors to campus are invited to record a video message addressed to the next president of the United States of America. Participants are encouraged to share personal stories, feelings and thoughts about their lives.The video messages will be organized, streamed from the project's Web site and mailed to theWhite House. "My desire is to engage with young people regarding the political process," said Ulrey, who collaborated with the Art Department and several student organizations in designing the project and the house. "I believe that it is really important for people to hear themselves speak." Geri Ulrey, Cinema and TelevisionArtsDepartment lecturer, instructs student Kemi George on how to balance the lighting for the camera used to record Dear Mr. President project letters. The project will be recording messages on campus at various locations untilNov. 6. Geri Ulrey, Cinema and TelevisionArtsDepartment lecturer, instructs student Kemi George on how to balance the lighting for the camera used to record Dear Mr. President project letters. The project will be recording messages on campus at various locations untilNov. 6. The video house is open now through Nov. 6 at various locations on campus. Ulrey, the project producer and director, said the project is nonpartisan. She plans to send the footage to the campaigns of both Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama, no matter who wins on Nov. 4. The project was funded through a grant from CSUN's Judge Julian Beck Learning-Centered Instructional Projects. Beck grants are awarded to faculty to provide students with opportunities to actively engage in and ultimately become responsible for their own learning. Projects must be completed in one year and all faculty and staff are eligible to submit projects, either individually or as a group. Ulrey said students are involved at all levels in the project, from inviting visitors to taping messages and editing and uploading the messages. "This is an opportunity to bring art to large numbers of people who wouldn't ordinarily have the opportunity, and to involve students on all levels," said Kim Abeles, professor of art. She said art students helped design the Victorian style miniature house as an on-campus public art piece. The idea for the house design came out of the notion that individuals are most comfortable talking about issues in cozy chairs in their own home, she added. "It's portable, yet it's also a cozy place,"Abeles added. So far, nearly a hundred students, faculty and staff have taped messages with themes ranging from concerns about the economy to health care. During his tapedmessage, student Shahar Aframian said he was concerned about taxes, gas prices and the economy. "I think those issues are more important than Iraq and the war," he added. For more information about the project, visit www.dearmrpresident08.org. |