Curator’s Statement
After a year’s hiatus, the Fine Arts All-College Honors & Scholarship Awards Exhibition has (like many things) returned in digital form to celebrate the wide-ranging creative output of undergraduate Fine Arts students at California College of the Arts. The artists selected to receive this year’s Charles Fiske Scholarship, Mikae Hara Scholarships, Ralls Scholarships, and Fine Arts Scholarships have created bodies of work that are thoughtful and poignant; hopeful and resilient. Among the sixteen artists selected to participate in the exhibition, nearly all of them contemplate some aspect of the domestic and the passage of time: ancestral or familial remembering; longing to escape a place or to return to it; dreaming as a site of radical imagination or a world to recoil from. These emerging artists are interested in how the space and time of “before” and “not yet” intersect with “right now.”
Maygie Li’s painting My Mama, 2021, is an ode to the artist’s mother, who embodied the warmth Li felt in their childhood home. Excerpts from photographer David Marchetti’s photo-collage series Invisible Wounds, 2021, conjures the familial in the framework of trauma experienced in the home. Li’s work, painted from a photograph, brings together family memories through the presence of framed portraits of family members, birth and wedding photos, first days of school. Conversely, Marchetti overlapped various family photographs to unearth complicated and contradictory stories and feelings towards the home, such as hurt and unresolved trauma. Though approaching family and the domestic from vastly different points of view, these artists remind us that there is a rich history in all of our pasts. Acknowledging these histories, long and short, can illuminate who we are and how we are becoming.
Morgan Lewis’s experimental documentary work The Riots confronts histories of racism in America—histories that exploded across smartphones everywhere in the summer of 2020. By condensing videos of joy and celebration with protest and outrage against police brutality in the video medium, Lewis concentrates the emotional rollercoasters Americans (not to be understood as a homogenous group) felt in that short amount of time. Nevertheless, the interweaving of historical footage reminds viewers that this fight for social and racial justice was not spontaneous. Also questioning dominant narratives of racism in America, Rolando Rosales’s small-scale collage The Nature of Invasion materializes histories of colonialism and racism enacted towards immigrants in the Bay Area. Using silver leaf to characterize the Bay’s wild turkeys, the artist ruminates on a moment when residents of his town complained that they were being “invaded by wild turkeys.” Rosales recognized the lexicon of invasion used against the turkeys as similar to the anti-immigration rhetoric used against Latinx immigrants and migrants in the U.S. Ironically, the artist points out, the human residents complaining about the turkeys were the ones who moved into the animals’ space first. When paired, The Riotsand The Nature of Invasion reveal how the personal lives within the stories erased from the dominant American history narratives.
Tiago Da Cruz and Katia Pontillo consider American histories closer to home. Cruz’s lumen prints deal with narratives of patriarchy and masculinity in and outside of the home by imprinting his mother’s jewelry on light-sensitive paper, showcasing their index as beings with worlds of their own. Katia Pontillo’s works made of a laser cut on leather pay homage to beings of the past that shaped her Mexican family history and help the artist grieve her mother’s untimely death. Together, these two works speak to our ancestors’ materiality and mothers’ roles in shaping our inherited culture(s).
Though it may already be a cliché to emphasize how the pandemic warped our collective senses of home and time, these artists have emerged from these truly unprecedented times ready to embed themselves in the world. Their eagerness to think deeply about ancestral time and belonging creates moments of vulnerability for both artists and viewers. In turn, the artists allow viewers to use their work as vessels to move through personal and collective trauma and grief, as well as joy and exhilaration.
I express my deepest gratitude to Nick Janikian for supporting the artists and me through the planning process. A huge thank you to Christina Nishihara and Teresa Duddy for their ample technical support. Thank you to the artists for being inviting, collaborative, and receptive to my own curatorial approach.
Katherine Jemima Hamilton