Author: Admin

The OC Art Blog sat down (virtually) with Orange County based multidisciplinary artist Alisa Ochoa in advance of her show with painter Huang Zhen that opens at Unveil Gallery on September 7th. Ochoa’s rich work of bold colors and poetic language applied to all areas of visual expression, including sculpture, painting, and video has been recognized with residencies at Hunter College Ceramic Department, Penland School of Craft, and Kala Art Institute, and with exhibitions nationwide. Her artwork has been reviewed online and in print, including...

01 September, 2024 /

Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty currently at the Beall Center for Art + Technology By Chris Hoff Since the emergence of cybernetics through people like Norbert Weiner, Gregory Bateson and others from the cold war avant-garde, and with the establishment of the systemic approach that tracked the relations between machine, man, and society. Artists have been interested in incorporating the language, tools, and metaphors of systems, prediction, and cybernetics into their work. These engagements have taken various forms, many of them critically examining the societal impacts...

28 August, 2024 /

Carolyn Saylor Your recent sculptural series, This is Not the End, reflects deep spiritual themes and addresses the anxieties stemming from apocalyptic events. Could you share more about the inspiration behind this series and how your personal experiences shaped these creations? 2020 marked by the COVID-19 pandemic was filled with so much public and private suffering. Right in the middle of it, tragedy hit my own family — a massive heart attack for my dad. I was thrust into a state of turmoil I was not prepared for....

18 August, 2024 /

Martin Creed: Work No. 3868 Half the air in a given space Orange County Museum of Art Newport Beach, CA By Chris Hoff Recently I was listening to the Art Angle podcast interview of Joshua Citarella, facilitator of the burgeoning online platform Do Not Research. In this wide-ranging conversation Citarella forecasts a total atomization of the art world where everything resembles Tik Tok and predicts the fall of institutions and museums. He argues that this fall of institutions will be brought about by the move to produce more and...

16 August, 2024 /

By Liz Goldner Gina Herrera’s artwork is a reflection of her journey into self-knowledge and realization about the world around her. She aspires to help save our planet; and she does so by employing in her work natural materials, including branches, rocks, cocoons and nests. These elements, along with colorful cast-off fabric scraps, plastics, buttons, ribbons, jewelry, domestic tools and military medallions, are affixed to frameworks, made of rebar or reinforced steel, which mirror human forms. Herrera also incorporates into her work barbed wire, sticks, straw, skulls...

03 February, 2024 /

Prior to his upcoming show opening at Mount Saint Mary's University in Los Angeles, titled My Little Narrative, at the Jose Drudis-Biada Art Gallery from October 3rd to November 11th. The OC Art Blog had the opportunity to meet with Walpa D'Mark who's self-reflective paintings use figuration and abstraction, historical and popular references that intersect between Nicaraguan and American history and politics. D'Mark has exhibited throughout L.A., including at Track 16, Mark Moore Gallery, Coagula Curatorial, and Torrance Art Museum. Internationally, he has exhibited...

17 September, 2023 /

Through January 15, 2024 By Liz Goldner Magnificent screen prints, many infused with electric color and Chicano symbolism, are featured in Laguna Art Museum’s Self-Help Graphics exhibition. All 78 prints by 78 artists in the show are owned by the museum. Looking back, 50 years ago, Franciscan nun Sister Karen Boccalero, along with Mexican-born, local artists Carlos Bueno, Antonio Ibáñez and others, recognized that  U.S. born Latinos, especially L.A. based Chicano artists were not being sufficiently recognized by the local and national art worlds. They collaborated with artists...

10 September, 2023 /

The OC Art Blog sat down with some of the leadership of Orange County based nonprofit Community Engagement to discuss their programming and support of local artists. In this wide ranging interview we discuss their new pop-up gallery, The Art Space OC, on Third Street in Downtown Santa Ana. Their grants program that includes grants for local artists who have been historically excluded from the mainstream art world. And their next show featuring William Camargo, a local photographer telling stories about his Anaheim neighborhood and...

28 August, 2023 /

By Chris Hoff In his new book Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come T.J. Demos draws on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements. His new book poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives. Recently I had the opportunity to meet with T.J., who is the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Visual...

19 July, 2023 /

By Liz Goldner Kudos to OCMA for mounting an exhibition of Alice Neel’s artwork. The painter has been described by art critic Roberta Smith as, “equal if not superior to artists like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and destined for icon status on the order of Vincent van Gogh and David Hockney.” Residing most of her life in New York City, Neel (1900-1984), a feminist and bohemian, painted and socialized with people of color, gays, radicals, civil rights and political leaders, Warhol superstars, musicians, artists, women...

09 July, 2023 /

By Chris Hoff Recently I had a chance to speak with Berlin based artist Cassie Thornton about the hologram a feminist peer-to-peer health for a post pandemic future. In an era when capitalism leaves so many to suffer and to die, how can we take health and care back into our hands? Cassie Thornton puts forward a bold vision for revolutionary care, a viral peer-to-peer feminist health network. The premise is simple, three people, a triangle, meet on a regular basis to focus on the physical,...

07 July, 2023 /

Barbara Berk, 2000 Revolutions, 2000. Graphite on wall, tape player and recorder, slides, projector. 84” diameter. Performed at Riverside Art Museum. Barbara Berk is a curious, quiet maker who has been an active participant in the Southern California art scene for over forty years. Since 1983, she has consistently shown or performed her work in solo and group exhibitions at many of the distinguished university and college art galleries as well as numerous institutions like the Laguna Art Museum, Torrance Museum, Angels Gate Cultural Center,...

18 March, 2023 /

This Saturday night at 205 N. Broadway in Santa Ana, longtime painter and OC resident Ryan Callis will open a show of new paintings. Oh No, I Seem Very Happy!!!” opens from 6-9 Saturday Sept 3rd, and will consist of new paintings, 100 posters for sale, and an accompanying zine for the first 50+ people in attendance. The OC Art Blog caught up with Ryan to ask a few questions about the show and his work. Enjoy! Painter Ryan Callis Can you start by telling us...

02 September, 2022 /

By Chris Hoff The skin found on the tips of our fingers, is known as friction skin. Left behind fingerprints are not visible to the naked eye so they must be made visible in some way. This is the utility of fingerprint powder, it makes the invisible, visible. In the new show at CREAR Studio titled Detain & Displace. The powerful work of Alberto Lule makes use of the medium used against him, fingerprint powder, and makes the invisible, visible as well. To great effect. Alberto Lule at...

30 August, 2022 /

By Meg Linton Daniel Porras, Distraction and Diversion with Direction, 2020, oil on canvas, 44”x33.5” As things are opening back up, yet again, I’ve been venturing out to look at art. I wound up in San Pedro and discovered Cornelius Projects, a contemporary art space run by artist and curator Laurie Steelink who shines a light on artists living and/or working in this seaside community located on Tongva Territory. The current exhibition on view through March 26, 2022 is called DUST & WISPS and features watercolors by...

23 February, 2022 /

By Chris Hoff Nothing is true and everything is possible. – Peter Pomerantsev At this juncture, I don’t think there are many artists now that haven’t heard about a Beeple NFT going for $69 million, or a large series of arguably mediocre illustrations of a bored ape having a price of entry of 52 ether, or $210,000. I imagine this sort of news has many an artist, isolated away in their studios, wondering how they get a piece of the action and what this might mean for...

17 February, 2022 /

Q: I'm an introverted artist and it seems that the art world awards extroversion. Meaning people that are out all the time at openings and artist talks networking are more successful. How can I move from being introverted to extroverted? My career depends on it! Dear Fellow Traveler, Want to know a secret?  I’m terrified of public speaking.  The pounding heart, the drunk-dizzy-sweating-profusely kind of afraid that grips me in a vice and paralyzes me. Eventually, I somehow pull from the deepest places of belief in myself,...

06 February, 2022 /

©Amir Zaki. On Being Here: Built in 1927. Renovated in 1936, 2021. Ultrachrome Archival Photographed. 60” x 48” Framed. by Meg Linton “Photography is so much about cultivating a skill of sustained observation.” – Amir Zaki Recently, a colleague, Edward Cella, recommended I go visit the studio of Amir Zaki, a photographer he has worked with over the years located in Huntington Beach. The studio is hidden in a nondescript business complex amongst wood finishers, commercial printers, and a jet ski repair shop. Zaki met me at the...

25 January, 2022 /

By Walpa D'Mark I attended Albert Lopez Jr’s show at Crear Studio on September 4, 2021. It might seem like it’s a little too late to be talking about it, but the exhibition had many layers, and eventually it led me to think about Albert’s creative process. Full disclosure, I know Albert, we both attended Cal State Long Beach in the late 90’s, and I worked for him at OCMA in the 2010’s. Albert’s show at Crear Studio, titled “The Dollar Dance I Never Had!” featured works...

21 January, 2022 /

By Meg Linton On December 9, 2021, with some trepidation about whether to mask or not because of the new Omicron variant, I ventured out with a few friends to The Wayfarer: A House of Social Provisions in Costa Mesa to see one of my favorite young guitar-strumming song-writer poets and NPR/KCRW-described folk-punk phenom Sunny War. Opening for her was the energized Orange County band Delving, who said it was their first time playing together on stage in this iteration, and the solo artist Caitlyn Jemma...

20 December, 2021 /