By Tyler Stallings At SCAPE, Earth’s Rhythms brings together four artists whose works pulse with the energy of movement, structure, and transformation. The exhibition is anchored by Nancy Mooslin and Carol Saindon, two artists whose shared fascination with waves—both aquatic and sonic—manifests in vibrant, layered compositions that challenge perception. Their works fragment, reassemble, and reimagine water and sound, creating a visual language that is both scientific and poetic. Gail...
by Tyler Stallings The use of abstraction to probe the intangible—thought, memory, consciousness—has long fascinated artists. Inner Vision: Abstraction and Cognition, curated by Erin Stout at the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach, continues this investigation, building on her earlier exhibition The Resonant Surface: Movement, Image, and Sound in California Painting (2021) at UCI’s Institute and Museum of California Art. Where The...
In this first episode of the OC Art Blog TV, I visit Frieze Los Angeles, the high-profile international art fair known for showcasing blue-chip galleries and contemporary heavyweights, before heading to Post-Fair in Santa Monica, a new, independent alternative offering a different vision of the art world. I share insights on both events, explore standout works, and reflect on how each fair shapes conversations about contemporary art. Whether you're into the mainstream or the emerging, this...
Insights from the Anonymous Creative Futures Report “What was solid yesterday feels uncertain tomorrow.” This single phrase from the Anonymous Creative Futures Report captures the unease and shifting ground beneath contemporary artists. Seventy-five creators spanning writers, fine artists, filmmakers, musicians, and digital creators were asked to reflect on their futures in 2025. While some concerns were expected financial insecurity, algorithmic anxiety, and the looming presence of AI their...
By Tyler Stallings Chris O’Leary’s Gravity Well is a profound and poetic meditation on the unseen forces that shape our universe. Curated by Jennifer Frias, director and senior curator at the Nicholas + Lee Begovich Gallery at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF), from November 2, 2024, to May 17, 2025, this multimedia exhibition brings viewers into the realm of gravitational waves—distortions in space-time predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago but only directly...
The OC Art Blog had a chance to ask Unveil Gallery co-founder Lorraine Han some questions about their space and program. Located in an office park in Irvine. Unveil Gallery is a contemporary art gallery co-founded by Lorraine and Dan Yang. Their mission is a diverse platform that focuses on contemporary art, women, and community culture. Unveil aims to provide a space for young or emerging artists who are bold in their creativity and willing to explore new artistic languages. Committed to...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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 about your connection to the OC/Long...
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 CREAR...
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 their careers? I also...
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...
The OC Art Blog was created in 2004 as a way to build community and promote the marginalized but dynamic Orange County art scene.
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By Mason Fujikawa Awakening at Gallery Sonder is the first exhibition in the United States by Mexican artist Moncho. Moncho takes an instinctive approach to his practice. He doesn’t sketch or even plan before painting. Instead, he draws from his subconscious, working...
By Alisa Ochoa Low and Slow is on view at House of Danger Gallery, nestled in an unassuming shopping center just off the 55, beside a Circle K and below the Attic Skateshop. The space is operated by Jackie Danger, a visual artist and brand strategist who opened the...
By Chris Hoff I’ve been messing around with learning to play guitar for as long as I can remember. It’s been a story of starts and stops for years. In a more recent start I picked up the book How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy. I thought it might provide some...
By Maggie Luy What shifts when the ground beneath everyday life begins to move? Infrastructure is usually what disappears first. In “Breakdown/Breakthrough: Art and Infrastructure," it stayed exposed. The exhibition, on view at UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum...
By Maggie Luy What does it mean to be remembered, and who gets to be seen? Through textured brushwork and carved forms, Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma honors labor and ancestry. That legacy continues in Edgar Fabián Frías’s layered digital collages and psychedelic video...
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