Indices of Being – Curator, Tavarus Blackmon

Today is a place of uncertainty but there is hope, struggle and resistance. In the face of challenges large and small, institutional and interpersonal, it is with will and courage we find ways to live our best lives and uplift others on this shared journey with empathy and compassion.

Indices of Being asks the question: in a time of patriarchal injustice, in a time of global warming and debate on climate change; native battles for water and land, atrocities in immigration policy; in a time of voter suppression, #Me Too, Black Lives Matter, Queer suppression and anti-Trans legislation, and, with gender biases in some of our finest Museums and gathering spaces of culture and intellect, what does it mean to be, in this most critical and vital moment from a woman’s perspective?

The artists in this exhibition create a range of bold, fresh, exciting and moving ideas from diverse backgrounds and methods of working. There are inquiries on climate vulnerability and the sustainability of our future. There are declarations of identity that speak to holding space and indicate how place and culture are beacons in a world of refusal and forced invisibility. There are formal investigations that push the limits of form and thus, shift thinking from perceived representations of voice and institutional methods of making one silent. Also, there are elegant and detailed meditations on spirituality, posing profound questions about unity and universality. And included with ferocity and vitality, there are inquiries and statements on race, immigration and, a foregrounding of otherness— placing the viewer in the position of witness and holding accountable forces of homogeneity.

The artists in Indices of Being represent an inclusive range of voices, contemporary practitioners of visual art in a rapidly changing, highly competitive, capitalist world of digitized- global markets and market vulnerability. Moreover, it is a vulnerable act that they place themself in a position to respond to the world around them, but it is with courage that they ask the needed questions at this critical moment and, they have the strength to offer methods of change through moments both intimate and grand.

Thus, it is not with a brutal hand, nor, is it with the exercise of force that change occurs. The artists of this exhibition impart subtle and affirmative gestures that with critical investigation, process, play and discovery, a clear and bright path is indicated, an imperative statement is outlined, giving way to a new vision of Art through which sustaining a progressive self is possible and the future is exciting, complex and a hopeful endeavor.

Curator, Tavarus Blackmon

Aleksandra Avramova

Statement:

Liminal space is described as the time– or threshold– between “what was” and “what is next.” A moment of contemplation amidst movement and transition. I am interested in how these intermediary moments of reality transition to the sublime. My imagery is culled from the natural world, my imagination, experiences from the past, and the anticipation of the future. A narrative is established by joining multiple scenes; figures are presented as moments in time and space; color is always moving and settling somewhere else. I have come to embrace ambiguity and change as a constant driver of my work, as it is needed to cross the threshold to the next destination.

Zeina Baltagi

Zeina Baltagi b. Stockton, CA 1988 is an artist and educator, raised between California and Lebanon. Her work explores tensions within her identity and social politics. The work reveals intimate realizations, transforming how Baltagi navigates herself in relation to physical, emotional, economic, and cultural mobility. 

Zeina Baltagi holds a B.A. from California State University, Northridge, and an M.F.A. degree from University of California, Davis. Baltagi has exhibited her work with but not limited to; Basement Gallery, LADOT, Union Station, Los Angeles Road Concerts, PØST, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, bG gallery, Klowden Mann, Art Music Lit Space. As well as, numerous University galleries including University of Southern California, Claremont Graduate University, California Lutheran University and California State University, Northridge. 

www.zeinabaltagi.com

Statement:

My work examines mobility in the collision of physical, emotional, racial, and economic identities. I explore materials that carry collective memory and symbolism in relation to my personal experience with walking in my perceived collective surroundings. Objects such as currency, the national flag, the sidewalk hold collective memory through time because it is a shared symbol and material object with real consequences. I study objects that carry layers of memories that can-not be erased although unseen.

I turned thirteen years old, on September 11, 2001. Overnight the political landscape of America changed. At that time, I was undergoing an experimental knee, tibia, and femur titanium endo- prosthetic replacement. I was asleep the entirety of the day, but what is important is the days after. I had to re-learn how to walk with my new limitations, including a newly sexualized and exoticized form as a teenager, a new political landscape, a new leg and a new urban environment now visible from a different bodily perspective. This is also where I discovered my mobility as a means of being connected with and vulnerable to others. Sidewalks are a delineated separation from moving traffic to provide an adequate buffer space and a sense of safety for pedestrians. But for whom? The sidewalk is where most of my work is pulled from and performances are held. It is the space between the private and the public. It is where we talk to our neighbors, where children play, where protests are made, where the resistance is discussed, and many people are murdered, assaulted, arrested, and denied access.

The ability to walk and move freely is a privilege often taken for granted. Our ability as to how far we can mobilize ourselves is dependent on ability, race, gender perception, and class. Whereas the perspective of one’s body moving through space in relation to landscape and other  bodies was once undervalued is now at the forefront of our thoughts via an airborne global pandemic. The individual moving through space and on the ground brings their own self- perspective and interpreted interaction with the urban landscape and the people with in it.

Elizabeth Cord

Statement:

References to movement, growth and transcendence are recurring themes in my work.  Each surface is prepared with black Gesso, I add bright colors, patterns, lines and abstracted figures to create a visual world that references the shapes and spaces of celestial and cellular manifestations. This visual aesthetic is bold and topsy-turvy with a hint of disconcertment, but contains elements of subtlety and rest. A comparison with and synthesis of ideas such as singularity and multiplicity, emergence and retreat are important elements within the work and by using fundamental forms such as circles, cubes and spirals and expressive color, the artwork communicates cosmic growth,  mystery and beauty.

elizabethcord.art

Michelle Lee

Michelle Lee was born in California and is a first generation Chinese American. She received her BA and MA at CSU Sacramento. She currently works in Sacramento, CA as a tattoo artist at White Buffalo Gallery.

www.white-buffalo-gallery.com

Instagram:

@michellebotanicalart

@whitebuffalogallery

Statement:

The bittersweet cycle of life and death is necessary and unavoidable; this becomes most evident to me when observing the natural world. The forms in my work are inspired by the variety of flora and fauna that I've come to admire. Watching the fruiting body of a fungus appear out of no where, the unfurling of a small fern frond, witnessing a carnivorous plant catch their prey, and experiencing the large bloom of a corpse flower have all sparked a curiosity that I bring into my studio.

Julia Rigby

Julia Edith Rigby received her MFA in Studio Art at the University of California, Davis. She received her BA in Environmental Writing from Scripps College. She has been an artist in residence at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga, Wyoming and the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia in Venice, Italy. She has exhibited work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and the Netherlands. She lives and works in California. 

Statement:

I am an artist who thinks about climate change and ecological relationships. I search for relationships among material circulation, ecology, and the waste stream. I am curious about the journeys that materials undergo from disposal to dump, the ways that they are transformed in the process, and what they say about the climate crisis. Studying the lives of objects reconfigures my understanding of time.I am curious about ways that matter breaks chronology, and the ways in which matter is marked by its placement in and interaction with the world. I am a scavenger who researches waste sites as ecological landscapes. They are places to map psycho-geographical relationships, digest the residue of the Anthropocene, and reconfigure my understanding of the natural world.