art of the here & now
All in Print Issue
Dalia Garcia: I’m an Indigenous Mixteca from San Juan Mixtepec, Oaxaca. I have lived in Santa Maria for almost 20 years; and I’m the program director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara.
Narsiso Martinez: I’m from Oaxaca, from the Zapotec region, and I'm also an immigrant, and I make art.
Beta Epochs is an unapologetically unpolished, collaborative adventure. We organize aspirationally in the spirit of basement punk shows and unsanctioned apartment galleries. The first eponymous exhibition, in October 2020, brought together work from twenty eight artists in a 4,200-square-foot warehouse situated between downtown Los Angeles and Echo Park Lake.
1. Every Time the Communist Manifesto Has Nothing to Say redacted from Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, 1947, as translated by Samuel Moore & Frederick Engels
2. Meat and Potatoes redacted from Personism, A Manifesto by Frank O'Hara, 1953
3. Verbs in the Futurist Tense redacted from The Futurist Manifesto by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1908, as translated by R.W. Flint
4. Cannibalized Techno Animal redacted from A Cyborg Manifesto By Donna Haraway, 1985
5. Wants and Needs redacted from Queers Read This, published anonymously, 1990
The found photo—anonymous, frequently distressed, sometimes historical but often not, diverse in subject—is prime fodder for an artist’s imagination. One can project onto it much creative speculation as it is devoid of attribution or provenance. Regardless of subject matter or condition, re-contextualized, the object itself takes on new meaning.
Scattered around in the morning sunlight of Ken Bortolazzo’s Santa Barbara studio yard are a half dozen very tall, plant-like objects constructed out of lightweight stainless steel. Each stem is topped by two or three shapes, some almost transparent stainless mesh, that slowly move in the wind interacting with each other.
When the US Mint in 2022 released its Anna May Wong quarter, the fifth coin in the American Women Quarters Program, female Asian American representation got a boost. The following year, it had a pop culture moment when Mattel released the Anna May Wong Barbie, wearing a red dragon dress, in its Inspiring Women series. But who is Anna May Wong and what made her an icon?
While in graduate school in Texas, California-born artist Evelyn Contreras studied the human-made landscape of her home state via the lens of the Internet. Then, when the COVID-19 pandemic limited her ability to travel back to Texas for a residency at the Rockport Center for the Arts, she reversed the direction of her digital gaze to Rockport’s post-Hurricane Harvey streetscapes from her desk in Santa Barbara. This virtual sojourn culminated in works featured at the Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara City College in 2022.
Something as rigid and heavy as copper does not often appear as the cornerstone of a conversation about movement, immigration and assimilation. But the connections that Mayela Rodriguez draws between the metal and her family show pieces of history lying just beneath the surface, ready to be excavated.
“Shut up and look out the window!” Christina McPhee’s parents would urge their children while driving them around the US in the family’s car. Mile after mile of staring at the sierras and plains stretching across the country through the rear glass prompted McPhee’s avid imagination to picture them as an unexplored territory, filled with dormant truths yearning to be unearthed. Emphasizing this childhood fantasy were the lavish depictions of the American West by 19th-century such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole that McPhee recalls admiring at the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, not far from the village where she spent her formative years. Similarly influential in shaping her childhood perception of the country’s hinterlands as a land of wonders was her foray into prairie habitats during solitary bike rides around her home.
Either/or oppositions are everywhere, and they have the virtue of compressing complexities into easy to remember pairs. Cats versus dogs; socialism versus capitalism; secular versus religious; coffee versus tea; pen versus pencil; or friend versus enemy. Their virtue is being a cognitive shortcut to keep attention focused. No better way to lose an audience than meandering through a thicket of facts. This virtue is also a vice, however, as it drains away color and subtleties, leaving us to deal with unreal stark binaries. Their simplifications can obscure entirely what is out there IRL, in real life, turn into accidental misrepresentations, or even lies with everything from minor miscommunications to horrific injustices following suit.
A cracked iPhone screen spells disaster for most people. For Kevin Clancy, it’s a moment of transformation.
Late last summer, the stars aligned for a candid conversation between artists Sandy Rodriguez and Sarah Rosalena at a joint program for their concurrent exhibitions Sarah Rosalena: Pointing Star (April 16–July 30, 2023) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) and Sandy Rodriguez—Unfolding Histories: 200 Years of Resistance (Feb. 25, 2023–March 3, 2024) at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum (AD&A Museum), University of California, Santa Barbara.
Alex Lukas, installation view, STNDRD, Granite City, Illinois, cut tarp, photographed by Sage Dawson/STNDRD
Mona Kuhn, 835 Kings Road, Installation view, Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, photo by Tony Mastres
