Arts Walk
March 4, 6 - 9PM
Contemporary Choreography and Performance by UCR MFA Dance students.
Ann Mazzocca is in the Dance MFA program at UCR. Mazzocca’s work is rooted in Afro-Caribbean folkloric dance, most prominently Haitian dance, through Western contemporary dance methods. These works are inspired by communal partnership and intimacy that she has experienced in Haiti, but are also conscious of her position as both an outsider and insider within the Haitian folkloric dance community. Mazzocca mixes and recombines movements to evoke memory and imagination of experience within Haitian cultural communities in New York and Miami as well as in Haiti.
In “Skirts,” a quartet of female dancers use improvisational methods to generate material inspired by Afro-Caribbean movements and gendered identities that leave space for individual experiences and interpretations of gendered movement, labor, and play. In “Ogou, Ossagne, Ocean Remix,” a solo framed by two duets, dancers explore the energies of three lwa (Haitian Vodou deities) without the use of Haitian movement. The result communicates the solitary, technological, and manic elements of the artist’s visits to Haiti, negotiating the conflict within of romanticizing Haiti’s communal living, privileged mobility, and current difficulties.
Choreographed by Ann Mazzocca in collaboration with dancers: Manny Gutierrez, Adanna Jones, Ryan Morris, Hannah Schwadron, Crystal Sepulveda; drummer
Husni Abu Bakar. Music by Hang Around (Karizma Kaytronic Dub Remix) by Ben Westbeech. Camino del Sol (Joakim Remix) by Antena. Edited by Ann Mazzocca.
Mark Indig: New Works
Reception: Thursday March 4, 2010
Opening during Riverside Arts Walk
6 - 9PM
Great photographers are like our best teachers. They pick out something we’ve missed and get us to notice it. They challenge us, confuse us, push us out of our bubble of comfort. In a perpetual show-and-tell, they encourage us to ask questions of our environment. In Mark Indig’s works, the prints are carefully-composed, existing in a space without people but with the feeling of human presence. These are lived-in environments, altered by their inhabitants, and unique. The stillness belies their sometimes handmade, improvised nature: the hand-painted murals, graffiti, signs, advertisements and even the choice of dresses in the windows. Like an urban anthropologist of our own present day, Indig gets us to notice this world.
On exhibition at RAM are selections from Mark Indig’s Closed on Sundays and LA River Project series. Closed on Sundays serves as a visual documentation of a contemporary “folk” style taking place on avenues and streets across the country. These photos are all shot on Sunday mornings. Their beauty encourages us to wake up early, if only to get us out of bed, onto the street. The LA River Project series focuses on the life and spirit of a maligned river in a frenzied city.
Indig asks us to look past the “ugly” association of a concrete river. Slicing through the thick air with his camera lens, he pares down images with an almost minimalist feel. Colors, reflections off the water, metal patterns, decaying letters, and weathered walls have the feel of a mid-20th century colorfield painting. The huge variety of scenes captured are surprising given that the photographer strayed no more than 100 yards from the river. It is this focus on capturing the inner life of the tributary that compels us to see more.
In presenting Mark Indig’s work, the Riverside Art Museum continues its dedication to exhibiting the work of important artists living and working in Southern California.
Intimate Distance: The Modernism of Schuyler Standish
Reception:
March 13, 7 - 9PM
Los Angeles native Schuyler Standish has been an artist for nearly all his 83 years - but a visual artist only for the last 60 or so. Standish, who lives in Tujunga, was an accomplished professional musician by the age of 13, at which age he entered UCLA. He was also an accomplished Hollywood actor, having appeared in everything from a Ruby Keeler-Dick Powell dance movie to Wuthering Heights and Blood and Sand. It was after the Second World War that he picked up a brush and never looked back.
Standish, who taught art at the Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, is an unabashed modernist in a post-modernist age. Best known for his landscapes, Standish is also adept at abstraction and figuration; but in all genres he betrays a loyalty to the principles of dynamic form, luminous color, and transformative imagery that motivated the giants of modern art from Monet to De Kooning.
Standish’s landscapes, acknowledging the plein air tradition, clearly recapitulate the lessons of Paul Cézanne. Standish painted in the Hollywood Hills and Highland Park, rendering the houses and streets nestled on the verdant mountainsides as Cézanne might have. At the same time, Standish depicts space with dramatic recessional structures reminiscent of the Bay Area Figurative painters.
As a figurative painter and draughtsman himself, Standish has worked naturalistically and expressionistically with equal deftness and confidence, evincing a wide familiarity with modernist examples, from Picasso and Léger’s Cubism to Dali and Tanguy’s Surrealism to the Bauhaus figuration of Klee and Schlemmer to the American approaches of Diebenkorn, Guston, and Saul Steinberg. If anything, Standish’s abstractions even more widely embrace the entire modernist, from Futurism and Dada to Constructivism and Hard-edge painting. As such, they may constitute his most distinctive achievement, showing him to be a master of texture, tone, and line, able to elaborate upon the simplest of arrangements - and, conversely, to elucidate the most complex arrangements with a self-possessed forthrightness.