Armory Center for the Arts to unveil "Interactions"

Opening Saturday, May 2, 7 to 9 p.m., the Armory Center for the Arts will present Interactions, a group exhibition of nine diverse emerging artists who were selected for the Armory’s Teaching Artist Fellowship program. This exhibition will be on view through June 14, 2009 and is curated by Lorraine Cleary Dale, Director of Professional Development at the Armory.

Participating artists include Holly Boruck, Eduardo Consuegra, David P. Earle, Sandra Gallegos, Patrick Jackson, Lindsay Lacewell Kessner, Alexander Kroll, Christina Pierson, and Alejandro Sanchez.

The works will include painting, sculpture, photography, video, and site-specific installation.

The Interactions exhibition explores the relationships between the teaching artist, their art, and the viewer.

Each year, the Armory selects 8 – 10 emerging artists who demonstrate exceptional talent and promise and a genuine desire to learn how to teach from the Armory’s philosophical perspective of “artist as educator”. The Fellowship program is in partnership with several prominent graduate programs in the Los Angeles area including Art Center College of Art and Design, Claremont Graduate University, and Otis College of Art and Design.

In her installation, artist Holly Boruck explores the interrelationship between humanity and nature. The sculptures she has created for this exhibition combine forms found in the internal anatomy of the human body with those of seed pods, new growth, and sprig structures.

Eduardo Consuegra’s work consists of framed collages and paintings of found advertisements from the 1980s, particularly from American television shows, films, and advertisements of European shoe franchises. The source of his material is from Semana, a popular weekly magazine that has circulated from Colombia in the 80s through the present.

David P. Earle will construct an interactive video installation that embraces the tradition of the automatic drawing developed by Surrealists in the early 20th century. In his drawing station, created out of an old school desk, viewers will be invited to make a drawing while watching and listening to a lecture on creativity and the unconscious.

Sandra Gallegos’ paintings depict images of the different found images and objects from her collection of curios. Using these objects as inspiration, she creates abstract symbolic images by combining shapes in a repetitive motif in order to create patterns that are filled with brilliant color.

Patrick Jackson often mixes sculpture and theater in his work in order to focus on the human body. For this exhibition he will create a site-specific installation that involves making a wallpaper work out of sheets of newspaper from The New York Times that will have a brick wall pattern printed on them. The pattern he will employ is meant to comment on our varied perception of events from staring at a wall to reading a newspaper.

Lindsay Lacewell Kessner will create a series of four paintings with an accompanying sculpture that refer to landscapes. Her paintings visually reference deserts, mountainsides in the distance, wispy clouds, and expanses of water, and evoke a sense of openness in the presence of looming anxiety.

Alexander Kroll will create a series of new paintings for this exhibition, and a site-specific window awning to be installed in the Armory’s Community Room. Working with abstract shapes and bright illuminated colored transparent plastics and paint, he will also create small non objective works that reference the architecture of the Armory’s building.

Christina Pierson’s work explores the synthesis of perception and the process of constructing a unique reality. Operating in the space of the viewer’s perception, Pierson uses representational and abstract images through video and photography combined with varying degrees of abstracted light reflections to create luminous installations and sculptures.

And finally, Alejandro Sanchez will build a low-rider bicycle acknowledging his interest in Southern California custom car culture and his roots in Catholicism. The bike will be made in dedication to and remembrance of the apparition at Lourdes, and a fictional recreation of what young Bernadette may have ridden to this apparition if it had occurred today.

This exhibition will be on view in the Armory Center for the Arts’ Community Room and Mezzanine Gallery spaces at 145 N. Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, and will be open Tuesday – Sunday, noon – 5 p.m. Admission is free. The Armory is easily accessible from the Gold Line Memorial Park Station in Pasadena. For information about the Armory exhibitions and events, the public may call 626.792-5101 x 122. or visit the Armory website at www.armoryarts.org.