The artists included in Orange Alert:
Espiritu all make the unseen visible.
They honor hidden identities, give voice to 100-year-old letters, express
emotion through lush color and brushwork; translate poetry into visual data, or
show weather and time through drawn and sanded marks.
These artists all
live in Orange County, some for decades, others for just a year or two. They
come from Greenwood Lake, Sugar Loaf, Goshen, Cornwall-on-Hudson, and Newburgh.
They have exhibited in venues such as Mass MoCA,
Gallery Aferro, and LACMA.
They paint, draw, take photographs, and create multimedia installations. By
bringing these artists together, I intend to showcase the rich variety of artwork
being made across Orange County.
The original idea
of P.U.G. Projects’ Orange Alert was to create a venue to exhibit abstract and conceptual
works made by local artists who were well known outside of Orange County, but
had rarely exhibited close to home. Now twelve years later, Orange County residents can see a wide
variety of artwork at newly established venues, including pop-up galleries and
performance spaces. My motivation this time has shifted to promote cross-pollination.
I want to bring together artists from across the county, young and old, newbies
and long-time residents, to meet each other and share their art with the
larger community. Click their names below for links to their websites.
I truly enjoyed thinking
and writing about the powerful work in this exhibition. Each artist demonstrates
a profound commitment to their practice. I am especially grateful to the owner
of 10 Carpenter AVENUE (not street), Madeline Trezza, who has been so helpful with each step
of the installation. This amazing space
is for rent, so spread the word!
Thanks
also to Orange County Tourism for their enthusiastic support.
This project is made possible in part with
funds from the County of Orange and Orange County Tourism.
Olivia Baldwin’s
lush paintings seem to play with duality. They are beautifully messy, full of
gorgeous brushwork and luminous color, yet also splatters, scratches and even
the occasional crack. Simultaneously
ambitious and casual, her paintings would be at home on the walls of a Brooklyn
loft or a New England farmhouse. In fact, Baldwin grew up in New England, yet
her color palette glows with California light reminiscent of the Bay Area
Figurative Movement. Allowing whatever landscape surrounds her to soak
into her studio practice, Baldwin riffs on a seemingly neon cartography. Her
titles suggest places or narrative moments, prompting examination of these
abstractions for hints of meaning. In short, these works are a visual banquet.
They embody a “joie de vivre,” a spirit of creative vivacity and play that
permeates the viewer’s experience.
Bill Kooistra finds inspiration from the landscape around Goshen.
The works exhibited here come from his investigations of the fields near his
home. We often think of landscape as vistas, but Kooistra tilts our gaze
downward to suggest the play of wind and rain across the grasses and brambles
of a winter field.
These works are
physical.
His marks scatter across the paper and knit
into dense patches of tangled line. The expressive way Kooistra draws bear
witness to his hand making the mark at particular place and time.
The artist is indeed present. The smaller
abstractions included in the exhibition evolve from a different process,
although still inspired by nature. Looking at shell fragments, Kooistra builds
layers, lightly sands away portions, and rebuilds, creating “ghost marks” that
suggest history and impermanence. In this sense, these two groups of works
describe complementary methods of the same creative investigation of time,
place and mark-making.
Peter A. Campbell’s installation is inspired by a trove of letters David
Freund, a photographer, collector, and 2010 PUG Projects alum, shared with him.
Responding to an ad in the 1916 Pittsburgh Press of a man looking for a suitable
wife, women wrote brief letters introducing themselves. Campbell acknowledges the
difficulty of re-presenting their words. The gulf of history creates an
impassable divide even as the letters offer a glimpse into the lives of the
women who wrote them. Considering this, Campbell creates this installation to
place the past and the present beside each other. Viewers see present day
Pittsburgh and its surroundings while
concurrently hearing
the letters read as performers re-enact their writing. In this sense,
Campbell evokes the spirit of the past through the lens of our present
experience. Playing on the taciturn directive, “You can’t get there from here,
“ Campbell suggests that perhaps, with enough imagination, you actually can.
Joshua and Alaina Enslen create an “intertextual history” of the
Brazilian poem
Song of Exile, written
in 1843 by Antonio Goncalves Dias.
Although less known in the US, it is one of
the most imitated poems of all time, inspiring thousands of parodies and
pastiches. Because
Song of Exile
glorifies Brazilian landscape and culture, it has been used both for
nationalist causes and as a way to criticize the government. With the advent of
the internet, its use has skyrocketed.
The
works exhibited here are a portion of a multimedia installation the Enslens
have created in Portugal. Their art depicts information collected from search
engines and social media platforms, representing literally thousands of data
points. Some pieces reference the cool detachment of minimalist art. Others
suggest the lyrical quality of the poem’s primary metaphor, a bird. The poem starts
and ends as an abstraction. It is language made into data, which in turn the
artists transform into visual art. The Enslens make beautiful abstractions that
reveal
Song of Exile’s longevity and
influence.
Beginning in 2009, VincentCianni traveled across the United States for three-and-a-half years to
over 21 states making photographs and recording oral histories of gay military
personnel. The resulting project Gays in the Military includes nearly
120 active duty service members and veterans of different ages, races, ethnic
and socio-economic backgrounds who served in every branch of the military.
Either photographed alone, with family, or among objects that attest to their
former lives, we observe them while listening to or reading their stories.
Together they reveal the devastating effects of the policy that banned gays in
the military and the continued harassment before, during and even after DADT.
At times surrounded by medications, medals, or souvenirs from far away
deployments, these service men and women gaze back at us with undeniable
dignity. Finally being recognized for who they are and what they have suffered
under the gay ban, the people depicted in Gays in the Military bravely
share their stories to attest to their ongoing battle for justice. Cianni’s
deeply moving project has brought national attention to their cause. In
addition, the portraits and oral histories he has collected are now published
in the book Gays in the Military and are archived at Duke University.
