Made You L k Curated by Gajin Fujita

“Made You Look” features ten SoCal artists whose work and origins acknowledge contemporary street culture – a subgenre of the Los Angeles art scene. Inspired by ordinary and everyday experiences, this exhibition presents a broad range of conceptual perspectives and aesthetic modes. Committed to deeply personal creative practices, these artists have captured a unique glimpse of Los Angeles that is magically situated on an edgy periphery.

The attention-grabbing text works by Defer, Cryptik, and Jose “Prime” Reza are technically tight and energetically fluid.  Their inventive repetition of marks and symbols creates rich visual vibrations. Their individual approaches and honed skillsets emphasize the ritual-like nature of art making. With compositions that are centrifugally spiraling, luminously shimmering, or intricately interlocking, Defer, Cryptik and Reza’s works possess active personalities that announce their presence like street graffiti.

Gregory Bojorquez, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., and Carlos “Kopy” Talavera’s pieces are inspired by and reflective of the Los Angeles environment. Bojorquez’s photographs document homes in the Boyle Heights neighborhood as well as a chaotic police scene at the iconic 4^th Street bridge; his work can evoke sentimental harmony and tense discord. Observing freeway construction sites, combing through Google maps imagery and connecting with Los Angeles communities, Gonzalez Jr. paints public spaces and his experience of the rapidly changing urban landscape. Painted atop wood panels Talavera’s stop signs accentuate the experience of nature intersecting with city structures; defying the signs’ command, birds fly freely through the depicted landscape.

Jesse Simon’s personal narrative and Nehemiah Cisneros’ fictional scene approach storytelling in distinctly different ways. Simon, a SoCal surfer, assembles sections of his old surfboards into a ruin-like artifact displaying a figure operating a metal detector.  This piece suggests beach activities like seeking a perfect wave and hunting for buried treasure. Cisneros’ painting incorporates multiple images and ideas with an uncanny twist. His color saturated composition of imaginary figures and creatures seems to present a tangled allegory of temptation and fate.

Embracing color and materials, Robert Acuña and Ruben Ochoa infuse their abstract canvases with layers of meaning. With a nod to California low rider culture, and finish fetish aesthetics, Acuña paints precise shapes with glistening metallic pigments; his mixture of organic forms set against rectilinear edges creates a playful flow and structure. Ochoa’s oxidized color field canvases have rich surfaces that conjure notions of purity, degradation, and beauty, while his sculptures of bronze cast tortilla stacks are an homage to his family’s history.

The Harris Gallery is located across from the Abraham Campus Center at 2000 Second Street on the La Verne campus. For more information, please visit:  https://artsci.laverne.edu/art/exhibition or contact Dion Johnson djohnson@laverne.edu or 909.593.3511 x 4383