Starting August 12, Experience going Into The Wilderness from new dynamic perspectives

July 24, 2012 - PRLog -- Starting August 12,  Experience going Into The Wilderness from new dynamic perspectives
For Immediate Release                                                                                                                       July 24, 2012

Angels Gate Cultural Center premiers a new exhibition for the banner year about “wilderness”. The Project Space will feature an interactive installation by Katie Bachler and May Jong, while outside there will be a performance activity by Trish Stone. The opening reception is Sunday, August 12, 2012 from 1p.m. to 4p.m. Trish Stone’s performance will begin at 2 p.m. and there will be a gallery walk though starting at 3:30 p.m. Angels Gate Cultural Center galleries are open to the public Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday 12 p.m.  – 5 p.m. and admission is always free.  All are welcome!
                                                                                 
SAN PEDRO, CA -

PROJECT SPACE: A Reintroduction Library
Katie Bachler and May Jong
A Reintroduction Library  is a collaborative project between L.A. based artists/educators that have concentrated most of their work on societies interaction with the natural world. The project consists of an archival library that pertains to the Natural History of San Pedro’s native plant life with maps, as well as a vertical garden comprised of medicinal plants native to San Pedro. This is an interactive space for scholarly and imaginative research where visitors can sit and read, touch, smell and engage with specimens allowing the viewer not just to ponder the past but to physically engage with the natural world around them as well.

Katie Bachler, an artist and educator hailing from the woods of New England. Her work in Los Angeles deals with ideas of human interaction with nature and alternative modes of living in an urban context. She has exhibited work in Paris, Los Angeles, and Vermont. Katie has a Master’s from USC’s Art in the Public Sphere program. She is currently the Slanguage green artist in residence, and teaches for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
May Jong is a Los Angeles based artist and educator. Her recent work explores humankind's relationship to the natural environment, whether mutually beneficial, detrimental or neutral. Jong has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York and Berlin, most recently at the Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento and the Cypress College Art Gallery. She received her M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University and currently teaches at Cypress College, Glendale Community College, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

OUTSIDE: Lighter Than Air
Trish Stone
Lighter Than Air is an artist-led activity featuring the launch of a Balloon Drone (a weather balloon fitted with a video camera). Open to participation on several levels, this activity includes flying the balloon, holding neighboring balloons, and using hand-held mirrors to communicate with the aerial surveillance device.  In using a security camera (an object not meant for creating art) and allowing the members of the community to be partake in this happening, Stone merges technology, people and nature into one. Thus capturing their coexistence both geographically and metaphorically. Documentation of this performance will be installed in the gallery at Human Array on 357 W 7th St, San Pedro on September 6th.

Trish Stone is a new media artist and curator, whose conceptual art projects have been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally. Her project "Things I Never Say," in which she used publicly accessible webcams in San Diego as a platform for public performance, was recently exhibited at Art Produce Gallery. Trish Stone holds an MFA (2003) from California College of Arts. She continues her interactive, interruptive, interventionist art practice in San Diego, where she serves as Tour and Gallery Coordinator for Calit2, UC San Diego.

COMMUNITY GALLERY: Water, Our Precious Resource
Using the painting Wave Break by JEN ZEN® (aka Jen Grey, CSULB Art Professor, Faculty Emerita) the Community Gallery considers our fragile clean water supply. In an effort to collaborate with the community the gallery will install a second wave that is collaboration with young artists and the community. Together, the pieces push us to consider what preserving clean water and clean oceans entails. Is this something that we want preserve? What steps can we take to keep fresh water clean for our families? What steps can we take to keep the ocean free of trash? To submit your 5”x 5”color squares or poems about water, please email, submit@angelsgateart.org or call 310-519-0936.


MAIN GALLERY: Wilderness Mind: Dissolving Duality              
Curated by Deborah Thomas and the Eco-art Collective of the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art

This curated exhibition features the work of fourteen artists from the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art’s Eco-art Collective. The group, embracing collaboration, believes that “wilderness” is a state of mind that defies location, either geographical or imaginary—one in which social structure relaxes, logic slips away and time and space collapse. The exhibition provides an alternative experience to more traditional strategies of agency through domination, and allows the possibility for anyone to experience “wilderness” in any number of settings, not just in uninhabited nature.

Deborah Thomas is an artist, professor and independent curator who live in Los Angeles; she has also lived and worked as an artist in Geneva, Switzerland and New York. She holds an MA and she is ABD from the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas is a longtime member of the Eco-Art Collective sponsored by the Southern California chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art (SCWCA) and one of the chairs of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) national Eco-art Caucus

The Eco-art Collective is a Los Angeles-based group of fourteen women artists that uses art to explore the many connections between creative and environmental practices through exhibitions, educational programs and public actions. The group was first organized in 2005 by artist/eco-activist Linda Lundell and is sponsored by the Southern California chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art (SCWCA), a national organization dedicated to creating community through art, education and social activism.


About Into the Wilderness: The Journey Within
Angels Gate Cultural Center proudly presents our exhibition year entitled Into The Wilderness: The Journey Within.  Over the course of the next year, artists and curators will engage the term ‘wilderness’ from multiple perspectives ranging from ecological to introspective.  The exhibitions consider how our ideas of wilderness continue to define our contemporary life and contemplate how we can find new opportunities to re/define the transition between physical and imaginary geographies. Inspired by the work of one of the earilest enviromental activist in the U.S. John Muir,  this exhibition asks us to look at wilderness through his adventurous and poetic lens. Muir not only saw the wilderness as a geographical location but also a spiritual sanctuary as he describes it in this passage, “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.” The exhibition aims to inspire us to consider our relationship with the “wilderness” whatever it may be and embark in our own journeys to get to that place.

For more information, please visit www.angelsgateart.org.