Get Your Culture On!

Spring Art Shows at the 5Cs

Lauren Eckler / Claremont Student

By Sydney Delaney
Staff Writer

This January brought two stellar art exhibits to the 5Cs, which are still open for viewing this spring semester.

The first art show opened at Pomona’s Museum of Art on January 22 and will be open until April 9, 2006.  Entitled Project Series 29: Machine Project, the show also features Ed Ruscha/ Raymond Pettibon: The Holy Bible and THE END.

Contemporary artists Ruscha and Pettibon combined artistic efforts for this collaboration of image, text and idea that moves beyond pop art and graphic design. As individual artists, Ruscha and Pettibon have explored the contradictions, parallels and relationships between image and text in their prints and multi-media art works. They are also individually well known for work that focuses on the culture of the city of Los Angeles, film, Hollywood and commercial art.

In two series of prints, the artists focus on their strengths together, exploring the inseparable quality of word and image in our modern culture. The Pomona exhibition features images of books and actual books, flush with the wall, emblazoned and re-titled with words like HOLY BIBLE or the phrase “BOY O BOY.”

The commercial and novel simplicity of the large printed words is underwritten by more text printed below. In one piece, the phrase “As my eyes cleared I felt like the dizziness of not knowing which end I was at the end of,” emerges beneath two discontinuous images of the phrase “THE END,” which appear like murky grey silent-film stills before the credits roll (Ed Ruscha and Raymond Pettibon THE END – State II 2003, 2-color lithograph, edition: 20).

The altered cover titles, the images of and tangible objects of finely bound books, combined with roughly printed gold and silver paints in large gothic lettering make for an unexpected and amusing combination of much commercialized iconographies. It is a pointed remark on the idea that cultural and moral value both come from the common, the intellectual and the religious values of seeing. 

The Machine Project is a space - a center and gallery - for the unique, challenging and artfully-minded public of the Los Angeles area. Their portion of the show is given to a unique and mind-bending examination of various sized eggs being tapped in synchronized beat patterns with awesome sound effects in a monochromatic and sterile environment. This is the type of art you could close your eyes for. 

The recent opening of the Scripps 62nd Annual Ceramic Exhibition entitled the “Ceramic Annual” is one of the primary art events of the Claremont Colleges in the springtime.  The show opened on January 21 and will be up until April 9, 2006. The 2006 exhibition showcases the work of twelve artists including Luis Bermudez, Michael Geersten, Babs Haenen, Steven Heinemann, Eva Hild, Robert Hudson, Christine McHorse, Gustavo Perez, Nicholas Rena, Goro Suzuki, Howard Tollefson, Robert Turner and guest curator Steve Portigal. 

The exhibition is located at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, and displays the works of ceramicists of multiple and richly variant form and structure. Some pieces suggest the decorous and clean appearance of brightly glazed dishware stacked together, such as Geertsen’s “White Wall Object.” This clean, yet shifting piece contrasts well with the Bermudez structure-like forms of dwellings, encrusted with geode-like texture and deep, gleaming tones of moss and red clay, situated atop a pedestal.

In between these two styles, rough and smooth, and the solid and the continuous, are the organic shapes of Heinemann’s ceramic pieces. If you can imagine a kidney bean or seed-pod you are half way there. Shaped on the whole like bowls or hollowed nut-shells, the bottom insides of these smooth pieces are expanses of cracked and brittle fissures as only dried clay can become. Heinemann’s pieces are the result of a multiple firings and the product shows, and they tempt one to reach in and touch. 

The installation also includes several of Tollefson’s expansive stoneware bowls and urn-shaped pieces. Unassuming in form, his works are rich in color, with an interchangeable and distinct blend of blue, smooth ivory and grainy sand-colored clays.