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Indepth Arts News:
"American Pastiche : Choose Your Own Adventure - Jose Arenas / Phillip Hua"
2010-01-02 until 2010-01-28
Hang Art
San Francisco, CA,
USA United States of America
As an homage to a series of children‚s books, in which the reader assumes the role of the protagonist and makes choices that determine the actions of the main character, Jose Arenas and Phillip Hua deal with the issues of personal and political direction in their two-person exhibition, American Pastiche: Choose Your Own Adventure at HANG ART Gallery in January 2010. Using a variety of materials and imagery, Arenas and Hua piece together a snapshot of contemporary American culture regarding relationships between immigration and identity, and commerce and the environment. The viewer becomes the protagonist, navigating through the fragmented and reinvented visual vocabulary of each artist.
Born in San Jose, California, Jose Arenas traveled to and from Mexico with his family until he was fourteen. As a young boy, he experienced two school systems, learned to converse in both English and Spanish, and maneuvered through two worlds. Jose's artwork captures the joys, uncertainties, and difficulties of these experiences; by drawing on the cultural symbols of his two homes, he explores the dual feelings of dislocation and belonging.
In this recent body of work he recycles old and dilapidated wood planks that, given their naturally worn state, convey a sense of time, age, and history. These weathered surfaces provide a backdrop for richly layered images that consist of bees, native plants, map-reading symbols, and ships. The pairing of such imagery helps to reference a constant navigation through two different cultures. The honey bee, in particular, represents the idea of cross-pollination and is a metaphor for an ever-forming and changing identity. By combining images of bees with colonial symbols the paintings help us explore the connection to our history. This correlation continues to play a part in the melding of cultural traditions.
Phillip Hua, also born in San Jose, California, draws upon the technological aura of Silicon Valley and the environmental activism of the Bay Area to create his hybrid digital/traditional paintings of trees. Using process as a metaphor, his works are abbreviated representations of the association between consumerism and nature. After printing and painting on various financial newspapers, he wraps each sheet in packaging tape and assembles them together, creating a reconfigured tree. When exposed to extended amounts of light, these works begin to yellow and degrade, symbolizing environmental change. His materials play with themes of paper and plastic, his process, with manufacturing and commoditization. From painting to photography to printing to digital processes, Hua's technique is a synthesis of various media and a nod to the trajectory of the interaction between art and technology.
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