Energy Exhibition at OCCCA

Juried by Howard Fox

Emeritus curator of contemporary art,

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

2nd Reception: September 3rd, 2011 - 6pm to 10pm  

With a special musical, visual performance by Brit Collins at 8pm!

Brit Collins presents moonhead music, a unique blend of Brian Eno ambient EMS Synthi synthesizer and Robert Fripp sonic guitar soundscapes, combined with a visual live performance for a unique media arts experience. Brit Collins is a guitarist & synthesis and currently performs with the band Solarvolt.

Exhibition Dates: August 5th - September 17th, 2011

Aisen Chacin, "Energy 1"

Nearly 1,500 works of art were entered, from across the  

country and as far as from Israel, Taipei, Brazil and Iran.

A total of 73 works were selected.

Juror's Statement

Energy is all. According to the Book of Genesis, the creation began in a burst of pure energy - light. According to Einstein, energy is the source of all matter, and convertible with it. According to most artists, creative energy - an inner force - is the motivation of their lives. In the studio artists transform creative energy into material expression. For this exhibition artists were encouraged to submit works that celebrate the concept or force of energy in its broadest connotations or in its most focused denotations. The resulting show and catalogue indeed are a reflection of the range and depth of the submitted works.

As juror I surveyed all of the nearly 1,500 submissions in a wide array of media - among them painting, sculpture, drawing, prints, video - and assembled groupings of works that seemed to have a notable affinity with one another, whether stylistic, formal, conceptual, or thematic. My intent was to build a show - not to eliminate submissions - from the pool of resources that artists put forth in their pursuit to reveal OCCCA's chosen exhibition theme of energy.

Denis Hagen, "Brisance"

Many, many artists created abstract works that seemed to evoke a cosmic source of primordial, original energy, often represented as a glow or burst of light in a nebulous field of darker color.  

Many others made abstract compositions that seemed to pulse with an animate life force, writhing and restless. Quite a few artists proffered abstract visual fields of startling visual energy - patterns, stripes, grids - not obviously connoting cosmic or vital forces but that exist for their own formal excitement. And a very sizeable contingent of representational artists depicted landscapes featuring the indelible imprint of industrial energy production in our daily environment, in the form of power plants, telephone and electrical poles, street lights, and strip mines. All of these are amply represented in the exhibition.

I thank all the artists who participated in this annual juried show by submitting their works for consideration, and I especially commend the artists whose works are included in the limited exhibition space. It would have been possible to have made a very different looking - and equally engaging - exhibition from the works submitted; in the end I chose a diverse collection of works that seemed to my eye to desire to be in one another's company.

Howard N. Fox, juror

Editor's note: Mr. Fox is an independent curator and was formerly, from 1985 through 2008, curator of contemporary art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Michael Holcomb, "Hopper"

Howard Fox:

Howard N. Fox is Curator Emeritus of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At LACMA, beginning in 1985, he organized numerous major exhibitions and authored their catalogues, including Avant-Garde in the Eighties (1987), A Primal Spirit: Ten Contemporary Japanese Sculptors (1990), Lari Pittman (1996), and Eleanor Antin (1999). He was a collaborating curator and contributing author for Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity 1900-2000 and for Tim Hawkinson, co-organized by LACMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He wrote a principal essay for the catalogue accompanying the 2006 exhibition Los Angeles 1955-1985: Birth of an Art Capital, organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and was co-curator of the recent LACMA exhibition Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement (2008). In 2010 he organized a 20-year survey exhibition of Los Angeles-based media artist Steve Roden for the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena.   

Often focusing on issues of content and meaning in contemporary art, Fox has published and lectured widely. He was previously a curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., where he organized some of that museum's first large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art. From 2000 to 2004 he was a member of the History / Theory / Humanities Faculty of the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Valerie Wilcox, "Migratory Marks"

Orange County Center for Contemporary Art

117 North Sycamore

Santa Ana, CA USA, 92701

  

www.occca.org 

Opening events sponsored by Reed's