Studio Channel Islands Presents ‘DIS/CONNECTION’

Studio Channel Islands Art Center (SCIART) will present DIS CONNECTION, a program of visual and performing art in the Blackboard Gallery from April 1 to May 27. The exhibition has been Curated by SCIART Artist-in-Residence Elana Kundell, featuring the work of eight contemporary female artists who have a family history of displacement by global events. The exhibition includes paintings, installation artworks, photography and sculpture responding to the personal impact of losing one’s home and community, one of the most consequential topics of our time.

Opening reception with the artists is free to attend and will take place April 1, 4 to 7 p.m.. Exhibition programing includes an artist panel discussion at 1 p.m., Saturday April 15, a concert by Gilles Apap and Armen Guzelimian at 7.30 p.m., Saturday April 22, and a film and live art performance by Maria Adela Diaz at 7.30 p.m., Saturday April 29. Curator Elana Kundell states, “The diverse artworks in this exhibit respond to the multi-generational trauma of destruction of home and community. The artists find poetic language for loss through the imaginative transformation of materials. Their works inspire reflection, posing the question, ‘When a sense of place and home is lost, along with the identity built around it, how do people construct a new place and sense of meaning?”

Guatemala-born artist Maria Adela Diaz invites the community to take part in the creation of ‘Lost and Found,’ a performance art anthropological inquiry into the common connection that we share with home and family. Her work has been exhibited at the Pompidou Center in Paris and at the London Design Biennale. “Everybody has a story about an object that they cherish.” Said Diaz. “An object that holds their memories of home. Objects anchor us and contribute to a sense of comfort, stability, and safety.” The community is invited to bring an object from their own home into the gallery and to add their story into the creation of this artwork.

Featuring:

Arezoo Bharthania, http://arezoobharthania.com/

Arezoo Bharthania is an Iranian-American multi-disciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Her works reflects the experience of creating a home while existing in a state of in-between. It is a narrative formed through layers and gestures that blends her childhood and early adulthood in Iran with her current life in Los Angeles. The space she occupies is navigated through the bodily experience of womanhood and a balance of dichotomies: public and private, psychological and physical environments, here and there.

Fatemeh Burnes, https://www.fatemehburnes.com/

A painter, photographer, educator, and curator, Burnes was born in Tehran, where she was trained in both miniature paintings and in classical Persian poetry.

Fatemeh Burnes is a visual artist, educator, curator and activist based in Los Angeles. She obtained formal and informal training in the visual arts, receiving a BFA and MFA, and did additional graduate studies in art history and exhibition design. Since 1992, she has exhibited her own work nationally and internationally, curated over 100 exhibitions, authored numerous publications, and conducted art-education documentaries. Burnes’ work focuses on nature and human nature, looking at modern events and tragedies, ecological and social, and how those events manifest in contemporary life. Her most current work has taken an autobiographical turn in the context of her experience as an immigrant and as a woman.

Janet Neuwalder, https://janetneuwalder.com/

Janet Neuwalder is the daughter of Japanese immigrants who were interned during the Second World War.

Janet Neuwalder, a sculptor and installation artist specializing in clay and ceramic processes, has focused recently on large-scale sculptural wall installations. Works are assembled from hundreds of fragments floating off the wall’s surface, creating a provocative and visually active topography. The assemblages express movement, playfulness and a sense of history and time.

 Neuwalder received her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri and a Master of Fine Art from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Neuwalder has been exhibiting her work nationally since 1984.  She has taught at numerous universities and colleges throughout the United States. She currently teaches Ceramics at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California.

Maria Adela Diaz, https://mariadeladiaz.com/

Diaz is a multidisciplinary Latinx artist, born in Guatemala. Diaz uses her body as a medium to convey her political deceptions, patriarchy, immigration and discriminating philosophies, with performance, installations and video, her work points out issues that deal with the Latin American diaspora.

Diaz has participated in many art exhibitions around the world, like: Centre Pompidou, Paris France, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, México City, Museum of Contemporary Art, San José Costa Rica, Somerset House, London UK, among others. Her feminist work inhabited the boundaries between visibility and invisibility in nature, absence and presence of humanity in contemporary societies.

Marthe Aponte, https://martheaponte.com/

Marthe is a self-taught artist living at the edge of the Mojave Desert. I draw inspiration from my life in France, Venezuela, and California, influenced by African and Australian aboriginal people’s artistic traditions as well as the flora and fauna.

My current practice focuses on “picoté”, an art form defined by delicate patterns and textures produced by piercing tiny holes in paper with a punching tool. This unique technique was probably born in France, around the 13th century. I enjoy creating contemporary designs inspired by nature and the human body imbued with a touch of surrealism.

Nurit Avesar,  https://www.nuritavesar.com/

Nurit Avesar was born and raised in Israel. She moved to Los Angeles in her early 20’s.

Nurit Avesar is a mixed media artist and a painter. Her process-based images are combinations of the faded, ghostly images of the initial layer that blend and merge with the bolder, brighter final layers. She states, “History is not linear; it is interwoven with present and future. I have always been fascinated by the effect of history on the present, and the way current events and decisions determine the future.”

Sigrid Orlet, https://sigridorletstudio.weebly.com/portfolio

Sigrid Orlet uses her personal life experience and her investigation of symbol formation in deep scientific inquiry to ask question of her most firmly held beliefs. Today, “not knowing”
informs her art-making.

“I produce a variety of media including painting, sculptural forms and installation. In all
these works, I am concerned with unearthing the roots of being human as an aspect of the coherent whole of existence.

In our increasingly high-speed virtual world, I go beneath the smooth and shiny surfaces
to immerse myself in great solitude and deep silence. I use my brushes and other tools
to quietly and patiently express the rawness, textures, and layers of a seemingly unending
process of unfolding — of what I do not know.”

Artist Alicia Piller’s powerful sculptural forms merge the new and discarded into large scale works that mimic forms of cellular biology. She notes, “The construction of each work becomes a biological unfolding of time that examines the energy around wounds left by historical traumas.” Piller is currently exhibiting at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles.

Curator Elana Kundell is a longtime Artist-In-Residence at Studio Channel Islands who communicates life through the language of color, in oil and mixed media painting. She is the granddaughter of a Holocaust refugee from Czechoslovakia.

There is ample free parking, admission to the Gallery is free. Visit studiochannelislands.org or call 805-383-1368 for full details