Thickets (2018)
March 1 - April 6, 2018
There are several programs to accompany this exhibition
Opening Reception
Thursday, March 1
5:00 - 8:00 pm, Art Space Gallery
SIX x ATE: THICKETS
A roving, themed dinner series organized by Casey Droege (Pittsburgh, PA), that invites 6 artists to present their work in relation to a theme.
Presenting artists: Caleb Duarte, Tracy Teran, Teresa Flores, Ronda Kelley, Adrianna Alejo Sorondo, Leslie Batty
Friday, March 9, 6 - 9 pm, at the Art Space Gallery
Experimental Quesadilla Lab
The Experimental Quesadilla Lab is a project by artist Teresa Flores. It is a pop-up kitchen, recipe exchange and conversation space. Cheese and tortillas become metaphors for the often indistinguishable boundaries between class and culture, creating dialog about food justice, California history, culture and colonialism.
Friday, April 6, 12 - 2 pm, Art Space Gallery
Thicket
A thicket is site of entanglement, refuge; each twig a strand of raw data. It is intimate, but not exactly safe. Thickets brings together place-based and intergenerational feminist practices, focusing on works that code or obfuscate information, messages, and bodies, while playing with mapping and spatial relationships. It asks, how can art hide, heal, and connect us?
The artists in the show work within—or are connected to—contexts outside of traditional art world centers. The medium of quilting provides an important visual and conceptual seed, with its useful history as a coded messaging system, its inherently collaborative ethos, and relationship to mathematics and pattern. Another common thread is play with spatial relationships and mapping, through compression, use of the grid, and the production of illusory and metaphorical space. Included are works in collage, fiber, painting, sculpture, and installation.
Thickets brings together artists with roots in the Fresno area, such as Adrianna Alejo Sorondo (Fresno, CA), whose work reclaims indigenous motifs and healing rituals in abstract paintings and performances; Teresa Flores (Los Angeles, CA), whose experimental video and public interventions examine class and regional cultural experience; and Fresno-based fiber artist Ronda Kelley. Drawing connections to artists from further afield, Tina Williams Brewer, (Pittsburgh, PA), whose dense, layered works, and cosmic representations of time and space are rooted in the African American story quilt tradition, and Columbus-based artist Carmen Winant, whose collages and text-based works address the consumption of the female body in contemporary culture, will also participate. The inclusion of Judy Chicago (Belen, NM), who established the Feminist Art Program at CSU Fresno in 1970, acknowledges the vibrant history of feminist thought in Fresno.
