City Gallery: 'Selected Drawings'

Recent work by:
Dakota Noot
Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio
Catherine Ruane
Vicki Walsh

On view Feb. 1 through Mar. 1, 2022
Receptions: Saturday, Feb. 5 from 5-7 p.m.
Saturday, Feb. 27, 5-7 p.m.

From the gallery:
The City College Gallery presents an exhibition of drawing works by four southern California based artists, Dakota Noot, Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio, Catherine Ruane and Vicki Walsh. This show combines intimate large format works, installation, mural and sculpture all rooted in the act of drawing. The artists have exhibited work in galleries and museums nationally and internationally. Details of their experience and accomplishments can be found on their websites listed below.

About the artists:
Dakota Noot
Food is a strange, surreal, and colorful world. I explore the complexities of our diet and animal-human relationships through installations (made with drawings mounted on free-standing foam core) or wearable art taped to my body. By drawing with crayon and color pencil, I can become animals and talk about difficult topics like sustainability and food sources. I specifically use a coloring book aesthetic merged with theatre-like cutouts. I want to be seen as a cartoon character: playfully violent, entertaining, and educational. My work is often located in my apartment, making use of non-traditional spaces and backdrops. In addition, I have used cutout installations and wearable art to transform both gallery and public spaces. As a cartoon-like character, my art can be seen in different locations. Tune into my art, laugh at, and eat it.

Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio
I examine the experience of time as both linear and circular, as finite and infinite, of the impossibility of it being defined yet always striving to capture it. I am deeply interested in the instant: the small window of time we call the present; the space between transitions; the nebulous moment that barely exists because it goes as soon as it arrives. In my work I search for the invisible membranes that divide One from Other, past from future, life from death.

Catherine Ruane
Making art is a process akin to studying and note taking. Drawing for me embodies a rhythm much like a repetitive prayer in worship. My studio process is a search into the mysterious border where the physical meets the mystical. I methodically build images as a visual expression of the contrasts between the appearance of natural, wild forms and what they have come to symbolize.

Vicki Walsh
My paintings are mostly large works created with multiple thin layers of transparent oil paint. This process imitates the quality of human skin and gives a luminous presence. I name each series to hint at the unnoticed; Skin deep, Beyond Appearances, Touching the Surface, Mostly Mortal, Amazing Face. People’s faces are my subject, but I don’t see them as portraits. Portraiture in painting takes on a connotation of external beauty and an enhanced likeness or status of the subject. I am not interested in these things. What I am interested in is conveying something genuine, something not so tangible on the surface, the psychology, the essence of being human, that quality that makes an individual sympathetic or vulnerable, even at the risk of being rebuffed. It seems we have little room for truth in our appearance. I’m confronting that. I’m hoping to find a connection with people who think similarly, those that find superficial things to be just that; a shell, a veneer.

Courtesy of City Gallery

Related links:
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City Gallery website