'Migration Home 1 (MH-1)' by Aaron Glasson
Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego: North
"Primordial Refuge," Aaron Glasson's multi-part exhibition at ICA San Diego's North campus, is his first solo museum show. The works look toward a future transformed by climate change. In one gallery space, Glasson has built an intersectional, crowd-sourced ecological reading room, complete with library furniture built from scraps and reclaimed pieces of wood.
On the other is an entire home, built for a future climate that feels both imagined and troublingly real. "MH-1" is a bicycle-drawn pod that's inhabitable and transforms into a boat to accommodate rising sea levels (or maneuver around border walls). Formed around a wire frame built by artist Spenser Little, the pod is encased in a gossamer, papery material that's waterproof and glows from within when lit. When the shell's vault-like opening is peeled back, it's hard not to think of Da Vinci's sketches for the "Flying Machine." This tiny pod forces us to ask ourselves: how will we live? Where will we find home? Will we be safe?
Glasson also enlisted the help of Brillan De La Cerda to construct "MH-1," including the collection of trash from the beach in Tijuana. The found objects are encased in acrylic on the oar's paddle, alongside trash from the San Diego side of the border. Glasson recently launched the pod on water, and a video from MH-1 voyages will be looped as part of the exhibition.
Exhibition information. On view noon to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday, Jun. 3 through July 31, 2022, with an opening reception at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Jun. 3. ICA San Diego North, 1550 S El Camino Real, Encinitas. Free/donation-based.
'Murmuration' by Kaori Fukuyama
PHES Gallery
In a three-person exhibition at the new PHES Gallery in Carlsbad, "Boundaries and Connection," artist Kaori Fukuyama shows several new works alongside pieces by Kline Swonger and Alvaro Alvarez.
Fukuyama's "Murmuration" is a series of hundreds of clear, triangular acrylic spikes with dichroic film that jut out in multiple directions from the wall. As the light hits the wall, shadows and color scatter in seemingly endless directions and angles, transforming depending on the daylight or where you're standing.
Fukuyama started with a simple, mundane object — "Disposable picks you often find with martini olives," she said — and added dichroic film to one side of each pick to add a shimmer of color.
"I tend to see this piece as an extension of and a departure from my past work called 'Shadowscape,'" Fukuyama said about the installation. "In this piece, you'll not only see the shadows but also colored reflection and refraction on the wall reaching for multiple directions."
In this piece, she's inspired by the formations of starlings coming into roost — a flock's movements and spacings that seem to defy the limits of physical space and communication — and how human connection can also transcend limits. "Murmuration" was also created as a response to some of the other works in the exhibition, so it's worth seeing how they intersect. Plus, like much of Fukuyama's dichroic film sculptures, photographs barely capture how magical these works look in real life.
Exhibition information. On view 2 p.m. - 7 p.m. Thursday through Saturday or by appointment, through July 30, 2022. PHES Gallery, 2633 State St., Carlsbad. Free.
'Again' by Christopher Lloyd Tucker
San Diego Central Library Art Gallery
Artist Christopher Lloyd Tucker created "Again," a work of hardwood and acrylic at the point in the pandemic when the delta variant of COVID-19 emerged.
"It's kind of an emotional self-portrait. It doesn't really look like me, but it kind of represents the feeling that I was having," Tucker said. "All of a sudden it seemed like this whole pandemic was coming right back at us again. And that's just the first thing that I ended up making afterwards. For me, it's an image that is of a good bit of anguish, of feeling like you were almost out of the woods, but then not quite."
Tucker's works are intricate, almost like puzzles. To create the pieces, he begins with a digital drawing, then processing the colors into rough, intricate shapes and patterns instead of gradients. Using a laser cutter, he fashions these shapes out of different pieces of wood, adding splashes of acrylic for color. Then, the puzzle begins.
"I even actually often draw myself a map so that I have some sense of how to put the pieces back together because sometimes there's hundreds to thousands of pieces to reassemble," Tucker said.
"Again" will be on view with several other works by Tucker in "Echoes of Africa," a group exhibition curated by Dr. Denise Rogers opening Saturday at the Central Library Art Gallery. The exhibition also features work by artists Andrea Chung, Angie Jennings, Maxx Moses and Jermaine A. Williams, paired with African pieces from the Mesa College World Cultures artifact collections.
Exhibition information: On view 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, and noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Closed Sunday. Open Jun. 4 through Aug. 20, 2022. 330 Park Blvd., downtown. Free.
'Filtration System for a Process-based Practice' by Carmen Argote
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Downtown
Los Angeles-based, Guadalajara, Mexico-born artist Carmen Argote shapes her artistic practice through walking — observing public spaces and recording voice memos as she walks.
In her artist statement, Argote writes:
"I use the action of walking to construct and develop the visual language of my work. The slowness of walking within a city like Los Angeles offers context to the scale of my body. This process compels me to contend with ideas of class and consumption, with ideas of home and place."
"Filtration System," is modeled after a mound-like concrete structure in the lake at Lincoln Park in LA's Lincoln Heights neighborhood. The sculpture is over 5 feet tall, constructed of fiberglass, wood and steel and covered with cloth and paint. The drips of color evoke weather, water and bird damage to the real-life structure, but the colors in Argote's work represent her own memories of visiting (and climbing atop) the structure at the lake. A series of paintings accompanying the sculpture are marked with small metal tags — a sort of legend or key for the memories, visits and colors each pairs with.
At the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego's downtown location, the mound sculpture will be on view along with a body of work from the past five years, including voice recordings, drawings, sculptures and paintings.
MCASD's downtown space has been temporarily closed since the Yolanda López exhibition was taken down, and will reopen with Argote's exhibition and "Figurative Vocabularies: Selections from the Collection" and Chris Burden and Byron Kim's "The Reason for the Neutron Bomb" on Saturday, Jun. 4.
Exhibition information. On view 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday through Sunday, through Oct. 23, 2022. MCASD, 1100 Kettner Ave., downtown. $0-10.
Women's Museum Pompom Installation by Katie Ruiz
Women's Museum of California Education Center
At the new education and exhibition space at the Jacobs Center for Innovation, the Women's Museum will open a new exhibition called "Crafting Feminism: Textiles of the Women's Movement." With the exhibition and the grand opening, they'll unveil a new textile art adornment for the front entryway.
Led by recently appointed artistic director Katie Ruiz, community members have gathered since the beginning of the year to fashion dozens of pompoms from pink-hued yarn, which now hang on the side of the building in a cascade with the woman gender symbol, also made of fuzzy yarn balls, at the center.
The museum recently expanded to Southeast San Diego and has now set aside its Liberty Station space for administration and archives only.
Visiting information. Viewable outside 24/7. Open from noon to 4 p.m. on the first Saturday of each month, or by appointment. Women's Museum of California, 404 Euclid Ave., Southeast San Diego. Free.
