CSUN’s Main Gallery is kicking off the fall semester with the second installment of an exhibit called, Full and Part (two), featuring artwork from full and part-time staff and faculty from the Department of Art.
Artworks ranging from paintings to photography, sculpture and multimedia, this exhibit showcases the innumerable talent the art department staff possess.
Painting professor, Samantha Fields, seeks inspiration from her local home of Northeast Los Angeles.
“I live in Mount Washington/Cypress Park area and my studio is there as well,” Fields said. “This painting is from a larger body of work called, “Faded in the Sun”, and most of the paintings in the series were based on my morning and evening walks around my neighborhood during one of our increasingly frequent heatwaves.”
Fields’ work on display titled, “Mt. Washington Sunrise”, was created from a photograph she snapped of the landscape outside of her home. She paints, as she puts it, “atmosphere with atmosphere”, applying layers on top of layers to mimic the depth a photograph captures, employing a paintbrush instead of a camera.
“I am not interested in the drama of paint itself,” Fields said, “or the documentary nature of the photographs I work from, rather, I seek to find a middle ground that presents the viewer with images that are mysteriously made so that the emphasis is on the image itself, not the physicality of process.”
Part-time photography professor, Levon Parian, goes further than photography for his submission to the gallery.
“This was a new project but I had been thinking about doing something with our Christmas trees,” Parian said. “Every year my wife likes to get a fresh Christmas tree to celebrate the season…I couldn’t help noticing how people dumped their trees after the season was over and I just felt there was something disturbing about the way they were discarded.”
Parian decided to start keeping the old Christmas trees by planting them in his backyard. When it was time to submit for this exhibit, he decided to showcase his new hobby as an art installment.
“I had always planned on photographing them and this exhibit offered the opportunity,” Parian said.
He decided to bring his vision and ideas to James Sweeters at the gallery, to expand upon his work and curate an installment that went beyond just photography.
“I love shooting in 3-D so I shot each tree with a standard 2 1/4 format as well as a stereo version,” Parian said. “I included actual trees with the work…There is something to having the actual subject in the room as opposed to just a picture of it.
See these and more at CSUN’s Main Gallery from Aug. 28 to Sept. 23.
