DENIZEN | NAMBA Exhibition
OCT/1 - NOV/5, 2016

NAMBA Arts Center
47 SOUTH OAK STREET
VENTURA, CA 93001
T 805 626 8876
 

HOURS: MON-FRI 9A-6P
SAT 11A-4P

Opening Weekend | October 1 (11A-7P) & 2 (12-5P), 2016

Dab Art is pleased to present DENIZEN, a five-week exhibition featuring eight contemporary artists based in the greater Ventura area of Southern California. These presented artists include single works and surveys. This unique collection of works will be hung in Ventura's premier performing arts space, NAMBA. This exhibit will have a special two-day opening coinciding with Ventura’s annual Art Walk in Ventura’s Historic Downtown District. 

JONAS LARA; Just as history painters of previous centuries found their subjects in the realities of everyday life, Lara finds inspiration in his own spontaneous visual experience, relying on his ability to abstract unique perspectives from surroundings. 
For Environmental Geometry, Lara explored Ventura County’s natural and man made landscapes. Focusing on rigid agricultural grids against the natural coastline, Lara captured then interpreted the imperfect, but highly strategic organization of our community into complex works of art through his distinctive process using both photo and paint. 
The resulting mixed media works have a formal congruence deriving from a bold and edgy dialogue between photography and painting, empirical observation and artfulness, conceptual rigor and spontaneity, representation and abstraction. Jonas Lara’s intangible viewpoint fuses the flux of life and nature with the stillness of metaphysical reflection. 

YESSICA TORRES; Completed in 2016, Friends is the catalyst piece in Torres’s latest series, Streets of Sesame. This series features familiar and lovable Sesame Street characters engaged in desperate and despicable scenarios. The series is an assessment of the loss of our autonomy as a society.
“Generation X was the last to enjoy the freedom of walking home from school, riding bikes without helmets, Saturday morning cartoons and playing outdoors. Gone are the days where children learn self-reliance and accountability. As we continue to celebrate mediocrity with participation trophies, our childhood lessons are forgotten along with those who taught us. 
Development in technology and communication are knowledgably important; unmitigated reliance on these advances can be beneficial or even necessary. However, it is the personal responsibility and the liability we obligate as individuals that are arguably the principal attributes of being a productive member in society. Present day adolescents can navigate smart phones, but not conversations. Experience has been replaced with expectation. Our inability to function without simple etiquette will be our downfall. 
The compromised characters in my Streets of Sesame series represent my scrutiny of the present day.”
-Yessíca Torres

DOMINGA OPAZO; Selections of Textile Works
The rigorous labor required and the intimacy with organic materials is captivating. The selection of yarns incorporated into the installation derives from her native country of Chile. The suspended and staggered panels are distinctive and influential. Finding inspiration in Chiloe art, Dominga began to experiment with weaving in art practice. First creating a series of prints with configurations that are inspired from patterns made by the Selkma, the prints are then integrated these patterns into the weavings. 

LISA CAREN; Caren's work has clear links to the generation of Pop and Conceptual artists that preceded her, while attesting to her affinities for ocean vessels, brilliant spectrums of color, and French design. Working in digital format with great attention to the effects of scale, she transforms elements from the culture of everyday life into artworks that evoke classical archetypes. Caren’s art invites psychological interpretation while remaining firmly objective due to its uncanny proximity to the real, and its relationship with the minimal. By re-erecting everyday objects with veracity but on a giant scale, she dramatically alters the relationship of viewer to artwork. Tin In Water, 2016 has a premium archival mount designed specifically to protect images from moisture damage. This museum quality mount is preferred by collectors for it’s longevity and superior presentation. The image is sandwiched between polished Plexiglas and anodized aluminum for added protection and finished with aluminum tube brace to prevent warping over time. 

JANE PETERSON; Survey Works & Welcome Earthlings
In artist Jane Peterson’s all new work, she continues to explore the spectrum of human emotion with particular attention to anxiety, passion, and fear, as well as an element of humor. Cartoon-like characters make their way through Peterson’s fanciful compositions, ranging from otherworldly creatures to abstracted human forms. Her hybrid travelers exist in an environment not entirely foreign to that of her viewers; they wander between reality and the subconscious, taking on personalities that are decidedly familiar, yet eerie.
Peterson always starts with drawing, for her limited Ed. Digital pieces. “A wonderful thing about the digital process is the fact that it exceeds the speed of thought. Any digital mark I make can be instantly changed, duplicated, or eliminated,” says Peterson. In addition to digital paintings, this current body of work includes drawings on birch panels with wax/oil crayon, ink, and graphite. The wax surface is then polished with a soft cloth, to create a satin finish. The surfaces of her sculptures are treated in the same way, on ceramic, wood, and metal supports.

NOVA CLITE; DrinkSmashDriveCrash, 2016
“Drinking, smashing bottles and drunk driving impacts not only Grant Park but also our entire community. I collected broken glass and collision debris to create this artwork as a way to express my feelings and explore both the sacred and the profane within the act and aftermath.”
-Nova Clite

NASH RIGHTMER; Survey of Abstract Works
The selected works on display embody Rightmer’s inimitable voice and artist process. These paintings surprise with maximalist gestures combined with small formats, and daring, voluptuous colors expressed in the complex layers and textures that emanate from the brush. Rightmer is an artist who embraces spontaneity and directness in equal measure to the processes of reflection, capitulation, and disguise. Sometimes he will labor intensively over what looks like a single brush mark produced in an instant. With their incorporated frames and use of both traditional and contemporary materials, his works behave as both objects and images.
In this group of very recent works, Rightmer depicts vibrant traces of human experience inspired by his memories and encounters in subjects such as tragedy, ambition and romance. Using bold gestures that seem to push beyond the confines of the common abstract elements, each work is at once a completely autonomous composition and a suggestive synecdoche of the greater aesthetic reality that lies beyond its limits. 

MARIANA PEIRANO ROYUELA; Survey of Portraits
With the statement “A painter can say all he wants to with fruit, flowers or even clouds”, Edouard Manet evoked the genre of still-life painting to rebuff the heroic and overcharged history paintings of his time. Mariana Peirano Royuela reaffirms Manet’s belief in the quiet potency of an enduring intimate genre more than a century later.
Portraits of artists both historical and contemporary are rendered from photographs or from life. Mariana imbues each likeness with a startling freshness and immediacy, although like a still life it is distanced from its subject. She has recently begun to conflate the genre of portraiture, where the subject is subsumed into a field of pictorial elements, along with that of traditional still life, where she situates objects at hand in delicate fields of pattern and color.
Although Mariana’s paintings infer a deep knowledge of historical artistic forbears from Goya to Vermeer, this awareness is processed through an instinctual understanding of the time in which she lives. Combining her insights with modest scale, a lush yet tremulous palette, and extreme graphic sensitivity, her paintings and drawings are testaments to a passion for beauty in all its forms, from the sublime to the everyday.

Dab Art
T. 1 805 626 8876
E. info@dabart.me
www.DabArt.me

Works

Artists

Installation Views

Press Release

Checklist