Escondido exhibition poignantly examines the concept of innocence lost

By: KIRBY FAIRFAX - For the North County Times | Wednesday, March 5, 2008 12:45 PM PST ∞

"There used to be a time when the idea of heroes was important. People grew up sharing those myths and legends and ideals. Now they grow up sharing McDonalds and Disneyland."

Bob Dylan was in New York City when he uttered those words in 1989, and probably didn't intend them to be prophetic. Fast-forward to Escondido in 2008, however, and we find sadly similar themes in the work of the six artists on display at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum.

They, like the poet, are voices crying in the wilderness that something is wrong, something is lost, and ---- unlike many who do not know how to voice their pain ---- unabashedly say that we have lost our collective way, if not our very minds.

The new exhibit, "Innocence Is Questionable," which opened last weekend and runs through May, features a half-dozen San Diego-based artists, all of whom are professors or graduate students at UC San Diego, in addition to being recipients of the 2006/2007 San Diego Art Prize, awarded annually by local arts networks to recognize established and emerging local talent.

The artists, all of whom bring very personal interpretations to what the concept of innocence lost may mean, share many traits. They all work in representational styles, and with the exception of photographer Yvonne Venegas) rarely depict the human being directly. That they are exploring what it means to be human in an inhuman world is the more boldly stated by the intentional absence of people in their powerful examinations of what that world has become.

"This particular exhibit represents the apex of the type of thinking of many artists located in this region, and of their different ways of looking at reality," noted Raul Guerrero, a veteran area painter and teacher. "We are all trying to make sense of who we are, not only as artists, but as residents of San Diego. We are all part of American society and culture, but we have a particular perspective because of where we live. I don't think we have a cynical approach; our art is straightforward and somewhat innocent, but it is subversive. It is not only about what meets the eye, because there is deeper meaning in the imagery. There are many layers and it is quite complex."

Those different approaches run the gamut from Venegas, who captures the rich and privileged of Tijuana on film, to the assemblages and installations of May-Ling Martinez, who reminisces shyly about the past with nostalgic images of Dick and Jane as well as talking slyly about the present with found objects juxtaposed in surprising ways.

The self-contained black-and-white drawings, executed with military precision, that Iana Quesnell uses toexplore her own private space contrast sharply with the expansive, exuberant canvases of Jean Lowe, which depict very impersonal environments. And the subtle hues of Ernest Silva's images, which tell ---- at least at first glance ---- of childhood serenity and security but demand that the viewer look again, share at least the need for careful scrutiny with Guerrero's bolder immediacy.

Venegas, a grad student, said of her attempts to examine the issues of class, "You never know with documentary work how people will respond to it until it's out there. I have to wait and see, so perhaps in that sense I'm innocent until proven guilty. We'll see if I succeed."

Quesnell, another grad student, who has lived in her truck by choice and now rents a house in Tijuana, remarked, "I can't talk about epic issues; I only have control over my own life and how I relate to my own personal place in the world. My work is about ownership and occupancy, the scripts we live by, where we have the right to exist and the power relationships that implies, the choices we make. I mean, why do we work so hard to pay for houses we can't afford, so then we don't have the money for cultural experiences that make life meaningful? I play with reconceptualizing these issues."

Martinez, a recent graduate who grew up in Puerto Rico, observed that she likes to "investigate the underbelly of discarded stuff. I use mundane things to hint at deeper, darker meanings of what's going on.

"My pieces are not clear-cut," she said, gesturing towards reinterpreted cake pans and pictures cut from her mother's Spanish primers, "but they speak about family relationships and interactions and are open-ended. They embrace memories, but they are dissected and put together in new ways."

Silva, an instructor who has exhibited widely, said that "after 9/11, I found comfort in an antiseptic but familiar past." He has created a body of work peopled with images from storybooks of the '40s and '50s and family photos that has an almost hypnotic effect, suggesting as it does the safe and familiar into which touches of a nightmarish incongruity intrude. "They suggest innocence, yet question it," he said of the unsettlingly surreal world he has created.

Lowe, a lecturer who has shown work nationally and internationally, offers four monumental landscape paintings, interior monologs about the popular but impersonal retail environments our culture now takes for granted. She added that since it has difficult content, she tries to balance her work by the sheer physicality and playfulness of the paint so it "won't be such a downer."

"Empire Style" is an entire gallery dedicated to messing with your mind, as Lowe juxtaposes papier-mache likenesses of the grotesque decadence of the 19th century French court with a mural of a contemporary, homogenized strip mall, in the background of which trees stand forlornly. "Corporations are the new empire," the artist noted.

Finally, Guerrero, who focuses on the forces of history that shape our culture, offers a triptych of sorts: giant fast food images that sum up Southern California's appetites; portraits of Mexican criminals; and a mammoth canvas titled "The Desert: A Cultural Primer for Undocumented Workers," which includes pages of Vanity Fair magazine, barely visible under layers of paint, and three very bold references to the paintings of European masters.

"We have to sublimate, because we do not readily see the reality underneath," he concluded. "I, as all the artists in the show, use icons and metaphors to tell our narratives of the human condition."

The museum plans several events with the show, including gallery talks by the artists and a performance slam.

Kirby Fairfax is a freelance writer.

"Innocence Is Questionable"

When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, noon to 4 p.m. Sundays; through May 31

Where: California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum, 340 N. Escondido Blvd., Escondido

Admission: $5, adults; $4, seniors and active military; $3, students with ID; children under 12 are free

Info: (760) 839-4120

Web: artcenter.org/museum.htm

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