Sean Black
Adam Rippon, 2018, DTLA, CA
Archival Inkjet Print on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Baryta
16" x 20"
TRAJECTORIES
Friday, January 25 – Thursday, February 21, 2019
Curated by Patience Joy Flaro and presenting artworks by faculty from the Cypress College Photography Department: Sean BLACK, Renee CHARTIER, Joshua CHO, Jason DAWES, William HARE, Steven KING, Joey LEHMAN MORRIS, Aydinaneth ORTIZ, Alejandro SANCHEZ, and Julie SHAFER. MORE
Related Events
PANEL DISCUSSION
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2.30-4 PM
Trajectories artists, including Julie SHAFER and Sean BLACK, discuss their work and their pathways at a discussion moderated by exhibition curator Patience Joy Flaro.
Artists
SEAN BLACK
Sean Black is a journalist, artist, advocate and educator whose interests within the nexus of social activism and visual art drives his work with the intent of presenting thought-provoking content. He especially loves capturing people as they are.
Black is a working, editorial photographer specializing in the fields of entertainment and health journalism. His personal work and writings investigate life and the human experience through a queer lens. He holds an MFA from the University of Miami.
Renée Chartier
Untitled I
2019
Archival Pigment Print
16” x 20”
Josh Cho
Unfaithful – Untitled #1
2012
Inkjet on Baryta
2.6” x 3.5”
Renée Chartier
My work begins with the question: what does power look like? Through photographic documentation of unexpected sites of power in controlled, lyrical visual style, my work questions the notion of photographic truth, accepted beauty and value. Often framed in a cutting way and using text and found images from unknown sources, the photographs and supporting documents implicate the viewer in the understanding of the unfolding narrative, resulting in poetic relationships and metonymical associations.
The recent body of work Wild Type (working title) documents the site of a pigeon breeder in the San Fernando Valley. Constraint, suspension, release and creation exist in the systemic breeding of birds for aesthetic variance and competition. The site and subjects, both ambiguously described, provide an engagement with ideas surrounding the mythology of not only pigeons, but freedom and the notion of ownership and value. Feathers float in an algae-filled water dish, birds hang in the sky and sit behind a screen resembling a scope, bringing together a macro and micro view of the relationship between owner, other and nature.
Renée Chartier was born in Warwick, RI and lives and works in Long Beach, CA. She graduated from Cal. State University Long Beach with an M.F.A. in 2014. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and was recently an artist-in-residence at Obracadobra Residency in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Josh Cho
I am interested in the capacity of photography to re-imagine histories, subvert the sublime, and dissolve space and time. What is convincing to me about a photograph is its ability to depict surfaces and alter them simultaneously. These particular characteristics contained in the process of making photographic images are revealed, concealed, and manipulated in my work in order to address issues of temporality, site, landscape, veracity, and the medium of photography itself.
In the series Unfaithful (2012), images are collected from the internet depicting geyser-like bursts of water produced by broken fire hydrants in the urban landscape. The images are then converted to black and white, vertically recomposed, and digitally edited to discard any humans from the original photograph.”
An artist, commercial photographer, and educator, Cho received his B.F.A. from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and his M.F.A. from UC Irvine. His artwork has been shown at UCLA, UCI, CSULB, La Cienegas Projects, Santa Monica Museum of Art, San Diego Art Institute, and The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Specializing in architecture photography, his commercial work has featured in Vanity Fair, Phaidon, Architectural Record, SFGate, and the Los Angeles Times.
Jason Davis
Space Race
2016
Collage: paper & glue
19 ¾” x 19 ¾” (framed size)
Will Hare Jr.
Subway
Inkjet print on Fine Art Rag Paper
12" x 18”
Jason Dawes
“This body of work centers around the ideas of the interaction with nature, space, and the changing world around us. In a world where we are inundated with images, videos, clips, tweets, and selfies, the environment and space we occupy becomes another photo back drop or façade. Our impact on the environment, our relationship with one another and the intersection of where society, humankind, and physical space meet is my domain. With so much of our environment existing in a digital space I found it imperative to create these works with actual paper, glue, and the artist hand ever present so as to reestablish my own physical self in this digital space.”
Jason Dawes is a Southern California multi-media artist whose foundations are deeply rooted in photography. He works in various media, including photo, video, collage, photomontage, etc. Jason attended CalArts and attained his BFA in Photo & Media. He then moved on to CSUSB for his MFA in Studio Arts. Jason is a photography specialist at Chaffey College as well as an instructor of photography at a number of institutions in and around Southern California. Jason suffers from a Peter Pan complex and continues to skateboard, cycle, and collect vinyl.
Will Hare Jr
As a photo instructor I teach everything from basic photography to professional studio lighting to advanced digital tech. I’ve been a photographer for over 25 years, and teaching for a decade. I own and operate an award winning and widely published architectural photography studio specializing in both commercial and residential properties.
I teach because of the energy and fearlessness I get from the students. My goal is to give them the technical knowledge and guidance they need to get them out of their comfort zone. It’s that duality of teaching and learning at the same time that helps me to inspire my students to be critical thinkers. I want to have a conversation with the class. I strive to stop thinking about the technical aspects and to focus more on what I’m shooting. I try to get the camera to disappear.
A dystopian MIT computer model from the 1970s predicted the end of civilization by 2040. My new series, 20/40 Vision, explores the idea of a post-apocalyptic planet that is no longer inhabitable. My current work shows what normally-crowded spaces look like without people.
Steve King
Tverrfyellhytta, Reindeer Pavilion, 2016
Archival Inkjet print
20” x 30”
Steve King
A trajectory is a path, a route or track that is followed when an object moves under the action of a force. The Tverrfjellhytta Trajectories images are from a body of work completed while traveling through Norway in the winter of 2016, just south of the Arctic Circle, with the sun so low in the sky that the mountains cast shadows across the landscape in the middle of the day.
This image is from an ongoing project that is exploring the convergences between Modern Design and the Landscape. Outside the city of Oslo, this building was the only specific architectural destination for our trip: \ impossibly difficult to pronounce: Tverrfjellhytta. More commonly known and the Snohetta Reindeer Pavillion or Snohettta Viewpoint, this world renown building sits on the edge of a mountain pass where wild reindeer and musk oxen migrate from northern to southern Norway, and back. We arrived at 930 am on January 3rd, the temperature was -13C and there was a stiff 15 to 20 mph wind from the west.
Steve King is an architectural photographer, film maker, artist, and university + community college educator, living in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited nationally and his images have been published in numerous regional, national and international architectural magazines, and books, including the recent “Hollywood Modern (2018) published by Rizzoli Press. He has received numerous awards for his photography by the American Institute of Architects, including two 2017 awards for creative work in Norway. His current research explores the relationship between lens based imaging, perception, and current developments in Speculative Realism.
Joey Lehman Morris
Exuviation Consort
2008
Two chromogenic prints on Dibond, lacquer on maple frames
Each 70" x 48" x 2 1/8"
Joey Lehman Morris
Anyone, anyone who has been too haughty to try to represent and reposition the sun setting, probably should. I have been working primarily with ideas about the shaping, reshaping, and recollection of the American West at a subject for making pictures.
My pictorial work is a kind of portrait of Southern California and its material and geographic surroundings, paying attention to tangible influences that have formed the fabric of place and a construction of a geographic and cultural identity. Much of the work is preoccupied with developing a type of language that speaks toward a convergence of long and short-term histories and divergent forms of representation. Most of my pictures are large-format photographs that both romanticize and look critically at the California landscape. Sculptural in form, or with steady consideration of sculptural elements, I apply language to the representative forms in a manner that entangles or moves the image.
Lehman Morris works with photography, utilizing the sway of language on landscape in the American West. Residing and working in Los Angeles, he received a BFA from the University of Southern California (2004), and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine (2008). Exhibitions include The Unified Field, curated by David Orr, The University of Philosophical Research, Los Angeles, CA; Wüst, curated by Martin Sturm, Klukyland Gallery, Vienna; and Build Up, curated by David Kelley, at the Jewett Art Gallery, Wellesley, MA.
Aydinaneth Ortiz
Hijas de Elsie
2018
Elsie: bp. Santiago, Chile | 1978 migrated to the United States
Alejandro Sanchez
Skate Night
2018
Silver gelatin print
16” x 20”
Julie Shafer
Conquest of the Vertical: 600 miles to Eureka!
2015
Silver gelatin pinhole negative
42” x 72”
Aydinaneth Ortiz
“Hija de tu madre (2017 – ongoing), my newest photographic series, takes a step away from the trauma and focuses on the positive relationships migrant mothers and their daughters experience, while considering the historical context of portraiture and representation. Hija de tu madre is a series of portraits that counters the negative stereotypes placed on immigrants by photographing strong women who have succeeded in the United States. While the White House continues to politicize, marginalize, and generalize Latin American people, the series empowers women who continue to rise despite the multitude of challenges they continue to face. Each family is considered one body of work and titled according to the mothers' name. To give the viewer more context I include the mother’s birthplace and the year she emigrated to the United States.”
Aydinaneth Ortiz (Long Beach, 1987) received her BA in Art at the University of California, Los Angeles and MFA in Photography at the California Institute of the Arts. Utilizing documentary, landscape, and portrait photography, she focuses on intersections between urban structures, familial relationships, mental illness, drug addiction, immigration, and social contexts. Ortiz has exhibited her artwork internationally, most notably at the Pomona College Museum of Art in Claremont and the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, where she is now part of their permanent collection.
ALEJANDRO SANCHEZ
Skate Night is a documentation of an LA roller skating community that is currently facing many changes. This style of skating, that is trademarked with custom touches, is unique to the West Coast within the black community. Dress shoes on top of low “slider” wheels allow for a way of skating that is not common within mainstream pop culture. With this style of skating being banned at some rinks, and after the closure of two of the major rinks in the LA area (World on Wheels in 2013 and Skate Depot in 2014), people are forced to travel to rinks in the O.C., I.E., and the S.F. Valley in order to continue skating. These images are about individuals that have come together to keep a culture alive and thriving.
Alejandro Sanchez is a visual artist based out of El Monte, California. He received both his BFA and MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Currently, Alejandro is an adjunct professor of art at multiple colleges in Southern California including: Chaffey College, Cypress College, Cerritos College and California Institute of the Arts. Alejandro has exhibited in multiple solo and group exhibitions.
Julie Shafer
Julie Shafer’s work has recently focused on American landscapes and how our desire to conquer new territory and accumulate resources has scarred those spaces. Shafer’s Conquest of the Vertical (2012-2013) is a series of six-foot tall pinhole images of remote Native American lands in California where mining occurred in the 1800s. Shafer thinks of these as portraits, invoking the body--bodies of Native Americans forced from their land, bodies of miners who worked the land, the artist’s body in making the work, and the viewer in encountering the photographs. This land, devastated by years of gold and silver mining, makes its mark on the photographic paper and serve as evidence of a lesser-known history. Sand, dust, and snowstorms all affected the photographic chemistry and the surface of the paper (causes scratches, blotches on the surface, and chemical stains) as the images are exposed. Poignantly, the mining of these lands caused a surplus of silver, making advances in photography more affordable and accessible.
https://julie-shafer.com/home.html