tanya batura

Lineage: Mentorship & Learning highlights the impact and importance of the teacher/student relationship. This exhibition illustrates the thread connecting multiple generations of ceramic artists from Peter Voulkos to today’s students.

For decades there has been an impressive variety and strength in California’s colleges and universities ceramic programs. AMOCA invited 25 current educators from the state to participate in Lineage. In addition to inviting the educators to exhibit their own work in the show, we asked them to identify their most influential instructors or mentors and to nominate their most promising students or recent alumni. A panel then reviewed the nominations and selected the artists to include in the exhibition. The artwork in Lineage ranges from functional to sculptural with the artists exploring a wide range of forms, techniques and narratives.

 
 
AMOCA is proud to feature the work of the past, present, and future of ceramics and education.

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After Eve and Adam were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they were faced with the awareness of their bodies. Shame, transgression, the stigma from nakedness and an impulse to hide were introduced to their lives. The artists in AFTER EDEN each work with the body in various ways. They poke and prod at the trappings of our skin and our flesh, which are entangled in symbolism and our own associations and stories. How image is created, how the body is understood and received, how we use our own bodies and how we share in agency with others’ bodies are all questions considered.

The art presented departs from conventional portrayals of the human form and image. These works allude to the body in unfamiliar ways that are often intimate and complex. There is an undercurrent of what the body can symbolize in terms of identity, the self, one's psychology and how these change when associated with an other. Transgression and transcendence, the abject and the seductive, beauty and the grotesque are all intermingled — their borders confused and overlapping.

Please join us from 6 to 10 p.m. July 18 for the one-night reception and performances. Viewings are available by appointment July 20 to 24, 2015.

Contact Virginia Broersma at vbroersma@gmail.comor 562-477-4974 for more details.

www.jausart.com

Please join us at JAUS for the closing reception of "Head Space" a two person exhibition featuring new sculptures by Tanya Batura, and new paintings and drawings by Brian Cooper.

Also, for the evening of the closing reception, Cooper will be performing live music as Earth Like Planets. www.earthlikeplanets.bandcamp.com/

Batura and Cooper were paired to exhibit together for multiple reasons. Upon first observation, one immediately notices that both demonstrate a high degree of craft, with a majority of their recent works adhering to a restrained, relatively monochromatic palette. In contrast to the somberness of their color schemes, the works present a subtle and wry humor of sensual forms that playfully allude to their inner thoughts and ruminations.

On a more conceptual level, the two artists diverge in that Cooper, with his most recent series “Empty Space Is Not Nothing”, draws inspiration from nature and science documentaries that describe space as a physical and malleable substance. Reminiscent of his earlier sculptures, he connects to more familiar objects like fleshy bodies, lumps of clay or upholstered cushions. Batura, on the other hand, views her giant ceramic heads as incorporeal objects that explore themes of death and the physicality of the human body. With her more recent sculptures, she finds inspiration from her childhood fascination with books and images relating to séances and the occult. She is focused on giving substance to the ectoplasmic manifestations that frightened her as a child.

In spite of these differences, what unites the recent work of Batura and Cooper most compellingly, is the fact that they strive to reach for and make sense of what most people would consider the “unknown”. They long to give thoroughly detailed form to imagined realms that lie beneath, behind or beyond our immediate surroundings. In this sense, there is perhaps a nod to Surrealism. Yet unlike their manifesto waving predecessors, the quirky, almost self-deprecating tone gives both of their work a fresh, sympathetic quality allowing for multiple readings that lie somewhere in the nether regions of childlike awe and self-conscious wit.