DO NOT AVERT YOUR EYES

Scott Fife follows in the footsteps of Pop artists from the 1960s and 1970s by focusing on the fads and fascinations of American culture and using non-traditional materials to create his sculptures. Beginning with commercial products, he turned to objects from everyday life and also created a series of portraits of celebrities all fashioned using archival cardboard, glue, and screws. To give these simple things greater cachet, Fife often recreates them at an exaggerated scale making them literally larger-than-life.

Mexican-born artists Einar and Jamex de la Torre are brothers and artistic collaborators, who moved to the United States from Guadalajara, Jalisco in the early 1970’s.  Leaving behind the academic, religious and social rigors of an all-boys Catholic school in 1960’s Guadalajara, the de la Torre brothers ended up in the small Southern California surf town of Dana Point, where they discovered the unbridled joys of co-ed public schools.

While attending California State University at Long Beach in the 80’s, they studied sculpture and glass blowing, during which time the artist-brothers began a flame-worked glass figure business.  This business was quickly eclipsed when their artistic collaboration began in earnest in the late 1980’s with small mix media works.  In the late 1990’s, they began to do large-scale sculptural installations, eventually branching out into commissioned site-specific and public art projects.

Currently, the brothers live and work on both sides of the San Diego-Baja California border, enjoying a bi-national life style that very much informs their art.  Einar and Jamex de la Torre have worked, taught and exhibited both nationally, as well as internationally. Their distinctive three-dimensional work can be found in galleries, museum collections, Museum catalogs, as well as in various public art installations.

The human figure has fascinated ceramic sculptor Patti Warashina for most of her 55+ year art career. Her sustaining interest in the human figure is likely due to the fact that her own body is the closest resource from which she draws her ideas. The use of the body gives affirmation to Warashina’s own daily existence, and serves as the subject of her own “visual diary” which, for Warashina, is a reminder, reflection, and observation of personal time and the civilization in which she lives. Warashina draws from her daily life and has an abnormal interest in the absurdity and foibles of human behavior, in which her figures have become the actors in her introspective narratives.

I have now been doing hollowware – hammering 3D forms out of flat sheet metal – for nearly 30 years. It is a very slow process but satisfies my need to do something expressive, which involves both mind and body in a kind of conversation.  What has remained constant in my work is an interest in the beauty of ordinary objects, and in the way objects can seem to have a life of their own and to connect us to fragments of our history.  I usually conceive of the bottles in relationship to one another:  as we are highly social, so are they.  Some are explicitly stand-ins for humans, others less so. What is different in this new work is the addition of words to many of the bottles.  The relationship of objects and language has always interested me, but the only evidence of this in my work was in the titles.