Openings

By Meg Linton Daniel Porras, Distraction and Diversion with Direction, 2020, oil on canvas, 44”x33.5” As things are opening back up, yet again, I’ve been venturing out to look at art. I wound up in San Pedro and discovered Cornelius Projects, a contemporary art space run by artist and curator Laurie Steelink who shines a light on artists living and/or working in this seaside community located on Tongva Territory. The current exhibition on view through March 26, 2022 is called DUST & WISPS and features watercolors by...

23 February, 2022 /

By Joel Woodard Jordan Christian just wrapped up his latest solo exhibition at the F+ Gallery in Santa Ana. F+ has been in business for 9 years at the Santiago Street Art Lofts (one of the few remaining art galleries there). Situated just down the street from the Santa Ana train station, the Lofts also sit just blocks away from Logan Creative, where Jordan Christian and F+ owner Micah Kersh first met. At that time...

12 April, 2021 /

Last month, over thirty artists from the 2020 Festival of Arts of Laguna Beach opened their private art studios and gallery venues for visitors to take a no-cost, self-guided journey through the Orange County coast in an event called “Art Along the Coast.” For two consecutive weekends, artists from San Clemente to Santa Ana shared their new art as well as works in progress to locals looking to support and connect with the art scene in their community. This was a great opportunity for both...

21 September, 2020 /

Paradise for SoCal art lovers during summertime is usually Laguna Beach. With three art festivals, the Pageant of the Masters, many art galleries displaying their treasures and rotating exhibitions at Laguna Art Museum, the city has been a garden of earthly delights for decades. Of course, this summer is different. The throngs of art-viewing tourists and residents — along with local artists eager to talk about and sell their work — are replaced by quiet streets and empty art venues, thanks to COVID-19. However, the abundance...

10 August, 2020 /

On a bright, sunny day in Fullerton, a man dug a pickaxe into the soft earth of his front garden. His strenuous expressions were hidden behind the cover of a cloth mask. Directly across from his cottage-like home is the manicured lawn on the north end of The Muckenthaler Cultural Center, which has just installed a new contemporary sculpture. The steel sculpture towers at twelve feet high. It is one of the many new highlights at The Muck. The sculpture is called Godot, by contemporary Orange...

26 May, 2020 /

With the art world on lockdown, and with many of us desiring, even needing, to feed our art addictions, many visual and performing arts organizations throughout the OC are getting creative with how they remain relevant to the larger OC art scene. Luckily, many art organizations are offering opportunities for the public to still engage and enjoy art digitally, whether it be through live streaming, virtual tours, social media engagement, online art collection browsing, film screenings, videos of recorded performances, or through art-related lectures. This...

18 May, 2020 /

The Brea Art Gallery is a small, distinct gallery that is often overlooked; however, its current exhibition, “Chapter One,” is a reminder that it is a staple of Orange County. An inviting display of imaginative multimedia artworks can be seen from the glass outside. What lies inside is an arena of fantasy and storybook beginnings. The exhibition’s central theme is tying together the importance of imagination and narrative-based art, which shows through its display of works from many different types of mediums. Visitors who come to...

11 February, 2020 /

Saturday night I made it to the opening of Re:Balance at the Irvine Arts Center. All around a great show but the stand out in the show was the work of Ching Ching Chen. I wanted to write something more detailed here but for the sake of transparency, I bought a piece from the show. That's how much I liked the work. As I was standing in front of one of the pieces from the Letting Go series, I overheard a couple behind me discussing...

18 November, 2018 /

This Saturday night a special show, curated by Jim Ellsberry and Suzanne Walsh, opens at the HB Art Center. Color Vision brings together scientifically and culturally engaging aspects of how we perceive and utilize color. Featuring a group of contemporary artists who use color not only as a medium, but as an element of their message. Presented in three dynamic groupings: The Architecture of Color, Color Theory, and The Practical Applications of Color.​ Don't miss it! ...

03 May, 2018 /

[caption id="attachment_6776" align="aligncenter" width="650"] Matt Maust, Dum Vacation, 2016, detail images[/caption] The worlds of rock music and fine art have long traded personnel back and forth, from John Lennon dropping out of art school to make music as one of the Beatles to Captain Beefheart dropping out of music to make paintings as Don Van Vliet. Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, whose solo show at the Akron Museum of Art just ended, is a more recent exemplar of the creative spirit who is able to walk in both...

05 September, 2016 /

[caption id="attachment_6756" align="aligncenter" width="545"] Rainbow Watercolor by Bumblebeelovesyou[/caption]   When I first visited DAX gallery for its opening in 2013 owner Alex Amador had big plans for the Costa Mesa space that would bring fine urban art to Orange County. Over the past few years, in part due to how hard it can be to maintain a gallery, DAX has shuffled around some of its original aspirations. I was curious to see what the gallery was up to when I met with  curator Alec Van Sealund for the August...

17 August, 2016 /

Mark Zuckerberg by Ray Turner 6:45 p.m., Costa Mesa Mark Zuckerberg, having done as much as anyone who isn’t Steve Jobs to push us all headlong into the digital age (whether we wanted it or not) now tastes the revenge of the analog world in a show of paintings at Coastline Gallery. Curated by David Michael Lee, Like MARK features the Facebook founder’s face as portrayed by the likes of F. Scott Hess, Julio Labra and Bradford J. Salamon. [caption id="attachment_6715" align="alignright" width="150"]Marinus Welman, Harnessing the Energy (detail)[/caption] “Revenge”...

01 August, 2016 /

4:30 p.m., Venice Los de Abajo is a Southern California printmaking collective whose members strive to keep alive the Latin American tradition of printmaking while also experimenting with new techniques and individual expression. Their show "Division: Reflections and Shadows" at SPARC in Venice, Calif., an Art Deco former police station, is socially-engaged in a way uniquely appropriate to the coming Trumpocalypse, as in Yvette Mangual's Flight, inspired by the Caltrans immigrant crossing signs on the I-5, or Daniel González's Unidos o Morimos, which plays off of...

26 June, 2016 /

The Orange Coast Review is Orange Coast College's literary journal. The current issue (which I art directed) contains sixteen pages of art from mostly local artists working in various media, including works by Bradford Salamon, Lindsay Buchman, Pamela Diaz Martinez, Nguyen Ly and Riley Waite, who is represented by two pieces from his Playing With Fire series of portraits of young heroin addicts drawn with candle soot on paper. The cover painting by Fatima Jamil combines traditional realism with contemporary abstraction. A reading from the journal...

26 April, 2016 /

“SUCCESSIONS” OPENING: April 2, 2016 Jamie Brooks Fine Art 2967 Randolph Avenue Unit C, Costa Mesa, CA 92626 949-929-4143 What is better than an artist’s fresh, brand new, and stimulating paintings? It is seeing David Michael Lee’s 15 year retrospective “Successions”. In this expanse of time, Lee, through his daring and personal exploration of accepted painterly elements, broadens our understanding of artistic possibilities. From graduate school to the present, the groupings of work encompass the artist’s thought processes and perseverance, and how he tackles each problem with zest. Yet, noteworthy...

12 April, 2016 /

Trace Mendoza creates hypnotic work that makes you feel inspired, inquisitive and strangely euphoric.   A seemingly schizophrenic fixation with cultural iconography, his Southern California homeland, psychedelic design, deconstructivism, and unlikely pairings, OC artist Trace Mendoza finds strange and fascinating narratives in his creations that are just as fantastical and weird as the artist himself. With an overtone of whimsy, Mendoza’s artworks combine the darkness of the unknown spaces in each of us with the bright and colorful obsession with advertising, capitalism and cultural pressure that is inherent...

10 December, 2015 /

Written by: Roberta Carasso The selection of work by artists – Arno Kortschot, Connie Goldman, and Gary Petersen – is a look into the dimensions artists develop to express formal and spatial ideas – fully dimensional, the suggestion of dimension, and the illusion of dimensionality on a flat canvas. Also, because the art is intermixed, one artist’s work hung near another artist’s work, the viewer is given an additional opportunity to contemplate far more spatial and formal possibilities had the art been compartmentalized artist by artist....

24 November, 2015 /

The First Friday art walk in Oakland, California — known as Oakland Art Murmur — is a chance for galleries throughout the city, from uptown to downtown to Jingletown, to throw open their doors for an art-loving public. Current shows of note include Kurt Fishback’s “51 Portraits of Women Artists” through July 18 at Transmission Gallery in West Oakland and Chicago-based painter and textile artist Samantha Bittman’s “Material Data” through July 4 at Johansson Projects. The Friday commute is a killer for Orange County residents though,...

07 June, 2015 /

The 2015 faculty exhibition opened tonight at Cal State Fullerton’s Begovich Gallery (a chance, perhaps, for students to grade the teachers). Fine artists in the show include Julie Orser, Joe Biel and Joe Forkan. Rebecca Campbell fills an oven with classic paperback literature in Liebe Mütti (courtesy of LA Louver), presumably to be cooked until done at 451° Fahrenheit. Jim Jenkins supplies a kinetic sculpture consisting of school chairs, dunce cap, globe and paper airplane entitled I Ain’t Much for Book Learnin’ and John Leighton...

12 April, 2015 /

Saturday night the Mat Gleason curated exhibition conTEXTual abstraction opens at Peter Blake Gallery. This group show will feature artists that utilize various forms of text in their work and includes Mark Dutcher, Jonmarc Edwards, Gary Lang, Molly Larkey, Adam Mars, William Powhida, Cole Sternberg, and Tim Youd. Gleason, a long time art critic and curator, founded the Coagula Art Journal in 1992 and now runs the dynamic exhibition space Coagula Curatorial in Chinatown.  Gleason is also a long time Angels fan and is no stranger...

16 March, 2015 /