The Fine Arts gallery at Cerritos College opened their doors once again and hosted two different, but equally appealing showcases, one curated by professor Hagop Najarian and another by professor Sergio Teran.
The opening reception on Oct. 30, quickly filled with friends, colleagues and students of both Najarian and Teran.
While timing is everything, the curators seemed to have picked a perfect time to showcase the art gallery; students are getting out of class, fellow colleagues are also done for the night and the evening went along smoothly as Najarian and Teran hosted and entertained their guests.
Keeping it local, Najarian and Teran selected to showcase artists in the Los Angeles area.
This isn’t Najarian’s first rodeo. Having painted dozens of art piece beforehand, he was able to curate the art showcase Polychromatic Mojo: Color as Content with ease.
Although, Najarian said the difficult part of curating was theming the abundance of art pieces the artists generously gave, together, while being cautious as to not overcrowd the show.
Najarian’s choice of art were paintings, which is fitting, since he recently had a showcase of his own at Rio Hondo College, exhibiting his abstract paintings.
Time and Space: 122 hours of Ink: Work from the Cerritos College Summer Printmaking Residency, curated by Teran focuses on the art of printmaking.
With the residency hosted by Teran, artists are invited to create pieces with the art of printmaking.
Printing is the art of multiples and is essentially making everything by hand and putting it onto paper, said Teran. While it does not incorporate using anything digital, it is a traditional art form.
“The artists we’ve invited are pretty much professional artists. They’re artists who have been around Los Angeles, who have made a name for themselves through art, they’ve worked as gallery artists and museum artists,” said Teran.
The artists Teran had invited to showcase had never done printmaking before and had once attended the residency of printmaking. Thus the work displayed in the art gallery are new works for the artists.
While many of the artists showcased in the gallery were in attendance. Linda King, being one of them, explained the three paintings that are featured.
Working on several paintings at a time, King starts with pours, (pours are essentially dropping large amounts of paint into a certain spot of the canvas, and then making the pours into shapes and patterns) and edits them into shapes.
King’s paintings can take up to seven months and her paintings have “developed to be sort of about memory, time, microscopic and the universe.”
Audrey Chan, featured in the Time and Space showcase, had an interesting self-portrait made of silkscreen.
“You know, I haven’t been really doing that many self-portraits, so it was just fun to do it, but it’s actually a silkscreen of a tiny sculpture that I made a few years ago out of sculpting clay,” said Chan as she laughed.
While her focus on self-portraits has passed, Chan is now working on digital murals, which as she explained are, “digitally-produced murals that are then fabricated at a large scale.”
Many of the attendees of the showcase attracted art, design and graphic design majors, and some of which attended the showcase for inspiration.
Monique Edwards, graphic design major and previous student of Najarian, says she came to the art gallery because of her interest in color and seeing how other artists use color.
Polychromatic Mojo: Color as Content and Time and Space: 122 hours of Ink; Work from the Cerritos College Summer Printmaking Residency will continue on at the Fine Arts gallery until Dec. 7.
