NORWALK, CA.- Cerritos College Art Gallery is pleased to announce PHOTOS: Heather Cantrell; Yoko Kanayama and Santos R. Vasquez. A group photography exhibit featuring three Los Angeles-based artists who’s distinct view is reflective of their varied backgrounds.
Heather Cantrell, born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky has her MFA from UCLA and BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. Ms. Cantrell has produced a series of photos that function as a historical epitaph of the persons and places that have helped shaped the basis of her creative vision. Corpus Battalgia is an ode to things past and remembered. Not only of those things in the artist’s life, but a gentle reminder that we all come from somewhere. An effigy of battlefields, war memorial statues and portraits of each of her mother’s ex-husbands – Corpus Battalgia is the body of Ms. Cantrell’s past. The battlefield from which the artist has survived, she has turned back to reflect and memorialize her own experience, shaping it – not through the lens of overt personal indulgence – but through an honesty and comic tragedy that shape these images in a way that each of us has lived.
Yoko Kanayama, born and raised in Kyoto, Japan has an early B.A. in Economics and Business Administration in addition to a later BFA from Otis College of Art and an MFA from CalArts. It is clear that Ms. Kanayama uses the same type of systematic rigor applied to economic theories and business models as she does in her photographs. “Life Is Elsewhere, 2005 Cerritos College” is a cross-section of five different countries and their reflective cultures - wonderfully democratic and peculiarly subjective - engaged with a social study of culture and its resultant detritus. Reflective of a kind of theory purported and refuted – Ms. Kanayama’s photographs are social documents of the kind of sameness and difference we all embody, no matter the background, without arriving at a kind of blind homogeneity. While re-presenting a cross-section of our difference, Ms. Kanayama maintains the Economist’s objectivity and the Artist’s subjectivity, creating images that are neither wholly disconnected nor overtly romanticized.
Santos R. Vasquez, born and raised in Los Angeles, California has his BFA from Otis College of Art and an MFA from UCLA. The only L.A. native among the three, Mr. Vasquez presents a series of library photographs that capture a few of his interests: information, people and architecture. Not necessarily in that order, Mr. Vasquez re-presents libraries from the inside out – breaking them down, then rebuilding them for us in a disarmingly simple and poetic manner. All interior shots, a lens into the intellect – Mr. Vasquez captures the intense engagement both he and his subjects have with an expansion of the mind. In this series, his subjects are those persons who have been intimately involved with the making of meaning – the library patron and the way in which they activate text; the library employees and their maintenance of the library’s contents and functions; the architect and his or her ability to shape a structure that promotes democracy and empowerment and finally, the artist, whose passionate interest of all of those things is poignantly documented in a rich, expansive image.
