Exhibition: July 5 to 26, 2014
Opening: Saturday, July 5, 6 -10pm (free shuttle between venues)
OCCCA VAALA Cultural Center
117 N. Sycamore St. 1600 N. Broadway, Suite 210
Santa Ana, CA 92701 Santa Ana, CA 92706
Gallery hours:
Thursday to Sunday, 12 – 5pm
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
To learn more about OCCCA, click here >>
Statement by curator, Richard Turner
At the end of The Wizard of Oz, the Good Witch of the North tells Dorothy that
she can return home by clicking her heels together and repeating “There’s no
place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” Even
a cursory look at the work in this OCCCA / VAALA collaborative exhibition Home
tells us emphatically that there is indeed no longer a place like home, at least
not the home to which Dorothy and Toto return at the end of the film. If there
is any vestige of a connection between today’s home and the home depicted in
the 1939 film, it is the home seen at the beginning of the film rather than the
end, the home that is swept up into the clouds by a twister, the unstable, topsy-
turvy structure that has been ripped from its foundations and hurled skyward.
Dorothy’s floating bed, the whirling images and nightmare dizziness transform
the familiar into the frightening which is the case with many of the pieces in this
exhibition. The home, as depicted in this exhibition is a site occupied, for the
most part, by dysfunctional families and disoriented people.
It has been said that adults don’t have homes, only children do. The ideal home,
that place that represents comfort, safety and control is often, for adults a
wishful fantasy that some of us spend our entire lives trying to return to. That is,
of course, impossible. “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your
childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back
home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things
which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home
to the escapes of Time and Memory.” (Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home
Again).
As we see again and again in this exhibition, the real or imagined homes of our
childhoods have been abandoned and they are presented as ruins. Or they
have been demolished entirely, bulldozed away in the name of progress. The
pressures of a down-turned economy have transformed them from brick and
mortar structures into mobile homes, tents and in the worst case scenarios they
have disappeared altogether leaving their residents literally home-less.
Those that still exist are no longer safe havens, they are invaded by electronic
media that lay siege to privacy disrupt intimacy. What little hope for the idea of
home that we see in this work is in images of people who have made an uneasy
peace with chaos, who have been able to relax into disorder, who have found
a sense of meaning in mythologizing their mundane lives, who have made their
homes into places of mystery and seduction. Ultimately every artist in this show
has found a home for him or herself in being an artist, in making art and thereby
creating that safe place of comfort and control for themselves – a home within a
home.
About curator
Artist/curator Richard Turner is Professor Emeritus at Chapman University where he taught contemporary Asian art history and studio art. He lived in Saigon, Vietnam from 1959 -1961. He studied Chinese painting and language in Taipei, Taiwan in 1963-1964 and Indian miniature painting in Jaipur, Rajasthan in 1967 -1968 while on a Fulbright scholarship. As Director of Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery from 1975 – 2011, he curated over seventy exhibitions including several that examined the art and issues of Asian American communities in California and the contemporary art of Asia. His most recent curatorial project, Facing West / Looking East for the Oceanside Museum of Art, featured works by 20 artists who shared a common interest in borrowing, recycling and sampling from the cultures of Asia for their content and commentary. His current studio work is sculpture and drawing based on his interest in Chinese scholars rocks.
Selected Artists
Orly Aviv, Sonia Barrett, Pat Berger, Victoria Chapman, Michael Chomick, Patricia Houghton Clarke, Valerie Colston, Rodney Daut, Cheryl Derricotte, James Doyle, Malcolm Easton, Daniel Evans, Michael Falzone, Catherine Forster, Judy Gardner, Jeff Gillette, bruce Gundersen, Ting Ying Han, Victoria Heilweil, Doug Herbilla, Stacey Herzing, David Hollen, Joe Johnson, Allyson Klutenkamper, Kerry Kolenut, Eric Landes, Anthony Lazorko, Tiffany Ma, Tony Maher, Stuart McCall, Allyson McCandless, Rocky McCorkle, Dan McCormack, Jim McKinniss, Doris Mitsch, Jon Ng, Roget Nguyen, Vann Nguyen, Brad Pettigrew, Zoe Phillips, Nicholas Potter, Robin Repp, Michael Rohde, Michael Allyn Roy, Edward L. Rubin, Stephanie J Ryan, Vinothini Sachithananthan, Emilia Sadeghi, Tamsin Salehian, Mark Schoon, Jane Szabo, Cynthia Velasquez, Allison Watkins, Jerry Weems, Denise Weyhrich, Patrick Whitaker