Author: elenaharveycollins_aihd6b

Caleb Duarte: Chuchería

Art Space Gallery at Fresno City College, March 9 – April 9, 2020

Caleb Duarte works in public sculpture, performance, and painting. He uses ordinary construction materials to create temporary structures; these often become sites for performances that Duarte organizes in collaboration with communities, most recently working with unaccompanied minors seeking asylum. In Chuchería (loosely translated as a thing of little value), Duarte uses drywall, lumber, packed earth, cement, and plaster to construct a spatial intervention in the gallery. Chuchería reflects on the powerful symbolism of home, systems of value as they relate to art history and culture, and the expansiveness of decolonial art practices in Zapatista indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico.

Liz Roberts

GOING PUBLIC

Art Space Gallery at Fresno City College, October 10 – November 21, 2019

Recorded at Fresno City College and at CMAC (Community Media Access Collaborative) in downtown Fresno, GOING PUBLIC is a DIY public access TV show, directed by artist and filmmaker Liz Roberts and made with the participation of FCC students and members of the Fresno artist community. Episodic and accumulative, GOING PUBLIC builds over time as content is added, re edited, and looped. Thinking about issues of access, representation, local public conversations, and documentary, through the lens of a community college gallery.

Episode One: PILOT includes music and an interview with local punk band Squid Ink, and student generated content in the form of art tutorials and skits. Episode Two: How To includes a paint color mixing tutorial with Fresno based artist Kezia Harrell and her brother, Chaim Harrell, and more student skits and tutorials.

Episode One: PILOT screened at 6pm on October 10 at the Art Space Gallery, with simultaneous broadcast through Community Media Access Collaborative (Comcast Xfinity Channel 93 and AT&T U-Verse Channel 99 in the Fresno area). Episode Two screened on November 7th.

Sylvia Savala’s paintings are fluid and gestural with a strong, Chicanx feminist perspective. Figures and objects sit in swirling, fields of color, symbols, and form. Her works often chronicle dreams, personal narratives, and the ebb and flow of relationships. They express the power of female desire and sensuality, often placing her body, and by extension, her identity as a Mexican-American woman, unapologetically front and center.

A sense of emancipation, fun, and self-love characterize Sylvia Savala’s paintings, with the artist’s irrepressible sense of humor evident in works such as Let them Eat Cake (2001)—a lewd play on the mythical words of Marie Antoinette at the time of the French Revolution—and Fast Car (2015) in which furious but measured brushstrokes capture a car as it speeds away from the frame. Lately, Savala’s paintings have become increasingly abstract, with towering, geometric, compositions  of cakes and other objects filling the frame. 

Savala has spent most of her life in the Fresno area. Her home, like the homes of many artists, is an important part of her creative life and practice: it is filled with furniture, art, and color collected over time. Acknowledging this, we recreate a small part of her home studio within the Art Space Gallery.