SoCal Comeback: The Return of OsCene

Laguna Art Museum’s “OsCene” returns to show what’s hip and happening in the SoCal art world

How quickly time flies. It’s been four years since Laguna Art Museum staged its last “OsCene,” the survey exhibition meant to showcase the best of the Orange County art scene. After gaining cred for curating “The World of Warcraft,” recently hired chief curator Grace Kook-Anderson puts her stamp on the show initiated by predecessor Tyler Stallings.

“I wanted to cast my nets wider, beyond the confines of Orange County, and bring in artists from Long Beach and San Pedro, cities that have a vital art scene and that form a bridge between us and Los Angeles,” she says.

Keeping with tradition, she has included film and music (teaming up with film curator Keiko Beattie and music curator Ashley Eckenweiler), and keeps things edgy by emphasizing photography and video, drawing, installation and performance over conventional painting or sculpture.

Eschewing a theme, Kook-Anderson says she wants to illustrate the breadth of the physical and social landscape of the area. Jennifer Celio’s drawings, for example, document the changing face of an urban street through time, decay and development.

“There are no repeat artists from 2006, but new ones spanning several generations,” she says. She emphasizes that there is a trend toward narrative art based on personal experiences and social commentary and expressed surprise at the strong resurgence of ceramics as creative expression.

Note Stephanie Bachiero’s retro-Bauhaus sculptural forms and, on the other end of the spectrum, Melissa Thomson’s Red Progression, a series of cubes made from the same clay but fired at different temperatures to create a dark-to-light value scale. “I wanted to find a way to visually show how clay transforms itself in the kiln, often beyond an artist’s control,” Thomson says.

Since the artists range in age from their early 20s to mid-60s, there are a number of narrative pieces that reflect artists’ personal journeys and life experiences. Cheryl Ekstrom’s Out on a Limb is a sculpture that was first realistically constructed from bronze, plastic, resin and fabric and then deconstructed (destroyed) into an expressive amalgam of abstraction and representation.

“I am going way out on a limb with the piece,” says Ekstrom. “I am telling a story that many already know about the breakup of my marriage and its resurrection as a reconfigured relationship.”

Rebecca Erbstoesser voices the ambivalence of a woman who, mid-life, had to redefine herself in Empty Nest, a multimedia drawing based on geometric shapes and sculptural forms placed and then traced on paper. “The piece was done during a period in my life when everything changed—the kids moved out, the dog died and I had to leave a place I loved. Making the piece restored hope in the future,” she says.

One-name artist Yasuko references her experience as a very young immigrant from Japan in multimedia photographs incorporating still clips from Disney’s Snow White. By photographing a beautiful Asian model coiffed like the “fairest of them all” and placing her into scenes from the film, she positions herself as an observer of her own past and present.

Wedding contains an image of a Shinto ceremony that alludes to traditions that survived in post-World War II Japan and that have formed her psyche. Placed into the Disney context, the artist’s conflicts about cultural adjustments become clear, while Minority features social commentary on outcast or marginalized minorities in Japan and the United States.

Speaking of marginalization, Gina Genis’ photographs illustrate the elderly’s frequently insulated existence in places like Laguna Woods. At day’s end, exhausted from caring for a mother with dementia, Genis tells of walking around and photographing people and things she saw in their lit windows. One of the results is The Pack Rat, a photo that speaks for the complex lives of people who once contributed to a society that now shunts them aside.

“Originally, I had no intention of showing the work but then decided that the images were more than mere expressions of my personal feelings,” she says.

For younger artists such as McLean Fahnestock, history offers inspiration. She examines the effects of television on people’s beliefs and faith in events such as the first moon landing. “I can understand how unbelievable that must have looked at the time,” she says. “I often wonder if we lost our skepticism to television.”

Her video/sculpture titled St. Claire of Burbank (yes, television has a patron saint: St. Claire) consists of a 1950s-style TV on which a video of said moon landing takes place. “I know I will never go to the moon and could question whether anyone really has, but I wanted to open doors of faith and also question how far we can trust the media to tell us the truth,” says Fahnestock.