CCA News
CCA Wattis Institute Presents "Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art"
Posted on Wednesday, June 9, 2004, by Brenda Tucker
The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts presents "Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art" (B2V), an exhibition that explores a revealing and animated selection of recent art created on the western edge of North America, stretching from Baja California, Mexico, to the United States and Canada. Unlike regional biennials, B2V is a tightly focused survey of representational artworks that respond to and engage with the West Coast's physical and social landscapes.
Organized collaboratively by the CCA Wattis Institute, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Seattle Art Museum and Vancouver Art Gallery, B2V features 33 artists—both established and emerging—and includes several new pieces commissioned especially for the exhibition. B2V is on view from September 23 through December 11, 2004 (note: these dates have been updated) in the Logan Galleries on the San Francisco campus of California College of the Arts; an opening reception will take place on Thursday, September 23, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public.
Though Los Angeles and, more recently, Vancouver have become internationally recognized art centers, the West Coast of North America has never before been the subject of a major survey exhibition.
"This 2,200-mile-long coastal region is both a coherent cultural corridor and a continental hub of innovative art and design. As such, it is overdue for recognition as North America's most vital region of contemporary art making. This art doesn't look to Europe or art history for validation; instead, it draws its inspiration from changes in the cultural landscape that are happening first, and accelerating more rapidly, all along the West Coast," says Wattis director Ralph Rugoff, one of the five West Coast curators who organized the exhibition.
B2V focuses on recently made work (produced within the last two to four years) in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, installation, photography, drawing, video, text pieces, web-based works and performance. Artists in the exhibition include Michael Brophy, Delia Brown, Brian Calvin, Russell Crotty, Roman de Salvo, Trisha Donnelly, Stan Douglas, Sam Durant, Thomas Eggerer, Kota Ezawa, Harrell Fletcher & Miranda July, Evan Holloway, Chris Johanson, Brian Jungen, Tim Lee, Ken Lum, Liz Magor, Matt McCormick, Roy McMakin, Mark Mumford, Shannon Oksanen & Scott Livingstone, Michele O'Marah, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, Glenn Rudolph, Steven Shearer, Catherine Sullivan, Larry Sultan, Ron Terada, Althea Thauberger, Torolab and Yvonne Venegas.
The artists in the exhibition are interested in popular forms and genres, from landscape and portraiture to vernacular signage and music videos.Their work thoughtfully reinterprets myths and reexamines histories related to West Coast cultures as diverse as the First Nations of British Columbia and the contemporary youth tribes of Los Angeles and San Francisco. The exhibition invokes patterns of immigration in the region as well as utopian visions of the "good life" and the unique topography of West Coast cities—part urban, part suburban and part wilderness. The art in B2V not only embodies a range of West Coast sensibilities, it also offers revealing portraits of the people and places on the western rim of North America and presents evidence of creative collaborations and shared aesthetic concerns among artists living and working in the region.
"Perhaps because of their relative youth as well as their geographical distance from national capitals and traditional centers of high culture, West Coast cities have nurtured ideas related to the reinvention of both self and society, and this tendency inflects the art being made here," says Rugoff.
B2V took shape through an extensive research process; the curators conducted literally hundreds of studio visits with artists in Tijuana, San Diego, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver. The B2V curatorial team consists of Ralph Rugoff, Director, and Matthew Higgs, Curator, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts; Toby Kamps, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Lisa Corrin, Deputy Director for Art, Seattle Art Museum; and Daina Augaitis, Chief Curator/Associate Director, Vancouver Art Gallery.
B2V is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, which features the artists and their works and includes essays on the themes of art and life on the West Coast of North America by novelist Douglas Coupland, novelist and NEST magazine editor Matthew Stadler and others.