William Rolland Gallery of Fine Art Kwan Fong Gallery of Art and Cultur

California Lutheran University plays host to two exhibitions that ship viewers to faraway places while making them feel right at abode. Blueish Similar Me at the William Rolland Gallery features piece of work by Siona Benjamin, an Indian-born artist based in New Jersey. In the nearby Kwan Fong Gallery is Time Traveler: Compass by Rotem Reshef, an abstract activeness painter who works in Tel Aviv and New York.

Blue Like Me , William Rolland Gallery

"Information technology is nice to be reminded of shared aspects of humanity," says Rachel Schmid, curator of Blue Similar Me. "[I] was fatigued to the mode [Benjamin's] work underlies a commonality across multiple religions, geographies and cultures. She can take something that is substantially very human — like loneliness, fright, vengeance, excitement, dear — and translate it with motifs influenced by Persian, Indian, Muslim, Jewish and even contemporary American art. They're so confederate that you're likely to run into Hebrew, English, Hindi and Arabic, and yet everything feels familiar considering, if you're able to recognize even just one aspect of the piece, like the American flag, yous feel a sense of home."

That sense of abode and not home is fundamental to Benjamin'southward work. She was brought up Jewish in the predominantly Hindu and Muslim India, attended a Catholic middle school and a Zoroastrian high school, then emigrated to the U.s.a.. "I always had to reverberate on and consider the cultural borderland in which I seemed to discover myself," Benjamin explained during an ELI Talk sponsored by the AVI CHAI Foundation. Schmid describes Benjamin's piece of work as "multimedia in every sense of the word," adding that it "incorporates reproduction with painting, cartoon, hand-embellishments, rhinestones, gold leaf, bullet casings, installation, projection, operation and more. I feel that part of the reason the work resonates is because in a sense she is the piece of work."

Many of Benjamin's pieces feature images of women — sometimes a self-portrait, sometimes a dancer, sometimes a Syrian refugee — who are depicted in the most cute shade of blueish. "My childhood was something that seemed hard to explain," Benjamin has said. Her childhood was a earth of what she refers to as "unexplainable things": synagogues in the middle of Mumbai, Jewish women wearing saris, Jewish brides with henna on their hands. "In my attempt to explain these unexplainable things," she adds, "my pare turned blue and I became the color of the sky and the bounding main, belonging everywhere and nowhere at the same time."

That sense of belonging "everywhere and nowhere" resonates throughout her work. "Exodus: I Run across Myself in Yous" depicts Syrian refugees set against a background of paradise motifs. Another section of Bluish Like Me includes portraits from the "Faces" series, which earned Benjamin a Fulbright scholarship. A portrait of a decorated war hero shares the space with one of a local caterer. "I liked that all members of the community were equal in value," comments Schmid.

Several other works rounding out the showroom eloquently and powerfully challenge what Schmid calls "the othering of people that nosotros do."

Fourth dimension Traveler: Compass , Kwan Fong Gallery

A lovely walk across campus to the Kwan Fong Gallery leads you to Time Traveler: Compass past Rotem Reshef. The work is striking in its size and impact. Bursting with color, move and sheer magnitude, the work stretches two stories tall and includes six continued scrolls, each representing a season. "Reshef imprinted different materials, by and large plastics and threads, on the canvases," explains curator Sagi Refael. "She added an boosted characteristic representing each season: raffia for summer, cellophane for winter, ribbons for spring and leaves for autumn."

Rotem Reshef, creator of the installation Time Traveler: Compass.

Another version of Fourth dimension Traveler was first exhibited at the University of La Verne. For the installation at Kwan Fong, explains Refael, "Reshef wanted to use the same scrolls in a new mode. This transition represents both the changes that the world has been going through . . . besides as to evidence how art tin shift and become completely different while using the same materials, much like the four seasons echo each year but never in the same way."

Time Traveler has been described as a lighthouse, representing "a safe land." Refael explains that it invites viewers to "search for the compass inside themselves and reverberate on the times we live in. Its size inspires the viewer to motion in front of it to catch every particular. Instead of the viewer standing however, Reshef aims to create an artwork that activates the entire body of the viewer, to brand him/her walk dorsum and forth, get closer to the painting in social club to see texture and variations of color, but likewise to go back and see the fuller picture, both from the ground level of the installation and from the balcony of the Kwan Fong Gallery."

The work bears the shape of a cross but is not meant to exist religious. "Reshef suggests that art tin evoke a spiritual and meaningful experience," Refael says, "not by praying [to] a divine entity, but past looking inside and finding oneself reflected in the artwork. [The artwork] reveals the soul of the creative person, connecting to the soul of the viewer."

Both Benjamin's and Reshef's works pause downwards barriers while celebrating differences and highlighting commonalities nosotros all share. Every piece is a soulful trip the light fantastic toe to the rhythm of humanity. This beingness Women's History Month (acknowledged with the understanding that women make history every single mean solar day), at that place's no ameliorate time to take in the works of smashing women artists. To their credit, the galleries of California Lutheran Academy often feature the work of women artists. Today they are giving Siona Benjamin and Rotem Reshef their rightful places in the sun. Seeing their work promises to be enlightening.

Come across Bluish Similar Me through April 12 and Fourth dimension Traveler: Compass though Apr 8 at California Lutheran Academy, 60 West Olsen Rd, Thousand Oaks. For more than information, telephone call 493-3697 or visit rollandgallery.callutheran.edu or blogs.callutheran.edu/kwanfong/.

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Source: https://vcreporter.com/2018/03/on-exhibit-navigating-cultural-and-personal-borderlands-at-clus-kwan-fong-and-william-rolland-galleries/

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