Campus Updates & Messages

2:21 pm

June 1 – August 11, 2024

Fever Dream explores resonance, metamorphosis, multispecies relationships, and entanglements among organisms, oceanscapes, and sound.

Sourcing field recordings from sea caves, atmospheric river events, decomposing trees, aquaria, animals, and climatic phenomena, the opera expands our human-centered understanding of perception / world-making to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans. Wild bats and beetles, sea lion pups and tortoises, coyotes and hagfish, cicadas and cormorants, marine isopods and bees are among the many animals voicing the score.

Metamorphoses abound. Tree frogs transmogrify into brass bugles, pupae into pipe organ pistons. Sea caves and juniper trees transform into cellos.

The project experiments with expanding our senses of perception to consider different understandings of time, sounding and sensing. When we hear the glassy bells of starfish tube feet, we are hearing feet walking, tasting, and smelling all at once. Recordings of echolocating bats open our ears to means of sensing via pulse and echo. Buzzing cicadas reveal a world of sounding reliant on tympanal vibration and abdominal resonance.

Field recordings of animal vocalizations are arranged with recordings of local sea caves. Bowing wires that have been stretched across cave mouths allows us to hear a cave’s range of resonance, its unique acoustical architecture.

An ancient juniper tree also plays into the score. Copper wires stretched across a fire-carved scar in a 1000+ year old juniper are activated with a cello bow, with the tree itself acting as the resonant body for the wires’ vibrations. When we hear the vibrations of these fibers, we are hearing the acoustical anatomy of a tree, the resonance of centuries of climatic phenomena acting upon an organism.

What are new ways of thinking about growth and decay, decomposition and re-composition—of a musical note, a juniper tree, a sea cave—on larger-than-human and even geological timescales? How might listening to growth and decay on larger-than-human timescales influence our thinking about phenomena?

Many of the sounds and visuals in Fever Dream were created with the sound sculpture Brass Tide, which can be viewed in the main gallery space. Sourcing material from traumatized instruments and brass objects salvaged from waste streams and flea markets, Rigby welded the piece in the Okada Sculpture and Ceramic Facility at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.

Pipe organ soundscapes and video footage from the performance Gill Valves are also present in this piece. Gill Valves was a community-activated performance in which audience members were invited to sit back-to-back with a pipe organ and experience sound on a seismic scale, to move freely and observe the ways our spatial movements shaped not just our perception of the soundscape but also the very nature and creation of that soundscape. A similar phenomenon is occurring here now, whereby your presence and movement in this space is shaping an ephemeral sonic signature. As you move through this space, what are your own relationships to sounding and listening, sensation and perception?

Rigby played the parts for pipe organ, piano and viola. Kafele Williams played the trumpet elements, and The Wrinkles in Time Brass Band played horns and percussion.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Julia Edith Rigby is an Orange County-based experimental sound artist, composer, and sculptor who thinks about entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, phenomena, and sound. She works with found materials and found sites to explore phenomena, perception, and sense of place.

The artist has performed at LEAF Festival in Lafayette, Colorado (2024), LOW End in Omaha, Nebraska (2023), and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, Florida (2023). She is a recipient of artist grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. She was recently awarded an artist residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Oregon. Rigby was the Sound Art + Experimental Music Fellow at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska in fall 2023. She has been an artist in residence at GlougauAIR Artist Residency in Berlin, PLAYA Summer Lake, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Kala Art Institute, and others. She has exhibited work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Berlin. Rigby received her MFA in Studio Art at the University of California, Davis (2020), where she was a recipient of the Mary Lou Osborn Award and the Fay Nelson Award.

1:53 pm

Daniel Tucker, Rosten Woo, and Manny Escamilla

Program and Opening of the Time Capsule

Saturday, September 7 @ 6PM

Join us on Saturday, September 7th at 6 pm for a program to mark the unlocking and opening of the ten-year Santa Ana time capsule installed at Grand Central, developed originally in 2014 as part of artist Daniel Tucker’s GCAC artist-in-residence. The event will kick off with a discussion between Tucker and Rosten Woo about the video Future Perfect: Time Capsules in Reagan Country on display in the gallery, which documents the creation of the time capsule. The conversation will be followed with a reading of a letter to the future by Manny Escamilla, who co-organized the 2014 time capsule with the Santa Ana Public Library History Room. Concluding the evening, the time capsule will be opened and displayed in the Grand Central Art Center gallery. People who placed items into the original time capsule and those interested in local history and California political history are highly encouraged to attend. 

Daniel Tucker’s original residency in development of the time capsule was supported in part by a grant to Grand Central Art Center from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

5:03 pm

September 7 – November 17, 2024

Daniel Tucker’s 2015 work Future Perfect: Time Capsules in Reagan Country grows out of an interest in the continued echoes of a speech delivered by Reagan following the end of his Governorship in California on August 19th, 1976 at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri. In this speech, Reagan talks of the difficulty he found in writing a letter for a time capsule to be sealed in Los Angeles and opened one hundred years in the future. Departing from this moment Future Perfect explores Reagan’s future-oriented science fiction imagination and rhetoric through visits to Reagan-inspired monuments and time capsules throughout California. Directed by Daniel Tucker, Edited by Valerie Keller, Additional Camera: Emily Forman and Steve Rowell, Music: Tim Kinsella and Todd Mattei. The video was the subject of a profile in the Baffler Magazine by Rick Pearlstein and has been screened at Veggie Cloud (LA), Grand Central Art Center (Santa Ana), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Slought (Philadelphia), Visual Studies Workshop [Rochester, NY], Interference Archive (Brooklyn NY), Spaces (Cleveland), and the Galleries at Moore (Philadelphia).

Daniel Tucker’s project Future Perfect was developed through a GCAC Artist-in-Residence, supported in part by a grant to Grand Central Art Center from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

10:14 am

September 7, 2024 – January 12, 2025

Since 2017, Evan Apodaca’s work has sought to deconstruct U.S. imperialism and the militarization of Southern California. In Insurgent Smokescreen, Apodaca assumes the role of historian by depicting first-hand accounts of Vietnam War era antiwar activists from Southern California. From Ocean Beach to Del Mar and Oceanside, CA, moments of state-sanctioned repression against antiwar dissent are recounted and re-enacted through multi-modal approaches to documentary. Performed and filmed at their sites of original occurrence, we visit a beachfront railroad crossing, an outdoor amphitheater, a busy intersection, and an activist house turned-AirBnb rental. Correspondingly, Apodaca’s chalk pastel drawings attempt to fill the void in our collective memory of encountered struggles and hard-won victories in times of immense global conflict.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Evan Apodaca is a third-generation Chicano artist based in Southern California with a Bachelor’s of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Apodaca’s work has shown at the El Paso Museum of Art (2024); Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juarez (2024); Athenaeum Art Center (2024); the San Diego International Airport (2023); the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2022); Best Practice Gallery (2020); The New Americans Museum (2017); the Chicano International Film Festival (2017); the Tijuana Film Festival (2017) the PBS Online Film Festival (2016); and the San Diego Latino Film Festival (2016). Apodaca was a recipient of San Diego Commission for Art and Culture’s Far South Border North grant and a Reclaiming Border Narrative Fellow at the Center For Cultural Power in 2023; in 2021 he was a recipient of the National Association of Latino Arts & Culture’s Border Narrative Change Grant; and in 2019 he was a San Diego Foundation Creative Catalyst fellow.

SUPPORT

GCAC thanks Chemers Gallery in Tustin, CA, for their generous in-kind support towards framing the artist’s work.

2:34 pm

June 1 – September 15, 2024

In the 1980s, a mere 234 warehouses dotted the landscape of the Inland Empire. Today, over 4,000 logistic centers have been implanted across the region in a rapid movement to bring commerce to the region. Once identified by its untouched land, the area has become enveloped by the sprawling network of warehouses that define the region’s skyline. As this part of Southern California quickly becomes the backbone of America’s road-based supply chain, it simultaneously introduces many repercussions to the daily lives of communities that call the Inland Empire home.

Through this consumption of land, the skies in the IE have become tainted with smog as diesel-fueled trucks crisscross the freeways, leaving a trail of pollution in their wake. According to a 2022 report from the American Lung Association, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties rank first and second for the worst ozone pollution in the United States. This toxic air quality seriously threatens public health, causing inflammation, shortness of breath, and damage to airways. In addition to health consequences, these logistics flow through the region contribute to clogged commuting paths along streets and freeways. These repercussions of industrialization disproportionately impact people of color, who make up more than 70% of the population in the Inland Empire.

91 East investigates the penetrative supply chain industry emanating from the Inland Empire. Through these visual investigations, Rodrigo seeks to capture the complexities of his evolving home—the beauty of a land marred by pollution and the resilience of a community shaped by the logistics industry.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rodrigo Morales is a Chicanx Visual Artist and Musician working in the Inland Empire. Rodrigo constructs his ideas with various mediums, including photography, video, graffiti, sculpture, sound, and archival research. Across these practices, Rodrigo is interested in exploring concepts including American Visual Culture, Southern California’s Warehouse Industrial Complex, and the Identity of Adolescence.  The artist received a BFA in Creative Photography and Experimental Media from California State University, Fullerton.

4:34 pm

November 4, 2023 – March 3, 2024

Opening Reception:

Saturday, February 3 from 7-10pm

A long-standing tradition at Grand Central Art Center, the annual ceramics and glass show and sale provides an opportunity to see and purchase quality works by regional artists. 

Artists in this year’s show include Emily Brasch, Jose Flores Nava, David Gutierrez, Philip Kupferschmidt, Destiny Martindill, Nathan Olvera, Michael Penilla, Karen Thayer, Deshon Tyau, and Jordan Young.

1:59 pm

February 3 – May 12, 2024

OPENING RECEPTION:

Saturday, February 3 from 7-10pm

ARTIST WALKTHROUGH and DISCUSSION:

Tuesday, February 20, 2PM

Location: Grand Central Art Center

In collaboration with CSUF Prof. Julie Orser, Creative Photography and Experimental Media and CSUF Begovich Gallery

ARTIST LECTURE:

Wednesday, February 21, 4PM

Location: CSU Fullerton, Visual Arts, Building D – RM#180

In collaboration with CSUF Prof. Linda Kroff, Creative Photography and Experimental Media –and CSUF Begovich Gallery

Specter in the Gate presents an opportunity to delve into the historical progression of political, economic, and cultural machines, anchoring its narrative in a pivotal yet often forgotten event: the 1906 burning of Chinatown, located adjacent to the former Santa Ana City Hall. This critical incident not only exemplifies the extensive history of biased urban planning and development practices in California but also serves as a poignant reminder of how collective memory and historical narratives are shaped and reshaped over time. The work of Hings Lim is driven by the utilization and notion of perspective machines – technology such as cameras, projectors, and mappings. These mediums extend beyond mere technological use; they act as conduits through which the multifaceted layers of history and memory are examined and presented. By intertwining technological innovation with societal structures, this interplay between technology, history, and memory conjures the tangible and intangible legacies that span time, linking past, present, and future, with a body of works consisting of objects, photographs, moving images, and real-time projection mapping installation.

Featured in the exhibition is an installation comprising two towering structures, built from brass tubes, and layered with human hair that were meticulously collected by the artist from several local salons. During his year-long artist-in-residence at GCAC, Lim reached out to more than half of the over 25 salons run by members of the Latino community, all located within a few blocks of the site where Santa Ana’s Chinatown once stood. The hair, a remnant from the community, materializes a cross-temporal and spatial collective memory, weaving together the history ingrained within the people on this land. These unfinished towers reference ceremonial gateways found in traditional Chinese architecture and echo the arches that are often emblematic of Chinatown. Simultaneously, it creates a parallel narrative, juxtaposing the historical migration of the Chinese with the contemporary migration experiences of the Latino communities. 

Upon stepping into the exhibition space, one is drawn to a subtle shadow on the floor seemingly cast by an invisible, shape-shifting object suspended in mid-air. Featuring movement of lights, projectors on tripods, and a computer simulating in real time, this installation utilizes projection mapping as a technique as well as a conceptual framework. At certain moments, shadows cast through an unseen doorway recall the original Santa Ana City Hall built in 1904. This installation, propelled by the notion of the perspective machine, delves into the institutionalization of political, economic, and cultural mechanisms. It suggests how these apparatuses may represent a unitary, imperialistic, or colonial worldview, shaping notions of inclusion and exclusion. Considered as performing beings by the artist, this installation invites a critical interrogation into the technical and conceptual aspects of these interrelated apparatuses, haunted by the unseen, suggesting a rethinking of how the past can be perceived and the future can be envisioned.

In the back room, the narrative deepens through a video installation. A white screen, suspended from above, cascades like a curtain for the backlit projection of a CGI-rendered fire engulfing Santa Ana’s Chinatown. This digital reconstruction entitled At Night (Santa Ana’s Chinatown) is based on historical maps from the era, as Lim’s extensive research led to a single photograph purported to be of the Chinatown ablaze. Using this as these references, along with other historical data, Lim reenacted the tragic night of the fire. The flames burn in an endless loop, symbolizing a perpetual narrative. Resembling the cinematic style prevalent during the early film industry’s boom, the video includes intertitles derived from archived news articles reporting on the Chinatown. These texts starkly expose the era’s profound biases and racial prejudices, further intensifying the installation’s exploration of memory, history, and the continuous impact of past narratives on the present.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Hings Lim (b. 1989, Malaysia) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. He works in an expanded use of medium that includes video, installation, sculpture, performance, simulation, and situation. His process-oriented practice probes the formation of apparatuses, while addresses the multiplicities between historicity, performativity, materiality, and subjectivity of things and their becoming.

He completed a Master of Fine Arts degree and the Performance Studies Graduate Certificate at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 2021, as a recipient of the USC International Artist Fellowship; and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia in 2012. He is a recipient of the Petronas – P. Ramlee Chair’s Award in 2012 and completed the Southeast Asian Artist Residency Program at Rimbun Dahan, Selangor, Malaysia in 2018. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California, supported in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Inflaming Machines’, island gallery, New York; ‘Imperceptible: machine, animal, plant, stone, skull’, Roski Mateo Gallery, Los Angeles. Selected group exhibitions include ‘The Tale Their Terror Tells’, Lyles & King, New York; ‘Don’t Look Now’, Human Resources, Los Angeles; ‘Wonderland’, EPOCH Gallery, Los Angeles; ‘Young Contemporaries Award’, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur; ‘Art Stage Singapore’, Singapore; and ‘Malaysian Art: A New Perspective’, Richard Koh Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur. He was one of the founders of Lattalilat, a community art project, and exhibited at National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur; MIA College Gallery, Kuala Lumpur; FACA Gallery, Sarawak; and Muzium & Galeri Tengku Fauziah, Penang, Malaysia.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROJECT

Artist Hings Lim was originally invited to develop an exhibition at the Santa Ana Artist Collective space by that spaces Curator and Director Maurizzio Hector Pineda. At Maurizzio’s untimely passing, and as we considered the curator a dear colleague and friend to our institution, we extended an invitation to Hings to join us as an artist-in-residence to realize their original vision of working together. Hings has been a GCAC artist-in-residence for the past year. We dedicate this exhibition to the spirit and energy of Maurizzio Hector Pineda.

1:58 pm

February 3 – May 12, 2024

Opening Reception:

Saturday, February 3 from 7-10pm

Music: Pauline Kim Harris

Narrator: Pamela Sneed

A video essay recorded in the waters around Hart Island, home to the largest mass grave in the United States, where New York’s unclaimed victims of COVID-19 have been buried.

The piece was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona and the Museum of Modern Art of Medellin, and featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. 

“Indelibly disturbing and enthralling, “Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word” (2021), by the veteran Cuban American artist and singularly plainspoken social activist Coco Fusco, is a gorgeous twelve-minute video exploration of Hart Island—New York’s potter’s field for unidentified or unclaimed corpses. Shots of the artist laboring in a rowboat along its shores are intercut with drone overviews of a really quite lovely place where rows of small stone markers perfunctorily memorialize innumerable lost lives. Beauty stands in for unconsummated mourning. The work can seem to invoke the cascading fatalities of the covid pandemic and, by chance, the remorseless current carnage in Ukraine, whereby the destruction of so many people occasions news headlines as sullen as those stones. To be alive now is to be overwhelmed by a consciousness of the untimely dead, who, in Ukraine, have resigned their parts in a drama of ever more urgent military, political, and humanitarian imperatives. Their silence roars.”  

– Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. She is a recipient of a 2023 Free Speech Defender Award from the National Coalition Against Censorship, a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman award, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.

Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Sharjah Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. A retrospective entitled Tomorrow I Will Become an Island opened at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin in September, 2023. An accompanying monograph with the same title was just published by Thames & Hudson.

Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). She is also the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications.

Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985), and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007).

Fusco is a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.

12:19 pm

December 2, 2023 – March 10, 2024

In Can You see Me Through These Walls?, Marie Tagudena extends the profound interpretation of Angel King’s installation currently in our GCAC project gallery, delving into the expansive realms of connection and the intricate interwovenness of time, memory, space, and the frequential aspects of life. In this mesmeizing exploration, Tagudena skillfully navigates the ethereal territories encapsulated within the pockets of void and transports viewers into a realm where the intangible becomes tangible and the walls that separate us dissolve into the sheer energy of shared existence.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Marie Tagudena is a mixed-media artist born in Pasadena, California. Her artistic exploration delves into the profound connection between humans, navigating a realm beyond the tangible. She probes celestial realms, exploring an astral plane where energy, sensations, and symbols intertwine. Embracing the unknown, her work contemplates the relative nature of existence, weaving together past lives, reincarnation, and soul connections. Tagudena received her BA in Art and Art History from UCLA in 2022. She is currently a Fall 2023 Artist in Residence at Slanguage, based in Wilmington, California. Her work has been exhibited at the New Wight Gallery at UCLA, ArtExchange Gallery, Rainbow Gallery, Bungalow Gallery, Long Beach Museum of Art (all based in Long Beach, California), Bergamont Station Arts Center (Culver City, California), OMC Gallery (Huntington Beach, California), and ROOT Studios (Brooklyn, New York).

9:21 am

December 2, 2023 – March 10, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 2 from 7-10PM

In Bed Sentence, the confluence of the corporeal violence embedded in a stained bedsheet juxtaposed with the historical context of domestic labor, specifically the artistry of sewing. This layering is further accentuated by the inclusion of a gendered material, exemplified by the delicate intricacies of lace. The intertwining threads assume a metaphorical semblance to a spiderweb, trapping in it not only the video projection but also implicating the observer in a complex web of socio-cultural narratives. The transformation of mundane objects such as toys and furniture explores the complexities of trauma through body and memory.

Attraction/repulsion, safety/danger, hard/soft, outside / inside, these examples are often seen as opposites, but they are interconnected, opposing forces interwoven through time, space, and experience. Objects that are seemingly different become melded together. The lines between opposition become blurred through personal experience, colliding within each piece, making for a complex interaction for the viewer. The domestic space is interpreted through personal interaction with the environment, objects, people, and actions. The psychological space is then materialized through manipulation and process. Processes of transformation such as tying, pouring, burning, melting, and sewing become repeated until the process becomes obsessive, labor intensive, meditative, and ritualistic. The artist’s relationship with her past and present domestic space is explored through a process-based and material-obsessed approach. Transformed daily objects are pushed into the uncanny, creating a visible affect.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Angel Grace King is a mixed-media sculpture artist living in Long Beach, California. Born in Ellijay, Georgia, a small town in the deep south, she utilizes her past relationships to analyze patriarchal systems. Angel received her BA from UCLA in 2019. In 2020, she was a Verge Artist in Residence with the AYP Ali Youssefi Project in Sacramento, California. Her work has been exhibited at UCLA, Long Beach City College, Angels Gate Cultural Center, Verge Center for the Arts, and Long Beach Museum of Art.  

CURATOR

Savannah Lee, GCAC Curatorial Associate / Public Programs Coordinator

Savannah is currently pursuing a Master’s in Art History and Visual Studies at California State University Fullerton with a focus on Contemporary Art.