Prominent Bay Area Artists to Show at Skyline College
by coor on September 14, 2018
The Skyline College Art gallery is proud to present Tropeycalia Club, a group installation of paintings, sculpture and more by Sacramento artist, John Yoyogi Fortes and Bay Area artists, Juan Carlos Quintana and Carlo Ricafort. The exhibition runs from September 22, 2018 to October 20, 2018. A reception will be held for the artists on Saturday, September 22 from 3:00-5:00 p.m. at the Skyline College Art Gallery.
The title of the exhibition is a play on the 1960’s Brazilian artistic movement, Tropicália. Using a conscious misspelling tactic of ‘tropey’, the show explores myriad tropes associated with everything tropical. In his essay about the exhibition, artist and gallerist Arvin Flores explains, “Tales of exotic places, fantasy islands, and otherworldly paradises, utopian in essence, are discourses about the ideal, and thus political by nature. This notion has given inspiration to such classic gangsta rap hits as manifest destiny, or turn of the century eugenics, both having racist leanings with genocidal outcomes. In short, colonial mentality is but a reflection of the master’s image, and colonial states are bastardized versions of the ideal (of course this is not a news flash to everyone).”
The exhibiting artists both embrace and scathingly satirize kitsch tropical imagery that abounds in movies, TV shows, art, music, travel brochures and tourist trap souvenir shops. Imagery runs the gamut from coconut palm trees to stereotyped musicians, to tiki dolls, cannibals, pineapples and bleached bones scattered about on desert islands. Viewers are invited to participate in both deciphering the ways in which these tropical tropes perpetuate themselves in culture, and examining the (unexplored?) and conditioned mental spaces from which these tropes’ biases and prejudices arise.
Viewers are also invited to make their own tropeycalia drawings that can be added to a large collaborative mural project in the gallery.
Send image to: [email protected].
Article by Paul Bridenbaugh, Arvin Flores, Juan Carlos Quintana
by coor on September 14, 2018
The Skyline College Art gallery is proud to present Tropeycalia Club, a group installation of paintings, sculpture and more by Sacramento artist, John Yoyogi Fortes and Bay Area artists, Juan Carlos Quintana and Carlo Ricafort. The exhibition runs from September 22, 2018 to October 20, 2018. A reception will be held for the artists on Saturday, September 22 from 3:00-5:00 p.m. at the Skyline College Art Gallery.
The title of the exhibition is a play on the 1960’s Brazilian artistic movement, Tropicália. Using a conscious misspelling tactic of ‘tropey’, the show explores myriad tropes associated with everything tropical. In his essay about the exhibition, artist and gallerist Arvin Flores explains, “Tales of exotic places, fantasy islands, and otherworldly paradises, utopian in essence, are discourses about the ideal, and thus political by nature. This notion has given inspiration to such classic gangsta rap hits as manifest destiny, or turn of the century eugenics, both having racist leanings with genocidal outcomes. In short, colonial mentality is but a reflection of the master’s image, and colonial states are bastardized versions of the ideal (of course this is not a news flash to everyone).”
The exhibiting artists both embrace and scathingly satirize kitsch tropical imagery that abounds in movies, TV shows, art, music, travel brochures and tourist trap souvenir shops. Imagery runs the gamut from coconut palm trees to stereotyped musicians, to tiki dolls, cannibals, pineapples and bleached bones scattered about on desert islands. Viewers are invited to participate in both deciphering the ways in which these tropical tropes perpetuate themselves in culture, and examining the (unexplored?) and conditioned mental spaces from which these tropes’ biases and prejudices arise.
Viewers are also invited to make their own tropeycalia drawings that can be added to a large collaborative mural project in the gallery.
Send image to: [email protected].
Article by Paul Bridenbaugh, Arvin Flores, Juan Carlos Quintana