Ventura County Reporter
Art & Culture
August 2, 2007
http://www.vcreporter.com/article.php?id=4980&IssueNum=135
Copyright ©2007 Southland Publishing. All rights reserved.
The best of youth
Four Oxnard College students prove
"Cool Kids Never Had the Time"
by Matthew Singer
"Mail Order Child" by Andrew Dadacay
Copyright ©2007 Andrew Dadacay. All rights reserved.
In a lot of cases, "student artist" has the same connotation as "student driver." It means underdeveloped, faulty, prone to simple mistakes and by God, do not tailgate. Obviously, showcasing work from these admitted beginners is a risky proposition. But the owners of Ventura's Upfront Gallery are not averse to risk. And luckily, there is none to be taken in presenting "Cool Kids Never Had the Time," an exhibition fully curated by four Oxnard College art students. It is a stunningly unique collection of pieces that, while appearing to have been created by artists with far more years of experience under their belts, does not shy away from the fact that this is really the work of kids. Hell, it's right there in the title of the show.
The individual styles in each painting varies, but they are all linked by an immediately identifiable energy that can only come from young adults on the verge of leaping into the chasm known as "the real world." According to artist Gladys Rodriguez, 20, the idea behind the exhibit is to capture that moment before the fall: the pressure, anxiety and personal, political and social confusion of the purgatory between teenagerdom and full-fledged adulthood.
It is one of her pieces that perhaps best illustrates those feelings. A mixed media installation, it is a self-portrait surrounded by pipes and clocks; the image depicts Rodriguez's hair caught in a pipe system, a metaphor for the burden she felt weighing down on her as she created the painting. She describes the piece as "a very painful painting. I was trying to get all my credits done and turning in all my paperwork. I was going insane." She adds, "The painting really represents Š what young students and young artists are going through."
Other artists chose to express those emotions in different ways. For instance, Aaron Dadacay, 22, went political. In one of the exhibit's more poignant paintings, Dadacay uses a masonite surface to represent the familiar brown UPS and FedEx packages, with the sides curling up to reveal ethnically ambiguous children underneath. The images inspire multiple interpretations: Perhaps they are a reference to the genocide in Darfur? Implications of the artist's own lost youth? America's racist heritage?
Actually, Dadacay says, the pieces are about the still-ongoing international slave trade, referred to these days by the slightly less vile moniker of "human trafficking." Dadacay was inspired by a discussion in an African American History class he took at Oxnard College. He was shocked to learn the practice still exists in parts of world, more than 100 years after the abolition of slavery in America, and his bewilderment at the realization is mirrored in the faces of the anonymous children in his paintings.
"What if one day people are ordering people from other countries," he says, "literally putting them in boxes and putting them on doorsteps?"
While Dadacay's work, in some respects, articulates a loss of innocence, Gene Tapia's is to a certain degree a look back at and celebration of a simpler time. His pieces, fresh and colorful, pop with what Upfront co-owner Paul Benavidez calls a "street aesthetic," using graffiti-influenced lettering and an almost cartoonish sensibility. By contrast, Maria Villote's pieces are darker in tone and appearance. One is a gray-scaled comment on pollution, while others are simply paintings of birds which are starkly beautiful and suggest a desire to escape - to fly.
No matter the method, though, "Cool Kids" is tied together by a fleeting sense of urgency, of a need to communicate certain things at a time in life where opinions and thoughts are changing almost daily. Even now, Rodriguez says, less than a month after the opening reception, she feels differently about some of her material. And in a decade, who knows? She and her colleagues might be completely different people - if all goes as planned.
"When I look back [at this exhibit] in 10 years, I want to say, 'That's what I was thinking back then,' " she says. "Hopefully we'll change a little bit."
"Cool Kids Never Had the Time" exhibits at the Upfront Gallery through Sept. 8. 267 S. Laurel St., Ventura, 340-1448. Info: www.upfrontgallery.org.
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