The dark histories behind these architectural gems are as spooky as they are beautiful… Take a tour with me as I explore stunning structures and spooky locations to discover why visitors to these haunts never want to leave – even after death.
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Like the earth, the bedrock of society is not as stable as we perceive it to be, and unforeseen events can lead to the raising of the structures we have built for ourselves, whether they are physical or social. There are fissures in our social system in the form of absent social services and safety nets.
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The Passing Landscape highlights Cynthia Martin’s passionate concern for the fragility of the natural world. Born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, familiar California scenes and environmental disasters have always been her main source of inspiration. Her recent series “contains glittering stripes of deconstructed colors that refer to pathways, roads, contrails, channels, and other evidence of a population constantly on the go.”
These elegant landscapes depicting earth, sky and water are abstracted from the familiar scenery of the South Coast. Martin notes: “even if much of that landscape has changed, I am focused on my memories of its pristine beauty and my hope that we can preserve what is left.” Martin’s vibrant, saturated hues, layered in stunning stripes, are often coated with the hi-tech finish of auto paint, a salute to the surfing community and to California’s busy commuter life style.
Graduate work with Ciel Bergman at UCSB propelled Martin’s decision to use painting to express her concern for the environment. With a B.A. and two teaching credentials from UCSB, she began teaching in Santa Barbara in 1963 and has shown her work in many group and solo exhibitions. She is a Fellow of the University of California’s South Coast Writing Project. Martin helped initiate the teen docent program at the S.B. Museum of Art and serves on the boards of the S.B. Studio Artists and the Abstract Art Collective.
Color Notes highlights Miracle’s everyday wanderings around his neighborhood in Goleta and his fresh eye for color. Seeking neither picturesque nor unsightly subjects, Miracle freely paints his immediate surroundings with an open mind—landscapes, parking lots, isolated figures, and interiors. He paints from both memory and observation with an immediacy and vitality of color. These small, intimate paintings are a celebration of the senses. They represent commonplace encounters imbued with human experience and perception. They all eschew the technological filters so often used today and instead rely on first-hand experience of places and people. Miracle continually experiments in search of fresh, vital, visual approaches within the contemporary artistic dialogue. His recent oil paintings in Color Notes highlight a little-known aspect of his unique artistic career.
After receiving a B.A. in studio art from Belhaven College (Jackson, MS), Miracle spent ten years working and exhibiting his paintings and installation art in New York City, Washington, DC, and Germany. A recent graduate of UCSB’s MFA program, Miracle is currently a Teaching Fellow at the University. As a recipient of a “Humanities in the Community” grant from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (UCSB), he is co-creating and exhibiting with artists who experience mental illness.
Abstract Trompe L’oeil highlights Wilson’s deep interest in the interplay of colored surfaces. Her previous paintings were conventional still life paintings depicting recognizable objects with reflective, transparent surfaces that appear as small abstractions. Creating these paintings led her to the idea of creating purely abstract still life paintings. At first glance, her new work appears to be flat, hard edge, geometric and abstract. Upon closer observation, viewers are drawn in by the illusion of depth.
To create these unusual paintings, Wilson first constructs an abstract “still life”—a three-dimensional composition of opaque, translucent, and transparent papers, and colored gels. After arranging lighting above to create a kaleidoscope of reflections, she paints the “still life” from direct observation, challenging herself to create the illusion of three dimensions and transparency using only opaque pigments.
Although the paintings are formal compositions, they evoke futuristic cities, outer space, and science fiction settings. Surface flatness and the illusion of depth coexist simultaneously, creating spaces where the interplay and fusion of saturated colors, abstract shapes and imagination magically coexist.
Wilson received her BA in 1979 from San Francisco State University where she studied with Robert Bechtle, a photo-realist painter. She completed her MFA in 1982 at UCSB where she studied with Ciel Bergman and William Dole. She has maintained a studio and residence in Santa Barbara for 40 years and has participated in many group exhibitions and several solo exhibitions. She currently teaches art classes at SBCC School of Extended Learning.
This exhibition looks at the experience of the school through the art of three alumni who became educators, bringing with them pieces of the Brooks’ legacy to be passed on in their own classrooms.
For over 70 years Brooks Institute provided a visual arts education to an international gathering of students in Santa Barbara. Brooks was unique in its immersive focus on imaging arts – photography, film, photojournalism – and in its educational philosophy of hands-on learning provided by practitioners in their field.
Christopher Broughton, Christy Gutzeit and Ralph Clevenger came to Brooks with a passion for the art and craft of photography. What they encountered was an intangible mixture of location, pedagogy, and mentoring which fueled their unique professional paths.
Through-line showcases moments from each photographer’s career. Christopher Broughton’s photographic black and white series, “Anhydrous – Our Unquenchable Thirst”, explores the anthropogenic landscape shaped by our endeavor to control water in the west. Ralph Clevenger exhibits a selection of work that demonstrates the connection between the photographer, the subject, and the viewer. In this case the subjects are animals from around the world, each animal’s portrait revealing a story in a single frame. Christy Gutzeit’s personal work is inspired by the ebb and flow of the ocean’s energy, calm one moment and forceful the next. Using multiple layers of materials combined with photography, she explores the transient nature of the waves of water and the power they have to imprint and erase.
Each of these image-makers has continued the legacy of their education by becoming educators themselves, teaching craft and professionalism while imparting their passion for photography to new generations of students. Currently, they are all part of a new collaboration established by The Ernest Brooks Foundation called “Brooks at UCSB” which is hosted by UC Santa Barbara’s Professional and Continuing Education department.
Nina Warner and Libby Smith share a love of plein air painting (painting outside on location) and of the landscape of Santa Barbara County. This exhibition reveals the two artists’ points of view whether looking at the same scene, or in different directions, or down the road from each other—a tradition extending from the 19th-century Impressionist painters’ practice of working outside together.
“Painting outside lets you watch things change – sometimes slowly and quietly, almost imperceptibly – sometimes suddenly and surprisingly, but always inexorably changing.” (Nina Warner)
Smith and Warner are both retired from many years of teaching in the Art Department at Santa Barbara City College. They started painting landscapes outside on location at the urging of another friend who wanted to give it a try. Since then Libby and Nina have gone out painting every Monday for the past seven years. This exhibition is a result of those adventures.
“I love a vista, an open space. It draws you in and asks what is just beyond that hill or horizon? Shall we go?” (Libby Smith)
Libby Smith and Nina Warner are also members of Rose-Compass, a group of six artists who recently presented a well-received exhibition, The River’s Journey at the Wildling Museum in Solvang. A new version of The River’s Journey is now open at City Hall in downtown Santa Barbara and will be on view through March 2019.
An on-going exploration of marrying paper and glue to form new, hybrid images, they document his process of constructing visual poems—evocative musings, distilled from the ephemera he collects: “I attempt to meld the textures, graphics, and echoes of old papers with marks that I make into a seemingly organic object. Sometimes, it turns out okay.”
Dug Uyesaka’s quizzical outlook on life and love of the arts germinated while growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s in the fertile San Joaquin Valley. Living out in the boondocks provided many hours to roam the countryside and appreciate the slow side of life, fueling his passion to draw and make “stuff” from his imagination.
Dug studied painting and silkscreen printing at UCSB and later, graphic design and multimedia at SBCC. After doing graphic design and media management for a local film production company, he became a working artist and involved in the community arts scene. Currently, he teaches art at Laguna Blanca School and is a Santa Barbara County Arts Commissioner for the Second District.
Dug has been recognized with the Laguna Blanca School Faculty Excellence Award for the Middle School (2009), the William T. Colville Foundation grant (2009), and the Individual Artist Award for Assemblage and Collage from The Arts Fund of Santa Barbara (2010). His stunning, mid-career survey, long story short, took place at the Westmont Ridley Tree Museum of Art in 2016.
INSIDE is an exhibition at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara of compelling, black and white photographs documenting Australian prison facilities that have surpassed their use-by dates.
Empty prisons are eerie places where the walls do speak. Etched into the stones is the passing of successive generations of inmates. Photographer Brett Leigh Dicks demonstrates that every prison has its own history, character, and stories to tell and so too does every cell. But old prisons are not just a reminder of the past, but they can also help guide the future.
For the past five years the Santa Barbara-based, urban landscape photographer has been photographing closed jails, prisons and penitentiaries throughout Australia, Europe and United States – many of which have now been preserved as heritage sites. Last year Brett returned to his homeland where he undertook the first comprehensive photographical documentation of decommissioned Australian prisons and jails.
The exhibition includes historic and contemporary sites across Australia including Adelaide
Gaol, Fremantle Prison, J Ward Ararat, Maitland Gaol, Old Melbourne Gaol, Parramatta Correctional Center, Port Arthur Historic Site, Trial Bay Gaol and the Wilcannia Police Station. The subject matter ranges from the now empty silence of once bustling cellblocks and common areas to more abstract contemplations of the interaction between barred windows with the morning light and the poetic twisting of coils of barbed wire.
While Port Arthur closed in 1877, Parramatta Correctional Center housed prisoners until 2011. Brett found that photographing the two locations offered two very contrasting experiences:
“There were still books and televisions and personal items in the cells at Parramatta – the in’s and out’s of prison life remained very apparent there, whereas Port Arthur featured the haunting remnants of rustic metal and stone. The prisoner experience was obviously very different at each of those locations and so too were the resulting photographs.”
As for the role photography can play in the afterlife of prisons, Brett thinks that every society’s approach to punishment and incarceration should be constantly reassessed: “As society changes so too does its values. Prisons used to be places of punishment and repentance, but in the lifespan of some of these prisons they were transformed into places of reform and rehabilitation. Justice and the forms it takes should be an ongoing conversation in every community and I think there is a place for photography to illuminate that.”
Brett Leigh Dicks was born in Sydney, Australia and currently resides in Santa Barbara, California. Through fine black and white photography he investigates the landscape and the tenuous ties it shares with human history. His work has been exhibited in Australia, Europe and the United States and hung beside photographers as diverse as Ansel Adams, Jeff Bridges, Max Dupain, Lewis Morley, Yoko Ono and Hiroshi Sugimoto. He is currently a finalist in the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards.
“Unseen and Unheard: Accidental Musings” evolves from Gebhart’s background in science and art history. Her organic compositions resonate with sumptuous textures and images, meandering line formations and color transparencies. Each work on paper is a unique, one-of-a-kind viscosity monotype—a printmaking technique that lends itself to the creation of luminous effects, chaos, and turbulence. Over the last decade, the topography of the Southwest influenced her horizons, undulating lines and explosions of color.
Educated first in the health professions, Gebhart then went on to learn art history and printmaking. After attending Immaculate Heart College, she earned a BA in Art History at the California State University in Los Angeles, followed by art classes in Santa Barbara and workshops in traditional etching techniques at Crown Point Press in San Francisco. She makes annual visits to Santa Fe to develop her skills in printmaking and is a Docent at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.