Through-line: Brooks Institute, a culture for photographic education

January 24 – March 6, 2019

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.

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.

A Conversation about the Art of Collage

Saturday, September 8, 2018, at 2 – 3 PM. 

Artist Talk: Dug Uyesaka

FREE. Please RSVP.

The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to present a conversation about the art of collage with three prominent members of Santa Barbara’s art community. Please join us as they share their personal experiences and knowledge of collage techniques and history.  Discover how and why each came to embrace this unique art form as well as the special role of collage in the history of art in Santa Barbara.

  • Dug Uyesaka’s current AFSB exhibition, pulp n’glue – remix vol. 1, which features a selection of his recent collages, will close on September 13, 2018.
  • Artist/teacher Tony Askew has taught and exhibited locally for decades.  Many of his prints are made with chine collé, a form of collage.  His solo exhibition, Looking Back/Going Forward, will be on view at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art from August 30 to November 17, 2018.
  • Jeremy Tessmer is the Gallery Director of Sullivan Goss – An American Art Gallery where he is also curator of nineteenth and twentieth-century American art and sculpture.

The AFSB Gallery is located in the historic Acheson House at the corner of Garden and East Victoria Streets in Santa Barbara. Regular gallery hours are Saturdays from 1:00 to 4:00 pm and by appointment (please contact Rocio Iribe at 805-965-6307).

FACEBOOK Event Here.

pulp n’glue – remix vol.1 by Dug Uyesaka

Dug Uyesaka - Pulp n Glue

Dug Uyesaka: pulp n’glue – remix vol.1

July 17 – September 13, 2018

Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara

Opening Reception: Friday, July 20, 5:00 – 7:00 pm

Dug Uyesaka - Pulp n Glue

The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to present an exhibition of recent collages by Dug Uyesaka. 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.

The AFSB Gallery is located in the historic Acheson House at the corner of Garden and East Victoria Streets in Santa Barbara. Regular gallery hours are Saturdays from 1:00 to 4:00 pm and by appointment (please contact Rocio Iribe at 805-965-6307).

FACEBOOK Event Here.

Join Us For A Talk About Art!

A Conversation about Creativity and Viscosity Printmaking
with Rosemarie Gebhart, Michael McCabe, and Tony Askew

Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara Gallery
2:00 pm on Sunday, May 6, 2018
FREE (limited space, please RSVP)

Conversation About Creativity

The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to present three noted printmakers who delight in viscosity printmaking as they share their personal experiences and knowledge of the technique.  You will discover how each came to embrace this unique type of contemporary printmaking and how their stories are intertwined!

  • Rosemarie Gebhart’s current AFSB exhibition, Unseen and Unheard: Accidental Musings, featuring her vibrant viscosity prints, will close on May 12, 2018.
  • Beloved artist/teacher Tony Askew has taught and exhibited his viscosity prints locally for decades, inspiring and enlivening the Santa Barbara art community.
  • Master printmaker Michael McCabe specializes in viscosity techniques, is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico and teaches workshops in Ojai and Goleta.

*to RSVP email info@nullafsb.org or call 805-965-6307*

FACEBOOK event here.

Pop Up Photography Show: Christopher Broughton

Christopher Broughton: Les Rues de Paris

Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara Gallery

February 19 – March 11, 2018

The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to present a pop-up show from a Brooks Institute alumnus. Chris Broughton went on to become an educator bringing with him pieces of the Brooks’ legacy to be passed on in his own classrooms. Christopher’s photographic series, “Les Rues de Paris”, features images taken while a faculty member in the Brooks’ Paris summer study-abroad program. Read below his artist statement:

A constant watchman looking past what is seen but anticipating what is about to be revealed.  The work cogitates the mise en scène of the street juxtaposed with the unscripted narratives of humanity.  Charles Nègre was the first to bring the camera to the streets, specifically Paris France in 1851.  Following within the pure roots of tradition and unnoticed observations, Les rues de Paris focuses on the multitudes of independent humanistic narratives interacting within layers of time. The camera’s invasive and subjective nature begins within the frame and its ability to include or exclude. Its subjectivity ends there.  Human interactions individually spontaneous and overlaid with time, allow true visual metaphors to be observed ever so briefly.

The images on display were selected from an exhibit containing 88 images.  The complete collection can be viewed at:  https://www.christopherbroughton.com/les-rues-de-paris/

 Observed / Observer: Photographs by Matthew Straka

Observed / Observer: Photographs by Matthew Straka

Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara Gallery

August 18 – September 28, 2017

Opening Reception: Friday, August 18 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm

The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to present Observed / Observer: Photographs by Matthew Straka. The opening reception will take place on Friday, August 18th from 5 to 7pm. Admission is free. All are welcome.

Observed / Observer is a collection of photographs concentrating on California land use and the relationships of individuals with the environment. Straka documents mundane and sublime aspects of the landscape, with a special focus on abandoned and industrial subjects. With the advance of smart phones, he has become intrigued by how ordinary people, situated in everyday surroundings, create unique tableaux and document it using their mobile devices.

Drawing inspiration at an early age from set design and film, specifically disaster and zombie films, Straka was led to search out and explore lost byways and dead ends throughout California, seeking images and scenes that imply unwritten, enigmatic narratives. “That set design of abandonment was a magnet for me. The left-behind shoe, a small pile of trash in an alley, a car left by the side of the road [they] all told stories….This was a different practice for me, trained as a photojournalist: to not include people to tell the story but to rely on the physical evidence instead.”

Within this time frame also came the rise of the cell phone as a means of photography: “It was hard not to include that in my photographs as it was multiplying so fast. It became a counter balance to my increasing body of work of abandonment–people interacting with their surroundings like never before. Living through your screen and sharing it with the world has become the norm and I felt it was necessary to include this in my documentation.”

Matthew Straka is a Santa Barbara native. During the past twenty-six years he has worked as a photojournalist, a commercial photography assistant, and chiefly as a color lab technician. He studied photography at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale and journalism at Santa Barbara City College. His photographs have been exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions throughout California including: Celestial Bodies, The Essential Worker, Pilgrimage and Notable Rejects. He currently works at Grace Design Associates, a landscape design company in Santa Barbara.

The AFSB Gallery is located in the historic Acheson House at the corner of Garden and East Victoria Streets in Santa Barbara. Regular gallery hours are Saturdays from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. and by appointment (please contact Amy Collins at 805-965-6307).

Previous Art Gallery Exhibition

kinetic

It’s About Time:
A Kinetic Installation on the Illusive Nature of Time
by R.T. Livingston

May 12 to June 21, 2017
Architectural Foundation Gallery
Opening Reception on Friday, May 12, 5-7 pm

The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to present It’s About Time: A Kinetic Installation on the Illusive Nature of Time by conceptual artist R.T. Livingston. A participatory Opening Reception is planned for Friday, May 12 from 5 to 7 pm. All are welcome…and, everyone is invited to wear a watch with hands—in order to compare time’s uneven path!

The installation, It’s About Time, is a visual metaphor demonstrating how our perception of time, with its accordion-like expansion and contraction, is constantly changing while systematically going around in circles. Livingston observes that: “The notion of time begins in our guts then moves to our heads before entering the space of our lives.” Like the earth spinning every 24 hours in its yearly rotation around the sun, a clock with hands follows the earth’s movement as it makes its rounds. Earth and clock move in sync giving us a poetic connection to the cosmos and the space-time continuum where notions of time travel, memory and déjà vu boggle the mind.

Together with video and sound, It’s About Time consists of some eighty 4” x 4” battery-powered clocks with the words ‘time is a man made Illusion’ handwritten on each. Several layers of iridescent paint partially obscure the writing, which creates movement through the play of light. The uniformity of the square clocks creates a structural matrix in which each clock runs at its own pace, not unlike the movement of our own lives.

R.T. Livingston studied painting with Elizabeth Murray in the Fine Arts Department of Daemon College in Buffalo, New York. Graduate work in the History of Photography took her to Princeton where she studied with Peter Bunnell. While working on a Ph.D. in Art History at Rutgers University, she joined the curatorial staff at the University’s Zimmerli Art Museum. In New York, Livingston sat on the Boards of Franklin Furnace and was a charter member of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival Producers’ Council.

In 2003, after 30 years living and working between studios in Lower Manhattan, Springs-East Hampton and Woodstock, New York, Livingston was commissioned to create several large outdoor installations in California. Additional projects brought her back and in 2006 she moved to Santa Barbara where she continues to spin ideas and make art.

The AFSB Gallery is located in the historic Acheson House on the corner of Garden and East Victoria Streets in Santa Barbara. Regular gallery hours are Tuesday to Thursday, 10 am to 2 pm and by appointment. Please call Allison Marcillac at 805-965-6307.

Into Nothing: New paintings in Ash and Oil

February 15 to March 23, 2017

 

Into Nothing is a momentary foray into the darker side. The darker side is to be understood not as something necessarily evil for its own sake, but ‘the’ something as an obverse of light.  In the truest sense of the nature of humans and nature itself, one cannot have light without the dark, positive without its negative aspects.  The potential in fire as the ultimate destructive force hides within it its polar opposite – that of the regenerative potential of what is left behind.  In creating a void, fire nonetheless immediately fills the space upon which it acted.  As Gaston Bachelard observed, “It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell.” Fire is therefore ‘the’ conflicting force about which, to this day, we know very little. It is both good and evil.  Pazderka negotiates the subject of fire via depictions of local wildfire smoke, clouds and portraits of in/famous philosophers, artists and cabin dwellers, painted and drawn into burned wooden substrates treated with ashes and charcoal.  Ghostly images emerge, subtle and soft, yet quietly disturbing at the same time.

Tom Pazderka is an interdisciplinary installation artist, painter, sculptor, teacher and writer. He holds an MFA from the University of California Santa Barbara where he was a Regents Fellow and is currently the Artist in Residence for the 2016/2017 academic year. He is a lecturer of art at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, CA. Half Czech and half American, the son of working class immigrants, he moved to the US at the age of 12 shortly after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. His works have been exhibited at UCSB’s AD&A Museum, Asheville Art Museum and Cameron Art Museum in NC, Parasol Projects, NYC, Trafo Gallery in Prague, and Pink Dog Creative and the Push Gallery in Asheville, NC.  The recipient of numerous awards including the Howard Fenton Award for Painting, residencies, his works have been reviewed and profiled in many publications including New American Paintings and Daily Serving.