Impossible Objects: Screen Prints by Ed Lister

MM Rainbow by Ed Lister

Impossible Objects: Screen Prints by Ed Lister March 13 – May 8, 2021 Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara Gallery

The AFSB Art Gallery at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to announce the opening of Impossible Objects, an exhibition of vibrant, abstract silkscreen prints, or serigraphs, by Ed Lister.  

Ed Lister, known in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara as a skilled scenic artist, created this series of “impossible objects” in the early 1970s while teaching printmaking at the Chelsea School of Art in London.  After teaching art for twelve years, Lister moved to California.  Starting in the mid-70s he worked for ten years as the lead scenic artist for the Center Theatre Group at the Taper and Ahmanson Theaters in Los Angeles. Subsequently, he painted backdrops and installations as wide as 400 feet for TV, movies, and destination resorts, hotels, and casinos.  

More recently Lister was commissioned to paint a 60 feet-wide mural encircling the Bisno Schall Clock Gallery of the Santa Barbara Courthouse that depicts our perception of time and various ways of recording it (http://www.bisnoschallgallery.com).  Although he loved working on such a large scale, Lister now paints more modest-sized images concerned with iridescent and reflective seascapes and skies. 

Created fifty years ago, these striking, hand-pulled prints play with our contemporary sensibilities and logical brains in their resemblances to imaginative digital images. Of all the printing techniques, Lister most relished executing screened images with areas of pure color put down in a clean and direct manner.  In this series, he created improbable, mind-bending objects that cannot exist other than on a flat surface.  Intrigued by their bold colors and shapes, our eyes are lured in, then our assumptions of reality are challenged.

The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara has been dedicated to expanding our community’s appreciation of the built environment since 1983. 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 weekdays by appointment.

Historic Preservation Series by Patrick McGinnis

Vanishing Behemoths of Industry Star in Bold New Photographs by Patrick McGinnis

November 7 – December 19, 2020
Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara Gallery

Detail of Sloss Iron Works #45, 16×16

patmcginnisart.com

patmcginnisart.com

The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to announce Historic Preservation Series, an exhibition of industrial photographs by Pat McGinnis. Visitors are invited to view the exhibition on Saturdays, from 1:00 to 4:00 pm, November 7 through December 19. The artist will be present on November 7 & December 19. (Self-screening, masks, and social distancing are required.)

Following a career in engineering, Patrick McGinnis turned to creating semi-abstract, biomorphic sculptures in marble, bronze, and metal, inspired by natural forms. Then, during a family trip across the country, he visited a rusty old factory, the Sloss Iron Works in Birmingham, Alabama, and his interest in photography was piqued. Attracted by the dramatic interplay of light on the tall, solid forms of these massive, industrial structures—vanishing monuments to America’s once vibrant iron and steel industry—McGinnis felt compelled to photograph them.

Most blast furnaces built in the United States are now dormant or on their way to demolition and becoming scrap metal—only a few, like the Sloss Iron Works, survive as historical landmarks. Energized by studying the photographs of Bernd & Hilla Becker and paintings by Charles Sheeler, McGinnis discovered new subjects closer at hand, notably the large Vulcan plant at Ellwood Station in Goleta, which he was able to photograph just before it was torn down. He has also made photographs of an obsolete, wood-waste burning electric power plant, Soledad Renewable Energy, whose future is uncertain.

McGinnis’s transition into making art is a continuation of being a design engineer in the nuclear, aerospace and semiconductor industries and his own business, Prime Technology. Aesthetics played a vital role throughout that work, whether creating an aerospace component or an analytical instrument. He is currently a member of Santa Barbara Art Association, Abstract Art Collective, Gallery 10 West (board member), and the LA Art Association. He has exhibited his work at 10 West Gallery, Elverhoj Museum of Art & History, Gallery 113 (Santa Barbara), Gallery 825 (LA), Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, and San Luis Obispo Museum of Art.

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.