QUADRANT:
NEW VOICES OPEN

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 22, 2022, 6-9pm

This is the inaugural exhibition of QUADRANT, a project that keeps TAM at the forefront in developing new art programs and innovative strategies for sharing them.

In early 2021 TAM posted an invitation open-call on social media inviting curatorial proposals for this project. From the many proposals presented to us, 4 projects were ultimately chosen for their diversity of themes, range of artists, curatorial intent and their sharing of an essential TAM goal – a focus on emerging artists.

TAM is proud to present their realized proposals: Pilosus nuces orbis curated by Carolyn Mason, Nocturnal I curated by Joey Lehman Morris, Repetition of Difference curated by Khang Bao Nguyen, and Out of Bounds curated by Lisa Rockford.

Pilosus nuces orbis
curated by Carolyn Mason

Mushrooms operate in surprisingly collaborative ways, communicating underground with tree roots and sharing nutrients that foster a symbiotic relationship. While of course, some fungi have the potential to invade and destroy—this exhibition focuses on the predominantly collaborative potential of mushrooms in nature and how this parallels possibilities within artmaking.

My own work has long been inspired by mushrooms, their organic, fruiting bodies and multitude of spores, so I’ve relished learning more about the complex life of fungi from the scientific community’s research surrounding their processes. The theme for this exhibition arose from my fascination with these processes.  In 1885, the German biologist Albert Frank coined the word symbiosis while studying fungi, noting the intricate entanglement between fungi and tree roots, and suggesting that the relationship was mutually beneficial. Tree roots share glucose resulting from photosynthesis while fungus share minerals as they have the ability to break down soil. Frank's ideas were attacked at the time as the West could not conceive of a relationship in nature of mutual benefit, only of conflict and parasitism. Fungi's propensity for exploration and communication as they weave intricate and expansive, rhizome-like patterns of underground connection called mycelium, can offer artists—and all humans—a map as we create, connect and form community 140 years after the term symbiosis was coined.

Chosen for the breadth of their practice and their affinity for collaboration, the four artists in Pilosus nuces orbis, are based in Los Angeles and are object-makers. Each has a penchant for working with themes of regeneration and using natural materials including wood, wool, and clay. Instead of creating works about mushrooms, it was actually our processes of making that embodied the nature of mycelium. We collaborated, shared ideas and materials and found inspiration for our own works from one another’s projects. The result was an expansiveness in our respective practices as we explored new media and themes. The resulting connections among the four artists’ works are visible, though sometimes subtly, in both their form and content.

The fluid, non-linear, and mutually supportive connections among our works mirror the underground patterns of fungal filaments, where it’s impossible to locate a beginning or an end within the connections. After a long period of quarantine, the collaborative project offered a welcome means of artistic engagement and community. Ultimately, we decided to name the exhibition after an orange mushroom with a particularly colorful common name: “Hairy Nuts Disco,” which, when translated into Latin, becomes Pilosus nuces orbis.


Featured artists: Tony Brown, Gioj de Marco, Carolyn Mason, Andre Yi


CURATOR BIO

Los Angeles-based artist Carolyn Mason creates sculpture from a variety of both natural and manufactured materials that reflects a fascination with botanical and regenerative forms, creating what she calls “hybrid objects.”

Born in Walnut Creek, CA, Mason received her MFA degree in Sculpture from Mills College in 2005. She has recently exhibited at Mt. St. Mary’s University, the Laband Art Gallery at Loyola Marymount University as well as in a solo exhibition at Winslow Garage (all Los Angeles, CA). She has also exhibited and performed at Artists’ Television Access, (San Francisco, CA) and the Los Angeles World Airport (Los Angeles, CA). Mason has been awarded residencies at the Banff Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, for which she also received a fellowship. Her work has been featured in Elle Decoration (UK edition) and Surface Design Journal, among others. Quadrant: New Voices at the Torrance Art Museum is her first curatorial project.

Nocturnal I
curated by Joey Lehman Morris

Nocturnal Ⅰ is the first in a series of exhibitions of contemporary artwork that position the nightscape as a curtain for exploration: works of painting, photography, and poetic texts are motivated by or engaged with architecture, landscape, the natural world and the body, through abstraction, metaphor, physicality, and psychological means.

In the technological advancements following 1879, the commercialization and mass proliferation of electric light distanced us from our previously essential connection to nightglow emissions — an atmospheric phenomenon which once offered subtle luminescence to the night. Nothing was ever fully dark, never wholly asleep. Electric light ushered in a different era of semi-darkness.

Our relationship to the night sky used to locate us in time and space, adhered to the clock, the compass, and the calendar. The agrarian, natural rhythms of sea and land were compelled to follow the pursuits of agriculture, architectural and urban development. The technology of astronomy provided uses for exploration (at its most romantic) and imperialism (at its most violent). As we continue to dissimulate the celestial body in the age of electrification, the loss of photosensitivity mimics our myopic relationship with nature and politics. In the open night sky we can literally see into the furthest distances, observe celestial events that have already occurred, imagine multiple futures, and recognize that the present tense is only a myth.

In rhythm with the phases that cascade through an earthly eventide, this exhibition will pass through multiple stages. Its serial nature will unfold musically like the practice of composing the notturno or the nocturne sequentially. Nocturnal Ⅰ draws relationships between loss of sight and vision -- and considers the impossibility of now.


Featured artists: Dan Bayles, Linda Connor, John Divola, Eve Luckring, Rodney McMillian, Avan Smith, Martin Sturm, Maritta Tapanainen, Magdelawit M. Tesfaye

CURATOR BIO

Joey Lehman Morris is a visual artist who works with drawing and photography, utilizing the sway of language and perceptions of time on landscape in the American West. Born, raised, residing, and working in Los Angeles, Morris earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine.

Repetition of Difference
curated by Khang Bao Nguyen

This exhibition contends that the innermost nature of living and material organisms is not homogeneous but rather is constituted by differential relations to alterity, thus acting to undermine hierarchies based on oppressive notions of identity and uniformity.

In regard to the relationship of identity (homogeneity) and difference (heterogeneity) in past philosophies, the former is conceived of as primary and intrinsic, and the latter as secondary and an extrinsic relation between two self-identical entities.   

The subversion of this traditional assumption gives rise to the notions of “intrinsic difference” and “differential repetition”.  Identity persists, but is now a secondary principle derived from a prior relation between differentials.  Difference is no longer simply an extrinsic contrast between entities but becomes a genetic principle that constitutes the sufficient condition of intrinsic heterogeneity.

The concept of “differential repetition” is conceived of as the repetition or production not of an original self-identical entity but of difference.  To be more specific, this concept denotes an ongoing process by which the inner nature of concrete entities is developed and differentiated through complex relations with otherness.  Everything that exists only becomes and never is as it differs from itself in each moment by virtue of relations to alterity. 

Difference, then, is within entities and not merely between them. 

Together these notions of “intrinsic difference” and “differential repetition” constitute the genetic principle that accounts for the experience of concrete individuals in the present.

Featured artists: Asad Faulwell, Ibuki Kuramochi, Khang Nguyen, Alicia Piller, Brian Randolph, Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Linnea Spransy, Kayla Tange

CURATOR BIO

Khang Nguyen is a visual artist, independent curator and Ph.D. candidate in comparative philosophy at Claremont Graduate University. To be more specific, Nguyen studies the nondual traditions in the East as well as the dialectical tradition and postmodern philosophy in the West. He bridges these distinct traditions by showing their commonality, while at the same time respecting their irreducible differences. The philosophical and spiritual insights obtained from his investigations are integrated into his visual art and curatorial projects.

Out of Bounds
curated by Lisa Rockford

After being sequestered in isolation and living through a plethora of cultural, racial, and political dichotomies, the QUADRANT exhibition is opening at the threshold of a post-pandemic era.

Out of Bounds is therefore a curated negotiation of physical and psychological space.  The remnants of enclaves, architectural elements, and ineffectual boundaries are at play. Their architectural footprints simultaneously act as boundaries from, but not barriers to, the other quadrants in the shared exhibition space.

The works emblematically depict the destabilization of infrastructure to address themes of decolonization, segregation, economic disparity, migration, and marginalization.


Featured artists: Brody Albert, Daniel Boccato, Tanya Brodsky, Scott Froschauer, Ashley Hagen, Nery Gabriel Lemus, Anne Libby, Karen Lofgren


CURATOR BIO

Lisa Rockford (she/they), founder of Rockford Projects, is an independent curator, artist, and educator. A passionate arts advocate, Lisa is celebrated for creating new opportunities for underrepresented artists - organizing multi-disciplinary exhibitions, public lectures, artist workshops, and interactive experiences, all designed to be accessible to a broad audience.

In 2013, she was dubbed a "Rising Star" in Gold Coast Magazine’s article, “40 under 40,” and has since been named a “Change Agent” in local press for her community building art events. Over the past 12 years, Lisa has built working relationships with over 400 artists and has curated 25 exhibitions.

Lisa holds a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2001) and is currently a tenured Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Broward College. In 2014, she received the Robert Elmore International Exchange Award through the Honors department to travel to China, and The A. Hugh Adams Endowed Teaching Chair in 2018.

Published March 3rd, 2022