WINDOW was an ongoing public art project in collaboration with Discover Torrance, the official visitor’s bureau for the city of Torrance (2022-2024). Originally initiated in summer 2021 as part of TAM’s public art exhibition ULTRA!, the project presented a rotating installation of artwork, curated by the museum staff and displayed in the storefront window of Discover Torrance.

Discover Torrance was previously located at 21540 Hawthorne Blvd #463, Torrance, CA 90503 inside the main level of the Del Amo Fashion Center, one of the largest shopping centers in the Western United States. Thousands of visitors pass through the mall each week and Discover Torrance is in a prime location affording a large segment of the community as well as many visitors to the city a chance to engage with artwork in a non-institutional setting.

This project was put on long-term hiatus in Summer of 2024 due to the loss of venue.

Southern California based Manila born artist and educator Cat Chiu Phillip’s practice is focused on public art installation that draw attention to environmental issues. Phillips repurposes plastic waste into whimsical works of art that are at the same time playful and alarming.

Cat Chiu Phillips creates installation work in public spaces often using traditional handicraft methods including crochet, weaving, and embroidery. She uses discarded materials including plastic and electronic waste to create large-scale installations and public art projects. Growing up in Manila, she experienced and witnessed the overwhelming amount of pollution, poverty, overpopulation, and the constant battle against natural disasters. She has always explored these ideas in her work because of her admiration for the population's ability to rise against constant tragedy. Phillips has received many national and international public art commissions, is in the permanent collection of the City of San Diego and City of Redmond, ICA San Diego and has accolades from California Arts Council's Establish Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts. Phillips received her MFA in New Genre from San Francisco Art Institute and has been an educator in the public schools for over 20 years as well as an Adjunct Professor.

Anna Katrina McBride is a Visual Artist, Public Art Muralist and founding member of the Chroma Pop Long Beach Female Art Collective. She is a cofounder of McBride Arts, a mural team. She explores the role of artist as a architect of visceral and esoteric experiences and the physicality of space.

With the emerging technology of A.I. generated content, it’s easy for an artist to wonder where their place is as a creator. Her installation, Manuel Intelligence, reminds us that the artist’s most important contribution is not imagery alone, but art as a process of creating visceral experiences for the creator and viewer through the materials we sense in our physical spaces.

Out of the darkness, a glowing hand emerges; honoring and giving reverence to the hands that create art. 

Cassandra Rowden is a self-taught artist who explores cultural memory, as it exists on a global scale. Her artwork challenges the binary constructs modern society has built between “the Self” and “the Other”. Using symbolism, and both personal and shared experiences, she creates esoteric equations of meanings.

Her watercolor instalation, Mala Muerte, is emblematic of the future, as watercolor is never truly opaque. The symbolism within the iridescent cutouts represents her family’s traditional healing practices past down – light during the dark, and the candy treats depict the mixture of Latin X generation’s growth in 2023.

This work is presented in conjunction with the SUR biennial at the museum, presenting work that explores the complex notions of globalization and exchange that takes place in the ambiguous borderlands between Los Angeles and the broader 'South.'

Will Raojenina, also known as WCMTL is a Canadian/Malagasy self-taught, multidisciplinary visual artist currently based in Los Angeles. His heavily painted, colorful mixed-media work—meticulously reinforced, layer upon layer—engages with themes of immigration, language barriers, cultural differences, and oral histories. For him, art is a means to escape pain, understand one another, and communicate without fear, while maintaining a positive outlook.

Born to immigrant parents from Antananarivo, Madagascar, WCMTL was raised in Montreal, Canada and experienced pain, poverty, and frustration from a young age. After turning to painting and clothing design as a creative outlet, at 15 years old he earned his nickname WCMTL (Willis Couture Montreal) and created a community around him of other immigrant children who shared similar experiences. Being surrounded by this array of perspectives taught him how to be an effective visual communicator, overcome struggles, and maintain a positive point of view, which inform his practice today—above all, to let go of his negative feelings, love others, keep pushing, and appreciate cultures that are different from his.

Will likes to paint positive art that provides visual joy and inspiration to others. 

I was born in the Mexican state of Puebla but it was while I was living in Huajuapan de Leon, Oaxaca that I had the chance to truly connect with my cultural heritage and grow an appreciation for pre-Hispanic art. Oaxaca is uniquely influential to our modern understanding of the pre-colonization indigenous culture of Mexico as quite a few of the few surviving codices are from the area. Additionally I was able to experience the remains of this culture first hand, as just north of the city is the Ñuiñe (the second historic period of the region’s indigenous Mixtec culture) archeological site, Cerro de las Minas, and a short drive away is the UNESCO world heritage site, Monte Alban. These formative experiences have guided my self taught art practice. My artwork use contemporary art practices to present traditional pre-Columbian imagery, blending anthropology, history, and fine art. I use paint, sculpture, and embroidery to honor the indigenous roots of my culture.

I am currently based in Riverside, California.

I’m a Swedish/Moroccan visual artist based in Los Angeles, California. My art practice centers on ideas of unearthing multiple layers and buried memories. I use materiality and process to excavate ideas of hidden meanings, allowing for a wide range of interpretation. In this body of work, I make paintings out of manipulated cotton duck by cutting and unraveling the threads that hold the canvas together. Then, I re-assemble the material into biomorphic shapes that are painted with oil and/or acrylic.

I started out as a figurative painter, which I later found to be too literal and restrictive, not providing enough space for more esoteric ideas. Once I moved into an abstract visual vocabulary, I discovered my predisposition to biomorphic shapes, which echoes the visual language of abstracted generalized human forms and/or cellular building blocks.

At the same time, I began working towards making the physicality of painting as an object visible, composed of a support and paint, primarily by playing with (deconstructing) the painting support by taking the canvas off the stretcher bars and unraveling the warp and weft holding it together and then re-attaching the threads. Some of the pieces are two-sided, featuring a front and a back, further moving the paintings into a tangible and actual arena usually associated with sculptural pieces while still retaining their two-dimensionality by having a very limited depth. The work is reminiscent of domestic crafts such as tapestries, quilts and other textile-based works. It’s this fluidity that I find interesting, in that the work refuses to settle into a fixed category.

I make art that combines sculpture and painting and is composed of rope, hot glue, sawdust, resin, and pigments. I use thick rope as the backbone of the form and build up surfaces around it until a rough and mucky exoskeleton is created. My palette is muted and often monochromatic, giving the pieces a monolithic feel that is both contemporary and ancient. The finished aesthetic of my work is reductive and primal, and it obscures an intricate process marked by craftsmanship. I begin directly by spatially “sketching” out a form with rope. Often, a single line is my starting point. I layer rope onto itself to give the work its form, then I brush on resin and sawdust until the form is solidified. I am currently exploring new ideas of surface treatment and pigmentation. 

My art evokes questions of ritual, process, and growth. Motifs of repetition run throughout the work to suggest the cyclical nature of our daily experiences, such as the establishment of personal routines. My most recent body of work was informed by my pandemic experience and fixates on germs, bacteria and parasites as well as instruments and tools that we use on our bodies and environments in pursuit of cleanliness. 

​​Using the historic phenomenon of kunstkammers - also known as wunderkammers, the so-called cabinets of curiosities - in which European collectors would display acquired objects, this installation serves as a vehicle for examining how metaphysical frameworks determine our personal immersion and interaction with our environment and each other. These randomly curated objects, many of non-European origins collected during colonial campaigns, were presented as decontextualized curiosities.
Die Kunstkammer is an ongoing and evolving sculptural installation made up of individually painted, carved, and stacked wine crates interspersed with various found objects. My contention is that a metaphysics that defines the physicality of objects as made up of dead matter alone, enables the type of collection, hierarchical categorization, and exploitation of resources that occurs within an imperialistic framework. Never fixed or finished, the overall project is inspired by the process-based metaphysics of thinkers such as Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, and Heraclitus.. A process-oriented world-view leads to a more relational understanding, in which the things and beings of this world are seen as co-constituent and interdependent.
In a manner of poking fun, the black boxes literalize the idea of static building blocks of matter and have the macabre appearance of a memorial to the dead. Die Kunstkammer is in fact not a static sculpture and very much undead. I emphasize the inherent relationality of a process-based metaphysics by letting the site of the sculpture influence the form. The arrangement changes with every showing; it is a shape-shifting sculpture that is never stuck in the same position. Through my immersion in assembling Die Kunstkammer, I underline an internal animation that comes with the act of stacking. Objects and engravings are hidden from sight while others are revealed. Electronic candles and figurines are interspersed throughout. Light emanates from cracks and gaps within the boxes. As the facilitator of this eternal becoming, I frequently pull prints from the carved boxes to further expand the form, expand the possibilities of transformation within matter, and to document the process itself.

I have always felt a strong affinity for nature. Growing up in Chicago, I found the most beauty in the trees, the singing birds, the sky above. As a visual learner with a multicultural heritage, I have been influenced by my father’s Tesuque culture and my mother’s Costa Rican heritage. While cultural art fascinates me, experiencing beauty of great European art collections while stationed in Germany early in my military career inspired my professional pursuit of art.

While serving in Iraq, amid the devastation of combat, I was moved by seeing miles of mountainous trash heaps. I viscerally experienced the global extent of the systematic destruction of the planet, exploitative, unsustainable, and perhaps worst, careless, unconscious, accidental. This led me to question my own practices, hoping to lessen my environmental impact. I began to build three-dimensional forms out of discarded and natural objects. I am engaged in an aesthetic and spiritual ritual to channel and honor Mother Earth, to seek connection and communion with a power greater than myself.

Everywhere I go, I gather materials, finding inspiration in my surroundings. Like a scavenger, I play an interventional role in removing garbage from the landscape, preventing it from doing further damage. I am also drawn to natural materials and organic forms -- branches, rocks, cocoons, nests. My process is meditative and intuitive – each step revealing a new aspect. Figures emerge, in gravity defying postures on the brink of movement, alive with possibility. Their haunting spiritual presence reminds us they have not gone back to the earth, but asks us to question our connection with our world and the choices we make in our daily existence.

My greatest objective is to awaken individual and societal consciousness; to examine and heal our relationship with Mother Earth.