#cara despain

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Work by Adrienne Elise Tarver

Work by Ray Anthony Barrett

Work by Cara Despain

Work by Andrae Green

One room with sculpture by Margaret Griffith

Against Dystopia, the group exhibition at Diane Rosenstein curated by niko w. okuro, presents a variety of interesting work that speaks to the times we are living in.

The exhibition includes ten international artists representing twelve cities across the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and all five regions of the United States-  Ray Anthony Barrett, Ashanti Chaplin, Phoebe Collings-James, Cara Despain, Andrae Green, Margaret Griffith, Jane Chang Mi, Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan, Esteban Ramón Pérez, and Adrienne Elise Tarver.

From the gallery-

Presented on the eve of the 2024 presidential election, Against Dystopia is ‘a far-reaching exhibition, both in terms of the diverse backgrounds and approaches of its featured artists, and the social, cultural, and geographic ecosystems those artists represent and critique,’ writes okoro, who is based in New Haven, CT. The exhibition ‘features artworks that inhabit a spectrum of anti-dystopian thought, from mobilizing conceptualism to overcome historic traumas and the precarity of the present, to envisioning future utopias against seemingly insurmountable odds.’

Against Dystopia transforms fear and anxiety surrounding the uncertainty of our shared future into a tangible site of hope—one where collective memory reminds us of our agency to enact change today, and rich cultural traditions empower us to imagine alternative futures. Of significance is the inclusion of artists who identify as multi hyphenates, playing numerous social roles within their communities, such as advocate, change agent, chef, documentarian, educator, father, filmmaker, mother, musician, oceanographer, researcher, and too many more to name.

Artworks are grouped into three thematic sections, each of which explores creative strategies of resistance and works against dystopia at all costs: field research, symbolic interactionism, and speculative fiction.

Ray Anthony Barrett (Missouri), Ashanti Chaplin (Oklahoma), Cara Despain (Utah/Florida), and Jane Chang Mi (Hawai‘i/California) use field research to map histories of frontierism, settler colonialism, and land politics onto ecological and socioeconomic systems today. With a focus on listening to the land and sea to both unearth and atone for difficult truths, these artists name and dismantle dystopian practices on the path to reconciliation. Embracing an appreciation for both hyperlocal traditions and the tenets of global citizenship, each underscores our shared duty to ensuring ecocultural sustainability and Earth’s habitability for future generations.

While Margaret Griffith (California), Olivia Morgan (New York), and Adrienne Elise Tarver (New York) work through markedly different mediums and styles, they share a fearlessness in addressing ongoing tensions and questions surfaced amidst the political firestorm of 2020. Embracing tenets of symbolic interactionism, or the theory that individuals shape and are shaped by society through daily interactions and the co-creation of meaning from symbols, these artists remind us of the power of human connection to bridge difference. Each steers towards social cohesion by processing collective grief and the enduring impacts of the 2020 presidential election, the proliferation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement respectively. Whereas Morgan and Griffith subvert symbols that often polarize rather than unite us within physical space—such as fences, face masks, and smartphones—Tarver reaches into the past to pull forth reimagined symbols that speak to our spiritual interdependence.

Phoebe Colling-James (United Kingdom), Andrae Green (Massachusetts/Jamaica) and Esteban Ramón Pérez (California) boldly envision alternative realities by using speculative fiction and symbolic allegory to sew threads of connection across time and space. Each resists linearity and subverts narrative tropes to instead materialize the fluid spiritual dimensions of lived experience. Through their layered ceramics, paintings, and sculptures, these artists mine the depths of their respective Jamaican/British, Jamaican/American, and Chicanx heritages to comment more broadly on social conditions today, prompting us to dream beyond what’s readily visible or knowable.

Against Dystopia opens concurrently with The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA, which similarly explores, “opportunities for civic dialogue around some of the most urgent problems of our time by exploring past and present connections between art and science.” By convening an international group of visionary artists to help initiate these dialogues, Against Dystopia prompts viewers to pursue deeper understanding of shared challenges and solutions, on both the micro and macro levels.’

Below are a few more selections-

Photos by Olivia "LIT LIV" Morgan

Installation by Ashanti Chaplin

Work by Jane Chang Mi

Paintings by Andrae Green and sculpture by Phoebe Collings-James

Work by Margaret Griffith

This exhibition closes 11/2/24.

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Cara Despain’s 2014 poster for Micol Hebron’s Gallery Tally: project representing the overall percentage of women artists represented in New York and L.A. galleries.

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“Las Huellas del Vacio” is the literal centerpiece of “Fractured Landscapes,” the Art and Culture Center’s observant pairing of two artists with a lot in common. Emanuel Tovar and Cara Despain both work in large, ambitious scales, explore related themes through multiple mediums, and deal in issues of existential importance.

For Tovar, who was raised and still lives in Guadalajara, Mexico, the immigrant experience is central to his suite of works here. The highly personal “Homemaker” consists of a series of brown envelopes with faded postmarks, which housed, in the 1970s, the correspondence and financial assistance from his grandfather, then working in Los Angeles to provide for Emanuel’s parents in Mexico.

Mirroring the geometric, ritualistic presentation of “Las Huellas del Vacio,” “El Sol de la Bestia” features charred wood arranged in a large circle on a gallery wall. Tovar retrieved these materials from campfires along the route of the network of freight trains known as “The Beast” that delivered many migrants to the U.S. from Mexico. The crude tactility of these jagged stumps, jutting toward the spectator like fingers, makes for a visceral reminder of the countless humans that, indeed, sacrificed life and limb to be stowaways on this unfriendly means of transport.

Despain’s portion of the show, while lighter in color than Tovar’s inky palette, addresses topics no less urgent: the damaging history of bomb testing in her native Southwest, within the context of interstellar manifest destiny. The Utahan’s central contribution is “As Above, So Below,” a series of gradated white monoliths topped with plaster reliefs of U.S. and Soviet testing grounds inspired by Google satellite imagery (shown below). Each stunted tower represents a different event and location—the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico, the Tsar Bomba detonated over a Russian archipelago—and the physical indentations, tracks and pockmarks rendered fastidiously by Despain serve as indelible imprints of man’s destructive condition.

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CVA Gallery Art Opening, Friday the 11th

Really Intresting works, my favorites being Jae Lamar’s Don’t say your heart’s not in it and Cara Despain’s work, as shown above. Though that could be biased of me to say due to the California fires being a topic that hits close to home, the Wolsey fire and paradise fire. I really enjoyed the layout of her gallery and her pieces used to represent all the recent fires.

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The gallery opening, on January 11th, featured art by Cara Despain as well as multiple student works. The exhibition that stood out to me the most was the “Medford Photography Collection” by Lindee Newman & Collaborators because of scale. The artists used the wall space to their advantage and organized it in a way that made the viewer’s eyes move around the whole exhibition. Other attendees seemed to be just as captivated because there was a reasonable crowd viewing the exhibition.

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photograph by Lindee Newman

Seen in the Cara Despain 2019 Art Opening

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This piece by Cara Despain called “ seeing the stone “ shows rocks found in various locations of Utah and then cast in concrete. The height on the wall displays the relative elevation each stone was found at and each rock is labeled with it’s GPS coordinates. I really enjoyed how the artist chose to display this piece to highlight the elevation.

-Karsen Kehlet

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Cara Despain is a multimedia artist who works in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, and mixed media. she came to Southern Oregon University January 9th to talk about some of her work to art students. this picture is a slide from her talk on her work.

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Above is Cara Despain's installation for the 2023 Florida Prize in Contemporary art at the Orlando Museum of Art. Her work feels especially timely with the recent release of Oppenheimer, a film about the scientist who led the effort to create the first atomic bomb. Her installation for this show is captivating- eerie glowing green glassware  surrounds the entrance to a mesmerizing video installation, Test of Faith, where atomic explosions fill three walls as a Mormon hymn plays.

The museum's information on the artist and her work-

Miami-based artist Cara Despain was born and raised in Salt Lake City, and the experience of growing up in the West informs much of her work. Through video, sculpture, photography, and installation she critiques a range of issues pertinent to the region that are also internationally relevant. These issues stem in part from the nineteenth-century concept of Manifest Destiny, the belief that Providence intended for American civilization to extend across the continent and benefit from all its yet untapped resources. That philosophy gave rise to such virtues associated with the character of the American West as optimism, independence, and self-reliance. It also engendered an unchecked hubris which has sometimes had tragic consequences. Among these unintended consequences are the human and environmental costs of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing from 1945-1962 which polluted vast areas of the West and inflicted disease and death on many of the region's residents. Being from this region and having family that lived there during those tests, Despain has long had a deep concern about lingering effects of this exposure for the people downwind.

Despain's two-part installation begins with six cabinets of glowing green glassware. This inexpensive Depression-era glass was popular for its vibrant green color. As a bonus, the glass is fluorescent and glows hauntingly in the dark under ultraviolet light. This seductive coloration is ominous, though, being produced by adding small amounts of uranium oxide to the glass mixture. While now we would not consider using radioactive dinnerware, Despain is demonstrating our once innocent relationship with this toxic element that made the atomic age possible.

The domestic, fragile uranium glass flanks the entrance to Test of Faith, an immersive video installation that is menacing and enthralling. The room is filled with a series of atomic explosions edited from vintage nuclear test footage from the Nevada Test Site, which was less than 150 miles from where her family in southern Utah originates. Projected simultaneously on three walls, billowing clouds in swirling tones of blue, green, and yellow build to a crescendo then fade before the next explosion. To heighten the darkly supernatural sensation, Despain shows each mushroom cloud divided in mirror form like Rorschach inkblots and we are left to see within these abstract patterns our own fears and trepidations. Accompanying this vision of cosmic destruction is the sound of the Mormon hymn "Love One Another" rising and falling in step with each detonation. The digitally altered synthetic timbre of the song completes the experience of facing the apocalypse and is reference to the insidious appeal to the assumed patriotism and obedient nature of the largely Mormon and ranching populations in the fallout region to support the testing.

Today, nuclear weapons testing may seem like a remote episode in American history associated with the Cold War and the once alarming spread of global Communism. Despain's work is intended to remind us that the nuclear threat is still present, with more nations than ever expanding their arsenals or developing and testing new weapons.

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Cara Despain

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Went to Cara Despain’s art opening tonight... then got distracted and amazed by the photography exhibit in the other building. 

[thesoulofmiami]

Live Virtual Local Views at PAMM: Cara Despain 3/26/20

Live Virtual Local Views at PAMM: Cara Despain Thursday, 03/26/2020 – 06:00 pm – 06:30 pm Perez Art Museum Miami 1103 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, Florida 33132 Website Cost: Free

Join us digitally for our tour program, Local Views at PAMM, where select local artists will speak about a few works of art currently on view at the museum. This month, Cara Despain will lead the tour.

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Cara Despain http://ift.tt/2zDETgh http://ift.tt/2dH0WqY

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Photography in Medford Oregon by various talented artists and students of SOU

Seen in the Cara Despain 2019 Art Opening

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Cara Despain, Slow Burn, 2016, Spinello Projects