Long Beach Community College is very pleased to announce new exhibitions by three Southern California based artists: Kristin Beeler (INTEGUMENTUM), Lynne McDaniel (DISASTER), and Philip Vaughan (HISTORY). The exhibit runs From Nov. 7 – Dec. 13 and a reception will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 13 from 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm in the LAC Art Gallery, K-100.

Kristin Beeler, INTEGUMENTUM

Kristin Beeler is Professor of Art and Coordinator of Jewelry and Metalwork at Long Beach City College. She has been a resident artist at Cleveland Institute of Art, Kent State University and visiting artist at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She spent part of her recent sabbatical as Research Associate at the University of Technology Sydney in the Faculty of Engineering and IT working with the Materialising Memories research program.

My practice includes contemporary jewelry, photography and object making. Its product sits at the intersection of beauty, memory, and the body with jewelry as a mnemonic device. Integumentum is a related set of pieces exploring layering of skin, experience, and location. Photographic portraits printed on aluminum highlight scarring from traumatic injury and pair with garments rendered in Tyvek onto which each scar has been embroidered. The portraits mark a specific point in time and geography as well as a specific location on the body. Accompanying objects in charcoal, mother of pearl, vellum, and silver relate to physical experience and traces of individual moments.

Lynne McDaniel, DISASTERS

My work uses the language of the landscape to explore current events, as well as the sometimes-surprising beauty of urban existence. My current body of work reflects my anxiety about the accelerating consequences to the landscape of current policies. I am making landscapes on paper inspired by Chinese hand scrolls, using not the traditional ink and brush, but charcoal and oil paint. But rather than the dreamy, idealized scenes of the Chinese paintings, I am interested in the environmental and ecological changes caused by natural disasters, human intervention, and the passage of time. Often using news photos as sources, I paint the landscape then disrupt the image to indicate the place where things go wrong. The incursion can be a subtle dash of color, or a more violent stroke or erasure. I use a mostly black and white palette to evoke the memory and nostalgia of vintage photographs, while small touches of vermilion echo the bright red seals on the scroll paintings. The destabilization or interruption of what is happening in the paintings reflects my growing uncertainty about what is happening on the larger canvas of our world.

Philip Vaughan, HISTORY D. DAY DRAWINGS,

These drawings are based on research that Philip Vaughan has been working on for a number of years. He has been collecting images from war libraries, books and from the internet. He has been working from these to recreate the momentous events of the time.

This work comes about as a result of the artist having lived as a child with his family in Normandy, France in the aftermath of WW2, very close to the area where the Normandy landings occurred. The fighting was over by the time the family arrived, but evidence of the massive loss and destruction was all about them.

To the artist as a young child, the scale of War itself let alone its meaning was difficult to grasp and this project can be said to have begun then, as he gradually struggled to understand some of what had happened right there where they lived.

The artist’s father was a commander in the British Navy and he was intimately involved in the landings on the Normandy beaches and the planning of the construction of the Mulberry harbors on those beaches. Those remarkable floating harbors were created with great ingenuity and in great haste to supply the troops with vital material, food, and ammunition as all the other nearby harbors had been destroyed by the Germans.

The family visited those beaches when the artist was very young but his father died at a relatively early age so they never had much opportunity to discuss this. These drawings represent a kind of recollected memory of those events, events that pre-dated the artist’s direct experience yet which he sensed in some way throughout his childhood. They also represent his continuing interest in ships and the sea and the history of the time.