Just Some Friends from Beyond the Canyon – The PV Art Center’s Scott Canty wants us back!

“This is a very different show than I would normally do,” says Scott Canty. He’s referring to “Encore,” which opens on Friday, July 12, in the newly-renovated Palos Verdes Art Center.

“I could have had some artists that I know in P.V. in the show, but I decided that I wanted to bring a whole new crowd up here.”

Canty, who is the Art Center’s Exhibition Director, was hired by the facility in 1998. However, his career began locally a couple of decades earlier when he started working as a graphics designer for the City of Torrance in the Joslyn Center, which became the Joslyn Fine Arts Gallery and, more recently, the Torrance Art Museum. The Joslyn Center at that time was largely serving as a bingo parlor and dance hall for seniors, but Canty said words to this effect: Aren’t we an art center? We should have exhibitions.

“So I convinced the director to start doing exhibitions,” he says. The old folks with their bingo pads were sent packing. “That’s how the Joslyn Center became the exhibition space. I stayed there till ’86 and then I got the job with the Municipal Arts Gallery.”

By the time he was hired as the Art Curator at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, which is located in Barnsdall Park on Hollywood Boulevard, Canty had been curating shows for about eight years. He also oversees the art installations at LAX and figures that all total he’s involved with about 30 shows a year.

“How you do 30 a year, I don’t know,” he says. “That’s a lot of artists.”

At the same time, Canty points out, new artists are entering the scene every year; every three minutes one is being born, and they’re clamoring for attention. Meanwhile, so many talented people who once were in the spotlight have quietly faded from sight. It’s this latter group that Canty often wonders about: Where are they now? What are they doing?

“As a curator, I’ve always looked at artists who were on the fringe, that had major careers but are now either lost (from view) or galleries aren’t interested in their work anymore, or they’re in galleries but you don’t hear about them. I’m not so interested in the emerging, new artists, because I think they’ve still got some growing pains to get through. The younger ones sometimes are not ready or they go from one trend to another.” In other words, many have not yet found their “voice.”

Canty feels that the nine artists he’s invited in for “Encore” are mature, stable, and significant.

As to how he develops his group shows, Canty anchors them with two or three key individuals.

“I try to get a few artists who are your core artists,” he says, “that are going to carry the show, and then you kind of fill it in. That’s basically how it works.”

Although he praises all of his choices for “Encore,” Canty began with three artists he particularly admired: Lita Albuquerque, Abel Alejandre, and Jorge Oswaldo.

 

The pick of the litter

Scott Canty had hoped that “Encore” would be the premiere show of the renovated P.V. Art Center, which was under construction for two years or so, and during the interim the staff took over the former Borders location in the Promenade on the Peninsula. The temporary location was quite spacious and there was no letup in exhibitions, including one called “L’aura borealis: 100 Ways to Look at the Muse,” instigated by yours truly.

Anyway, the board of the Art Center opted for something more conservative, and opened with a plein air show that highlighted California Impressionists from the last century. The works were generally well executed, but it was also a show that stroked rather than provoked, and that meant safe and not being sorry.

And so “Encore” came to the plate batting second.

Canty’s original idea was to select artists who had been shown during his 15-year tenure at the Art Center.

“I went through the whole history of all the shows that I’ve put together,” he says, “and I picked out maybe one or two artists (from each show). And out of that 15 years I had hundreds of artists. Then I thought, well, what about all the community people? And then I had too many artists – I would have “Encore” One, Two, Three… 20. I said, okay, that won’t work. So I decided to put together a show of people who have influenced me as a curator and an artist.”

Had Canty pursued this idea to its conclusion we’d be seeing an array of artists from years past, those who have prospered and those who have not. Either way, it would have been a class reunion of sorts.

“Then I realized, wait a minute, the Art Center is opening all new again, so it’s mainly not about the artists, it’s about the Art Center.” This explains the subhead to “Encore,” which is: bringing one back for another experience.

“I’m inviting the community to come back and see the Art Center again,” Canty explains. “Come on back and see another show. I think this show, and some of the shows that Joe is bringing (Joe Baker, the Art Center’s new director), is sort of the direction we need to go, because we really need to start developing shows that are bringing in the younger audience.”

This will be a challenge, but it’s one the Palos Verdes Art Center should not back away from.

 

Yes, who are they?

Speaking, now, specifically about “Encore,” Canty says, “I’m celebrating the Art Center, but I’m also celebrating these artists, what they represent, and how they bring an influence in society to our culture.”

And so, who are these artists?

Of Lita Albuquerque, Canty says that “Her work has evolved so many times it’s amazing. She does video, photography, performance, painting, sculpture; she does public art.” She’s being represented by images of a beekeeper, decked out in beekeeper protective garb that makes him (or her) resemble an astronaut. The pictures begin to break apart and the pixels comprising the person become like an exploding red supernova.

Nancy Marko has photographed artichokes, in great detail, and brought out a beauty we may never have suspected.

“He does large-scale woodblock prints, and draws all the time,” Canty says of Abel Alejandre. “We’ve only corresponded through e-mail, but I love his work. I said, you have to be in the show ‘cause you’re so different, you’re so dynamic.”

Canty chanced upon Joe Biel through Biel’s connection with Alejandre. Biel draws, and apparently there’s one large work that Biel has been working on meticulously for ten years.

Canty then makes an interesting confession, one that could only have been made by a curator in the 21st century:

“Basically, everyone on this list (of artists) is a friend of mine on Facebook.”

This writer is both surprised and not surprised: You have thousands of Facebook friends, I exclaim.

Perhaps it’s now deemed old school, but until a few minutes ago, geologically speaking, a curator would hop into a cab and give the driver the address of an artist in a certain arrondissement or poor neighborhood, and he or she would make the prerequisite studio visit in this way. Although Canty has toured countless studios in the past, it was different this time: “The whole show has all been Facebook images and digital imagery in the computer.”

What happens if you see their work in the flesh and it doesn’t measure up, this writer asks, but it seems to be a rhetorical question. So, there you are. The times have indeed been ‘a changing.

David Fobes creates geometrically “psychedelic” imagery. Modern mandalas sort of, that play optic tricks on the eye.

Michael Flechtner is a neon artist. Canty selected him in part because his work is comical and much of the other work in the show is serious. “I wanted something fun; I wanted something that’s neon because what I’m also trying to do in this show is to have various mediums represented.”

Flechtner’s two pieces are rather large, but he doesn’t want them to overshadow anyone else’s work. Canty was impressed by this: “It was nice to hear a neon artist say, ‘and they’re not bright that they will affect the other art.’ I said, for you to say that makes me feel like you take pride and consideration for other artists.”

Antonio Muniz uses smoke stains on canvas as a means to create elusive shapes, and then adds paint to enhance the work. Fumage, I’m told, was a Surrealist technique popularized by Wolfgang Paalen.

Jorge Oswaldo has the dubious distinction of being perhaps the first artist whom Canty came across on Facebook without knowing anything about him before.

“There’s this picture of Jorge Oswaldo,” our curator says; “he has his hat on crooked and he looks kind of trendy, and I’m like, what are you about? I’m always intrigued about artists who are inspired by graffiti. So I clicked on him and I just fell in love with his work.”

At the time, Oswaldo was creating art, by way of symbols and lettering, with a vinyl-cutting machine. He was later commissioned to come up with a project for LAX, this being an abstraction with big California poppies. Oswaldo also makes portraits of people based on the corporate logos of the products they purchase or otherwise consume. The idea, and it’s not a pleasant one, is that we’ve sold out to these various companies and conglomerates.

Jamie Schoinick takes polystyrene packing materials, like the ones you tossed when your big screen TV arrived, which she regards as prefab sculptural forms, and she paints them. They become wall pieces and, Canty says, “Some of them are quite beautiful. It’s like, you found that in a box?”

These are the artists that Scott Canty has chosen for “Encore.”

“It covers a whole gamut of techniques, materials, and the whole show is about color and pattern and contemporary ideas.”

Encore, curated by Scott Canty, opens with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. (5 to 6 for members) at the Palos Verdes Art Center, 5504 W. Crestridge Road, Rancho Palos Verdes. Gallery hours, Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. Through Sept. 29. Call (310) 541-2479 or go to pvartcenter.org. ER

 

 

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