| From the Bay Area:
exhibition, Marcia Wood Gallery, May 6 - June 12, 2010 - installation
images
As a Mexican American
artist growing up in the inner city schools of Downtown Los Angeles,
I became aware of the differences in the class and culture of American
experience. This led me to take to traveling where I ended up on
the island of Rhodos in Greece. There meeting international
artists, Germans in particular, I began to make art as a primary
commitment in my life. I returned to California to study art at
the California college of the Arts. A few years later I attended
the University of California at Berkeley and received my MFA. Currently,
I making highly rendered and expressive drawings of manipulated
toys, and stuff animals in particular. These echo a feeling of
loss, beauty, the psychological dilemma of childhood and the transition
to adulthood. The animals float in an ambiguous space and are beginning
to perform gestures and form relationships. …………
My studio is in West Berkeley, California where I also live. I am
an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley and Diablo Valley College.
-- Aida Gamez
ARTIST STATEMENT
Emotional disruption is what guides my art-making, an interest
developed through personal experience and passion. Specifically,
it is the disruptive and disturbing combination of beauty and deformity
that is the focus of my recent work.
The purpose is not to produce an either/or response to the clashing
aspects of my work. Rather, I am striving to evoke a simultaneous
sense of beauty and disturbance, a single uneasy feeling of attraction
and repulsion.
In a practical sense, my three-dimensional work deals with what
is visible on the exterior versus what is hidden inside, whether
that be the disorders lurking within a normal-looking child or
the emptiness inside an attractive package. My work attempts to
illustrate or reference the inadequacy of perceptions built solely
upon appearances and first impressions
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