California Dreamin’
Curated by Ginger Shulick

June 5 – July 3, 2014

On June 5, Cindy Rucker Gallery will open a new group show curated by Ginger Shulick, Founder of Big Deal Arts. This four-person painting show will highlight artists who either currently or have lived in California.

Featuring the work of Jose Arenas, Patrick Dintino, Amir H. Fallah, and Don Porcella, this exhibition will explore the impact of color, design, symbols and contemporary figuration on these artists, whom often incorporate religious or culture-specific iconography into their surrealist works that draw on a rich history of painting and collage from California.

The work of Arenas explores the immigrant experience through collage-style vignettes. Metaphorical images like birds, navigational symbols, maps, compasses, ships, and other elements have been used to allude to place, direction, and the feeling of living in a state of in-between.

Dintino’s junk mail and wrapping paper collages are color translations of the everyday consumer experience. By combining a plethora of sales imagery into an illusionistic pattern, the original message is de-powered, and instead an abstract code with its own strange and chaotic beauty emerges.

Fallah’s work is heavily based in field research. He enters people’s homes and assembles “evidence” of their stories and identities, gravitating toward mundane objects that seem loaded with sentimental meaning: a worn afghan, an idiosyncratic plant, a figurine, a doll, running shoes. He depicts his subjects in dramatically Neoclassical poses, layering his canvases with paper and working back and forth between collage and painting, creating work that reflects his own cultural alliances: references to Persian miniatures may appear in the form of careful borders along the edge of a canvas, and blankets may start to resemble the long veils associated with Eastern cultures.

Porcella, inspired by African masks and outsider art, creates portraits of imagined people, floating faces and characters on a minimalist background. His art celebrates craft and the hand-made as he creates his own wax and pours the material onto the surfaces of his works in an intuitive, spontaneous process of art-making, elevating his lowbrow materials to a high art context. The works’ humorous titles point the viewer to a mysterious world of strange inhabitants and possibilities.