As part of Long Beach Arts Month, the Arts Council for Long Beach, in partnership with the Cultural Alliance of Long Beach, has tasked two celebrated local artists, Jeff Rau and Kay Erikson, to curate art exhibitions in the Bungalow Building, which is located on the 700 block of Pine Avenue.
When he’s not teaching at Biola University, Jeff Rau has been creating innovative, thoughtful, and engaging works in a variety of media. Although primarily a photographer, he’s created sculptural, installation, and mixed media works as well.
He’s been involved with the annual SoundWalk event and, with Sixpack Projects, curated a series of acclaimed exhibitions during the halcyon days of Phantom Galleries. This new exhibition, Trace Evidence, opens this Friday evening at 6 PM, in the northern most unit of the Bungalow Building, 743 North Pine Avenue. It explores the themes of measurement and documentation.
“Many artists work with strategies to capture and record experiences in more indirect ways that just creating a picture of that event directly. In fact, many artists strive to find ways to depict things that aren’t directly visual and, in order to see something of an experience, they have to access it somewhat indirectly.
“For example, Virginia Katz has a series of ‘wind drawings’ where she was striving to capture the energy and movement of the wind. But the wind is invisible, so to capture this effect she hung pens from trees and allowed the wind to create its own drawings over the span of several hours.
“Another example can be seen in Jocelyn Foye’s work. She stages rather elaborate performance events but, once the performance is done, usually the work is gone. She has sought to communicate some of the action of these performances by staging them on a floor covered in clay that captures and records every step with impressions in the clay, offering another unique way to experience the action of the original event.
“I guess both of those are more specifically ‘documentation’ examples. There are also some others who work more directly with measurements in the show. But the idea is the same, giving a unique perspective on the fleeting and immaterial.”
Rau usually does not include his own work in exhibitions he curates, but found that it was necessary to help connect the work of one artist with that of the others.
“My work actually sits very nicely with hers, In many ways we seem to have similar processes in studying a subject and creating our work. So in this case I thought that including my work would help to integrate her with the show more fully.
“The work that I am including is part of a larger project I have been working on for a couple of years. The project is called Haze, and it involved a daily practice of observing and recording details about the grey/brown cloud that hangs over LA.
“I’ve done it a few different ways in the larger scope of the project, photographing the city from Signal Hill, creating abstract images that reproduce the color of this low cloud, etc. But the work specifically included here is a grid representing a full month of daily sky color observations along side weather and air quality data recorded from the same time.
“Each day places the color of the clear blue overhead sky directly against the more gray color that is seen sitting low over the city. It winds up with some pretty jarring juxtaposition and, hopefully, leads one to reconsider our own role in creating this environmental effect.”
Rau credits Long Beach for starting him on the path to becoming an artist.
“When I first moved out here I was only mildly interested in the visual arts, but there are so many really talented artists here in Long Beach and, as I made friends in the community, I was really drawn to relationships with visual artists. Those friendships are really what inspired me to become a visual artist myself.
“Beyond the community of people, I think that the City of Long Beach has always made an effort to promote public art and arts programming in a great way. Even in the small ways (sidewalk art, creative bike racks, murals, etc.), Long Beach continues to celebrate the creative spirit time and time again.”
Rau admits there are still many challenges.
“Somehow, we need to find a way to keep our talent excited about Long Beach, even as they experience professional success. So many local talents are quick to run to LA as they achieve success and/or identify themselves more readily as an ‘LA artist’ rather than a Long Beach artist.’ We have struggled a bit to establish a strong gallery scene here in Long Beach, and we’ve struggled to connect artists with collectors locally. I’m not sure that I have a good solution to this, but I think it is part of what keeps us stuck in first gear as an overall scene.
“I would love to see Long Beach become known as an important destination for art in the LA area. I believe we have the talent, but we haven’t been able to build a scene that gets much attention beyond our own community borders.”
One event that’s breached those boarders is SoundWalk, drawing attention from across LA and Orange Counties.
“Soundwalk is a really unique and exciting event. I look forward to it every year, and I’ve had the opportunity to participate as an artist on at least two occasions. So much of the work at Soundwalk encourages the visitor to not be a passive viewer, but to really engage with the work and participate in a very active way. It is also a VERY eclectic group of artists, many of whom I’d categorize as avant-garde; in a more traditional gallery setting this work can be intimidating to viewers. By bringing the whole group of artists together for one night I think it is somehow more encouraging for the viewer. Maybe just because they know what to expect going in. But as an artist it is really exciting and rare to find an audience that it so willing to be active participants. I look forward to being a part of Soundwalk for years to come!”
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To learn more about Jeff, visit JeffRau.com.
Find information and images from Trace Evidence.
To discover the many events taking place during the Long Beach Arts Month celebration, visit LongBeachArtsMonth.org.
TO learn more about the Cultural Alliance of Long Beach, visit CALBArts.org.