2024 ADAMS SQUARE EXHIBITS
Ventana Huichola
Artist: Natalie Gonzalez​
On exhibit from October 7 - November 11, 2024
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Ventana Huichola - "Huichol window" in Spanish - is a site-specific installation consisting of four pieces made of various-sized God’s Eyes. Each God’s Eye is attached to a plastic net with a cord. These votive objects offer luck for those that pass by and honor the Huichol community in Mexico. Having these objects in Glendale offer protection to the City and create a window to the world of the Huichol culture. Gonzalez’s goal for this piece is for the audience to engage in the magical vibrations of colors and shapes.
Gonzalez is a visual artist and art practitioner based in San Diego, CA who primarily focuses on acrylic, and mixed media. She uses simple shapes, lines and organic images in her work. She enjoys the creative process; it is a response to all the things she experiences in her daily life and past. By using elements of her traditions, roots and Neo-Mexicanism, she attempts to construct her own ideas, analysis, and metaphors of what being binational means to her.
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Vestiges
Artists: Jonna Lee and John David O'Brien​
On exhibit from August 19 - October 4, 2024
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Vestiges obliquely divides the Adams Square Mini Park Gas Station into two. Jonna Lee and John David O’Brien each occupy one triangular section of the gas station and place back-to-back modified pieces of furniture containing multiple drawers. Abstracted traces from their own lives emerge suspended and standing from these drawers. The objects used in the installation relate to Lee’s and O’Brien’s overlapping names. The root of both their names results in the two sides of the room to be complementary but in very different arrays.
Lee is a LA-based contemporary sculptor whose artwork engages process, material, and form. Her interests revolve around the viewers' assumptions about particular materials, the anthropomorphically charged potential of sculpture, and the visceral impact present when any given artwork attracts the human senses.
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O'Brien creates artwork, writes, and works in a larger community creating exhibition spaces, curatorial projects, and public art. His personal creative evolution is grounded in abstraction rooted from his life experience as part of a military family.
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Jungle
Artist: Annli Tico​
On exhibit from July 15 - August 16, 2024
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"Jungle” is made out of mostly lightweight textiles and yarn, as well as crocheted pieces that are hung from the ceiling. The piece creates a jungle-like environment within the station, that is colorful and dynamic from all four sides.
Tico’s work spans multiple mediums and focuses largely on location, taking special interest in the expansiveness and intricate details of the natural world. Through the use of pattern, repetition, and the abstraction of shape, she attempts to create work that captures the broadness of nature in a way that is playful and inviting to the viewers. Tico often uses textiles and found materials to capture the softness and fluidity of nature, as well as its color and vibrancy.
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@mellowfeverart
All the People We Encounter Each Day
Artist: Amy Oates
On exhibit from June 3 - July 12, 2024
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All the People We Encounter Each Day depicts a crowd of people, swirling like a school of fish, created from layers of painted, cut paper. The layers are suspended from the ceiling with monofiliment.
Oates navigates between recognition and abstraction, simplifying palettes while complexifying layers and patterns through construct-deconstruct-reconstruct processes. She works to explore crowds as representative of ephemeral moments where individuals converge to form something abstract yet familiar, embodying negotiations between personal and public space. As she sees greater density necessitating greater attention to social interactions, she is exploring questions about how we can learn to live within the crowd.
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@amy.oates
Wings of Earth
Artists: Vivien Adamian and Natalia Sookias
On exhibit from March 25 - May 31, 2024
Wings of Earth transforms the Adams Square Mini Park Gas Station into a cultural "community sacred space" for reflection on land and loss. Adamian and Sookias created a series of hanging objects inspired by decorative ceramics from ancient Armenian churches, and vessels whose naturalistic contours and folds recall peaks and valleys from lands lost, both literal and metaphorical. Drawing from ancestral and contemporary stories of hope and grief, the artists wish to offer viewers a space of reflection and awe.
The reflection space, occupied by ceramic eggs, wings, aghamans (Armenian salt jars), and other evocative clay objects, creates a dialogue about how we process loss and conceive of hope in diaspora communities. Though Armenian culture is represented in the design of this installation, the artists’ aim is for the art to transcend cultural boundaries and remind the many communities in Glendale what it means to extend a hand during difficult times.
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The Campbell Center associates’ installation reflects their challenges with global warming. The associates have decorated umbrellas that reflect the stress & anxiety that climate discourse causes them. The umbrellas are turned upside to symbolize shelter & protection, and recycled cactus pillows at the base of the installation reflect the environments unknown.
The Campbell Center aims to showcase the work of their associates through Us vs. The Climate Change, and demonstrate opportunities for growth in expressing themselves through art. Since 2018 The Campbell Center has held open-house events and galleries that contain the art of various artists with disabilities. Their associates have showcased their work through watercolors, acrylic paint, and community murals during these events.
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