Art of the Hierarchies
By Michelle Aslan
Corsair Staff Writer

• Santa Monica College faculty exhibit art pieces that represent an array of metaphorical images.

The annual Faculty Art Show, a 30-year traditon at Santa Monica College, had its annual opening reception Friday at the Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery at the Madison Campus, attracting a large crowd of art students, faculty members and the public.

The crowd spilled over from the gallery into the reception area, where fruit, cheeses and desserts were served.
Thirty-eight art department professors showed off their work in various mixed-media, paintings, drawings, sculpture and digital art.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the show, and the artists had effusive discussions of their artwork.

Maurizio Barattucci, a participant in the art display, and chairman of the art department, said, “The art show is primarily for the benefit of the students, so they can see what their teachers are doing.”

Many of the art professors are involved in the Art Mentor Program, which is an arts program for advanced junior college students. Here, a teacher works one-on-one with an exceptionally gifted SMC art student.

There were many works of art on display, and a few of the professors had the chance to speak about themselves and their art.

Barattucci has been teaching drawing and painting at SMC for 30 years.

The artwork he contributed were two large-scale paintings of a pair of arresting roosters, one Japanese and the other Polish, who were both looking out contemplatively over the viewer. “I raise and collect different chickens,” Barattucci said. “I love them, so I painted them. They are like my children.”

Debbie Han was a former student at SMC, and has now been teaching drawing and design at SMC for three years and at Loyola Marymount University for over two years.

There was a buzz around her display of acrylic condoms. Han envisioned the image of discarded condoms while living in New York before she moved back to Los Angeles.

She created the candy-like condom shapes from clay models depicting their various crumpled appearances, then made the silicon molds, casting them in resin with pigments.

The results, according to Han, are condoms that at first resemble “suckers, but they depict a disgusting identity.”

“Metaphor is a way in which we perceive reality, meaning I find a lot of multiple experiences in the good and the bad, or beauty and repulsion simultaneously,” she said. “I want to examine how much of our perception is affected by our cultural conditioning and how much from our instincts.”

Marian Winsryg, the gallery director who teaches computer design and water color painting, brought her artwork entitled, “Insect Women Tie the Knot,” that was inspired by the movie “Paradyne Case.” The image represents a knot that ultimately cannot be tied.

The wallpiece, originally taken from a photograph, shows a scene from the movie with the images of its movie stars, which was then layered with acrylic glazes.

Chris Madans, who has taught more than 25 years at SMC, and who is also a participant of the mentor program, was originally a student at SMC. “Jim Urmston was my first art history teacher.” she said. She displayed two mixed media pieces, one of which was entitled “Without Memory, Who Am I?”

The work, which consists various objects placed in a dollhouse box, represent a “metaphor of loss of self by age and dementia.” An older woman sits lost and isolated on a bench, with only a small window of her past to nourish her mind. “Time is an unleashed racing horse that is racing by. Time only goes one way. You cannot turn back.”

Linda G. Lopez has taught Contemporary Art Theory and Practice at SMC for 10 years, and is a participant in the art mentor program.

She brought her class over to see her artwork, a mixed-media wallpiece entitled “Studies for Integration.”

Bubbling over with enthusiasm, she perhaps summed up what the other college instructors felt but did not say. “I love my work, I love my students. I have truly found my lifework,” she said.

Madans, Urmston, Curtis Hokzema, Ronn Davis and Jeff O'Connel have a collaboration of their work on display and for sale at "The Fig Gallery in Bergamont Station, on Michigan Avenue in Santa Monica.