Week Three: ART SHOW VISIT.

This week, I attended a show at the Contemporary Arts Forum in downtown Santa Barbara, right off State street. The show was entitled Eating Apples in Paradise, and features the works of twelve local Santa Barbara artists. The show was wrapped around the theme of Santa Barbara, and how it has, throughout it's history, been tied to notions of paradise through the ways it has been marketed to tourism and developed. Works in the show accepted this common theme in very different ways, utilizing very different mediums and art-forms, from photography, to paintings, to large installations. My favorite piece in the show, entitled Blitzed, by James Van Arsdale, was a mixed media installation that was both eye-catching in its execution, as well as allowed me, a spectator, to play with it in terms of its connection to the overarching theme of the show. It consisted of a painted, idealized city-scape, with plants in the foreground, on the wall, with what looked like painted cardboard rocks on the floor directly in front. Even further in front of the wall were two jagged red barriers, and various other cut outs strewn about. On the wall above the painting was a large hypnotizing black and white spiral, dramatically lighting the rest of the piece. Personally i interpreted this aspect as a statement about how Santa Barbara's Chamber of Commerce and Conference  and Visitor's Bureau has pushed forth an image of the city highlighting only the beautiful and "grand" characteristics, in a sense "hypnotizing" visitors with its facades, represented by the barriers in front of the wall.  I really enjoyed the theme of the show, for it allowed the artists to take their respective pieces in a number of directions.