Opening Reception: June 7th | 6-9 PM

June 7th – June 14th

Catalyst Gallery

Catalyst Gallery will be hosting its final exhibition for the 2011-2012 school year: a Free for All Exhibition! Bring in your work to install starting June 5 at 6:30 PM! Open to everyone and ANYONE who has art to put on walls! First come, first served in terms of wall space!! We are accepting any and all art you have to offer! See you there!

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June 1st – June 5th

Opening Reception: Thursday, June 1st | 6-9 PM

Catalyst Gallery

Catalyst is pleased to present our final solo exhibition of the quarter: The Spectrum (of Being) by Isabel Bogarin. The work consists of several bodies of documentary portraits of LGBTQIA individuals, and deals with issues of identity and body in a society beginning to question the heteronormative state of being.

Artist’s Statement:

Photography has developed my sense of art and activism beyond holding a sign and marching on the streets. It began with an interest in portraiture and fashion, I felt that I took “pretty” pictures but they had no message. After becoming involved with many organizations and partaking student activism, I became politically charged to say something with my art. I wanted to make art that was relevant to things that needed attention.

In this portrait series, I focused on people who identified with the LGBTQIA community. As a member, we are a group of people who are discriminated or ostracized for our identities. I want to depict the social construct of labels given to the queer community, the identifications we, queers, give ourselves, and the understanding that we are all humans. By using my D-SLR, I’m bringing modern means of production to represent modern day ignorance and identities of people’s understanding. The large prints are to observe faces of people we pass by every day, never looking, only the assumptions we have of others in today’s society.

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Images courtesy Isabel Bogarin.

May 24th – May 31st

Opening Reception: May 24th | 6-9 PM

Catalyst Gallery

Catalyst presents Memory Remains, a solo photography exhibition by Varduhi Simonyan. The photographs presented deal with issues of passing time and family remembrance, as well as the difficulties of a changing space and history in the artist’s memory.

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Open event, ONE NIGHT ONLY

Thursday, May 24th | 5-9 PM

Claire Trevor School of the Arts Courtyard

Join us for Catalyst’s premier event for the spring quarter! A delightful courtyard romp, this event will feature a free outdoor art exhibition, film/video screenings, live music and performance, a swap meet, vendor booths, and much more! This will be a single-night event only, so don’t miss it!

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Photos courtesy Marisa Colcord.

Performance by Button Willow Locomotive

Performance by Joey Luu

May 17 – May 22

Opening Reception: May 17th | 6-9 PM

Catalyst Gallery

Catalyst presents World War IIVVIIV, a solo video installation by Gilda Nowparast.

Artist’s statement:

The video installation World War IIVVIIV captures an unconscious reaction to the CNN Farsi news reporting the conflict between Iran, Israel, and United States. It also covers the war that might happen with Iran. Farsi news reports that Iran doesn’t want to negotiate the nuclear weapon situation and English news reports the issues between Iran and U.S. As an Iranian artist, it is a huge torture to live outside your homeland and hear about all the dangerous events that might happen there. I grew up during the Iran and Iraq war, which was some of the hardest days of my life. Dealing with war is even harder for me this time because I’m so far from my homeland. By peeling off the dried parts of my skin, I express desire to be part of the disaster and experience some of the pain.

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Image courtesy Gilda Nowparast.

Photos courtesy Corinne Chan.

May 10 – May 15

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 10th | 6-9 PM

Catalyst Gallery

Catalyst Gallery presents What’s Above is Now Below, a solo exhibition by Jacqueline Westling.

-we live by the currents, plan by the tide, and follow the sun-

For as long as I can remember I have felt a strong inclination to document every sunset I have ever seen. I am not sure if it is my love for color, my interest in time, or just the simple idea that if one does not drop what they are doing, they might miss the sky changing from day to night in an instant. When I miss a sunset, I wonder if I missed the best sky painting yet and missing one may make my categorization incomplete. It was a recent realization that the sky is something I have always been obsessed with, and after many photo classes of trying to come up with a photo project, I have been creating one all along. I am fortunate enough to have been close to the ocean all of my life, but traveling abroad has only made my documentation more worldly, making sure to capture every sunset I’ve ever seen.

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Photo courtesy Jacqueline Westling.

Photo courtesy Corinne Chan.

Saturday, May 5th | 7 – 10 PM

Santa Ana Artwalk, Santa Ana

Join Catalyst in a field trip to the Santa Ana Artwalk to support Catalyst alumni Noe Gaytan’s solo curatorial project, the Nomad Art Project! The first exhibition will be Passage: The Art of Jose Arroyo.

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Photo courtesy Noe Gaytan.

April 28 – May 7

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 28th | 2-6PM

Catalyst Gallery

Catalyst Gallery is pleased to present Artist as Changemaker, a salon-style exhibition featuring work by students at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School, San Juan Capistrano. The exhibition features student work from grades 9 to 12.

Featured artists:
Alexa Barberisi, Reagan Bean, Zack Berens, Skyler Dehasa, Kassidy Farina, Aaron Ko, Claire Kraft, Miller Marcus, Katie McBride, Emma Morris, Carly Page, Max Palladini, Savanna Rain, Christian Rafla, Winston Robinson, Ellen Roney, Camille Sheets, Caroline Smith, Megan Sweeney, Shivani Tarsadia

Organized by: Karen Poffenberger

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Photos courtesy Tiger Souvannakoumane.

Saturday, March 31st

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles

Join Catalyst on a field trip to see the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States. The exhibition is in the Resnick Pavilion, and runs from January 29 – May 6, 2012.

Info from LACMA’s website:

North America represented a place free from European traditions for women Surrealists from the United States and Mexico, and European émigrés. While their male counterparts usually cast women as objects for their delectation, female Surrealists delved into their own subconscious and dreams, creating extraordinary visual images. Their art was primarily about identity: portraits, double portraits, self-referential images, and masquerades that demonstrate their trials and pleasures. The exhibition includes works in a variety of media dating from 1931 to 1968, and some later examples that demonstrate Surrealism’s influence on the feminist movement. Iconic figures such as Louise Bourgeois, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Kay Sage, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo are represented, along with lesser known or newly discovered practitioners.

ONE NIGHT ONLY

March 15

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 15th | 6-9 PM

Catalyst Gallery

Catalyst presents Natalie Kovacs’  single night video installation I’m Fine Without You.

The psychological concepts of love, desire, femininity, and the performance of identity are explored in “I’m Fine Without You”, a video examining the effects of expectation upon the development of potential relationships. Due to the fact that I am the child of very unhappy divorce, I grew up lacking a concept of love and what a healthy relationship is. Instead of gaining insight into love and relationships from my parents, I looked to movies and have based what I feel a relationship should be on these onscreen romances. However since I like movies that don’t necessarily end in happy endings, having these characters’ relationships as a basis for what love should be has created a warped sense for the development of my relationships.

To complete “I’m Fine Without You”, I have created profiles on OK Cupid, a free online dating website, based on the characters from the films that have informed my idea of what love should be. These four unique profiles are based upon: Summer of (500) Days of Summer, Celine of Before Sunrise, Annie of Annie Hall, and Clementine of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. These women are presented as ideals of what is romantically desirable, but are all incredibly similar and generally lack substantial dialog. When interacting with potential dates, I will only communicate using dialog spoken by the female romantic interest. The conversations between myself and the dates will then be edited into a video consisting of the text of their message and the clip from the movie where the dialog was taken. These conversations will alternate between the four different characters to illustrate how similar these representations of ideal femininity in modern culture are and how little they actually say.

While these movies have played an important role in how I look at relationships, like my parent’s relationship, none of the couples in these movies actually end up together. This provides a confusion of what to expect in the desire for a successful relationship that will be confronted by trying to develop and pursue a relationship through the tools of a failing one. These conceptions of love are not successful and will never result in a successful relationship.