Homesick at Carnegie Art Museum opens 12/12/09

©Amy Elkins from the series Black is the Day, Black is the Night

I am more than excited to put some new work out into the world, especially at this upcoming group exhibition in a museum space in southern CA. A treat to show work in my native state and among such fantastic artists.

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Home•sick
Dec 12, 2009 - Feb 21, 2010
Carnegie Art Museum
See map here

—adjective, longing for another place, another person, another time
—noun, a group art exhibition in Oxnard, California this December 2009

Featuring fifteen international artists, Homesick debuts at Carnegie Art Museum December 12. Through mixed media including prints on paper, oil paintings, video installation, photography and sculpture, the show is an exploration of Homesick portrayed through images of wet landscapes, racing automobiles, grandmothers, track housing, meditative abstract illustration, stickers, and domestic housework.

Artists include Dennis McLeod whose line and drip ink works on paper were most recently shown in the exhibition "Rembrandt to Thiebaud: A decade of collecting works on paper" at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco; Amy Elkins whose photography has been exhibited internationally from Kunsthalle wien in Vienna, Austria to The PIP International Photo Festival in Pingyao, China as well as a solo show at Yancey Richardson Gallery last year called "Wallflower"; Derick Melander whose sculptures have been exhibited in numerous NYC museums and galleries, with most recent projects being a community event with CENYC utilizing 3,615 pounds of clothing and a solo show at Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA; Anthony Zepeda, a former Master Printmaker at Gemini G.E.L., whose prints have been exhibited around the world from Brazil to Thailand; and Livia Corona with her work, "Two Million Homes for Mexico" for which she was awarded a Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The show is curated by New York City based photographer Joaquin Trujillo who, originally a native of Los Angeles, also calls Zacatecas, Mexico home. His body of work "Los Ninos" has been shown by Rose Gallery at Paris Photo, Art Maimi and The Armory. He is half of the collaborative team Trujillo-Paumier that works editorially and commercially creating bodies of work that include "Hot Cakes" which belongs to the Weisman Art Foundation Collections.

Carnegie Art Museum is located at 424 South C Street in Oxnard, California. The opening public reception is from 4 to 7 pm on Saturday, December 12. The show runs through December to February 21.

For more information, please click here.
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I will be introducing a few of the artists a day, throughout the week.
Today: Malú Alvarez, Edward Doty and Derick Melander


© Malú Alvarez

"When I went to college and came back for the first break, I had an overwhelming sense of homesickness. We had to speak English because a guest was there. Later, when I went to Australia to study, I was completely by myself. Even though I had some contacts, and I was working the last year and a half, in that time, the weekends could be very lonely.

My photographs capture different images of home from details of interiors to food. I often feel like I’m between places culturally, but also now, I’m in this in-between place where I still very much yearn for the comfort and life of my family’s home as I try to make my own." - ma


© Edward Doty

"I have this memory of driving, when we were moving to Massachusetts from Connecticut, of driving on the highway from one house to another. That kind of displacement, having left one place and not having arrived in the new home, an early sense of that is what I consider homesick.

These photographs are from some slides that I found, mostly that were taken by my paternal grandfather. A few years ago, I started looking at them again, re-photographing them with magnifying glasses and cropping the images to something that was of particular interest to me. I recomposed some of the pictures and used the kind of blurring effect that the magnifiers provided to get a sense of what it was like for me to look at those. I’m thinking about how the photographic object functions kind of as a place-keeper, and also as a way of generating memories, stories and kind of a history because I can’t identify many of the people in those photographs. There’s still a lot of mystery about them. [A photograph] is a small object that can move around with you, that still refers back to the idea of home if not necessarily the specific place that was considered home." - ed


© Derick Melander

"Since moving here, I’ve never really left New York for probably more than a month. I did go to Washington DC for six months at one point. I never thought about being homesick at the time. I thought I was just suffering from a broken heart. But that probably was also being homesick for New York.

I’m excited to work with clothing that comes all from one source. Essentially, this pretty specific population that has [one person] in the middle is very interesting to me. If you can fancy that clothing perhaps maintains a trace of the people who wore it, as the elbows wear out on an old sweater and the way that jeans get tattered along the cuff, in a sense, the piece is going to end up ultimately being like a portrait." - dm