All tagged Santa Barbara City College
At the end of a long road near where highway 150 meets the 33 in Ojai is a round studio building where the Taft Gardens and Nature Preserve host artists in residence. Here, Stephanie Washburn and Jane Mulfinger were in residence from fall 2021 to spring 2022. Taft Gardens, and the studio within it, exist in a rich and mysterious space between the wild and controlled, and the natural and ordered. Inside the studio, just beyond a rather sobering sign to watch out for rattlesnakes, Washburn and Mulfinger’s respective bodies of work invite you to contemplate the natural world and the sublime.
Scattered around in the morning sunlight of Ken Bortolazzo’s Santa Barbara studio yard are a half dozen very tall, plant-like objects constructed out of lightweight stainless steel. Each stem is topped by two or three shapes, some almost transparent stainless mesh, that slowly move in the wind interacting with each other.
While in graduate school in Texas, California-born artist Evelyn Contreras studied the human-made landscape of her home state via the lens of the Internet. Then, when the COVID-19 pandemic limited her ability to travel back to Texas for a residency at the Rockport Center for the Arts, she reversed the direction of her digital gaze to Rockport’s post-Hurricane Harvey streetscapes from her desk in Santa Barbara. This virtual sojourn culminated in works featured at the Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara City College in 2022.
