REVIEW: There’s a sense of things nearly getting out of control in Sun Yu-Xin’s latest body of work, and that seems appropriate for these times.
It’s been about two years and five months since the grand opening of the Orange County Museum of Art at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in October 2022.
Because it’s been a little while since our last look at the Costa Mesa institution, I figured it’s time to pay a visit and have a gander at OCMA’s latest exhibitions.
It was a rainy weekday, so I took my umbrella.
When visiting OCMA, there is the issue of parking, which averages about $15 in the nearby corporate parking structures. Folks are NOT supposed to park at South Coast Plaza and walk over the bridge spanning Bristol Street, and these days, there are signs warning people not to park there if you’re not going to shop or eat at the mall. The penalty is a painfully expensive towing experience.
IMAGE 1: “A detonation, and the Time It Spent with the World (Atomic Bomb Test, New Mexico),” 2024. Su Yu-Xin. Image courtesy of the artist.
IMAGE 2: “Dust Crown (Mount St. Helens) #2,” 2024. Su Yu-Xin. Image courtesy of the artist.
PHOTO 3: Installation view of works by Su Yu-Xin in the galleries at OCMA. Photo courtesy of OCMA
Su Yu-Xin
The first new exhibition most visitors will encounter is “Su Yu-Xin: Searching the Sky for Gold.” It’s the first solo museum exhibition outside Asia by this talented Taiwanese-born artist.
I liked this show. Su transforms natural and synthetic materials into pigments, using them as both the medium for her paintings and also the subject of her explorations. The exhibit title, “Searching the Sky for Gold,” refers to the interplay between the intangible and the material, while also alluding to gold mining in the American West.
Su takes an unorthodox approach to the shape of her paintings, which are generally oval and seem to work in tandem with the energies of her subject matter. A few look like boogie boards, which we denizens of SoCal have grown accustomed to seeing.
Su has a dynamic, vivacious style, and she embraces disaster in the natural world, capturing fires, volcanoes, flowing lava and a nuclear explosion in “A detonation, and the Time it Spent with the World (Atomic Bomb Test, New Mexico)” (2024). It’s haunting and destructive with a tower of fiery red, yellow and amber, yet beautiful at the same time.
“Dust Crown (Mount St. Helens)” (2024) looks like a blue and aquamarine mushroom cloud over mountains and water. While mostly figurative and representational, Su’s work does venture into the abstract on occasion. There’s a sense of things nearly getting out of control in her latest body of work, and that seems appropriate for these times.
IMAGE 1: “Untitled,” 2024. Yuji Ueda. Image courtesy of Yuji Ueda/Hannah Mjølsnes.
IMAGE 2: “Alpine (2900 years),” 2021. Shuyi Cao. Image courtesy of the artist.
IMAGE 3: “Mosaic Vessel,” 2023. Masaomi Yasunaga. Image courtesy of Courtesy Nonaka-Hill.
IMAGE 4: “Neo-Crucible,” 2022. Tony Marsh. Image courtesy of OCMA
‘Unearthed’
The other new exhibition at OCMA is “Unearthed,” a group show of ceramic works. The artists featured here are Alex Anderson, Shuyi Cao, Tony Marsh, Keita Matsunaga, Yuji Ueda and Masaomi Yasunaga.
The presentation of Yasunaga’s work is a highlight. His ceramic, glazed sculptures are displayed in a multilayered metal scaffold draped with colored photographs and what appears to be a long, yellow, ochre, brown and auburn screen print. The scaffold is reminiscent of “Case Work: Studies in Form, Space and Construction by Brad Cloepfil/Allied Works Architecture,” which was on view at the Denver Art Museum and the Portland Art Museum in 2016.
The materials used in “Unearthed” are worth noting: clay deposits, mineral rich rocks, silica sands. The organic shapes and media allude to ancient, geological processes that have shaped the Earth’s crust over millions of years.
A few of the artists share a city, Long Beach, and a university, Cal State Long Beach, in common. Tony Marsh, a longtime SoCal contemporary ceramic artist, lives in Long Beach and is a professor of ceramics at CSULB. He’s also co-founder and the director emeritus of the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at the university. He has a trio of cylindrical, fired-clay glazed vessels on display.
The aforementioned Matsunaga, born in Tajimi, Japan, had an artist’s residency at Cal State Long Beach. And Alex Anderson, another sculptor in this show, is also a member of the CSULB faculty as a lecturer.
(Disclaimer: I also work at Cal State Long Beach in the Strategic Communications department.)
“Unearthed” is an intriguing group show, and I particularly liked the variety of textures and shapes on view. But it also seems like this exhibit is just scratching the surface of ceramics – which have experienced a resurgence lately – and more artists, more works and more geographic diversity could have helped. I left wanting to see more.
Incidentally, both the Su Yu-Xin and “Unearthed” exhibitions were organized and curated by Ziying Duan, OCMA’s relatively new assistant curator.
Penelope Umbrico
Umbrico is a Philadelphia-born artist who is best known for photography-based work that appropriates images found via internet search engines, mail-order catalogs and picture-sharing sites and apps. Her photo collage, “Sunset Portraits from 13,243,857 Sunset Pictures on Flickr 10/8/13” (2013), is quite literally that, comprising hundreds of images culled from the web via Flickr. The photos are shots people have taken in front of sunsets, and invariably the identity of the individuals has been erased, resulting from the brightness of the sun and the shadows cast upon their faces.
This work has been installed in the Yvonne de C Segerstrom Gallery, which is a narrow yet airy, window-filled space that offers a plain view of Avenue of the Arts. Viewers can sit and contemplate the many, many sunsets, and Umbrico’s work indeed has a calming, meditative effect. It’s definitely worth checking out and spending some time with.
IMAGE 1: “La Gourmandise,“ 1932. Image courtesy of the Weinstein Gallery.
IMAGE 2: “Berenice,” 1992. Leonor Fini. Image courtesy of the Weinstein Gallery.
IMAGE 3: “The Measure of Moral Phenomena,” from The Morality Plays, 1979. Roland Reiss. Image courtesy of OCMA
‘Deux Femmes’ and ‘Ordinary Extraordinary’
“Deux Femmes” juxtaposes works by two women artists, Leonor Fini, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1907; and Leonora Carrington, who was born in Clayton Green, England in 1917. Both resided in Paris in the 1930s, just as Surrealism was hitting its stride. These two artists also hung out occasionally and inspired each other, as evidenced by the photographs taken of the two together.
This show is featured in OCMA’s mezzanine gallery, which is named after James B. and Rosalyn L. Pick. It’s intriguing to see some of Carrington’s early work, a period when her surreal animal-human hybrids began to form. Some may remember the excellent group exhibition, “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women in Mexico and the United States,” on view at the L.A. County Museum of Art from January-May 2012, which featured some of Carrington’s work.
“Deux Femmes” is a fascinating window into Carrington’s development, with a nice variety of mediums and subject matter. But Fini’s work in this show is mostly portraits of women and girls, some looking plaintive, others looking spooky. I felt like we could have seen more variety of media and subject matter from Fini’s long career.
And was it coincidence that they essentially shared the same first name, or something deeper and more profound?
Last but not least, “Ordinary Extraordinary” is a reorganization of the permanent collection on the ground floor of OCMA. I’ve seen many of these works before in various iterations, so nothing really blew me away here. But it’s worth a walk through, if only to see the late Roland Reiss’ imaginary, cluttered living-space installations, and Narsiso Martinez’s mixed media ode to farmworkers, “Pacific Gold” (2021).
IMAGE 1: “Penelope,” 1960. Leonora Carrington. Image courtesy of the estate of Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society.
IMAGE 2: “Birdbath,” 1978. Leonora Carrington. Image courtesy of the estate of Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society.
The Case of the Missing Umbrella
So let me backtrack for a moment. After I checked in at the front desk, the young man attending admissions said, “You can’t bring your umbrella in the galleries.”
Understandable. I responded, “OK, can I leave it somewhere, then?”
He replied, “You can leave it with me.” And he took it.
I didn’t think much about my umbrella as I was perusing the galleries and occasionally taking notes and snapshots.
When I had seen all there was to see, I cast my gaze upon Argyros Plaza from inside the lobby of the museum. It had stopped raining, and the sun was attempting to come out. Given the constant downpour over the last several days, I felt a sense of relief.
I was done with my museum experience, and so I departed. My umbrella was the last thing on my mind.
(Incidentally, they should have a bin near the front entrance where you can deposit your umbrella on rainy days, and everyone abides by the honor system and just retrieves their own. It’s easier to remember that way. Plus, they do hire security guards in this museum. Hired folks could keep their eyes on the prizes.)
Anyway, I forgot my umbrella at OCMA, and boy, did I need it over the next couple of days.
I know, I should have used an old one, or bought a new one, but who has the time and budget these days to go buy a new umbrella?
I did call back the next day to ask for my umbrella. Despite pressing all the right buttons on the phone, I could not get anyone at the front desk for the life of me. I did leave a message. So I don’t know if my umbrella is there or not, but I suspect it still is.
I’ll have to pay a repeat visit soon, to see what’s new in the galleries – and to retrieve my favorite umbrella.
I wonder if OCMA’s collection of random, forgotten umbrellas is growing.
I’ll bet it is.
Orange County Museum of Art
WHERE: 3333 Avenue of the Arts, Costa Mesa
WHEN: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays
“Deux Femmes” runs through April 6; “Su Yu-Xin: Searching the Sky for Gold,” “Unearthed” “Penelope Umbrico” and “Ordinary Extraordinary” run through May 25
COST: Free
CONTACT: (714) 780-2130 or ocma.net
