mujeres de carne y hueso
women of flesh and blood

The Arts and Consciousness Gallery of John F. Kennedy University presents Rosa M. Valdez's exhibition, mujeres de carne y hueso / women of flesh and blood. Valdez, daughter of Mexican immigrants, artist, and community activist, works in the tense space between cultural expectations of women in her community and the possible creation of a new feminine identity. The exhibition explores women's roles, the stereotypical objectification of and violence against women, and the tension between external representations and real women's realities. The exhibit will feature photography, video installation, garments, and an installation involving 665 image transfers that commemorate the victims of feminicide in Latin America.

Valdez's work was most recently included in the Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana's (MACLA) Chicana/o Biennal "an exhibition and public forum conceived to take an inventory of emergent energy, critical edge, and aesthetic interventions within contemporary Chicano art."

Her work pierces the (artificial) divide between the personal and the political and invites viewers to participate in creating alternative spaces for women to define who they are.

For more information visit: www.rosamvaldez.blogspot.com

CAOL ÁIT (thin places)
Remembering What We Have Forgotten:
An Exploration through Paintings, Photography, and Installation

The John F Kennedy Arts and Consciousness Gallery in Berkeley, California will present the paintings, photography, and installation of Lisa Rasmussen's MFA graduate exhibition ---- Caol ait (thin places). The exhibition will open October 23nd through November 15th.

Caol 'ait is the ancient Celtic term for "thin places", were the veil between the physical world and the spiritual world merges. This is not solely a Celtic phenomenon, but is alive in all contemporary and ancient indigenous cultures around the world. These liminal places--sensory thresholds between differing states—can be a medium for accessing the personal unknown. This show presents an opportunity for the public to engage in a multi sensory experience of aroma, light, and sound, illuminating Rasmussen's fascination and exploration of the interflow between soul and matter and between time and eternity.

The exhibition will also include The Hands of Creation, Rasmussen's tender portraits of the children of Lincoln Child Center, a children's mental health agency in Oakland for vulnerable and emotionally troubled children. Her portraits will be coupled with the extraordinary transformative art works of her students at LCC. Their artwork will also be for sale via silent auction benefiting Lincoln Child Centers Transformative Art program and the students participating.

Desolation's Comfort
Photographic Re- collections
www.marklindsayart.com

Mark Lindsay, in conjunction with John F. Kennedy University, announces his MFA graduate show, Desolation's Comfort: Photographic Re-collections. A series of large, black & white photomontage images, Desolation's Comfort is an artist's response to lonely landscapes. With the help of modern imaging technology these desolate places have been populated with the images of human characters of lost times. Sometimes deceased family members, other times found photographs of unknown souls, the characters are meant to provoke the imagination and provide companionship and comfort to isolated places both real and imagined.

The composites are a re-contextualization of both old snapshots and mysterious landscapes that give them a vague narrative, open to interpretation by the viewer. Nature is distorted just enough to lend a sense of unease. The subjects are meant to seem oddly at home and out-of-place at the same time.

Using state-of-the-art, digital editing and printing software and hardware, the images evoke traditional photography but with subtle results that only digital imaging might achieve. Old snapshots were meticulously restored to remove the surface effects of aging, masked to eliminate milieu, and then composed into manipulated landscapes. Totem animals, most notably birds and reptiles, are added as both blessing and symbol.

Cate White's installation, SHE PLAYS WITH HER SELF (cut-outs, cut-ups and cut-downs), plays with more than herself. She is playing with the structures of identity and playing with you too, if you're up for the game. The 1500 square foot gallery space is animated by ceiling-high paper cutouts and all manner of scattered and suspended papier-mache sculptures, whose naive goofiness barely conceal a cutting wit. Is she angry? Or was that just a joke?

Using paper effigies of her own body as both player and gameboard/battleground, the artist rearranges the parts and pieces of the material self, traversing the margin between savage self-destruction and playful self-deconstruction. Represented in an undignified Crayola flesh tone, the figure is cut out, dislocated, exploded, purged and devoured, skinned and wrapped, converted into a pinata, grafted onto nature, and intermixed with language.

The result is a libidinous realm of criss-crossed boundaries where it seems there is an edgy kind of fun to be had. Ordered distinctions-between inner and outer, thought and flesh, sense and nonsense, image and essence-are all tossed up into the air like so much confetti. In this atmosphere, separation between artist, art and audience begins to dissolve, and an enlivened, inter-subjective experience of the self becomes possible.

Currently an MFA candidate at John F. Kennedy University, Cate White is primarily a painter, comic book artist and 'zine writer. This is her first large-scale installation.

The exhibition Killing Buddha, by artist Ronny Joe Grooms culminates his Master of Fine Art study at John F. Kennedy University Arts & Consciousness program. Grooms, son of a Vietnam veteran, and a former Army reservist who filed for Conscientious Objector status during the Gulf War, draws on those experiences and current events to explore the shadows of the warrior male. The Zen Koan, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him," inspires the shows title. The koan has painful implications to Grooms as the invasion and occupation of Iraq takes on its 5th year and continues to escalate with no end in sight.

In this exhibition Grooms, a dharma practitioner and multimedia performance artist, presents an array of video imagery and sculptural environments set to dissolve the subject/object relationship. Illustrating movement and stillness as essential human languages, he presents "meditation-sculptures" that are both spiritual asanas and non-violent actions that merge the inner-work of deep personal contemplation as ritual with the outwardly expressive forms of activism and art. Evoking these personal/social processes, he has challenged his own arbitrary differentiations between meditation, art, and creativity as well as promoting meditation and radical transcendence as a public act thereby awakening creative spirit in all.

Four artists, Kimberley Campisano, Kathy de Rosas, Tara Ford, and Heather Johnson, create a gallery environment that invites the viewer to experience impermanence. Each artist explores the transitory nature of time, thought and matter through the integration of drawing, painting, photography and sculpture. They share an intimacy and tender passion for their work as well as embracing the universality of being.

Impermanence is a quality of their art revealed through subject matter and materials, inviting the viewer to contemplate physical and emotional environments from the micro to the macrocosmic. Ruminations on the passages of natural and human-made situations are explored. The challenge and attraction for these artists is to allow the pieces in this show the opportunity to relate to one another in a complementary way that forms a natural progression within the diversity of the work itself.

From Self to Other
Mixed media and installation

I am a Terrible Morning Person

Lauren Odell Usher combines our everyday lives with everyday materials. Toilet paper, Ziploc bags, and pizza boxes - things you normally find in the recycle bin - have been taken to another level in an installation about day-to-day life and human connection. The project began with self portraits taken first thing in the morning and developed into a participatory work involving 16 other individuals.

By combining linoleum prints of people first thing in the morning with materials she uses on a daily basis, Lauren Odell Usher has visually written her philosophy about the world we all share. In this world every individual and every moment of their lives is significant. Learn more about her work at http://www.laurenusher.com.

Masters of Transformative Arts:
Kimberly Hawkins, Stephanie Navarro, Hayley Oggel,
Jennifer Prochazka, Susan Revier, John Sanders, Kerry Lynn Schwartz, Susanne Scott

Masters of Fine Arts:
Ronny Joe Grooms, Sing Murphy, Dorothy Nissen,
Lauren Odell Usher, Dayna Willard

Guest Speakers:

Gina Wilde, Alchemy Yarns Inc.
Tristy Taylor, The Church of Craft
Donna Seager, Juror, The Donna Seager Gallery, San Rafael

Visceral and diaristic monoprints, paintings, objects and hand-and- digitally made books explore the edges between personal and archetypal, conscious and unconscious, sacred and profane, the raw and the cooked.

Click to Enlarge

John Anderson's paintings are the visible traces of a lifelong inward journey into the unconscious and, through it, to the Unknown, to what lies at the origin " what the artist calls the Deep, a realm beyond the reach of intellect and senses and accessible only through what one could paradoxically call the discipline of spontaneity.

Mary Mountcastle Eubank's paintings possess an earthiness that is at once raw and warm, uncompromisingly awkward and embracing. Their rich, highly worked textures and warm colors draw you in until your gaze becomes a form of touching and the paintings become a palpable presence. And the manmade objects (books, scraps of flattened metal, cloth) that are pressed into the surface become a vital ingredient in this living, lived presence: culture is returned to nature but also emerges from it: it grows from the ground of our being. The ambiguous, back-and-forth relationship between culture and nature also plays a dominant role in the book sculptures in which books can be 'read' both as artifacts and natural objects.

"58 years of my life"

• A portrait of an artist, a daughter, a family, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers
• A broad-brush installation that bristles with an intense viewing of a mundane life through tender photographs, paintings, monoprints and text
• Personal, yet for all to share
• A human-interest story of sweet simplicity