Official Welcome, an art gallery and consulting office, opens to the public with California Split: June Edmonds, Jay Lynn Gomez, Henry Taylor, José Guadalupe Sanchez III, Barbara T. Smith, and Diane Briones Williams on May 30, 2025  from 6 - 8 pm. Following the opening the gallery will have normal business hours Thursday through Saturday from 12pm - 6pm and also be open by appointment.

 

California Split is a highly subjective dive into representations of the body in Southern California art from 1974 to now—with big gaps in between and no claim to a comprehensive argument. The gambit is going all in on the consciousness-shifting potential of art’s phenomenological nature. The feeling I (and hopefully we) keep chasing goes beyond aesthetic pleasure (though pleasure matters), beyond sensory or intellectual challenge (though tension—even distaste—is essential), and beyond material novelty or the thrill of concept braided perfectly with material (though that satisfaction is vital). The feeling is about being permeated, shifted—your metaphorical lens prescription changed—so that you not only see the work, but see the world differently. If the outcome is simply that a viewer learns to pay closer attention, ask better questions, or question their assumptions, then the work has done something meaningful. Learning how to see—and staying open to new ways of seeing—can only improve how we move through the world. The artists included in the exhibition are all expert practitioners of making the power of looking and being seen explicit. 

 

Henry Taylor’s (b. 1958, Ventura) 2001 painting Colonia Chiquez shows a group of men playing dominoes in the park. The work is painted in gestures both immediate and tender. The scene is set in Oxnard, CA, often colloquially called Chiques or Chiquez, near Ventura and Camarillo, where Taylor lived and worked the night shift at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital until moving to downtown Los Angeles in the mid-nineties. What catches my eye immediately are the four figures whose gaze is visible– they are notable, because most of the other figures have their faces obscured: the central figure, smoking and keeping score, looks over his left shoulder; behind him, a female cop and her dog stare directly at the game table; his companion to the left, in a fresh Dodgers cap, meets the viewer’s eye with a broad smile. The many other figures’ faces are obscure—some seem at ease, the situation of surveillance likely being normal; a woman plays with her child; others seem more concerned, like the driver of a yellow sedan who twists fully to look back at the cruiser. This painting exemplifies how representational works can map ecologies of looking in the postmodern era – The painting collapses the boundary between observer and observed, and quietly repositions power through the act of looking. Taylor’s composition winkingly implicates the viewer in the layered tensions of who gets seen, who does the seeing, and under what terms.

 

When I started to conceive of a show to open Official Welcome, I couldn’t get Barbara T. Smith’s 1974 work, Intimations of Immortality, out of my head. Made around the corner at the original Womanspace/ Women’s Building, the performance itself was straightforward - Smith commissioned a park bench to be installed in the gallery and over the course of a few weeks, traded places with women who were living in the park in shifts. Smith would sit in the park, and the women would sit inside the gallery. She compensated the women for their time and also supplied lunch. On view in California Split is a short video documenting a conversation with Alice, one of the women, and also a voice over from Smith herself describing the performance and her reasons for making it. 

 

Smith says of the genesis of the performance: “The women I sought were the furthest extension of my own consciousness. I felt that I, too, had been or was one of them. Was this my worst fear of aging, to be destitute, unhoused, and on the street? My life as an artist made this seem entirely and frighteningly possible.” The fears and vulnerabilities that the work confronts resonate deeply, as does Smith’s ironic discovery of a certain level of acceptance and adaptability to pretty dire circumstances articulated by the women participants. Somehow the unfolding of the documentation of the performance and the artist’s subsequent analysis of the work manages to negotiate a nuanced perspective where the realities of these women’s lives are not trivialized and their resilience and adaptability is also accessible to the viewer. Sometimes I have reflected that this resilience may be a projection too - Not of the artist, but of the women themselves. Centering an optimistic perspective is a highly effective survival strategy.

 

Another idea about representational work from Southern California that I wanted to gesture toward in this show is how many intersectional feminisms that are articulated and renegotiated throughout our various creative communities and generations of artists–An early concept for this show included collages from Yolanda Lopez’s (b. 1942, San Diego - d. 2021, San Francisco) Guadalupe Series (1977 - 1988), which challenge stereotypes of Latina women: “A common Chicano/Latino experience in contemporary American culture is the lack of positive visual representations of Latin Americans as normal, intelligent human beings. This omission and the continued use of such stereotypes as the Latin bombshell and the passive, long-suffering wife/mother negate the humanity of Raza women.” In almost all of her work in collage, painting, and print-making, Lopez honors and elevates the labor and resilience of women, elevating their work from quotidian to sacred, and highlighting the power of women’s self-determination. Lopez, who studied art at UCSD, was a student of feminist artist Martha Rosler (who was a peer of Smith’s, also at UCSD.) Rosler’s iconic collage practice is a clear influence on both Lopez and Jay Lynn Gomez (b. 1986, San Bernardino) whose painting and collage practice is something along the lines of House (made) Beautiful by the careful labor of immigrant workers. Her work here, Welcoming Gestures, 2024 inserts housekeeping and front desk staff into the otherwise uninhabited advertising photos for a new Wynn Las Vegas Hotel. Gomez’s work similarly utilizes simple interventions in familiar images to highlight the labor that makes the luxurious, leisurely image of Southern California possible. In her most recent work, this caring visibility is also directed at herself, and the radical possibilities of self-determination through transition. 

 

Diane Briones Williams’ (b. 1973, Philippines, lives and works in Los Angeles) series (De)valued Existence is a research-based project that combines historical narratives about the hidden heroines of the Philippine revolution with contemporary accounts of migrant workers from the Philippines. Her large textile works made of worn dasters, brightly colored cotton housedresses commonly worn in the Philippines, show the wear and tear of the daily labor that makes a household run. Stained, torn, repaired, the garments are well loved and were carefully collected by the artist through a network of friends and family over the course of two years. The dresses have been dyed with indigofera, an indigenous Philippine plant, infusing their fabric with ancestral protection. The work on view in California Split celebrates Nieves Fernandez, a school teacher, turned guerilla fighter after the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in 1941. Fernandez was stripped of her livelihood and safety by Japanese occupation, in response, and out of a desire to protect her students, she resisted alone, taking down 200 members of the occupying force with a homemade shotgun and bolo. Crucially, Williams’ work does not celebrate violence, but rather women’s labor to protect their communities, families, and cultures. The transformation from teacher to warrior is a profound sacrifice to protect the rights and freedoms of your fellow citizens. Alongside this large-scale work, three smaller works, also made of fabric dyed with plants indigenous to the Philippines, are embroidered in red thread with phrases from interviews with Overseas Filipino Workers, migrant workers from the Philippines, who are often working in under-compensated domestic and medical care work.

 

Similarly ethnographic in impulse,  Jose Guadalupe Sanchez III’s series Hard Eye-Roll, captures testimony from friends about moments in their professional lives where they are confronted with utterly distasteful perceptions, assumptions, and dictates from others. Those moments where how you are being seen is both clear and worthy of nothing more than your dismissal. These intimately scaled and incredibly detailed and volumetric portraits are both humorous and heavy. Each portrait busts beyond the boundaries of the canvas, the subjects refuse to be boxed in.

 

In Disconnection, 1982, June Edmonds’ (b. 1959, Los Angeles) rich brushwork and keen eye for texture and pattern, which has come to define her iconic abstract work, is deployed in service of a warm, intimate domestic scene. This interior scene of women, likely close friends or family, interacting intimately while one talks on the telephone, evokes themes similar to the work of Emma Amos. Many of Edmonds’ early figurative works depict women, including herself in the studio, at leisure and in community with each other. Over time, her work moved first into the public sphere and later into the lush abstractions she is best known for. Influenced by her meditation practice, Edmonds’ abstract works are vibrant, repeating patterns and shapes that evoke feminine iconography, mandalas, and energetic channels, including the vesica piscis, or the shape formed by intersecting circles, evoking to energies meeting to create a third. Edmonds’ evolution from depicting Black women at home with friends, in spaces of relaxation and leisure, into large scale public commissions, and eventually into absorbing color and pattern driven abstraction rooted in spirituality and explorations of feminine symbolism brings me back to my point. At its best, art shows us new ways to see our world, with more detail, nuance, and care – and perhaps also some recognition of what we don’t know. 

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Image above: © Henry Taylor. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth