Ventura Gallery Crawl
August 5, 2008 – 9:38 pmAmelia and I finally made it to an opening at Sylvia White Gallery over the weekend. We’d read about it in the Ventura County Star about a month ago and we dropped by a while back to check it out. This was the first actual opening we’d been to. After our first visit, Amelia was pretty excited about the upcoming show.
In brief, the show was really good and the space is fantastic. And, as far as contemporary art in Ventura County goes, the work at was of the highest caliber that I have seen since I moved here. Heck, she’s got works by Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg just sitting in her pile in back. I think that as a venue, The Sylvia White Gallery is a great addition to the Ventura scene.
My only disappointment, and this is not really a problem with the gallery itself, but of Ventura’s art scene as a whole, there doesn’t seem to be much out there that appeals to my “street” sensibilities. In other words, I have yet to see anything that screams to me, “This is the real deal.” I’m missing the work from maladjusted artists, living on nothing but rice, saving up for another can of house paint and Elmer’s glue, building paradise out of trash, and dreaming of the day they can exhibit their work in an abandoned shipping container. Granted, this is merely my opinion, it is most likely an opinion framed by my romanticizing of days long passed. I know that whatever it is I am looking for is out there and that I just haven’t found it yet.
I do have one complaint about the show at Sylvia White Gallery. The music was lousy. I felt like I was listening to some leftover Don Henley songs from an AM radio. I only complain about this because if you’re going to run an art gallery, part of your job is to provide a vaguely cool atmosphere. Being subjected to third tier top 40 songs pretty much drove me out of the place. It seems to me like it’s not too hard to slap on a collection of say, Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits and just be done with it for the night.
One Response to “Ventura Gallery Crawl”
I recently made it to the Sylivia White gallery as well. I live down the street and every time I’ve walked by they have been closed until just the other day when the doors were flung open and there were these huge tapestries all over the floor. Ian and I couldn’t help but wander in and question Sylvia about these giant pieces.
They had been created from photos and paintings by different artists, translated to a weaving pattern by computer and then woven and (some of them) reworked by hand. A few of them were so textural that Ian had to hold my both my hands to keep me from touching them (I wish there were more touchable things in galleries). It is a show worth seeing, though I’ll admit I’m still trying to figure out the purpose of recreating a painting as a tapestry. What does it all mean?
The gallery itself is really beautiful and the cupcakes offered at the opening for the tapestry show definitely helped to boost my already high opinion of the place.
By mia on Oct 26, 2008