"REIMAGINED LANDSCAPES" by REA LYNN DE GUZMAN
REIMAGINED LANDSCAPES
Rea Lynn de Guzman
April 2023
Artist Statement
In my new Reimagined Landscapes series, I free myself to a more intuitive process of making art unbound by research and western-centric historical references. My art is a cathartic visual play and a poetic exploration of materials that go back and forth between my backgrounds in painting and print media. I am drawn to soothing colors, complex shapes, motions, and subtle textures inspired by memories and familiar natural spaces. I continue to explore inexplicable psychological liminal spaces, reflective of my experiences of movements and sudden shifts. I seek to balance these ruptures by reimagining spaces, creating a push and pull through additive and reductive processes in my work. I pull from found, everyday objects, and layer it with collage materials created from my personal painting ephemera.
—Rea Lynn de Guzman
About the Artist:
Rea Lynn de Guzman is an artist, curator, and educator. She works in painting, print media, and sculpture. Born in Manila, Philippines, she immigrated to the United States at age 14. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited work throughout the US, and internationally in Australia, India, and the Philippines. She is a recipient of the API Artist Futures Fund award and the National Endowment for the Arts’ Multidisciplinary Arts Grant (in Partnership with the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco) in 2022. In 2019-2023, she curated the Wander Woman series — featuring Bay Area-based, women of color artists with immigrant backgrounds. She has been featured in the Asian Journal Magazine, Hella Pinay, KQED Arts, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications.
She is currently the Manager of Community Partnerships at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has taught art at: City College of San Francisco Continuing Education, de Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco Center for the Book, and Root Division, where she served as the organization’s first Filipina Teaching Artist Fellow in 2017. She lives and works in the Bay Area.
~~
We are grateful to Luisa A. Igloria for writing a poem after Rea Lynn de Guzman's "Reimagined Landscapes" series (more images available at the link). We present her generous and lovely participation through this ekphrastic poem:
Originally from Baguio City, Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Caulbearer: Poems (Winner of the Black Lawrence Press Immigrant Writing Series Prize, forthcoming 2024), Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize, Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), and 12 other books. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by a panel headed by former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. She is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University, and also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. During her appointed term as 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded her one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021, to support a program of public poetry projects. www.luisaigloria.com
**
THE REFUGEE'S ART GALLERY
Note From the Gallery Director:
Due to California's 2020 Glass Fire, gallery operations at North Fork Arts Projects (NFAP) were temporarily suspended. But as NFAP's curator, I didn't feel like giving the wildfires the last word. I decided to open NFAP’s offsite operations at my fire evacuee residence. Given that this residence and studio is much smaller than my pre-fire digs, the gallery's physical space also has downsized to, not even the closet but, the closet door. The Refugee's Art Gallery may well be the world's thinnest gallery—perhaps I should apply for a Guinness World Record!
My studio has a closet fronted with two sliding doors. One sliding door introduces the gallery. Slide that door away and the second door will be revealed with the hanging artwork. Obviously, all artwork will be flat as the distance between the two doors is 3/8th of an inch. But I can work with that (e.g. Rea Lynn de Guzman's mixed-media exhibit). I am glad to present NFAP's offsite Refugee Art Gallery because ART IS RESILIENT. I hope viewers also enjoy the presented artworks.
(Click on all images to enlarge)
Comments
Post a Comment