By Elizabeth Kneisley
Staff Writer
The South Bay is getting artsy. Contemporary art inspired the South Bay community on April 14. The Torrance Art Museum recently had its opening reception presenting the new gallery- “Between the Knowing.”
This local museum has been around for six years. It is located at the Joslyn Center at 3320 Civiv Center Drive, Torrance. It is often forgotten due to its tiny size with only two main rooms. Once inside this hidden treasure, art lovers are taken in awe.
“Visiting the Torrance Art Museum is a refreshing experience,” visitor Alex Pierre said. “I love being able to get a glimpse of the fast moving art world. This museum is small and quiet museum with very few visitors, so it is a great place to get away and be completely one with art.”
The Torrance Art Museum has about six to seven exhibits each year featuring artists nation wide. The museum is the most busy during the November through December exhibit. This exhibit features South Bay artists and gets over four hundred art submissions. The museum is curated by Max Presneil and assistant curator, Jason Ramos. They run the whole gallery and select which artists to feature.
“Max has an excellent eye for art as the curator,” volunteer Regina Taylor said. “He is always full of ideas and new ways to make our museum better. His ideas have attracted many artists and newcomers.”
“Between the Knowing” is a gallery in the main room of the museum and was put together by four contemporary artists: Brian Bosworth, Steve DeGroodt, Daniel Nevers, and
Chuck Moffit. Each piece of art in the gallery relates with one another, portraying the underlying theme of this exhibition: existentialism. This theory emphasizes the individual as responsible for determining its development through acts of the will. Each piece by itself represents isolation of the individual.
“This particular exhibit has a lot of meaning behind it,” Presneil said. “These may be ordinary objects, but they have a deeper meaning. If the viewer spends enough time observing the art, he will learn something about himself.”
“Tiempo” is a piece made of packing foam lying on the gallery floor with wooden oars lying on top and music composition paper lying on the foam make up this simple, yet complex piece of art was created by DeGroodt.
“My piece “Tiempo” is a manifestation of the passage of time,” DeGroodt said. “The foam represents newness, while the battered wooden oars reveal the past. The blank music composition is an elegy of time, space, and emotions of an individual.”
“Welcome” is a video art piece made by Sara Romo. It is a four minute loop of different scenes of doors projecting on a blank wall. As a viewer watches the doors, the scene begins to change. In one scene, there is an open door and then all of a sudden, balloons come through the open passage. This piece shows how an individual changes over time.
“My favorite piece in this exhibit is “Welcome,”” Pierre said. “Video art is amazing and Romo did a great job capturing my eye with her work.”
In the second room, the gallery the “Two-Headed Monster” is displayed. This gallery was put together by two artist duos- CamLab and Davis and Davis. This is the smaller room of the gallery, showing only three pieces of work.
“Ramos did a fantastic job curating the “Two-Headed Monster” gallery,” volunteer Bill Wasserman said. “Each piece tied together perfectly with one another.”
One of the pieces by Davis and Davis was called “Induction.” It contained a print of a man on one wall and a print of the back of a woman’s head on the adjacent wall. The prints were connected by a wire attaching to the print of the man and the print of the woman. As the viewer follows the wire, the wire is bent and rolled into a ball on the floor.
“Each of these artists are uniquely brilliant,” Wasserman said. “They push the limits of traditional art by using every day objects in cooperated into their work. Their experiments with making and defining art is revolutionary.”
The Torrance Art Museum is open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 am to 5 pm. Admission is free. “Between the Knowing” exhibition is on view until June 2nd. For more information visit www.torranceartmuseum.com.
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