Artist Bio

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Nishigawara’s sculptural work plays out the battle of cultural identity in a humorous way with dark undercurrents. The work focuses on the dichotomies and junctures of the two cultures that prevail upon the artist – those of Japan and the US. The resulting strange figures reference various models, including toys, to reflect the commercialization of individual experience that forms our desires and identities. These figures relate and interact with each other, exploring interpersonal and societal connections. Nishigawara utilizes characters, poses and gestures sourced from religion, Manga, J-Pop and traditional Japanese culture – as well as American models – combined with other cultural sources from around the world to create odd visual nexus points of cross pollination.
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Nobuhito Nishigawara received his BFA from Kansas Art Institute in 1999 and his MFA in 2002 from Arizona State University. He is currently Associate Professor in Studio Art at Cal St. Fullerton and a visiting faculty at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He has shown his work nationally. He has received critical reviews in such publications as Art Papers, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Sculpture Magazine and American Art Collector.

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>> Click here for a full CV
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>> Click here for artist’s website
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January 31-February 4, 2012

Tuesday, January 31, 2012 // 11:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012 // 11:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
Thursday, February 2, 2012 // 11:00 a.m.-9:00 p.m.
Friday, February 3, 2012 // 11:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
Saturday, February 4, 2012 // 11:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.
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Laguna Art Museum will be open and free to the public for Art Auction 2012: California Art Lounge preview week. You are invited to view and bid on the silent auction items from Tuesday, January 31 through  Saturday, February 4 at Laguna Art Museum. To ensure that you are the winning bidder, join us for Art Auction 2012 on Saturday, February 4.  If you are unable to attend the art auction, absentee bids can be made during preview week at the museum or on the museum’s website in the online auction gallery.
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>> Click here for a full list of events taking place during preview week
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Artist Bio

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Jennifer Shaw’s unmistakable eye for drama in nature and detailed photorealist painting enable viewers to follow her deep into the twilights of sprawling
cloudscape scenes. She grew up admiring the half-lit skies of spectacular California sunsets. When she paints, these variations of the sky come to the surface. One can observe the fusion of the manmade and the natural, the melding and opposition of light and shadow, and the vision of what is clear versus what is obscured. Revealing how realism can sometimes be surreal, Shaw captures a sky that takes on the phenomenon of being at once, both day and night.
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She currently lives and paints in Orange, California.

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Artist Bio

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Jeff Peters has been creating paintings of strange beauty in his Laguna Beach studio for quite some time now, but he’s not your typical Laguna Beach painter. Although ensconced in and respectful of figurative painting, his works take a leap into the realm of the ideal that combines the best parts of German Romanticism, “super flat” pop art, and a color field-esque palette. Perhaps you’ve seen his paintings of tree branches prominently displayed in the window of Peter Blake Gallery, symbols of ephemerality and mortality. Although the subject matter couldn’t be more traditional, the odd-shaped canvases and increasing levels of abstraction betray a formalist’s mind and a complex sense of compositional problems.
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“I could be satisfied just painting those trees, but I suppose I have learned how I interpret them. It’s like a songwriter who learns to play his own songs – you want to write a new one; set up new problems; that progressive devil on all our shoulders.”
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–Jeff Peters

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Artist Bio

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Richard is the head of the ceramics department at Saddleback College and lives in San Clemente, CA with his daughter Isabelle where he maintains a studio as many artists do, in his garage. In 2011 he participated in a variety of group exhibition and was the impetus and conceptual backstory behind Happening/Unhappening, a hybrid performance work at the Saddleback’s black box theatre. This performance combined spoken word poetry, sculpture, painting and Jazz. He has recently completed the 15’ by 100’ Veterans Memorial at Saddleback College in collaboration with Fred Olsen. It incorporates hundreds of hollow large tile, four water features and thousands of lights, appearing to glow at night as if it were red hot. It is perhaps the largest ceramic freestanding sculpture in the world. In his free time he rides his bike to surf at trestles several times a week.
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Artist Statement

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My work is a visual commentary on my perceptions of a psychological and spiritual need to connect to our surroundings and to each other. I explore city scenes, interiors of restaurants and places we may frequent, or even rural back yard pools, to set a stage for a narrative that explores this quandary. Our lives are full of places and people that come, or who have gone, or those we may long to know. My paintings give the viewer the permission to superimpose and examine their own feelings pertaining to the narrative given in each image i.e. the ubiquitous empty chair implies a presence, or absence, that may trigger memory or hope; the story everyone has but many hold secret. Or the empty quiet room that imbues isolation without loneliness allowing us the freedom to follow thought; city streets where we are surrounded by humanity and the crush of advertisements and faces yet be totally alone. I love realism for its ability to express the abstract. I love the process of oil painting for its ability to translate my own need to confess, to connect, to tell a story we may all read ourselves into.
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-Glenn Ness
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Verdure, 2007
Oil on canvas
20 x 15 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery
Value: $2,500.00
Starting bid: $1,250.00
Live Auction!
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Artist Bio

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Ali Smith (born 1976, Newport Beach, CA) received her MFA from California State University, Long Beach (CA), and has exhibited widely throughout the United States, with recent solo shows in New York at Freight and Volume Gallery, as well as in Houston and Los Angeles. She has just completed 12 new large-scale canvases for her upcoming solo show at Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City, opening February 25th.
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Smith’s energetic canvases meld delicate line with impasto paint, forging a fine balance between intention and intuition. With her emblematic vibrant palette, she manipulates jarring angles, soft curves and intricate nooks to unearth abstract terrains and surreal forms. Smith constructs elaborate micro and macrocosms through a delicate balance of chance and intention- simulating the complex balance found in organic structures. Often drawing from studies on paper and collages to create her large-scale compositions, Smith has continued to evolve her idiosyncratic, highly personal language of motifs and forms that are at once fluid and open.
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Her work is included in the collections of the Laguna Art Museum (CA), Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA), Progressive (OH) and the Chaney Family Collection (TX). Smith lives and works in Long Beach, CA.

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>> Click here for artist’s website
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