GRIM TALES

Flashbacks and Fables by Dwora Fried

February 6, 2023 – March 10, 2023
Artist Talk: Monday, February 6, 2023 @ 6PM
Reception : Monday, February 6, 2023 @ 7-9PM

The Cerritos College Art Gallery is pleased to present Grim Tales: Flashbacks and Fables, a solo-exhibition of recent assemblages by the Los Angeles-based mixed-media artist Dwora Fried. 
 
Fried’s distinctive assemblages, typically presented in small enclosed wooden boxes, are populated by the kind of vintage items one might find at local swap meets and flea markets, including miniature furniture, dolls and action figures, assorted old toys, various domestic doodads, and fabrics from the 1950s, all accentuated by photographic imagery, plastic, wood, metal and paint. Fried composes these three-dimensional dioramas just as a painter might a canvas, strategically drawing her viewer’s attention to select elements within the scene, while also maintaining a structural and formal balance overall. Preserving this duality of focus is no small accomplishment, as the pleasant, often charming, nature of the compositions and, in some cases, the literally child-like playfulness of the objects, can, at first glance, obscure a much more complex personal narrative, itself embedded within communal histories replete with generational pain and trauma. 
 
For Fried, these small room-like spaces are meant to evoke what it was like for her growing up as an outsider in post-war Vienna; a lesbian child of Jewish Holocaust survivors, she learned to perceive the world through a prism of loss, danger and secrecy, manifested in her work, per her own insightful description, as “a sense of isolation, displacement, and an appreciation for the surreal.” Which makes a lot of sense, considering that the dreamlike absurdity of Surrealism has long been invoked by artists to explore those deep-seated psychological mechanisms deployed by the human brain to inscribe and access memories, especially traumatic ones. Repression and denial work hard to conceal the root causes of suffering, personal and collective, but therapeutic analysis of the past is designed to, at the very least, offer some solace, if not also a small measure of cathartic understanding. Fried’s surrealist boxes, in the tradition of similar enclosures and miniature scenes by the likes of Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Joseph Cornell, and Laurie Simmons, are purposefully presented at a diminutive scale, such that one seems to have a modicum of control over the painful memories to which they allude. From this seemingly safe vantage point, the viewer is free to inspect the horrors of the past, to decode the tropes of terror, and to analyze the imagery of hate.

For this latest exhibition of her work, Fried has staged a selection of recent assemblages, divided into two thematic sections. The first is dedicated to significant events from her own personal biography, including important stories passed on from her parent’s experiences before and during the Holocaust (these include pieces from the Inherited Memories series, the Autobiographical series, and the Flashback series). The second focuses on deconstructing the popular epic struggles of good and evil playing out in familiar fairy tales, those modern mythical accounts of human nature, which these days ubiquitously permeate popular commercial culture, including and, perhaps, most notably, in Disney animated movies, the inevitable live-action remakes, and the straight-to-streaming spin-off series, as well as the branded amusement park rides, gift shop trinkets, and Halloween costumes. 
 
As fantastical stories, these fables may seem to be at odds with the harsh realities presented in the more personal tableaus in the exhibit, however, they are, in fact, fundamentally relevant. As Bruno Bettelheim points out in The Uses of Enchantment, “the child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue.” Certainly, this extends to their warnings about the precarity of life and the very real dangers that surround us, as well as the consequences of the all-to-commonly human impulses of envy, dishonesty, and greed. However, as numerous feminist, queer, and anti-racist critics have pointed out in recent years, these kinds of one-dimensional narratives have also historically been used to normalize particular modes of existence, while marginalizing others, and the categorical nature of their ethics leaves little room for ambiguity and nuance. No wonder, then, that the double scourges of Fascism and anti-Semitism have been on the rise lately, both of which require the anti-critical lens of fantastical conspiratorial thinking in order to spread their abhorrent ideologies.
 
Perhaps for this reason, at the center of the exhibition space, Fried is presenting a life-sized addition to one of her miniature boxed series, Inherited Memories. Devoid of the confining enclosure and made from real objects at their customary scale, this installation exists as a part of the world inhabited directly by the viewer, made all the more troubling by the nature of the subject matter; a large metal bunk-bed topped by two naked mannequins in a single-file line. As with the imagery in the boxes, it is impossible here to ignore the obvious associations with the familiar iconography of the Holocaust, of black and white photos and old film reels showing endless rows of squalid bunk beds and emaciated prisoners lined up for execution. In a ritualistic form of psychological cleansing, the artist invites visitors to bring small buttons to the gallery and to add them to those already collected on the bottom bunk, a reference to her own mother’s forced labor in a textile mill sewing buttons onto Nazi military uniforms and to the Jewish funerary practice of placing small rocks onto gravestones as a memorial to deceased loved ones.

Mixed-media assemblage artist Dwora Fried was born and raised in Vienna, educated in Tel Aviv, and, for the last forty-five years, has lived and worked in Los Angeles. She holds a BA from Tel Aviv University and studied at the Avni School of Fine Arts in Israel. Fried has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Glendale College Art Gallery, Shoebox Projects, Gallery 825/LAAA, SPARC, Museum Startgalerie Artothek (Vienna), Galerie Benedict (Vienna), Museo Ebraico de Venezia (Venice, Italy), Woolson and Tay Gallery (London), and ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive. Her work has been included in group shows at The Makery, the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Woman Made Gallery (Chicago), Quotidian Gallery, SITE:BROOKLYN, bG Gallery, Castelli Art Space, SoLA Contemporary, Golden West College Art Gallery, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Substrate Gallery, Irvine Fine Arts Center, LAUNCH LA, Keystone Art Space, MASH Gallery, Walter Maciel Gallery, Elmhurst Art Museum (Chicago), and Fullerton College Art Gallery.

Admission and events are free and open to the public.
Daily Parking is available for $3.00 in Lot 10 in the student white stalls only (use QR code on parking signage).

Before entering any facility on campus, including the Cerritos College Art Gallery, all visitors are required to show proof of vaccination, including booster shots, at the college’s COVID kiosks. Visitors will not be allowed to enter the Cerritos College Art Gallery without a daily wristband from a COVID kiosk. Once inside the gallery, it is strongly recommended that all visitors wear an appropriate mask and maintain proper social distancing. Please see https://www.cerritos.edu/covid-19/ for more information.

Daily Hours:
Mondays – Fridays: 10AM-4PM

Nightly Hours:
Mondays - Thursdays: 4PM-7PM

Please Note: The Cerritos College Art Gallery will be closed for President's Day (Feb 20, 2023)

in the PROJECTS ROOM

IT'S NO SECRET

every ARTIST IS A CANNIBAL

every POET IS A THIEF

Recent Feralscapes by Xavier Cázares Cortéz 

February 6, 2023 – March 10, 2023
Artist Talk: Monday, February 6, 2023 @ 6PM
Reception : Monday, February 6, 2023 @ 7-9PM

The Cerritos College Art Gallery is pleased to present a selection of new assemblages and mixed-media works from the Southern California-based artist Xavier Cázares Cortéz. 

For many years now, Cortéz has been carving a unique path with his inventive practice: somewhere between artist-as-archivist, artist-as-curator, and artist-as-semiotician. Harvesting his source materials from a literal treasure-trove of found objects, collected over an entire lifetime, Cortéz arranges a multiplicity of diverse items into these singularly stunning, decidedly maximalist displays, which he calls ‘feralscapes.’ While, at first glance, they may appear to be somewhat haphazard, these complex structural arrangements, made out of everything from rare antiques to contemporary mass-produced items, are actually far from random in their selection and placement; rather, they are quite consciously organized around variously shared formal, categorical, and/or theoretical patterns. This process relies heavily on the artist’s particular talent for impromptu world building, generated out of discarded possessions and disposable goods, a strategy he attributes to his youthful experience growing up in the rural Coachella Valley with limited wealth, but an overly-active imagination. For his feralscapes, Cortéz lays out, stacks, and juxtaposes a wide proliferation of both familiar and foreign objects, frequently with added textual elements, in order to explore the underlying taxonomic foundations that govern their meaning and, beyond that, of meaning itself. For Cortéz, these networks of signification extend well beyond purely linguistic relationships, expanding directly into, and also perhaps from, the very material world(s) that we collectively inhabit.
 
His latest feralscapes - presented in the exhibition alongside a selection of boxed assemblages, etched mirrors, and text-based paintings - look to examine the often paradoxical concept of originality and what it might actual mean to be creative in the 21st century, a time of ubiquitous appropriation, populated by constantly mutating memes and image generating algorithms. However, as much as things seem to have changed in recent years, perhaps it’s also much ado about nothing; for, as Cortéz posits, right in the title of this exhibition (ironically, using lyrics pulled from a well-known rock song), “it’s no secret” that “every artist is a cannibal” and “every poet is a thief.”

Xavier Cázares Cortéz has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at various southern California art venues such as the UCR/Sweeney Art Gallery, the Vincent Price Art Museum, the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, the Fullerton Art Museum, California State San Bernardino, Plaza de la Raza, Self-Help Graphics, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Barnsdall Art Park, and the Palm Springs Art Museum. His work has been shown in commercial art galleries such as Valerie Miller Fine Art, Imago Galleries, Denise Roberge in Palm Desert, and Patricia Correia Gallery in Santa Monica. He has been employed and held numerous artist-in-residencies that combined his art practice with educational programming at the Palm Springs Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Getty Foundation, the Bowers Museum, Community Art Resources (CARS), HeART Project, the California Arts Project (TCAP) and others. Cortéz has also served recently as a Lecturer in Art History & Film at California State University, San Bernardino (Palm Desert Campus) and UC Riverside Extension.

Admission and events are free and open to the public.
Daily Parking is available for $3.00 in Lot 10 in the student white stalls only (use QR code on parking signage).

Before entering any facility on campus, including the Cerritos College Art Gallery, all visitors are required to show proof of vaccination, including booster shots, at the college’s COVID kiosks. Visitors will not be allowed to enter the Cerritos College Art Gallery without a daily wristband from a COVID kiosk. Once inside the gallery, it is strongly recommended that all visitors wear an appropriate mask and maintain proper social distancing. Please see https://www.cerritos.edu/covid-19/ for more information.

Daily Hours:
Mondays – Fridays: 10AM-4PM

Nightly Hours:
Mondays - Thursdays: 4PM-7PM

Please Note: The Cerritos College Art Gallery will be closed for President's Day (Feb 20, 2023)

in the EXTERIOR WINDOW VITRINE

SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

A QUEERY TALE by Jynx Prado

February 6, 2023 – March 10, 2023
Artist Talk: Monday, February 6, 2023 @ 6PM
Reception : Monday, February 6, 2023 @ 7-9PM

The Cerritos College Art Gallery is pleased to present Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins, a special Window Dressing installation by the Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Jynx Prado. 
 
Deploying ample doses of humor and irony, Prado’s work seeks to intervene into the circuits of familiar iconography in order to better describe their lived environment and convey the nuances of their social life as a queer, nonbinary Mexi-Salvi American. Their practice ranges from paintings to sculptures to performances to installations, generally using burlap fabric as their unifying material. A loosely spun fiber with a rough texture and uncommonly resilient strength, burlap is fabricated material derived from the ordinary jute plant (corchorus olitorius), a safe and sustainable natural crop. Prado uses this material ambiguity, between the natural and the artificial, as a broader metaphor for the cycles of life and death present in their life and work. Once a living jute plant, in death it becomes a natural fiber that is artificial woven into a burlap pattern and then sewn together to become the embodiment of a new life, the vessel for a shared experience. 
 
This literal and metaphorical trans-formation is most prevalent in Prado’s Embodiments series, which consist of various fibrous bodies (humanoid, animalistic, and/or abstracted forms) each singularly and collectively operating as surrogates for the experience of a queer, genderfluid individual. The primary persona, manifested throughout this series though varying in form and number over time, is a character Prado has dubbed Mx. Burlap, a multiplicious figure representing the indeterminacy of the trans and/or nonbinary experience through a never-static, ever-evolving configuration. Despite, or perhaps due to, the evasiveness of their identity, Mx. Burlap is described by Prado as “wearing a burlap sack on their head,” a vague allusion, it seems, to being held hostage and/or humbled and humiliated (i.e. sackcloth and ashes), at a time when the queer community is frequently villainized, and even criminalized, both globally and, even here, in the United States. 

For their special Window Dressing installation in the Exterior Window Vitrine of the Cerritos College Art Gallery, Prado will debut Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins: A Queery Tale, the first of a new series focused on re-presenting familiar fairy tales from a nonbinary perspective. Included in the installation are all three current Mx. Burlap forms from The Embodiments series, including one taking the place of the titular Snow White. Within the context of this queer retelling, Mx. Burlap (Snow White), laying prone on their coffin, becomes a proxy for the all-too-many victims of anti-LGBT violence today. Just as Snow White from the grim fairy tale is, at least temporarily, murdered by her wicked and jealous step-mother, the Queen, simply for being the true “fairest of them all,” trans and nonbinary people are, these days, habitually murdered just for the supposed ‘sin’ of being their true and fairest selves. As part of their ongoing installation, the artist will also randomly perform alongside their sculptures as a living and breathing embodiment, a fabulous Snow White finally awakened from their cursed slumber.
 
Born and currently based in Los Angeles, Jynx Prado (they/them/their) critiques, questions, and challenges assumptions about the natural and the artificial within the human experience through an interdisciplinary practice using found objects, fabrics, and their own body. Prado received their MFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 2020 and their BA in California State University Dominguez Hills in 2018. Their work has been exhibited across Southern California, including at Grand Central Art Center, (Santa Ana), Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion at Orange Coast College (Costa Mesa), the VAMA Gallery (Los Angeles), Stay Gallery (Downey), Angels Gate Art Gallery (San Pedro), South Gate Art Gallery (South Gate), NOMAD for the Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA), and the Bendix (Los Angeles). They have also performed nationally and internationally in the Grand Central Art Center (Santa Ana), El Segundo Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), The Carnegie International 57th Edition (Pittsburgh), and QiPO 02 (Mexico City). 

Admission and events are free and open to the public.
Daily Parking is available for $3.00 in Lot 10 in the student white stalls only (use QR code on parking signage).

Before entering any facility on campus, including the Cerritos College Art Gallery, all visitors are required to show proof of vaccination, including booster shots, at the college’s COVID kiosks. Visitors will not be allowed to enter the Cerritos College Art Gallery without a daily wristband from a COVID kiosk. Once inside the gallery, it is strongly recommended that all visitors wear an appropriate mask and maintain proper social distancing. Please see https://www.cerritos.edu/covid-19/ for more information.

Daily Hours:
Mondays – Fridays: 10AM-4PM

Nightly Hours:
Mondays - Thursdays: 4PM-7PM

Please Note: The Cerritos College Art Gallery will be closed for President's Day (Feb 20, 2023)

GRIM TALES

Flashbacks and Fables by Dwora Fried

February 6, 2023 – March 10, 2023
Artist Talk: Monday, February 6, 2023 @ 6PM
Reception : Monday, February 6, 2023 @ 7-9PM

The Cerritos College Art Gallery is pleased to present Grim Tales: Flashbacks and Fables, a solo-exhibition of recent assemblages by the Los Angeles-based mixed-media artist Dwora Fried. 
 
Fried’s distinctive assemblages, typically presented in small enclosed wooden boxes, are populated by the kind of vintage items one might find at local swap meets and flea markets, including miniature furniture, dolls and action figures, assorted old toys, various domestic doodads, and fabrics from the 1950s, all accentuated by photographic imagery, plastic, wood, metal and paint. Fried composes these three-dimensional dioramas just as a painter might a canvas, strategically drawing her viewer’s attention to select elements within the scene, while also maintaining a structural and formal balance overall. Preserving this duality of focus is no small accomplishment, as the pleasant, often charming, nature of the compositions and, in some cases, the literally child-like playfulness of the objects, can, at first glance, obscure a much more complex personal narrative, itself embedded within communal histories replete with generational pain and trauma. 
 
For Fried, these small room-like spaces are meant to evoke what it was like for her growing up as an outsider in post-war Vienna; a lesbian child of Jewish Holocaust survivors, she learned to perceive the world through a prism of loss, danger and secrecy, manifested in her work, per her own insightful description, as “a sense of isolation, displacement, and an appreciation for the surreal.” Which makes a lot of sense, considering that the dreamlike absurdity of Surrealism has long been invoked by artists to explore those deep-seated psychological mechanisms deployed by the human brain to inscribe and access memories, especially traumatic ones. Repression and denial work hard to conceal the root causes of suffering, personal and collective, but therapeutic analysis of the past is designed to, at the very least, offer some solace, if not also a small measure of cathartic understanding. Fried’s surrealist boxes, in the tradition of similar enclosures and miniature scenes by the likes of Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Joseph Cornell, and Laurie Simmons, are purposefully presented at a diminutive scale, such that one seems to have a modicum of control over the painful memories to which they allude. From this seemingly safe vantage point, the viewer is free to inspect the horrors of the past, to decode the tropes of terror, and to analyze the imagery of hate.

For this latest exhibition of her work, Fried has staged a selection of recent assemblages, divided into two thematic sections. The first is dedicated to significant events from her own personal biography, including important stories passed on from her parent’s experiences before and during the Holocaust (these include pieces from the Inherited Memories series, the Autobiographical series, and the Flashback series). The second focuses on deconstructing the popular epic struggles of good and evil playing out in familiar fairy tales, those modern mythical accounts of human nature, which these days ubiquitously permeate popular commercial culture, including and, perhaps, most notably, in Disney animated movies, the inevitable live-action remakes, and the straight-to-streaming spin-off series, as well as the branded amusement park rides, gift shop trinkets, and Halloween costumes. 
 
As fantastical stories, these fables may seem to be at odds with the harsh realities presented in the more personal tableaus in the exhibit, however, they are, in fact, fundamentally relevant. As Bruno Bettelheim points out in The Uses of Enchantment, “the child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue.” Certainly, this extends to their warnings about the precarity of life and the very real dangers that surround us, as well as the consequences of the all-to-commonly human impulses of envy, dishonesty, and greed. However, as numerous feminist, queer, and anti-racist critics have pointed out in recent years, these kinds of one-dimensional narratives have also historically been used to normalize particular modes of existence, while marginalizing others, and the categorical nature of their ethics leaves little room for ambiguity and nuance. No wonder, then, that the double scourges of Fascism and anti-Semitism have been on the rise lately, both of which require the anti-critical lens of fantastical conspiratorial thinking in order to spread their abhorrent ideologies.
 
Perhaps for this reason, at the center of the exhibition space, Fried is presenting a life-sized addition to one of her miniature boxed series, Inherited Memories. Devoid of the confining enclosure and made from real objects at their customary scale, this installation exists as a part of the world inhabited directly by the viewer, made all the more troubling by the nature of the subject matter; a large metal bunk-bed topped by two naked mannequins in a single-file line. As with the imagery in the boxes, it is impossible here to ignore the obvious associations with the familiar iconography of the Holocaust, of black and white photos and old film reels showing endless rows of squalid bunk beds and emaciated prisoners lined up for execution. In a ritualistic form of psychological cleansing, the artist invites visitors to bring small buttons to the gallery and to add them to those already collected on the bottom bunk, a reference to her own mother’s forced labor in a textile mill sewing buttons onto Nazi military uniforms and to the Jewish funerary practice of placing small rocks onto gravestones as a memorial to deceased loved ones.

Mixed-media assemblage artist Dwora Fried was born and raised in Vienna, educated in Tel Aviv, and, for the last forty-five years, has lived and worked in Los Angeles. She holds a BA from Tel Aviv University and studied at the Avni School of Fine Arts in Israel. Fried has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Glendale College Art Gallery, Shoebox Projects, Gallery 825/LAAA, SPARC, Museum Startgalerie Artothek (Vienna), Galerie Benedict (Vienna), Museo Ebraico de Venezia (Venice, Italy), Woolson and Tay Gallery (London), and ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive. Her work has been included in group shows at The Makery, the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Woman Made Gallery (Chicago), Quotidian Gallery, SITE:BROOKLYN, bG Gallery, Castelli Art Space, SoLA Contemporary, Golden West College Art Gallery, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Substrate Gallery, Irvine Fine Arts Center, LAUNCH LA, Keystone Art Space, MASH Gallery, Walter Maciel Gallery, Elmhurst Art Museum (Chicago), and Fullerton College Art Gallery.

Admission and events are free and open to the public.
Daily Parking is available for $3.00 in Lot 10 in the student white stalls only (use QR code on parking signage).

Before entering any facility on campus, including the Cerritos College Art Gallery, all visitors are required to show proof of vaccination, including booster shots, at the college’s COVID kiosks. Visitors will not be allowed to enter the Cerritos College Art Gallery without a daily wristband from a COVID kiosk. Once inside the gallery, it is strongly recommended that all visitors wear an appropriate mask and maintain proper social distancing. Please see https://www.cerritos.edu/covid-19/ for more information.

Daily Hours:
Mondays – Fridays: 10AM-4PM

Nightly Hours:
Mondays - Thursdays: 4PM-7PM

Please Note: The Cerritos College Art Gallery will be closed for President's Day (Feb 20, 2023)

in the PROJECTS ROOM

IT'S NO SECRET

every ARTIST IS A CANNIBAL

every POET IS A THIEF

Recent Feralscapes by Xavier Cázares Cortéz 

February 6, 2023 – March 10, 2023
Artist Talk: Monday, February 6, 2023 @ 6PM
Reception : Monday, February 6, 2023 @ 7-9PM

The Cerritos College Art Gallery is pleased to present a selection of new assemblages and mixed-media works from the Southern California-based artist Xavier Cázares Cortéz. 

For many years now, Cortéz has been carving a unique path with his inventive practice: somewhere between artist-as-archivist, artist-as-curator, and artist-as-semiotician. Harvesting his source materials from a literal treasure-trove of found objects, collected over an entire lifetime, Cortéz arranges a multiplicity of diverse items into these singularly stunning, decidedly maximalist displays, which he calls ‘feralscapes.’ While, at first glance, they may appear to be somewhat haphazard, these complex structural arrangements, made out of everything from rare antiques to contemporary mass-produced items, are actually far from random in their selection and placement; rather, they are quite consciously organized around variously shared formal, categorical, and/or theoretical patterns. This process relies heavily on the artist’s particular talent for impromptu world building, generated out of discarded possessions and disposable goods, a strategy he attributes to his youthful experience growing up in the rural Coachella Valley with limited wealth, but an overly-active imagination. For his feralscapes, Cortéz lays out, stacks, and juxtaposes a wide proliferation of both familiar and foreign objects, frequently with added textual elements, in order to explore the underlying taxonomic foundations that govern their meaning and, beyond that, of meaning itself. For Cortéz, these networks of signification extend well beyond purely linguistic relationships, expanding directly into, and also perhaps from, the very material world(s) that we collectively inhabit.
 
His latest feralscapes - presented in the exhibition alongside a selection of boxed assemblages, etched mirrors, and text-based paintings - look to examine the often paradoxical concept of originality and what it might actual mean to be creative in the 21st century, a time of ubiquitous appropriation, populated by constantly mutating memes and image generating algorithms. However, as much as things seem to have changed in recent years, perhaps it’s also much ado about nothing; for, as Cortéz posits, right in the title of this exhibition (ironically, using lyrics pulled from a well-known rock song), “it’s no secret” that “every artist is a cannibal” and “every poet is a thief.”

Xavier Cázares Cortéz has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at various southern California art venues such as the UCR/Sweeney Art Gallery, the Vincent Price Art Museum, the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, the Fullerton Art Museum, California State San Bernardino, Plaza de la Raza, Self-Help Graphics, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Barnsdall Art Park, and the Palm Springs Art Museum. His work has been shown in commercial art galleries such as Valerie Miller Fine Art, Imago Galleries, Denise Roberge in Palm Desert, and Patricia Correia Gallery in Santa Monica. He has been employed and held numerous artist-in-residencies that combined his art practice with educational programming at the Palm Springs Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Getty Foundation, the Bowers Museum, Community Art Resources (CARS), HeART Project, the California Arts Project (TCAP) and others. Cortéz has also served recently as a Lecturer in Art History & Film at California State University, San Bernardino (Palm Desert Campus) and UC Riverside Extension.

Admission and events are free and open to the public.
Daily Parking is available for $3.00 in Lot 10 in the student white stalls only (use QR code on parking signage).

Before entering any facility on campus, including the Cerritos College Art Gallery, all visitors are required to show proof of vaccination, including booster shots, at the college’s COVID kiosks. Visitors will not be allowed to enter the Cerritos College Art Gallery without a daily wristband from a COVID kiosk. Once inside the gallery, it is strongly recommended that all visitors wear an appropriate mask and maintain proper social distancing. Please see https://www.cerritos.edu/covid-19/ for more information.

Daily Hours:
Mondays – Fridays: 10AM-4PM

Nightly Hours:
Mondays - Thursdays: 4PM-7PM

Please Note: The Cerritos College Art Gallery will be closed for President's Day (Feb 20, 2023)

in the EXTERIOR WINDOW VITRINE

SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

A QUEERY TALE by Jynx Prado

February 6, 2023 – March 10, 2023
Artist Talk: Monday, February 6, 2023 @ 6PM
Reception : Monday, February 6, 2023 @ 7-9PM

The Cerritos College Art Gallery is pleased to present Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins, a special Window Dressing installation by the Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Jynx Prado. 
 
Deploying ample doses of humor and irony, Prado’s work seeks to intervene into the circuits of familiar iconography in order to better describe their lived environment and convey the nuances of their social life as a queer, nonbinary Mexi-Salvi American. Their practice ranges from paintings to sculptures to performances to installations, generally using burlap fabric as their unifying material. A loosely spun fiber with a rough texture and uncommonly resilient strength, burlap is fabricated material derived from the ordinary jute plant (corchorus olitorius), a safe and sustainable natural crop. Prado uses this material ambiguity, between the natural and the artificial, as a broader metaphor for the cycles of life and death present in their life and work. Once a living jute plant, in death it becomes a natural fiber that is artificial woven into a burlap pattern and then sewn together to become the embodiment of a new life, the vessel for a shared experience. 
 
This literal and metaphorical trans-formation is most prevalent in Prado’s Embodiments series, which consist of various fibrous bodies (humanoid, animalistic, and/or abstracted forms) each singularly and collectively operating as surrogates for the experience of a queer, genderfluid individual. The primary persona, manifested throughout this series though varying in form and number over time, is a character Prado has dubbed Mx. Burlap, a multiplicious figure representing the indeterminacy of the trans and/or nonbinary experience through a never-static, ever-evolving configuration. Despite, or perhaps due to, the evasiveness of their identity, Mx. Burlap is described by Prado as “wearing a burlap sack on their head,” a vague allusion, it seems, to being held hostage and/or humbled and humiliated (i.e. sackcloth and ashes), at a time when the queer community is frequently villainized, and even criminalized, both globally and, even here, in the United States. 

For their special Window Dressing installation in the Exterior Window Vitrine of the Cerritos College Art Gallery, Prado will debut Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins: A Queery Tale, the first of a new series focused on re-presenting familiar fairy tales from a nonbinary perspective. Included in the installation are all three current Mx. Burlap forms from The Embodiments series, including one taking the place of the titular Snow White. Within the context of this queer retelling, Mx. Burlap (Snow White), laying prone on their coffin, becomes a proxy for the all-too-many victims of anti-LGBT violence today. Just as Snow White from the grim fairy tale is, at least temporarily, murdered by her wicked and jealous step-mother, the Queen, simply for being the true “fairest of them all,” trans and nonbinary people are, these days, habitually murdered just for the supposed ‘sin’ of being their true and fairest selves. As part of their ongoing installation, the artist will also randomly perform alongside their sculptures as a living and breathing embodiment, a fabulous Snow White finally awakened from their cursed slumber.
 
Born and currently based in Los Angeles, Jynx Prado (they/them/their) critiques, questions, and challenges assumptions about the natural and the artificial within the human experience through an interdisciplinary practice using found objects, fabrics, and their own body. Prado received their MFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 2020 and their BA in California State University Dominguez Hills in 2018. Their work has been exhibited across Southern California, including at Grand Central Art Center, (Santa Ana), Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion at Orange Coast College (Costa Mesa), the VAMA Gallery (Los Angeles), Stay Gallery (Downey), Angels Gate Art Gallery (San Pedro), South Gate Art Gallery (South Gate), NOMAD for the Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA), and the Bendix (Los Angeles). They have also performed nationally and internationally in the Grand Central Art Center (Santa Ana), El Segundo Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), The Carnegie International 57th Edition (Pittsburgh), and QiPO 02 (Mexico City). 

Admission and events are free and open to the public.
Daily Parking is available for $3.00 in Lot 10 in the student white stalls only (use QR code on parking signage).

Before entering any facility on campus, including the Cerritos College Art Gallery, all visitors are required to show proof of vaccination, including booster shots, at the college’s COVID kiosks. Visitors will not be allowed to enter the Cerritos College Art Gallery without a daily wristband from a COVID kiosk. Once inside the gallery, it is strongly recommended that all visitors wear an appropriate mask and maintain proper social distancing. Please see https://www.cerritos.edu/covid-19/ for more information.

Daily Hours:
Mondays – Fridays: 10AM-4PM

Nightly Hours:
Mondays - Thursdays: 4PM-7PM

Please Note: The Cerritos College Art Gallery will be closed for President's Day (Feb 20, 2023)