The College of Southern Nevada, School of Arts & Letters, and Department of Fine Arts will host an exhibition ecologically minded, installation artwork by San Diego, California based artist and educator Eloisa Guanlao. Eloisa Guanlao: Darwin Finches will open on Friday, July 19, 2024, and run through Saturday, September 14, 2024, in the Fine Arts Gallery on the North Las Vegas Campus of the College of Southern Nevada. A special Artist Talk and Reception will take place on Wednesday, September 11, 2024, starting at 6 p.m.
Eloisa Guanlao was born in the Philippines. Her experiences as an immigrant and nomadic scholar-artist influence her versatile art practice and critical inquiries. Guanlao’s interest in the natural world, history, art, languages and literature began at an early age. This multifaceted passion was nurtured at the Los Angeles High School for the Arts in California, cultivated with a liberal arts education at Carleton College in Minnesota, and further developed at the University of New Mexico, where she received her MFA in Studio Art.
Because Guanlao considers art making a social and cultural endeavor, she pursues projects that are research intensive and relevant to current issues. A trained teacher and lifelong scholar, Guanlao has taught at secondary schools and universities in Hawaii, California, Maryland, and Alabama, where students and colleagues appreciate her dedication to interdisciplinary learning and pedagogy. Guanlao practices and teaches art in California.
Referring to her work, Eloisa states, “As an artist and ecologically minded humanist, I am interested in performing history and historiography through visual means, giving careful consideration to the materials I use. Concerns about the unexamined expansion of technology and the unrestrained use of natural resources inform my art practice and historical inquiry. This includes a scrutiny of the impact of technological innovations on labor migrations, colonial acts, and socio-cultural development. My work traces the creation of institutional and symbolic systems as different factions scramble for control, and the ways these systems contribute to or disrupt community relations. More broadly, I want to reveal the link between compassion and environmental justice, and specifically, I would like to identify who benefits and who suffers. To begin a dialogue regarding my concerns, I am experimenting with spatial structures combined with photographic imagery that become performance spaces for the public. Within these structures the public enact and reflect upon their role as producers and consumers of culture and society. I reconsider space as subjective sites to be reclaimed for socio-political interaction and creative engagement. My approach to art comes from the perspective that our cultural environment shapes our socio-economic and political history and identity, but this perspective should not come to the detriment of the natural environment. As a human made product, culture can be unmade, and transformed for the welfare of circadian cycles and natural, biological systems.”
The CSN Fine Arts Gallery is free, family friendly, and open to the public. Gallery hours are from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. The Fine Arts Gallery is located adjacent to the Nicholas J. Horn Theatre Lobby on the North Las Vegas campus located at 3200 E. Cheyenne Avenue, one-mile East of I-15 North.
For more information, please call (702) 651-4146
http://www.csn.edu/artgallery
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