The Trajectories Art Gallery held its opening reception at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 7 in the art gallery.
The gallery opened with a brief speech from curator and student Patience Joy Flaro regarding her goal with the presentation of the gallery. Flaro stated her primary goal was to highlight the fact that the faculty within the photography department at Cypress College are “artists first” and teachers second. She elaborated on this point later in the evening, stating, “I feel like we often see our teachers just as that, especially when it comes to teachers who are photographers, or artists in general. That’s their career. That’s their choice first. And so I wanted to showcase their talents in this versus having them only seen as [instructors].”
After the brief speech, patrons were left to explore the presented photographs submitted by professors Sean Black, Renee Chartier, Joshua Cho, Jason Dawes, William Hare, Steven King, Joey Lehman Morris, Aydinaneth Ortiz, Alejandro Sanchez, and Julie Shafer.
The photographs presented by the myriad of artists was just as diverse as the artists themselves. Photographs ranged in subject matter from Sean Black’s emotional portraits to William Hare’s apocalyptic abandoned architecture to Julie Shafer’s six foot tall pinhole landscapes. Images ranged from black and white to full color, and in size from the 2.5 by 3.5 inch black and white geyser-esque images by Josh Cho to Joey Lehman Morris’ large format print, taking up two 70 by 48 inch panels, that “romanticize[s] and look[s] critically at the California landscape.”
This wide variation was done purposefully, tying fluidly into the title of the gallery- “Trajectories.” Janet Owen Driggs, Director of the Art Gallery and Professor of Art History touched on that point when she said, “There are many trajectories here. All the different directions, curves, explorations that the artists are doing . . . and thematically, because we do have so many different explorations going on here and the organizing concept is that everyone works here in the photo department, rather than a thematic one, then we have this single word that encapsulates multiplicity.”
Over the course of the two hour showing, 268 guests showed up and absorbed the presented artwork. This was a near perfect amount of people for the atmosphere to remain extremely pleasant, and throughout the evening, the gallery was decently filled, without being so full as to feel claustrophobic.
Patrons admired the showing, with patrons commenting on the overall quality of the photography on display; art major Khris Damogo saying “Some of these are so well done that [it] kinda makes you think it’s a photorealistic painting…”
The gallery is scheduled to remain open until Thursday, Feb. 21, 2019.
