The New Girl
Red Brick, a delightfully eclectic gallery, opens along Ventura\'s main drag
By Saundra Sorenson 01/11/2007
The exposed brick interior of 328 East Main St. is a welcome expanse to Jennifer Livia, a new gallery owner on the block. The previous gallery Livia ran was a mishmash of windows, art and music, all thrown together in a landmark building with unique architecture.
\"Most of the people just came in to ask me about the building,\" she remembers ruefully. Now, situated in Red Brick Gallery on Ventura’s lower Main Street, she describes the shabby-chic quality of the walls as a selling point. The gallery is warm and there is nothing to detract from the art. \"In here, it's very clear … what I am,\" she laughs.
Livia came to Main by way of Los Angeles and the Bay area. There, she studied art for eight years at the San Francisco Art Institute, with a focus on photography. After an internship at Oberon Designs, a custom design and manufacturing company focused on the hospitality industry, Livia found herself coordinating décor in boutique hotels located in San Francisco (her hometown), Texas and Times Square in New York. Although she often helped her clients sort through the work of 150 artists, her own nature photography is exhibited at numerous San Francisco-area establishments. In the hotel world, that means room-by-room exposure.
She has been known to climb Mount Whitney with her camera on hand or to use a work-related trip to camp out and amass material. But she also paints, and lately she defines her oil paintings as \"mostly abstraction, veering more towards landscape abstractions\" that are influenced heavily by local sunsets.
Along a long stretch of brick and hardwood floor, Livia’s paintings hang among 20 other pieces by artists, with the canvases grouped together by creator. In the Red Brick Gallery — on which Livia has put no more restrictive a theme than that it is a welcoming place to show emerging California talent — there is a pleasing mishmash of flavors, a stylistic catch-all. In short, an eclectic collection on a two-month rotation. \"I like to talk about people's art,\" Livia says. \"That's the one thing I miss most about school, discussing people's work.\"
Livia displays her own paintings and a cross section of her photography portfolio, from her luminous nature shots to the experimental, filter-fed treatments, like the pleasingly whimsical \"Digital Forest.\"
While past experiences with provocative material have resulted in Livia's decision to keep her collections relatively controversy-free, there are light touches of edge in unexpected places. Watercolor artist Margery Speilman seems to deal mainly in forest and wildlife imagery befitting a children's book of treasured tales, or in thought-provoking but message-heavy visuals, like \"Cold War is Over,\" in which bear, dove and eagle group around a nest of the world. But she also contributes some odd, delightfully twisted couplings, hinting at a capricious sense of humor. In some of her chimerical landscapes, a kitten hatches from an egg or a budgie lands on the nose of an elephant seal. Among these hangs a lone lithograph of a shark; in this context, the sweet meets the ominous.
Whether by design or by happy accident, photographer Jim Martin gives an exhaustive catalog of angles by which to view downtown Ventura, from crystal clear hilltop views to a foreboding depiction of the pier with ghostly figures, his display underscores the city's charm, as well as its reputation as one of the most haunted cities in the United States.
Portrait art is represented in the soft-edged watercolor realism of Nomi Wagner's work, ranging from the near-photographic quality of her street scenes, to the light hues of her idyllic images of children.
Chris Higgins, an oil painter who captures Ventura scenery and recasts it as a familiar yet alternate reality, is a favorite of Livia. \"He paints Ventura in a way I've never seen it; he paints it so intimately,\" she gushes.
Teri Yarbrow, whose mixed media work makes use of crushed leaves, wax and powdered gold, as well as butterfly and metamorphosis imagery, hints at fantastical worlds. Amazingly, by melding this form with paint-dripping methods, digital alteration or marbleization techniques, pieces like her \"Transformation Triptych\" stand out in the fantasy genre as samples of the hybrid genre's potential.
Lupe Martinez's bold, sensual female figures underscore a strong influence from early 20th century Chicana artists, while, in a nod to a different collection of classics, Cecile Gurrola-Faulconer provides a line of ceramics, many in the form of masks that invoke both Greek theatrical artifacts and the glitz of more recent Carnivale masks.
In a similar vein, David Rivas explores what he refers to as \"Chromogenic photography,\" using the abstract of his shots to hint at alternate worlds and hidden realities.
The functional art of Frances Ilson, whose fascination with glass works led her to create her own line of plates, dishes and platters, serves to remind us that even a world as mundane as one's household can make use of vivid imagery.
Livia tries to buy a piece by every artist she represents for her own personal collection, and uses this guideline in choosing which artists to hang or install in her space. In some cases, she even wears the art she supports: Cory Soto, a professional glass-blower, displays his collection of bulbous pendants, each containing an abstract explosion of colored glass design. His line is complemented by Shirley Judy's similarly hand blown but more intricate glass jewelry.
Still, one can't help but notice that this ambitious gallery owner with an eye for display is, well, young. Although it isn't hard to imagine her in her other professional life, freelancing as a graphic designer and crafting advertisements and Web sites for local restaurants and inns, it is a little surprising that she might step up as a gifted contributor to Ventura's cultural explosion.
It was a brave decision on her part, one that she's quick to admit was fostered by her business-savvy mother, Phyllis Gubins, herself a part-time artist who works in acrylics and watercolor. After Gubins drew her daughter to Ventura with news of a gallery- managing position, Livia pursued her own aspirations of owning a gallery. And true to the repetitive adage about the importance of location, Livia has managed to center herself among Ventura's burgeoning art community. \"I meet about 10 artists a day who want to show me their work,\" she estimates, hinting at the gratitude she feels to area craftsmen.
Reflecting on the difficulty artists face when trying to establish themselves in a gallery, Livia seems only too happy to extend the favor to her colleagues. It's a boon to her own career as well. \"I always have some place to hang my art.\"
Although Red Brick's current batch seems to represent most imaginable forms — the realistic, the abstract, small installed pieces, photography, dishware — Livia is making arrangements to feature large sculpture. \"In terms of medium, I'm game for everything,\" she says. n
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