Views from AltaSea's Blue Hour Exhibited Artists: 

Amabelle Aguiluz 

Isabel Beavers 

Barbara Benish 

Patsy Cox 

Danielle Eubank 

Katherine Gray 

Cynthia Minet 

Ann Phong 

Barbara Thomason 

Minoosh Zomorodinia

In 2022, renowned artist Kim Abeles, was invited by AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles to curate an exhibition for their 2023 Blue Hour –a yearly fundraiser for educational programming focused on youth and community. Located not far from the Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, AltaSea is a remarkable ocean research and innovation institute focusing on regenerative aquaculture, renewable energy, blue technology and underwater robotics. Partnering with scientists, educators and commercial entities, AltaSea’s volunteers and staff educate through art and science about our relationship to the ocean, and its importance to the health and future of the planet. 

The Cal Poly Pomona campus and the W. Keith & Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery community acknowledge AltaSea for its dedication to science and education while utilizing art and its Blue Hour Artists programming as a positive conduit for advocating for our environment at such crucial and pivotal times. We are also honored to welcome Guest Curator, Kim Abeles, and a remarkable selection of the poignant and inventive 2023 Blue Hour Artists to our campus for a new, abbreviated iteration of the AltaSea exhibition titled, Above & Below: Views from AltaSea's Blue Hour. 

We further recognize these local, LA-based female artists, including our esteemed Guest Curator, as part of 2024 Women’s Month and International Women’s Day festivities. For their lifelong dedication to creating art in such unique and formidable ways, utilizing such a diversity of media and expressive artforms, while also instilling profound and relevant meaning with current historical, socio-political and environmental significance to their bodies of work, these women artists are some of the most cherished treasures Southern California Art has to offer.



Michele Cairella Fillmore, Gallery Curator

Kellogg University Art Gallery

Cal Poly Pomona

2024

[4] Amabelle Aguiluz

[5] Katherine Gray

[2]  Installation view:

Barbara Thomason, Isabel Beavers and Danielle Eubank 

[3] Installation view:

Barbara Thomason and Danielle Eubank

The artists featured in Above & Below: Views from AltaSea’s Blue Hour have created long-term projects that speak to the importance of commitment. Barbara Thomason’s Coastal Disturbance is the result of ten years of travel (2012-2022), painting views along a coastline from San Diego, California to San Juan Island, Washington. Thomason’s paintings, and written accounts accompanying the locations depicted, succinctly describe the powerful beauty and the tragic errors of our interaction with nature. 

Danielle Eubank has been documenting the seas throughout the world for the past twenty years. Her journeys to the locations follow the route of ancient transport ships or take place on research vessels to the Arctic and Antarctic. Scale is in dialogue from multiple directions: the expansiveness of the seas, the travel to reach them, and the paintings themselves that offer refined details of the waters’ grand surfaces.

The splendor of the ocean and its relevance for our future is a meaningful direction for an exhibition. We must also address rather than evade the critical decisions we continue to face. The Abyss is an overarching project by Isabel Beavers that involves mixed media artworks to focus on the dangers of mineral extraction in the deep sea. The artworks in the exhibition represent three visual approaches ­–sculpture, video, and installation– to address this vitally important subject. 

Cynthia Minet’s colorfully lit roseate spoonbills combine the delight of the imagery with a somber message. The sculptures are created from plastic trash found at the Rio Grande, a prominent crossing point at the US/Mexico border for migrants from many regions of the globe. In Minet’s words, an intentional purpose of the work is “to provoke difficult conversations about climate change and human needs.” 

This interconnectedness can be found in the imagery of Patsy Cox. Urban Rebutia in its entirety contains 50,000 elements, each individually created from clay. The artwork began in 2006 with 600 hand-made pieces, and combinations of red, yellow, and blue are site-specific to installation spaces. In each case, the concept depicts urban sprawl. At the Kellogg Gallery, 17,000 red forms emerge from the darkness of the gallery space.

Katherine Gray’s blown glass and assembled sculptures connect the physical principles of air, water, and matter. She is interested in the property of glass as being both “present and absent”, visible yet transparent. The sculptures in the exhibit create a dialogue between the characteristics of glass and water. For example, one creates an optical reverse of the scene viewed through it, and another with its glassware interlocking with water seems like a core sample through the sea toward a sunken civilization

Process as a performative element can be seen directly in the work of Minoosh Zomordinia and Amabelle Aguiluz. Both artists involve their bodies to inform the outcome. In her three-channel video, Zomordinia places herself amid the windy shore of the ocean, maintaining a solid strength in contrast to the wild movement of her garment against the current.

The sculptures of Amabelle Aguiluz are created with a performative gesture: connected at the waist to a knitting machine carriage, she moves back and forth with an informed, intentioned awareness. Her holistic approach prompts the viewer’s thoughtful observation for art and the ocean, a time element based on a distant heartbeat and our connection to each other. 

Ann Phong’s paintings bring together selections from her two primary series and her personal encounter with the sea involving an intense immigrant journey. Her visual stories speak to her resilience and her empathic sense for refuges worldwide, past and present. Her artwork shares experiences –as an individual in a chaotic world and polluted environment– through the physicality of the paint and the objects that seem to fly through the thick swirls.

Phong’s paintings juxtapose dramatically with Barbara Benish’s enormous jellyfish created with repurposed, watercolor-tinted silk parachutes. The two artists share an interest in abstraction as a potent tool by communicating through a fearlessness of form and color. Benish’s artworks are presented at such a mammoth scale that our size as viewers is reduced. This contrasts with our typical experience viewing jellyfish, framed in blue behind a tempered glass aquarium in a museum. 

Discovery through physical endurance and passionate dedication is a philosophical connection between the artworks in this exhibition. In a variety of ways, the artists tackle their relationship with the ocean from personal, global, and political viewpoints. In connection with each of the artists exhibited, the urgency of this moment is balanced by a simultaneous surge of creative expression. The crisis we undergo propagates a human need in us to convey, create, and hopefully correct. The processes of artmaking open our understanding by prompting and clarifying. As an artist, one goes through a metamorphosis. The viewer is the recipient of the result, and in turn, empowered to be an active agent of that focused energy. 

Kim Abeles, Guest Curator

Kellogg University Art Gallery

Cal Poly Pomona

2024

[6] Installation view: Barbara Benish and Ann Phong 

[7] Ann Phong

[8] Video still: Minoosh Zomorodinia 

Full caption details: 

[1] Patsy Cox, Urban Rebutia (partial), Red Sprawl, 2006/2023, site-specific ceramic floor installation approx. 100” diameter 

Cynthia Minet, Migrations (Spoonbills 4, 5, and 6), 2018, post-consumer plastic, PVC, wood, fasteners, programmable LEDs, motion sensor, speaker, found objects from Rio Grande borderlands, rope, cable, approx. 70 x 60 x 38” each

Photo credit: Kim Abeles 

[2] Installation view (left to right): Artworks by Barbara Thomason, Isabel Beavers, Danielle Eubank.

(right) Barbara Thomason, Coastal Disturbance, 2012-2022, cell vinyl on illustration board, selections from 118 paintings with related stories organized geographically along the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington. Installation approx. 42’; 20 x 16” each 

(center) Isabel Beavers, What is 500 million years to a shark tooth?, 2023, stained glass, wood, fishing line, 120 x 70 x 28" 

(left) Danielle Eubank, Potomac V and Potomac VI, oil on linen, 32 x 42” each 

Photo credit: Kim Abeles 

[3] Installation view (left to right): Artworks by Barbara Thomason (background) and Danielle Eubank (far right and foreground). 

Barbara Thomason, Coastal Disturbance, 2012-2022, cell vinyl on illustration board, selections from 118 paintings with related stories organized geographically along the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington, Installation approx. 42'; 20 x 16” each 

Danielle Eubank, Gowanus Canal III, oil on linen, 60 x 42” 

Danielle Eubank, Floor installation created as digital prints from One Artist Five Oceans, variable dimensions 

Photo credit: Kim Abeles 

[4] Amabelle Aguiluz, Exposure, 2022, wool and cotton dyed with indigo, 16 x 17 x 2-3” 

Photo credit: Kim Abeles

[5] Katherine Gray, Untitled, 2023, water, glass, 40 x 6" diameter 

Photo credit: Andrew K. Thompson 

[6] Installation view (left to right): Barbara Benish and Ann Phong 

Ann Phong, Crossing the Ocean, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 24” 

Barbara Benish, Cyaneidae family (BlueFire) from The Marginal World: Jellies Series, 2023, repurposed parachute fabric (polyester silk), watercolor, fishing line, found plastic, seaweed, flotsam from the beach, wire, 9-15’ diameter 

Barbara Benish, Aurelia Aurita (Moon Jelly) from The Marginal World: Jellies Series, 2023, repurposed parachute fabric (polyester silk), watercolor, fishing line, found plastic, seaweed, flotsam from the beach, wire, 9’ diameter 

Ann Phong, Looking Up from the Broken Boat, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 36” 

Photo credit: Kim Abeles 

[7] Ann Phong, Crossing the Ocean, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 24” 

Photo credit: Courtesy the artist 

[8] Video still: Resist: Air, Water, Earth. 

Minoosh Zomorodinia, Resist: Air, Water, Earth, 2013, video installation, 28 x 130”, run-time: 19 minutes, 6 seconds 

Photo credit: Minoosh Zomorodinia