Jun 30

Jun 30 Arts Spring 2025

Seven Decades

OJAI VALLEY MUSEUM | KAREN K LEWIS
***130 West Ojai Avenue*** | June 19 to August 3 | Opening June 20, 5 - 7 PM

Best known for her large-scale oil paintings and evocative still life, Karen K Lewis has been a fixture of Ojai’s art community since 1990. This upcoming retrospective at the Ojai Valley Museum traces the arc of her prolific career, from her early days in New York’s SoHo scene (where The New Yorker took note), to her decades of work capturing California's landscapes in oils and prints. A former president of the Ojai Studio Artists and a favorite of collectors from here to Japan, Lewis continues to expand her practice with forays into printmaking and international workshops. This is a rare chance to see the full scope of her work in one place.

A Scarecrow’s Archive

SPORE SPACE | ELIZABETH HERRING & HAILEY LOMAN
***221 East Matilija Street*** | June 6 to July 12

One way ashore, a thousand channels
—Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

There was an isolation and loneliness to the scarecrows. You never see two together. They’re always alone, doing some important, solitary job for the person who made them.
—PumpkinRot

Elizabeth Herring created two scarecrows out of thrifted clothing and pantyhose, accompanied by a traveler’s journal for their fantasy vacation. The scarecrow’s “important solitary” job is in the eye of the beholder, as is the archivist’s time spent cataloguing. Why might we ingest, describe, and share single art objects with others? What can our ephemera tell us about our messy and contradictory lives?

Horizon Object

CAROLYN GLASOE BAILEY | STEPHANIE WASHBURN
***248 South Montgomery Street*** | June 5 - July 25 | Opening June 7, 5 - 7 PM

From CGBF:

Air, the most diaphanous of elements, skims the edges of a body unseen, unheard, and impossible to grasp, eluding sensory perception and any thought of threat. It reveals itself, but only with distance, as sky. Timothy Morton describes the climate crisis as a hyperobject, something so vast and abstract it overwhelms the mind's ability to process. There is a material problem. Integrating drawing, photography, video, and sound, the work included in this exhibition reaches for what is so untouchable. Sky drawn on rock. A blade cuts through the clouds. Wind billowing in and out of a shredded skyscape in fading light at dusk. Coup d’Oeil (Boreas) explores a related process in the video with a sound collaboration by Rebecca Comerford. The video presents a Janus view of wind entering and exiting the frame. Comerford, a mezzo soprano, navigates a single breath through the turbulent atmosphere with moments of almost indistinguishable resonance. Animating sky and body and back again, air shape shifts its way through wild and embodied forms, and roils our ever more deluded construct of nature as other to a human subject.

This exhibit is in conjunction with the Ojai Music Festival.

Painted Seasons

SANTA PAULA ART MUSEUM | ANNE WARD
***123 North 10th Street, Santa Paula*** | March 15 - July 6

From SPAM:

Anne Ward is obsessed with light and pattern and color. Two years ago, Ward began thinking a lot about impermanence in the midst of so much change and also about the things that make her feel calm and uplifted. As a gardener, she finds the seasons and what is blooming at a particular time to be profoundly reassuring. The garden helps her to reconcile change and embrace the “season of now.” “Painted Seasons” represents various seasons of life, from old family photos to the greens of early spring and the energy of summer. Ward’s great hope is that her paintings function like a window that, when opened, can allow people to notice the “ordinary” in a different way and hopefully feel some of the energy of optimism with which she painted them.