Open House, CAF Satellite @ Hotel Indigo Santa Barbara
Curated by Miki Garcia
Exhibition on view: February 14, 2012 – February 2, 2013

Alejandro Diaz, Ann Diener, Stephanie Dotson, Rob Fischer, Francesca Gabbiani, Saul Gray-Hildenbrand, Nathan Hayden, Cyndee Howard, Jennifer Nocon, Zack Paul, Lukas Stettner, Kirsten Stoltmann, Sandra Torres, and James Van Arsdale

RECENT:

The Can(n)on
Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara City College
Curated by Dane Goodman
February 24 – March 23, 2012

A group show of the artists in the Can(n)on Art Studios complex. Elizabeth Folk, Saul Gray-Hildenbrand, Kimberly Hahn, Zack Paul, Steve Soria, James Van Arsdale

Santa Barbara News-Press Review
Seasons Magazine blog preview
SB Independent review
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Double Trouble
Arts Fund Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA
November 12, 2011 – January 14, 2012
Curated by Nancy Gifford
Santa Barbara Independent review
SB Seasons blog preview

Featuring a collaborative mixed-media installation by Kimberly Hahn and James Van Arsdale, along with works by Philip Argent, Jane Callister, Mary Heebner, Macduff Everton, Marie Schoeff and Dane Goodman.
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Solo Exhibition:
Everything You Hear Is True
Left Coast, Goleta, CA
May 13 – July 2, 2011

Read the SB Seasons blog review
Gallery of images from the show

The title of Van Arsdale’s exhibition, “Everything You Hear Is True,” posits an improbable reality. In an era when Presidents have lied about the reasons for going to war, manufacturing the Tonkin Gulf incident in Vietnam and WMDs in Iraq, we know it isn’t true. If we accept the proposition that “Everything You Hear Is True,” there would be no need for skepticism or inquiry of any kind. Certainly, part of the culture, especially the mainstream mass media (representing the oligarchs and the political class), would like us to behave otherwise—and credulously accept their propaganda. An ongoing theme in Van Arsdale’s art is how our culture-at-large is permeated by violence and militarism. We’re conditioned, at an early age, to accept war as a normal part of human society. It’s evident in the toys we give our children and the kind of fodder that passes for entertainment on tv, the movie screen, and the internet.

If the Pentagon’s water supply was spiked with LSD, the wargamers might hallucinate the kinds of objects and visions presented in Van Arsdale’s exhibition. The current exhibition includes an oversized boardgame, with battleships modeled upon the counter used in the boardgame Monopoly, except “bitten” on one side (like an apple)—visually inspired, according to the artist, by the damage done to the hull of the USS Cole, bombed by al-Qaeda in Yemen. On an adjacent wall protrude three “ray guns,” painted with loopy, decorative colors you’d never expect to see on a weapon. Opposite hang two framed, ink-wash drawings connected by bright paper cutouts in lurid complementary colors. One of these drawings, modeled on an artillery field manual and executed in a cartoonish style, shows a soldier, hunkered down with a bazooka, using the Santa Barbara Mission as a visual reference to target an unseen or imaginary WalMart. This is paired with a drawing of a politically-incorrect machine designed to fire cigarettes at nonsmokers. The drawings and sculptures are all framed by undulating two and three dimensional forms.
-Simon Taylor