Domestic Deviation - Featuring Works by Ernest Silva and May-Ling Martinez Open Reception: March 3rd, 2007 from 7-9pm Exhibition continues March 3rd - May 21, 2007

San Diego, CA -- (ReleaseWire) -- 02/06/2007 -- The San Diego Visual Art's Network and SanDiegoArtist.com has established the San Diego Art Prize which is given annually to three established and three emerging artists who have exhibited outstanding achievement in the field of Visual Arts. The Prize recipients will receive a cash grant and an exhibition at the L Street Gallery in the Downtown Omni Hotel. Each exhibition will pair an established artist with an emerging artist. The final exhibition will run from June 2007 - September 2007 and will feature work by all recognized recipients of the SD ART PRIZE.

The third exhibition in the series, Domestic Deviation, Featuring Works by Ernest Silva and May Ling Martinez will begin March 3rd with an opening reception from 7pm - 9pm at the L Street Gallery and will be on view through May 21, 2007. The psychoanalytical term Object Relations Theory in many ways defines the work of both artists. This theory states that the building blocks of how people experience the world emerge from their relationship to loved and hated objects. Both use images as a visual language to tell a story. The viewer then interprets the story based on their own frame of reference. Each image invokes a different dialogue within the individual that is significant to his or her life.

Ernest Silva received a BFA from the University of Rhode Island in 1971 and an MFA from Tyler School of Art in 1974. Since 1972, his work has been shown in over 45 one person shows and over 150 group shows. In 1989, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and in 1995; he was the artist in residence at the National Workshops for Arts and Crafts, Copenhagen, Denmark, known as Gammel Dok. Mr. Silva has been commissioned to construct several public art projects in the San Diego/Tijuana region. His public projects include a permanent installation at the Children's Museum of San Diego, 1995; the Casa de la Cultura, Tijuana, 1994; and the Centro Cultural Tijuana. Mr. Ernest Silva has been a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego since 1979. Silva's recent paintings and sculptures are being shown at the Patricia Correia Gallery in Santa Monica, CA June 24 - July 29, 2006.

"Ernest Silva is a consummate painter, sculptor and installation artist with an individual vision and distinctive vocabulary. His work is an expression of mankind's eternal longings and fears, and in his world human beings are restless souls on a lonely journey through a sometimes, dark environment filled with risk and danger," said Mary Beebe, director of the Stuart Collection.

May-ling Martinez was born and raised in Puerto Rico, but has made San Diego her home. She is a recent graduate with a MFA degree in sculpture from San Diego State University in 2005. In 1996 she received a bachelor's degree in communications and visual arts from Sacred Heart University, in Puerto Rico. Her work consists of mixed media installations, sculptures and collages that function as triggers to evoke memories.

"For a while now I have been collecting and working with home related elements and objects. I've always found comfort and humor in them and in the general idea of the house. Philosophers, psychoanalysts and poets have perceived the House, or the home as a magical place full of contradictory wonder. That can function as a structure forming device," said May-Ling.

"May Ling's artwork shows the impact of the cultural aesthetic with which she grew up, as well as the effect of her strong family ties. From her father, an engineer, she inherited an interest in logic and mathematics, which is reflected in her repeated use of numbers, ledger paper and mechanical imagery. After a brief career as a secretary, her mother became a homemaker, and inspired Martinez's fascination with household objects and the concept of "home" as a symbol for domestic happiness," said Tina Yapelli, director of SDSU's University Art Gallery.

The L Street Fine Art Gallery is located at 628

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San Diego, CA -- (ReleaseWire) -- 10/16/2006 -- The San Diego Visual Art's Network and SanDiegoArtist.com has established the San Diego Art Prize which is given annually to three established and three emerging artists who have exhibited outstanding achievement in the field of Visual Arts. The Prize recipients will receive a cash grant and an exhibition at the L Street Gallery in the Downtown Omni Hotel. Each exhibition will pair an established artist with an emerging artist. The final exhibition will run from June 2007 - September 2007 and will feature work by all recognized recipients of the SD ART PRIZE.

The second exhibition in the series, Green Acres, Featuring Works by Jean Lowe and Iana Quesnell will begin November 18 with an opening reception from 7pm - 9pm at the L Street Gallery and will be on view through February 18, 2007.

Both Lowe (the established artist) and Quesnell (the emerging artist) have a fascination with places that humans occupy. Lowe's concentration is on an impersonal level as it relates to "plunked down communities" which she feels have no aesthetic appeal while Quesnell's interest is from a deeply personal level as she shares specific relationships with the places she inhabits. The visual contrast in their work is strikingly different; Lowe uses a more traditional painterly style while Quesnell works as a draftsman with graphite on paper.

California-based artist Jean Lowe earned her MFA at the University of California, San Diego in 1988, the same year she presented her first solo exhibition at the Dietrich Jenny Gallery in Downtown San Diego. Lowe earned her BA at the University of California, Berkeley and was the winner of the first Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation Art Prize in 2000.

For 18 years, Lowe has been inspired and challenged to make work that is visually seductive, viscerally engaging, but also provocative in its critique of how we live in relation to other species and the environment. Lowe enjoys creating artwork that tackles difficult issues such as over-development, exploitation of the environment, sex, power, and the widespread mistreatment of animals. "I'm motivated," says Lowe, "by a desire to stimulate conversation around issues I think are important, and challenged by the desire to do so in a way that is engaging and playful as opposed to dry and didactic." Her work ranges from traditional painting and sculpture to her most common medium, enamel-painted papier-mache. "At L Street Gallery, I'll be exhibiting one brand new large scale landscape and a couple of existing works that will hopefully have a nice conceptual resonance with the work Iana will be showing."

Iana is from the southern states and is currently in the Masters Program at UCSD. Iana's current work is about temporary living situations, specificity of place, as well as, navigation through the spaces she occupies and intends to occupy. Whether that be a military tent in Bosnia, her car, a studio on the border in Tijuana, or the Omni Hotel (for a week for this project), each incorporates architectural floor plans and schematic rendering with more experiential and ephemeral details. The viewer is initially pulled in to the work by its beautiful draftsmanship and the surprise of its scale but it's the conceptual underpinnings that seal the deal. She's quite literally drafting her life and this odd combination of technical drawing and autobiography yields an unexpected and original narrative. Iana Quesnell engages drawing as a mediating tool between her own body and her immediate surroundings. Often painfully honest these exceptional, large scale drawings take into account her every move with excruciating detail. Grab Life by the Horns is a diagrammatic drawing of the vehicle she lived in for seven months. In addition to how she slept in the space of the cab, it depicts the precise area where she parked and how the existing foliage provided a certain level of privacy."

The L Street Fine Art Gallery is located at 628 L Street across from the Omni Hotel, Downtown

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SanDiegoArtist.com: Online Retrospective: July 15 – September 30, 2006 L Street Gallery: Exhibit: Southern California, Recent Works by Raul Guerrero: August 26 – November 31, 2006 Opening reception for the artist: Saturday, August 26, 2006

San Diego, CA -- (ReleaseWire) -- 07/26/2006 -- L Street Gallery, in conjunction with SanDiegoArtist.com, is pleased to announce: Raul Guerrero: Past & Present: a comprehensive survey of Guerrero's work since 1974. The online retrospective will be available for viewing from July 15 – September 30, 2006 at http://sandiegoartist.com and will highlight 30 years of work by Raul Guerrero. This survey includes over 50 works -- ranging from his well-known Tijuana Nightlife paintings to earlier sculptures, installations and kinetic works -- from each phase of the artist's career.

The exhibition, Southern California: Recent Works by Raul Guerrero, will open on August 26 with an opening reception from 6pm – 9pm at the L Street Gallery and will be on view through November 31, 2006. Both the online and gallery exhibit have been organized by Ann Berchtold, curator of SanDiegoArtist.com and newly appointed gallery director for the L Street Gallery at the Omni Hotel in Downtown San Diego.

"Raul Guerrero has been an important presence on the Southern California art scene-particularly in the San Diego/Tijuana region-- for more than thirty years. Making paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, and videotapes, he has forged an expansive, ever-evolving vision-one that combines technical innovation with symbolic power. Although his style ranges from early conceptually based abstraction to recent narrative realism, Guerrero's self-described "search for the poetry of life" is a constant in all of this work. Traveling and reading voraciously, Guerrero continually engages the histories of culture in the United States, Latin America, and Europe, culling images and ideas for his art." Written by Toby Kamps, 1998, Assistant Curator Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Guerrero spent four years (1966 – 1970) at the Chouinard Art Institute studying with professors like Emerson Woelffer, Mike Kanemitsu, Don Graham, Ed Reep and Stephen Van Heune. At that time Chouinard students were witnessing the emergence of cutting edge artists such as Richard Serra, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Edward Ruscha, Edward Kienholz, Bruce Nauman and the Los Angeles art scene. Says Guerrero of that period, "In LA, I was embedded in an art culture that made a big difference in my life. Up to that time I felt alienated for some reason or another – and that scene was like finding my tribe." Guerrero had his first celebrated solo exhibit at the Cirrus Gallery, LA in 1974 and followed with four more successful LA based exhibits. Guerrero left LA in January of 1980 and moved back to San Diego. Guerrero has since gradually and steadily assumed the characteristics of a successful career and has become one of our most outstanding artists. After countless solo and joint exhibits his first major retrospective was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 1998.

His latest body of work, Problems and Marvelous Secrets of the Indies, which has been fifteen years in the making, is a history of the American continent presented in three parts: Black Hills of Dakota, Latin America and Southern California. In describing the series, Guerrero imagines two travelers chronicling their respective journeys as they move through time and geography within the continent. "The first traveler is coming from the Eastern seaboard and traveling west, encountering defining moments in the evolving history of the United States, eventually arriving in Southern California. The second traveler leaves Peru, treks thru South America, Central America, Mexico, eventually arriving in Southern California". Structuring research for the series in this manner allowed the artist to create a non-linear visual and poetic map of the territory, expressed in a variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, mosaic work, artist books, photography and bronze sculpture.

Guerrero continues: "Eventually the two travelers converge in Southern California, becoming witnesses of the hybrid culture from which they sprang, an infrastructure made up of Anglo-American, Indigenous and Latino influences. As one, they experience the strange surreal cultural phenomena that is Southern California with its "dive bars," take-out food culture, its highly industrialized consumer society and of course Hollywood, the ultimate surreal dream machine".

In a painting titled, The Lovers; a French fry is seen lying on a beach towel, while an elongated splash of ketchup hovers over seductively. The "lovers" are surrounded by a sandy beach and blue sky, and represent Southern California's most perfect and sought after couple. The composition, The Lovers, was inspired by Man Ray's classic surrealistic painting, A l'heure de l'observatoire—Les Amoureux; (Observatory Time--The Lovers).

Raul Guerrero's style and approach to art has been described in many ways, poetically by Michael McManus for ART WEEK in 1988. He states, "Guerrero is a dance photographer, an elitist, late of the school of Paris and a disciple of the dadaist Many Ray; he's political, a Chicano activist excavating the Olmec roots of his consciousness; he's the Prince of Oaxaca, a peripheral figure in the L.A. pop scene; he's a conceptual artist, a California surrealist; protege of Emerson Woelffer; he's an oil painter in the Academy San Carlos tradition, devoted to the memory of Dr. Atl and Diego Rivera; he's an ironist, a constructivist, a Jungian, a comedian."

2006 kicked off a series of joint exhibits for Raul Guerrero beginning in April with a show at the Billy Shire Fine Arts Gallery in Culver City: Problemas y Secretos Maravillosos de Las Indies/Problems and Marvelous Secrets of the Indies, which ran from April 15 - May 20, 2006. Guerrero is currently part of the Strange New World: Art and Design From Tijuana, which is running concurrently at both MCASD Downtown and MCASD La Jolla. His work will be featured at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, as part of the exhibition: Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge running from July 22 - October 22, which includes works of some of the country's best Chicano and Chicana artists. Works by Guerrero are also currently being featured in Ravenna Italy at the Galleria Ninapi.

For more information email: ann@sandiegoartist.com
Raul Guerrero's website: http://raulguerrero.com
SanDiegoArtist.com Retrospective: (preview view) http://sandiegoartist.com

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