Gregg Chadwick Love in the Time of Kamala 48" x 48" oil on linen 2024 Santa Monica Cultural Affairs, in collaboration with Art at the Airport, is proud to announce the opening of WHIPLASH: Art In The Ever-Changing Now, a group exhibition that explores the profound and dynamic shifts shaping our world today. Curated by Rebecca Youssef, Alexandra Dillon, and April Banks, this exhibition offers a reflective exploration of our times, showcasing the ways contemporary artists interpret and respond to the rapid transformations that affect societal norms, cultural identities, environmental crises, and political divisions. It's helpful, if possible, to RSVP in advance at https://whiplashexhibition.eventbrite.com
(To anticipate the number of visitors.)
Exhibition Opening
Saturday, October 26, 2024 from 4 - 7 PM
Location:
Propeller Gallery, 3026 Airport Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90405
Free to all. Feel free to invite friends and family. All ages are welcome!
Free Parking on Site
Art at its best possesses an uncanny ability to communicate ideas and feelings that we need to understand. It seems that especially in times of struggle or unrest, art helps us connect to the personhood of others. Art creates dialogue. Dialogue promotes reflective discussion. And reflection can lead to change. My paintings are crafted as reflecting devices that mirror and focus the viewer’s attention on where we've been, and where we are going in the United States. As Marvin Gaye sang so poignantly - “What’s going on.”
Often the big stories in my artwork are inspired by the rhythms and ideas found in music, literature, history, politics, and film. One of my collectors has described me as an artistic chronicler of our times. He finds threads of current events and pop culture woven into the philosophical and spiritual undercurrents of my art.
My new oil on linen painting Love in the Time of Kamala, which will be exhibited in Whiplash, engages the viewer in a scene of hope, perhaps irrational but heartfelt, as a couple embraces and the world turns around them.
Can the United States live up to its grand ideals?
- Gregg Chadwick, October 2024
"In old Arabic poetry love, song, blood and travel appear as four basic desires of the human heart and the only effective means against our fear of death. Thus, travel is elevated to the dignity of the elementary needs of humankind." - Czeslaw Milosz on the poetry of travel
Movement, travel and pilgrimage are themes that often appear in my paintings. Travel can involve a physical relocation or it can exist in the realm of the senses. I attended "A Gathering of Hearts Illuminating Compassion," an interfaith meeting in San Francisco. The Dalai Lama was the keynote speaker at the event. He entered the packed hall, briskly moved up the center aisle, but stopped briefly to greet an elderly Tibetan woman a few feet from where I was seated. Then the Dalai Lama suddenly spun around and, with a beatific smile, gazed deeply and directly into my eyes.
I was transfixed. The moment was short, but to me it felt as if all time collapsed within that point. For that moment, it seemed as if the Dalai Lama yearned to see with my eyes as I, in turn, learned to see through his. I have been working on this painting ever since to put my experience of that moment of empathy and connection down on canvas.
– Gregg Chadwick UPDATE: A large scale banner of my painting Through Tibetan Eyes has been installed on the Airport Avenue side facade of the Hangar at 3026 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90405
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