I like photography because it helps me keep special memories to look back on. However what I love about sketching is that I can dive deeper into the memories I want to keep. I capture the colors I felt and the shapes that I appreciated the most from an image.

Representation is nice because I genuinely like drawing people. I like the human anatomy, especially portraits. What I love about abstraction is that I can explore different colors and ideas. Abstraction has always helped me perfect my style with representation, so both things go hand in hand.

The artist I met at this exhibit was Shima TajBaksh. Shima is a graduate student in the School of Art’s sculpture program. She has been sculpting for about seven years, and is in her second year working on her MFA. She comes from Iran, which I found really interesting. I have not met anybody who is native from Iran up until this point. She is also fluent in English, which I thought was amazing (I have a tendency to struggle going back and forth between English and Spanish).

Walking into the room, every piece was captivating, but Shima’s piece (called ‘untitled’) drew me in due to how complex it is. It has an air duct looping through the wall with piece of what appears to be flesh sticking out of it. Next to that, there is an air vent with children peaking from the outside. The perspective is as if the audience members are looking outside from something. The jagged air duct had a rhythm that balanced your eyes to look at the whole picture, which I appreciated. The vent didn’t look like a random air vent, it appeared to have direct relation to the rest of the piece, and it is because of how the artist placed these pieces together. The colors are very cool but almost in a haunting manner. She also used printed fabric to create the flesh poking out of the duct.

Shima explained to me that the meaning of her piece was her criticism on the passive consumerism of social media. There is manipulation from the images we see on social media, whether it be political displays or other forms of pictures, that effect us subliminally. Shima focuses her piece on how children absorb this information. The purpose of the human flesh coming out of the air duct is to symbolize birth. The children on the outside of the vent are the representation of a new generation being born into these ideas. This was Shima’s way for us to observe our past, present, and future.

I think theres a lot of truth from this piece. I started using social media when I was thirteen, and I can say from that point onward, the things I’ve seen and read online affects me in so many different ways. I can scroll on twitter and laugh at tweets my friends have made, like their pictures, to suddenly finding gruesome or violent footage of something I’d never dream to view. Overtime, what should make me nauseous has made me numb as I have learned to simply ignore these posts and go on with my day. I wonder about the parents who allow their toddlers to have unlimited usage of iPhones, laptops, and iPads. It terrifies me that my nieces and nephews will see these things at such a premature age. What scares me more is how we are creating a generation of people who will have generated a self-defense mechanism to not feel empathy in order not to feel terror. Shima made valid points in this piece and I thought it was incredibly thought-provoking.

CSULB undergraduate Matthew O’Connor is working toward his BFA degree in the School of Art’s Drawing and Painting Program. He is 25 and resides along the beach. His interests include art, fitness, environmental conservation, and the growing gentrification problem of Los Angeles. His work questions the new age, such as social media, growing corporations, the deterioration of the environment, and so on. His ideas take form through juxtaposition and developing connections between things.

The materials he used for both Every Inch and Every Drop is acrylic and oil on canvas. What I found interesting about these two pieces are the motifs of paint he places along the image. Instead of allowing the blue sky to stand alone, he adds small squares of vertical strokes of light blue to go against the horizontal strokes. When I brought that up, he explained to me how he enjoys painting texture in his work. He indulges in finding different techniques in painting different objects because he wants his audience to be able to enjoy every part of his painting. However, the biggest reason he paints texture so frequently is simple: it’s fun. The color tones of his work balance from deep earth tones to pastel hues. What I like about these two paintings are his attention to perspective. He places the subjects of his painting as though you are watching them from a distance. The lines vary from sinuous to jagged patterns to reflect his passion for texture.

I find his interest in the Bolsa Chica wetlands interesting. He mentions he is a vegan and finds it awful that there are animals along the coast that are affected by big oil companies. I find it interesting mostly because as much as I consider this a tragedy, I often question why a majority of up-scale residents in Los-Angeles don’t consider the thousands of people in the city that lose their homes due to gentrification. I found the two situations similar, so I asked him about his thoughts on the situation. He was equally passionate about the subject, and he brought up how residents in Boyle Heights are beginning to lose their livelihoods to the growing Arts District in L.A.. It’s painful to hear that other artists are contributing to this growing problem, and hurting members within my community. In a similar way, through his art he speaks for the community he has grown up with. He ran alongside the Bolsa Chica marshes and wetlands since he was a child, and it hurt him to see it change over time. The animals he respects are being killed by constant oil leaks, and the beautiful nature that this area holds is being taken by the housing industry.

I personally love artwork that reflects a person’s passion for their home. Work that stands out the most to me is when an artist is speaking out about a problem within their community. This kind of art is important because as humans, we have a tendency to turn a blind eye to things, especially to things we don’t understand or care about. We need work that raises awareness because preserving our culture and environment is important. If we stay silent about these situations, people will continuously stay blind to the world out there. I love making art that reflects what I want people to understand. This gallery definitely incapsulated the elements I love in artwork, and I hope to see more from these individuals soon.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton