Cohesive Chaos is in the Bag

          Much of the art we see these days is grandiose. It’s hard not to look at the art world’s brightest starts without being intimidated simply by the materials they use. Thankfully art does not have to consist of skulls bedazzled in diamonds or rooftop bamboo buildings, real art can be made out of anything. That is what makes something become art, taking a common place object, and putting a different spin. The Paper Bag Show does just that, showing us a different view of something we use as not just a convenience, but as a tangible conduit into the world of art.

The Paper Bag Show is a collective effort of seventeen artists, curated by Ashleigh Norman and Cesar Karamazov. All artists involved are associated with CSUCI as alumni, professors or students. The exhibit itself ranges drastically from artist to artist with little in common. The curators of The Paper Bag Show asked their participants to spend the summer creating a piece for the exhibit with a single guideline: use a paper bag. The pieces range from images of paper bags, art on paper bags, and art made of paper bags.

CSUCI student Perry Casey’s “American Bag”, a mixed media on canvas work, depicts a man with a paper bag printed with the American flag, over his head. The work’s color scheme is split in two. The world where the subject’s body exists is a flat, black and white world, juxtaposed against the shadowed, vibrant world where the bag cuts off the subject’s senses. The bag is gripped tightly by simple fingers. Casey’s play on our nation’s economic status, along with the cultural common knowledge associated with the paper bag, creates a gripping political statement with a humorous twist.

Another piece titled “Peep” by Professor Christophe Bourély, is simple but memorable. Two lunch sack sized paper bags lay overlapping one another on their side so that there are no openings except for a hole cut about the size of a quarter. When the viewer peeps inside, a photograph of a human eye, the same size as the opening, peers back at them. Bourély’s minimalist take on the project is an interesting human nature observation typical of the artist’s own dark sense of humor.

  Local artist and CSUCI alumni, Raul Valdez, contributed one of the most striking pieces in the Paper Bag Show. His site-specific piece “Dos” comprises of two structures of intricately folded paper bags with burlap suspended by sewing string and weighted with copper and silver beads. Valdez combines these contrasting materials in provoking manners, transforming the average into the elegant, making the piece both complicated and graceful. Using both pins and stitching to secure the paper bags to the burlap, Valdez integrates these unlikely bedfellows flawlessly bringing out the beauty in both the materials through their contradictions.

While it was not intentional, The Paper Bag Show has a surprisingly consistent humor to its collection. “Everything was left up to the individual artist,” says curator and artist Ashleigh Norman, “I didn’t know what the show would entail until the artists dropped off their pieces.” Norman and Karamazov’s hard work and careful choice of artists must then be what delivers the show’s a sense of unity uncommon for a collective presentation. It is in the various methods of incorporating the paper bag into the individual artist’s world view that seems to give the collection cohesive chaos.

CSUCI may be a new university, but if The Paper Bag Show is any indication of the type of artists that it cultivates, we can expect great things from the CSUCI Art Department. The Paper Bag Show is open to the public at the Palm Gallery in downtown Camarillo from October 10^th through November 4^th. Not only is it worthwhile to take the time to go see this show, don’t forget to bring your own paper bag, as you might want to take a piece of the show away with you.