Diversions LA

 

“Art, at its best, reminds us that we are human,” visual artist Cie Gumucio says. And certainly, her art brings the spiritual components of our existence into clear focus. Gumucio, a resident of Redondo Beach, Calif., mixes media the way writers mix metaphors and similes – creating, in the artist’s own words, “images that when brought together in surprising juxtaposition often show a hidden doorway to the subconscious, sometimes whimsical, at times profound, ultimately reflecting a greater interior truth.”

Her recent solo installation of “Writers in Search of the Sacred” was exhibited at Studio 347/ Michael Sterns Gallery San Pedro, Calif. earlier this summer. This large-scale multi-media exhibit is a cavalcade of images and emotions, featuring Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” and the collected poems of Emily Dickinson. Gumucio focused on these authors and these particular works due to a shared thematic component in their writing that surprised the artist, a “yearning for the transcendent and sacred.” From that place of redemption, Gumucio created a mixed media assemblage comprised of a veritable artistic kitchen sink: sculpture, photography, large-scale video, collage, mobiles, found art, painting, and pastels. Each writer is presented with a full world of objects and art that resonate with their subjects and styles.

 

In the section of the installation devoted to Kerouac, the artist shapes a feeling of momentum and infinite possibility. A video installation creates the sensation of the viewer sitting behind the wheel of Kerouac’s car, looking through the windshield. Road maps form the textured background of a portrait of the author. A narrow highway is divided with cigarettes serving as the lines in the road; coffee cups along the shoulder stand watch as mileage markers or roadside memorials. Separately, a manual typewriter holds a sheet of paper imprinted with a broad tire track. The overall effect is perpetual motion, the pull of the road and the pull of something deeper within the author and the viewer.

             

With each of the authors depicted, Gumucio uses images culled from their writing to express the soul of the writer – an open bird cage for Dickinson, a fishing pole for Hemingway – and takes those images one step further, into a place where viewers can identify not just with the writer’s craft and soul, but into the spiritual longing in their own hearts. In short, Gumucio gets it: words paint a picture in these writers’ works, a sacred picture. In turn, she paints sacred pictures based on their words. “Through this exhibit I hope to deepen an understanding of these writers’ writing through art,” she notes. And in the process, she also deepens the viewers understanding of art itself, whether it’s found in the written word or on a painted canvas.

While this powerful installation is Gumucio’s most recent, the artist has created a wide variety of dynamic art forms over the years, including video installations embedded in canvas, and singular installations such as “Visible Light” which shimmers with green, blue, and gold orbs caught in a wire mesh reminiscent of a fishing net. The viewer gets the sense that Gumucio is indeed fishing: for meaning, form, color, and the spiritual. Her mixed media photo assemblage “Wedding Toast,” with a partially burnt wedding invitation and pearl necklace emerging from a toaster is another case in point. With the frame partially singed as well, Gumucio seems to be revealing what can happen when love becomes forgotten “toast,” while playfully mocking the concept of the classic champagne toast to the bride and groom. The artist also creates stellar travel photography, revealing haunting and vivid images such as a slightly bent figure of a woman in black walking down an alley in Greece, that portends mystery.

In short, the road to the heart-filling “Writers in Search of the Sacred” has been well-trod by the Gumucio. In other forms and mediums, the artist has served up images that couple a sense of longing and a lust for life. This is an artist driven to find the core in all art forms, and the viewers who experience it. She distills the essence of creativity and shares it in “art that provokes a conversation about the meaning and mystery of being human.”

As well as Studio 347, Gumucio has exhibited recently at the Downtown LA Art Walk, the Torrance Art Museum, the South Bay Contemporary in Palos Verdes, Calif., and the R. Blitzer Gallery in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Currently a part of the incredible collection of art that is CA 101 at The Industrial Cathedral, a.k.a. AES Power Plant in Redondo Beach,  artist Cie Gumucio should be one of many reasons for a visit to the exhibition. 

• Genie Davis