SPACE

An intimate meditation on an almost infinite subject, Space aims to explode an ordinary everyday word into a dazzling prism via an exploration of some of the many interpretations of the term. Artist Shana Mabari asked more than a dozen individuals from dramatically different walks of life—from an astronaut and a filmmaker to an art critic and a musician—what they think about when they think about space. Their answers, which alternate with exceptional work from contemporary Southern California artists selected by curator Andi Campognone, invigorate and inspire, and in turn become fodder for reflection upon our relationship to ourselves, to others, and to the universe at large.

Andi Campognone has over 30 as an arts and culture leader in the southern California region. She is the Executive Director of AC Projects, a non-profit consulting organization focused on promoting arts and culture. Projects include developing museum exhibitions, public engagement, mentoring programs and book and film publications of historically relevant southern California artists. Campognone is also the Arts Manager/Senior Curator for the City of Lancaster's museums. She is responsible for the development and maintenance of partnerships and community engagement initiatives with artists, businesses, stakeholders, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Los Angeles County Supervisors office, California Arts Council and higher level institutions. She develops curatorial direction for exhibition, educational and engagement programming and additionally leads the public art initiatives for the City of Lancaster. She has previously served the City of Pomona as Cultural Arts Commissioner where she co-wrote and implemented the City's Master Cultural Arts Plan and the adopted Arts in Public Places Policy. She is the cofounder of Kipaipai, a professional development workshop for artists in Hawaii, California and New York. Campognone is on the Board of the Lancaster Museum and Public Art Foundation and on the Board of the Holualoa Foundation for Arts and Culture. She volunteers as a regular speaker and mentor to art students at both the undergraduate and graduate level and is on the advisory board of the Los Angeles Arts Association. She is a member of ArTTable.

Shana Mabari is an American contemporary artist with a studio practice based in Los Angeles and Ibiza, Spain. Previously she has lived and worked in Paris, Northern India, Southeast Asia, and Tel Aviv. Central to Mabari's practice are her ongoing investigations of the intersections of art and science, as evidenced by her sculptures, installations, and immersive environments that explore the dynamics of visual perception and the ways in which we experience physical space. The artist's engagement with color, light, reflection, and geometric form can be situated on a continuum that connects to the Light and Space movement that originated in California in the 1960s, while her vision of an expanded practice in the twenty-first century centers on exploring how the space of art making and viewing might productively intersect with what are otherwise often highly technical and advanced scientific fields, such as astrophysics and psychophysics. In 2004, Mabari and Dr. Shinsuke Shimojo of the California Institute of Technology were awarded a patent for the design of Dynamic Spatial Illusions, a portable version of a visual-and-sensory experimental environment, and the artist has ongoing collaborations with experts in the vision sciences at Caltech and in the neurosciences at Zurich's Institute of Neuroinformatics. In 2018, Mabari was selected to be the first artist to fly aboard a mission of NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which uses a 2.7-meter telescope mounted in a customized 747 flying to a maximum altitude of 45,000 feet to study such astronomical phenomena as black holes and star formation. It is through the artist's own intersections with advanced scientific fields that she explores the complexities of the contemporary individual's relationship to the ways in which these disciplines have dramatically expanded our collective field of vision and our understanding of physical reality, which in turn serves as a key animating force in her production.