Young Art Making Its Way

In Santa Barbara’s ever-shifting art scene, one old reliable is rooted in the notion of young minds and artists finding themselves and finding their way into corners of the art world and/or the real world at large. This special encounter takes place in the ripe and beautifully outfitted venue of the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, where the annual senior art show ends each academic year, a fitting finishing touch to that season.

This year’s model of an exhibition goes by the title Re-Encounter, and although the styles and ideas put forth are expectedly diverse among the 14 artists, a certain theme clearly arises. Many of the artists find their own expressive routes to deal with the transition from youth to adulthood, with spiritual themes in the sidecar, linked to the Westmont’s official Christian institution status.

The memory lane venturing begins at the beginning of the show, with Kailea Najera’s intriguing family scene tributes painted on wood. It’s not just any wood, but wood salvaged from cabinets from home and, evocatively, spilling onto the art frames themselves. Next to these paintings, Marco Valdez’s charcoals make touching tributes to his family, a border-crossing legacy fringed by the family crest colors of blue and white.

Elena Everest’s oil-on-panel paintings train an eye — and nostalgic memories of her childhood home — lovingly on quotidian objects, bottles, jars and other items, elevated in status through art and serving symbolic ideas. 

Artistic lineage plays deeply into the sculptural “garden,” an inviting group of dark brown ceramic blossoms by Makena Wick. With this piece, she channels memories of both her great-grandmother’s floral paintings and her grandmother’s mosaic work.

But the most intense of these personally reflective artists comes through the installation piece by Arianna Rheault. As she explains in her written statement, Rheault is a survivor of childhood domestic abuse and has processed lingering trauma into a series of wall sculptures and other mediums to create a shrine-like tableau. It is properly tucked into a walled-off space within the main gallery, which becomes its own meditative niche. 

Nearby, Julia Lottes has created intriguing miniature assemblage pieces, under the overall title The First That Shape Us, reflective of her experience with chronic illness. These tiny but impactful scenes reference a hospital room (“Pray for Me”), chapels, crucifixes, a kitchen (“True Food”), and the metaphor of fire, accentuated by the clever use of matchsticks in her artistic palate.

On lighter turf, Gevena Asenjo gives us cool-handed nocturnal paintings of neon signage, some in the neon-friendly town of Ventura (Santa Barbara — not so much, except for grandfathered-in examples such as the “Blue Skies” sign). The sights of Tony’s, the Century movie multiplex, and Betty’s Boots reach out nicely into the gallery space. Speaking of the gallery as setting, Diego Castañeda’s woodcut relief prints, detailing structures and nature, benefit from the framing device of the main gallery’s large window on the campus’s ample green space outside, providing a complementary backlighting backdrop.

In other art stops along the path in the show, Sophie Southward’s watercolors deploy a light palette and a lyrical touch in their depiction of tranquil desert scenes and Spanish architectural fragments — that familiar visual in Santa Barbara. Elyona Brown’s Divine Elements series of oil and graphite figure studies concern sports, with youths of different ages, and Ella Oostema presents pleasing screenprint work with an affable focus on nature, in a unique medium.

Figuration varies in the show, from Dustin Ells’s self-portraits as a shadowy and often-silhouetted visage in different settings to Katie Mayhew’s friendly portraits of young women coming into their own. A set of five images lean mostly into a festive atmosphere, with the center piece showing another emotional character, of a woman peering into a hand mirror and presumably pondering her own identity and place in the range of feminine archetypes imposed by society. Or are we reading into it?

Abstraction is largely absent from Re-Encounter, with the exception of Jada Harper’s Blue in the Brain series. Her liquidy abstractions involved amorphous shapes or cellular forms adrift or afloat in patches of color, in such pieces as “Ambiguity” and “Green Envy” — the title of which tips us off to potential meaning and metaphor.

Another year, another group of impressive and developing young artists, getting their due spotlight in a bona-fide art museum setting. The tradition continues.

Re-Encounter is on view at Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art (955 La Paz Rd.) through May 9. See westmont.edu/reencounter.