SANTA BARBARA, CA.- Look…if you dare! This November, CAF debuts Unusual Behavior, an exhibition that critically examines the unusual and absurd in art! Featuring 11 internationally acclaimed contemporary artists, this exhibition offers a diverse range of performances captured on video–such as Marie Losier’s musical, which stars ballerinas, boxers, and a drag queen; Julie Lequin’s humorous knock-off of NPR’s Car Talk characters Click and Clack; to Kalup Linzy’s outrageous, one-man rendition of a melodramatic “soap opera.”

This exhibition of performance-based video pushes artistic, class, and political boundaries using off-the-wall comedy and extreme absurdity to examine our societal conventions. The results are hilarious, dark, and oftentimes ironic, all of which subtly reveal the underlying brutalities, dehumanization, fears, and taboos that lurk in the every-day. Because the exhibition is curated by Heather Jeno Silva–CAF’s Forum Lounge performance art series curator–expect many of the artists at the opening and a coordinating performance by Julie Lequin for December’s Forum Lounge!

CAF features: Tamy Ben-Tor, Stanya Kahn & Harry Dodge, Julie Lequin, Kalup Linzy, Marie Losier, Dave McKenzie, Julie Orser, Catherine Ross, Catherine Sullivan, and Marnie Weber. All of these talented artists are risk-taking, experimental and groundbreaking, and have received awards, exhibiting extensively nationally and abroad.

Heather Jeno Silva is a Santa Barbara-based independent art critic and curator. Currently she is the Programming, Contracts & Grants Analyst for UCSB Arts & Lectures and curator of CAF’s award-winning Forum Lounge performance art series. Her art criticism has appeared in numerous print and online publications.

Bloom Projects: Mitchell Wright, The Reconstruction
For his exhibition in Santa Barbara, CAF commissioned Mitchell Wright’s latest body of work inspired by William Faulkner’s short story, Barn Burning (1939). Faulkner’s coming of age text, while founded on grief and despair, ultimately acts as a metaphor for rebirth and renewal. Relating this narrative to his own history, Wright’s new works were created in an effort to come to terms with his own past and to learn from his experiences. This subject matter–barns engulfed in flames –has a particularly haunting and poignant read in the context of Santa Barbara’s recent fires.

Wright’s drawings and paintings contemplate the poetic–evoking strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience and places emphasis on trepidation, horror, and awe. In his work, one can see inspirations from varied sources including art history (Caspar David Friedrich and Francisco Goya), literature (William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor), and music (Neil Young).

Wright was born in Winona, Mississippi (1976). Solo exhibitions include Wishful Thinking, LAS Gallery, Phoenix, AZ (2008); and You, Me., White Columns, New York, NY (2006). In addition, Wright has participated in group shows such as The Merits of Silence, Gallery Min Min, Tokyo, JP (2008); The Object Direct, Heskin Contemporary, New York, NY (2008); and Sonotube, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, CA (2007).