Upon entering the Packard building at the intersection of Long Beach Boulevard. and Anaheim Street, one can see a merge of old and new, as Long Beach artists display their work on the walls of the historic property.
The Packard building was built in 1926, when it served as showroom for popular cars, and is now a creative office space available for art exhibitions and events. It currently hosts the gallery “UNPACKED at the Packard.”
The exhibit is curated by Long Beach artist group FLOOD Inc., an organization devoted to raising awareness and appreciation for new and emergent art. “UNPACKED at the Packard” showcases work by Arts Council for Long Beach’s 2015–2016 Professional Artist Fellows.
The fellows are artists who received Professional Artist Fellowship grants from the Arts Council for Long Beach. The grant honors artists who live, work or actively create in Long Beach for their recent artworks.
“UNPACKED at the Packard” features all five fellows: Gary Alvarez, Connie DK Lane, Christine Nguyen, Lara Odell and Ramon Rodriguez.
“This exhibition demonstrates the strong cultural expressions we have in Long Beach,” Arts Council Executive Director Griselda Suarez said in a press release. “Our fellows use identity to springboard into an aesthetic analysis of life.”
The Packard art exhibit’s name was not inspired by the name of the building, but rather one of the meanings of unpack: to analyze something into its component elements. The artists have each chosen to “unpack” a subject such as identity, time, nature and anxiety.
Alvarez focuses on his identity as a working-class, bicultural/bilingual, first-generation Americans. His films, “A Good Man” and “Loncheros,” aim to tell thought-provoking and socially conscious stories influenced by his experiences.
Lane examines time through large-scale sculptures inspired by her memories growing up in Hong Kong. She uses unique materials like shredded paper pulp, decomposed coffee grounds, wax, roofing cement and latex rubber, often suspending her sculptures from the ceiling with meat hooks.
Nguyen unpacks nature by collecting and recreating it. Her work combines drawing and photography and employs the cyanotype process – a photographic technique that uses the sun to expose paper and water to develop it.
Odell’s work reflects her anxiety through labor-intensive paper cut-out illustrations that address the fragility of identity through the process, form and color.
Rodriguez examines duality of the countryside and the city with paintings and sculptures inspired by his memories of growing up in a small isolated village in Bolivia and living the last 10 years in Long Beach.
“Among other things, we are seeking commonality between the five artists and the commanding space in which their work will be exhibited,” Marco Schindelmann, former Arts Council president said in a press release.
“UNPACKED at the Packard,” opened Nov. 5 and will close Dec. 12. The exhibit is open to the public Wednesday–Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. with a night for open conversations on Nov. 30 from 5-7 p.m.