Curated by Savannah Wood

September 14th – November 3rd, 2018

This exhibition features work by artists both established and emerging, who are seeking a nuanced understanding of history through an intimacy with the natural world. Using research, ritual, and close observation, these artists make work that questions authoritative reality and shapes new ways of seeing Southern California. Plain Sight features photography by Ken Gonzales-Day and Mercedes Dorame, paintings by Devon Tsuno, and debuts new work in sculpture and photography by Ruben Ulises Rodriguez and Chinwe Okona.

Installation Images

About the Curator

Savannah Wood

Savannah Wood is an artist with deep roots in Baltimore and Los Angeles. Wood works primarily in photography, text and installation to explore how spirituality, domesticity, and our relationships to place shape our identities. Major themes in her work include ancestral research, reframing land as a readable archive, and depicting humans as part of, rather than separate from, the natural world. Her projects reconnect people with the everyday beauty of our world and the histories that lie hidden below the surface.

As the Executive Director of Afro Charities, Wood is creating infrastructure to increase access to the nearly 130-year-old AFRO American Newspapers’ extensive archives. In this role, she has shepherded the organization through a period of historic growth, initiated new programming, and attracted support from national funders including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and #StartSmall, Jack Dorsey’s philanthropic initiative.

Wood is a graduate cum laude of the University of Southern California. She is a 2022 Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund fellow, 2022 Creative Capital finalist, and a 2019 - 2021 Robert W. Deutsch Foundation fellow. Like four generations of ancestors before her, she lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland, sharing and preserving Black stories.

About the Artists

Mercedes Dorame

Mercedes Dorame, born in Los Angeles, California, received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her undergraduate degree from UCLA. She calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of (in)visibility and ideas of cultural construction.

Dorame’s work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Triton Museum, The Allen Memorial Art Museum, The de Saisset Museum, The Montblanc Foundation Collection, and The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from: Creative Capital, the Montblanc Art Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Loop Artist Residency, the James Phelan Award for California born visual artists, En Foco’s New Works Photography Fellowship Awards program, Galería de la Raza, for her solo exhibition there, the Harpo Foundation for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center and from the Photography Department at the San Francisco Art Institute for her MFA Studies. 

She is currently visiting faculty at CalArts, and was recently honored by UCLA as part of the centennial initiative “UCLA: Our Stories Our Impact”, and was part of the Hammer Museum’s 2018 Made in LA exhibition. She has shown her work internationally.  Her writing has been featured in News From Native California and 580 Split and her artwork has been highlighted by PBS Newshour, Artforum, KCET Artbound, the New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, KQED, Artsy, ARTnews, the Los Angeles Times, the SF Chronicle, among others.

Ken Gonzales-Day

Gonzales-Day received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, an MFA from the University of California Irvine, and an MA from Hunter College in NYC. He is a Professor of Art at Scripps College in Claremont, CA. where he has taught since 1995. His work has been widely exhibited including: LACMA, Los Angeles; LAXART, Los Angeles; Tamayo Museum, Mexico City; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The New Museum, NYC; Generali Foundation, Vienna, among others. In 2017, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography.

Chinwe Okona

Chinwe Okona is a multimedia artist / photographer / writer and MBA candidate. Her work focuses on themes of black identity, nostalgia, and forgiveness through the lens of self documentation, and takes the form of editorial content / design, photography, and digital media. She resides in Los Angeles, California

Devon Tsuno

Devon Tsuno is an artist and fourth generation Angeleno. His recent spray paint and acrylic paintings, installations, and public art focus on Japanese American history. Tsuno’s recent work is a yonsei story, a Los Angeles story, indissociable from the complexities of intergenerational and collective trauma, fences and cages, gentrification, displacement, water and labor politics, and how and where we choose to live. Tsuno’s interests have been central to his work with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Topaz Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Hammer Museum, Candlewood Arts Festival, LA Metro, and Gallery Lara in Japan. His work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, NPR, KCET, Artillery Magazine, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal. Tsuno is a 2017 Santa Fe Art Institute Water Rights Artist-In-Residence, is the 2016 SPArt Community Grantee, and was awarded a 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Art. He is represented by Residency Art Gallery in Inglewood, is member of J-TOWN Action と Solidarity and is an Associate Professor of Art at California State University Dominguez Hills.

Ruben Ulises Rodriguez

The objects I find are mementos. Portals to the time and place where I found them. Trees are the most perfect portals. There is a divinity about them, an Axis Mundi. The trunks of trees have to do so much with this plane; they hold the history of everything around them. They are raw, exposed, marked and cut to fit a certain place. Not all of them are free. The roots of trees hold all to that which is hidden, the death, the decay, they are the labor of things hidden. Just a many the labor of work my dad had to have. The branches of trees swing to the wind in the same way my mom swings her hair back and forth while Vicente Fernandez sings ‘Volver Volver’ as she cleans the house with purple Fabuloso. There is a nest up there.