The photography-based installation art of James Ruby Barsalou sets him apart here. In a community where many artists defer to the predictable beauties of nature rather than the challenges of contemporary art, Barsalou, who is new in town, believes our little corner of paradise could use some help in the latter area.
“I wish there was more of a target or identification to the younger generation of artists,” the 29-year-old native Californian says.
Barsalou moved to Vero a year ago with his wife and two kids to take a job at Indian River Charter High School, where he has the title of Communications and Community Relations Specialist. A 2013 graduate of the University of California, Riverside, Barsalou has a B.A. in studio art.
Barsalou notes that Vero Beach has plenty of cultural events aimed at children as well as those “shaped for an older audience,” as he puts it. But there is not much here to get high school students or those 18 to 25 or 30 culturally involved, he says.
Fortunately for him, Barsalou has found a few like-minded people here. And while he shies from the idea that he’s the one to spearhead a contemporary art movement in Vero, Barsalou admits that he is willing to engage with others to produce some sort of local “happening” – an installation, exhibition or performance event – that would appeal to a young adult demographic.
He may have in mind the type of show he curated last summer at JAHZ: Project Space in Los Angeles, where Jason Schwab, an MFA student at Columbus (Ohio) College of Art & Design (CCAD), skyped a live performance that was projected on a wall outside the building.
Barsalou got in touch with Schwab via Instagram after seeing his work online. The two communicated by telephone only once, the evening before the performance, “just to figure out some details,” Barsalou says.
Schwab’s 10-minute performance piece dealt with the problem he was addressing for his master’s thesis: “the disconnect between online and offline identity through the use of selfies,” as his school’s blog post put it.
Not everyone is ready for the technology of the digital age with its Instagram, Skype, and selfies. But those media are the virtual pencil and paintbrush of a young generation of artists and art consumers. And while Barsalou is completely comfortable in this brave new world, he started his college career as a painter.
“I’ve always been way more interested in the hands-on visual arts – painting, drawing, graphic arts,” he says.
As a child, Barsalou was inspired by his artistic grandmothers, one of whom, Helen Dilley Barsalou, a commercial artist and art director, took up watercolor painting in retirement.
“She’s won quite a few national watercolor competitions,” he says with pride.
When he entered art school, Barsalou was considering a future in commercial art. Then photography came along.
He immersed himself in the medium during the latter part of his four years at University of California at Riverside. He didn’t even own a camera before he applied to the art school’s photo program. His interest started innocently enough, when he decided that learning photography would “fine-tune” his overall visual arts skills.
Photography, however, “just kind of took off on me,” he says.
“My wife can tell you that I was probably non-existent for a year-and-a-half. I was living (at school). A couple of times I slept in the darkroom. I was so interested in it, I couldn’t stop.”
Barsalou gives much of the credit for what turned into a mania to the art faculty at UC Riverside. There he studied with photography-based artists John Divola and Amir Zaki. Divola first gained wide notice for his 1977 series of the Pacific Ocean as photographed through the windows of abandoned, graffiti-sprayed houses. Zaki’s photographs of the Southern California architectural landscape are digitally-altered approximations of real scenes.
The work of UC Riverside faculty member Brandon Lattu was especially inspiring to Barsalou.
Lattu makes three-dimensional objects from photographic images.
“He was creating boxes – they’re made out of gator board or poster board, and they have a polypropylene photographic matte paper that adheres to the surface. He was hanging these on the wall,” Barsalou explains.
“I thought that it was an interesting solution to what happens after photography, once it’s just a flat image. But the funny thing is, I came to find out, that’s not the problem he was trying to resolve. It was much more of a painting concern. He was trying to find a way for painting to evolve, in a sense.”
For his thesis project Barsalou wanted to make a photographic image that took up more space than is usually allotted to a conventionally framed print on a wall.
“I was very much pushing the idea of what photography could do. To the point where I constructed a free-standing room to surround a three-dimensional photograph.”
Barsalou’s room was displayed in June of last year at UC Riverside’s annual senior exhibition. Constructed of two-by-fours and drywall, the room held not only a large cube covered with blue sky and puffy clouds, but also ambient sound – a continuous loop of it – sampled from a composition by minimalist composer Steve Reich.
“In this piece there are a lot of things up in the air in terms of ideas, and it’s kind of all over the place,” says Barsalou. “There’s too much too explain, sometimes.”
In his current series of photographs, Barsalou has revived his focus on the flat image, along with a return to painting.
“I’m taking analog photographs and I’m painting directly on top of them,” he says. “I’m using some acrylics that my kids have.”
Shot on black-and-white film, two of the prints in this series show both a horizontal and a vertical version of the same dusty California hillside. With painstaking care Barsalou painted the human-made elements in the landscape – its irrigation lines – arterial red.
Titled “Rabbit 1” and “Rabbit 2,” the photos were presented in May of this year at a group show titled “Film is Not Dead” in the SCA Project Gallery in Pomona.
Barsalou has a penchant for finding his heart’s desire in his own backyard. His “Rabbit” art works are variations on his ongoing interest in highlighting the unremarkable, personalizing the mass-produced. His “Objects Masked in Their Environment” is a series of digital still life photos in which Barsalou overlaid selected objects with vivid photo-shopped red.
Found in and around his in-laws’ California house, his chosen objects – folded lengths of rebar, crumpled aluminum foil, his daughter’s oven mitt, his son’s Nerf ball – were placed against backgrounds that included gaily flowered fabrics from his mother-in-law’s tablecloth collection.
A California sensibility still dominates his art; as Barsalou says, he is still getting a feel for what’s happening in town. Through his job with the charter high school he’s met many people, including some of the staff members at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, as well as local professional photographer Aric Attas, with whom Barsalou has enjoyed some “great conversations.”
And while it’s unclear how living Vero Beach will affect Barsalou’s oeuvre, he’s constantly taking new photographs, he says, in anticipation of a series about the Florida landscape.
“It’s so different than California,” he says. “I’m definitely excited to get more involved in the arts community. It’s a beautiful and wonderful place.”
