Stephanie HouseWherever you walk on Chapman’s campuses, art is everywhere. Now, Working@Chapman brings you “Art at Chapman,” a new content series for staff and faculty that explores the art surrounding us all.
Each month, Lindsay Shen, Ph.D. and director of Art Collections at Chapman University, and Jessica Bocinski, registrar of the Escalette Permanent Collection of Art, will reflect on a piece from the University’s collections.
“No matter how much you know or don’t know about art, these objects enhance the thinking, creativity, and experience of anyone who stops to enjoy them,” says Shen. “As one of our favorite Escalette artists, John Paul Jones, says “the great artist makes the human race look like a better idea.”
these objects enhance the thinking, creativity, and experience of anyone who stops to enjoy them.
“As a ‘museum without walls’ the Escalette Collection offers students, faculty, staff, and visitors at Chapman the privilege to look at artwork made by living arts that engages with issues important to people living in Southern California,” says Bocinski. “Our goal is to display artwork that is relevant and thought provoking.”
“Después del trabajo”
The work by Ramiro Gomez, Después del trabajo (after work), is currently on view on the 3rd floor of Beckman Hall. The piece references Gomez’s cardboard cut-outs in a two-dimensional form. Después del trabajo depicts a featureless housekeeper picking up a check left for her beside a vase of flowers on a table. This quiet moment evokes the invisible presence housekeepers are expected to have, even when exchanging payment for their work.
These people do hold up a specific amount of society on their backs and on their hard work. They’re upholding households (and) taking care of families, so that the families can go on with their lives. – Gomez, 2012, PRI
About the Artist
Ramiro Gomez was born in San Bernardino, California to undocumented Mexican immigrant parents who have since become US citizens. He attended the California Institute for the Arts for a short time before leaving to work as a live-in nanny with a West Hollywood family, an experience that greatly informed his subsequent interests and artistic practice.
Gomez’s work is known for addressing issues of immigration and making visible the “invisible” labor forces that keep the pools, homes, and gardens of Los Angeles in pristine condition. His method for doing so involves placing life-size cardboard cut-outs of gardeners, nannies, and housekeepers on display in neighborhoods and parks around Beverly Hills, California. The faces on these cardboard cut-outs are intentionally expressionless and lack normal features so that the viewer is only left with the bare outline of a person.
“There’s no details for the fact that when we drive by the real people, we don’t have the time necessarily to observe the details; their eyes, their nose; their moles; and their imperfections,” says Gomez. “We just have time to view the physical outline and my cardboard cut-outs are interpretations of that.” More than just replicating an optical experience, the vagueness of Gomez’s cut-outs powerfully communicates the “invisibility” of the individual workers they represent.
Explore Chapman University’s Escalette Collection
The Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art is an academic unit of Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences that installs, researches, stores and cares for the artwork in the collection, and organizes exhibitions and community outreach throughout Chapman’s campus. We are committed to the development of a focused permanent collection of art that meets teaching and research needs on campus, reflects the multi-cultural nature of Southern California, promotes new artistic talent in the region, and participates in current global artistic discourse.
Display Image at Top/Ramiro Gomez, Después del trabajo (after work), Mixed media on cardboard, 2016. Purchased with funds from the Escalette Endowment. 2017.10.1
